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Top Secret Researcher
Original Poster
#1 Old 7th Aug 2021 at 4:41 PM Last edited by Corylea : 3rd May 2022 at 8:11 PM.
Default Why it seems hard to make friends, and how you can make it super easy
A lot of people say it's difficult to make friends in The Sims 1; some even say that it's impossible. But it's easy if you understand how the game works!

Interests

When the Hot Date expansion pack came out, sims acquired a wider range of possible interests, and sims became UNinterested in any conversation that wasn't about one of their interests. Given that there are 15 possible interests, and the average sim has five of those interests, it's very easy to find your sim talking about things that the other sim doesn't care about.

The problem was that Maxis forgot to go back and give interests to the sims that existed before Hot Date came out. So people like Bob & Betty Newbie or Bella & Mortimer Goth didn't have ANY interests, which meant they hated Every Single Topic of conversation.

But it's easy to give those sims interests! Just play their household for a couple of minutes and take them to a community lot. You can take them to Old Town (if you have Unleashed) or Downtown (if you have Hot Date) or Magic Town (if you have Makin' Magic). Taking the sims to a community lot automatically gives those sims interests, so once you've taken them somewhere, bring them home, save the game, and they'll now have interests.

Of course, since there are FIFTEEN possible interests, and your sim will only have around five interests, it's completely possible to have no overlap between your interests and the interests of the sim you want to make friends with.

I play every household for a minute, so that I can look up their interests and write them down. Then, when a sim walks by my house, I can look up that sim's interests, compare them to those of the sims in my household, and have a sim with at least two or three common interests talk to the person. Or, if no one in my household has at least two interests in common with the walk-by, I don't bother talking with them.

Any topic the sim has seven or more points in is an interest. Any topic they have three or fewer points in is a topic that will make them LOSE relationship points if your sim talks about it. If they have more than three but fewer than seven points in an interest, they won't enjoy talking about it, but they won't lose points if you talk about it with them.

If you want to change a sim's interests (and don't want to use a mod), you can buy magazines downtown. Reading a magazine will give a sim a point in the topic you're having them read about, BUT it will also take away a point from a random interest.

When your sims are just standing around talking, you can't change what they talk about. But if they're doing a group activity -- eating at a table, watching TV, playing chess, and so on -- you can click on your sim, and one of the options will be Change Topic. If they're talking about something the other sims aren't interested in, you can make them change the topic of conversation to something the other sims DO like. You can tell what the sims are currently talking about by looking at the pictures above their heads and comparing them to the pictures on the interests panel. A boat, plane, or car means they're talking about Travel, whereas a shoe, eyeglasses, or necktie means they're talking about Style, and so on. If the other sim thinks about something with a large red X through it, it means they hate that topic -- don't talk about that!

Personality

No sim enjoys having the same social interaction repeated over and over again, but WHICH social interactions a sim enjoys depend partly on their personality. Nice sims like compliments and hugs, whereas Mean sims hate them. Playful sims love to be tickled and to hear jokes, but Serious sims hate those things.

I make families of 8 sims that exist only to be friends with my main sims, and all 8 of the sims in these families have the following personality:

Neat: 0
Outgoing: 6
Active: 7
Playful: 6
Nice: 6

This personality ensures that they enjoy interacting with others (Outgoing 6), that they enjoy compliments and hugs (Nice 6) and that they like jokes and tickling (Playful 6). The Active 7 is there to make sure they can stand up long enough to have a long conversation, without problems with Comfort. (Make sure you give these families a phone, so you can invite them over!)

When I meet one of these sims for the first time, my interactions go like this:

Talk - Talk - Entertain (Joke) - Compliment - Tickle - Talk - Talk - Entertain (Joke) - Compliment - Tickle - Hug

At that point, we're usually friends. :-)

Tickle is a great interaction because it gives EIGHT points towards a relationship. But sims hate it when you repeat an interaction too quickly, so you can't just Tickle-Tickle-Tickle; you must have several other interactions between each time you tickle. And, as noted above, they must be Playful to enjoy tickling at all.

Sims usually fend off compliments unless you've gotten to know them a bit -- a relationship of around 20 is good -- which is why I don't do it until after two Talks and an Entertain.

Nice sims love hugs with friends or people who are very close to being friends, but even nice sims won't hug total strangers.

Community Lots

Community lots are your secret weapon in the quest to make friends! When you go to a community lot, there won't be many sims there at first, but sims will flock to the lot after you've been there for a few minutes, and soon there should be five or ten sims on the lot. If you have your list of which sims have which interests, you can see which of the sims currently present has several interests in common with yours. Seek out THAT person and talk with them. The advantage of community lots is that there are more sims to choose from, so there's a greater chance of finding a sim that has at least three interests in common with yours. And if you have Unleashed and go to Old Town, you can have every sim in your family busily making friends at once. It's easy to go to a community lot and come back with as many new friends as there are people in your family.

And of course, you can play a family that's not your main family and have THEM do the work of making friends. This is so easy that it feels kinda like cheating to me, but it's certainly an easy way of getting your friendship numbers up.

Everything I've said so far uses the normal workings of the game. If you're willing to use a mod, though, things get even easier.

A Mod that helps a LOT

If you're willing to use a mod, you can go to SomeSimThings and download the Supersculpture that Hedda made, which will allow you to set your sim's interest points to 10 in any topic you choose. You can do this with as many interests as you like. The Supersculpture (which also has a lot of other useful functions) is at http://www.somesimthings.com/Obj/05Obj.htm

I've also made a mod called The Interest Adjuster; see post #4 in this thread.

Child sims have several different possible interests than adults do, such as Toys and School. They also have four possible interests in common with adults: Weather, Sports, Outdoors, and Music. So I use the Supersculpture to give EVERY sim in my town interests in Weather, Sports, Outdoors, and Music, so that EVERY sim will have at least four common interests. If every sim has four common interests, making friends is a snap!

Another useful mod

Of course, even once you've MADE friends, you have to maintain them, because your friendships lose points every single day. You can invite a sim over every night in order to maintain those relationships, but that leaves little time for raising your skills. Or you can get my mod that eliminates relationship decay at https://modthesims.info/showthread.php?t=657300.

But even if you don't want to use mods, knowing that pre-made sims don't have interests but will acquire some if you take them to a community lot will help. Keeping a list of who has what interests will help. Making sims with easy-to-befriend personalities will help. Knowing that repeating a social interaction too quickly makes that interaction fail will help. Put all of these together, and you really CAN make friends in The Sims 1 quite easily!

I've made some mods for The Sims 1 -- yes, The Sims ONE :-) -- which you can find at http://corylea.com/Sims1ModsByCorylea.html
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retired moderator
#2 Old 7th Aug 2021 at 5:28 PM
Thanks for this @Corylea , very useful!
I printed this guide to PDF in case anyone wants to keep a copy:
https://simfileshare.net/download/2650348/
Top Secret Researcher
Original Poster
#3 Old 7th Aug 2021 at 6:30 PM
Quote: Originally posted by simsample
Thanks for this @Corylea , very useful!
I printed this guide to PDF in case anyone wants to keep a copy:
https://simfileshare.net/download/2650348/


Thanks, @simsample!

I've made some mods for The Sims 1 -- yes, The Sims ONE :-) -- which you can find at http://corylea.com/Sims1ModsByCorylea.html
Top Secret Researcher
Original Poster
#4 Old 13th Apr 2022 at 12:27 AM
Given that the Maxis-made sims don't have interests unless you play them and take them to a community lot, and given that there are FIFTEEN interests, but each sim usually only has around five of them, that means that finding sims to make friends with can be difficult.

I've made a mod to address this; it's called The Interest Adjuster.

It comes in two types, with two flavors of each type. What does it do? The Interest Adjuster sets the interests that adults and children have in common -- Weather, Sports, Music, and Outdoors -- to 9, so that every sim in the neighborhood will have a set of common interests that they can talk about.

1) The MANUAL type of interest adjuster requires that your sim click on it to adjust their interests, so that you can control who has had their interests adjusted. If you want to change the interests of sims in the neighborhood, you'll need to play their household for a minute or two, in order to have them click on the interest adjuster.

2) The AUTOMATIC type of interest adjuster cycles through every sim on the lot and adjusts everyone's interests. It takes from 10 - 30 minutes to get to a sim, once they've spawned on the lot, so give them a few minutes after spawning to let the adjuster work before you talk to them. Once their interests are adjusted, though, that's permanent (provided that you save the game afterwards), so you only have to wait for it to work the first time you see them. The automatic version will work not just on neighborhood sims that you could adjust manually if you wanted to but also on Downtownies, Magic Town residents, sims on Vacation lots, and so on ... provided that you've put an Automatic Interest Adjuster on the lot.

The "cycle though all the sims on the lot" code is by Inge Jones of Simlogical; the "adjust this sim's interests to a particular pattern" code is by Corylea.

Because the automatic version cycles through all the sims on the lot -- all day and all night, forever -- it uses more processing power than most Sims 1 objects. But modern computers are so overpowered when playing The Sims 1 that this is only likely to be a problem if you're still playing The Sims on the computer you had back in 1999. :-)

So, I also said there are two flavors.

a) The TOTAL flavor, in addition to adjusting the four common interests to 9, also adjusts all the other interests to 4 or 5.

b) The MODERATE flavor adjusts ONLY the four common interests and leaves the others untouched, so every sim will have both the four common interests and some personal interests that are just theirs.

The TOTAL flavor, in addition to setting those four interests to Level 9, also sets all of the other interests to Level 4 or 5. Four or five points isn't enough for you to start a conversation about that topic, but it IS enough that you won't LOSE relationship points if someone else talks about it. If you use this on every sim in the neighborhood, your sim will never have a bad conversation with another sim because of mismatched interests. (You can still have a bad conversation if you use social interactions that don't fit the other sim's personality or if you use any given social interaction too many times in a row.)

I played with the TOTAL flavor for a few months and decided that while it was very useful when I wanted to focus on my sim's career or dog training or something, if I wanted to focus on social relationships, it made things a bit dull, because every sim in the neighborhood had exactly the same interest pattern.

So I made the second flavor. The MODERATE Interest Adjuster still sets the levels of Weather, Sports, Music, and Outdoors to 9, but it leaves all the other interests alone. So each sim will have some personal interests, in addition to the common interests that everybody has. You can still make friends with a sim, even if your personal interests don't overlap, provided that you engage in activities that allow you to control the topic of conversation.

If you're just standing around and talking, you have no control over what the sims talk about. But if you're doing a shared activity, such as watching television together, playing chess together, eating a meal at a table together, and so on, then you can click on your sim and choose Change Topic. If you change to Weather, Sports, Music, and Outdoors, you can be sure the other sim will share those interests if you've used The Interest Adjuster on them.

If you're looking for your sim's soulmate, though, you'll want to talk about more than just the weather. :-) The Moderate Interest Adjuster lets you have lots of friends for work but still lets you search for someone whose personal interests match yours.

The MANUAL Interest Adjuster looks like a lavender flamingo and can be found near the other flamingos in the catalog, under Decorative - Sculpture.

The AUTOMATIC Interest Adjuster looks like a pink African violet and can be found near the other African violets in the catalog, under Decorative - Plants.

You can get them at my Interest Adjuster page.

So THIS will happen easily. :-)

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I've made some mods for The Sims 1 -- yes, The Sims ONE :-) -- which you can find at http://corylea.com/Sims1ModsByCorylea.html
Field Researcher
#5 Old 25th Apr 2022 at 1:49 AM
The thing about varying interactions is spot-on. I could have sworn there was something about Sims disliking repeated interactions in the manual or maybe the official site. I always did that when I played and it definitely made things easier.
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