Question for career modders: if I make a career with no assigned workdays, will sims in that career just never go? I'm trying to take children under 5 years old out of school until they're old enough by putting them in a school that doesn't do anything, and I'm just wondering if it'll actually work before I try to debug it any more.

Yeah, I thought about doing that too but wanted something more scalable and automatic. So if not setting any workdays for the no-school school works (the bug I had turned out to be very silly and easily fixed, so I think it will? the days are grayed out, but it's Sunday in my test neighborhood, so we'll see) is set a listener to automatically move every child from normal school to no school at the start of the life stage, and another listener on the season transition to fall to assign every child who's old enough to be in school at the time back to elementary school.

[EDIT: Seems to work on Monday! No attempt to push the sim to school, no performance drop for not going, nothing. Also, since I put the sim in the no-school school before they'd ever been to school, they never got any homework generated in their inventory, which is nice since I thought I'd end up fighting with sims to stop their homework obsession.]

Thanks, I think? Sorry, I'm bad at interpreting memes

In case anyone else searches this later, what seems to work for automatic school assignment (mostly learned from MasterController and gamefreak130's Job Overhaul) is this -

Find the custom school (can just do once on world load):
And then when I want to assign a sim to it:

Tagging @MissyHissy as she might have insights into this.


Do you mean toddlers? I've been trying to give toddlers a placeholder active career called "Preschool" and may have found a hack where they have to walk in a rabbithole to "enroll" in the career - the minor issue is that they stretch when they do.

Due to toddlers not having the "career" outfit category, I figured it's not possible to assign a traditional rabbithole career to toddlers, including school careers. Would you happen to know if there's a hack to enroll toddlers in an actual traditional rabbithole school...?

Huh, toddlers weren't what I was thinking of with this, but now that you mention it I wonder if you could auto-enroll a toddler in school the same way I'm doing with children? I think their career managers might not exist [EDIT: I was wrong, they do], but if they normally don't it sounds like you've been able to get around that. I'll try putting a toddler in my No School school on my next iteration of testing it and get back to you in like an hour!

What I'm dealing with here isn't toddlers, but children early in the child life stage – this might be kind of a niche problem, but since I play with super-epic lifespans and use Battery's How Old Are You mod and Consort's Grow mod, it looks weird when for the first 24 days or so of the child life stage the sim is absolutely tiny and says they're 4 years old but they go to school and do homework like they're already 12 or something. So what I had been doing was just extending the toddler life stage so childhood starts at 5, but a 4-year-old toddler is kind of weird too, and also toddlers are boring.

So now I made it so children just get put in a fake school that's never in session until fall of the sim-year they turn 5. And so far it works! This career is extremely slapdash and lazy but hasn't obviously broken anything yet :p

EDIT: Adding toddlers to my fake school actually worked immediately, this is wild The box where it says "a toddler's job is to grow up well" etc. didn't change, but the toddler I tried it with has the custom school as the only entry in their career history now

I did it the same way as with children, just this:
noSchool is just a regular rabbithole School, so I think you should be able to do this with your preschool career also!

1) "I wonder if you could auto-enroll a toddler in school the same way I'm doing with children? I think their career managers might not exist [EDIT: I was wrong, they do]" > Wow, quite the breakthrough! That is really good to know, so many possibilities!

2) "but if they normally don't it sounds like you've been able to get around that." >



3) "it looks weird when for the first 24 days or so of the child life stage the sim is absolutely tiny and says they're 4 years old but they go to school and do homework like they're already 12 or something." > I hear you! Talk about an awkward sight.

4) "and also toddlers are boring" > so far in TS3, so true. Hopefully that changes some day.

5) "So now I made it so children just get put in a fake school that's never in session until fall of the sim-year they turn 5. And so far it works! This career is extremely slapdash and lazy but hasn't obviously broken anything yet :p" > so I understand, Nraas "Homeschool" career wasn't cutting it for you? I never tried it so maybe there's some skill & performance at play that you would rather do without?

6) "EDIT: Adding toddlers to my fake school actually worked immediately, this is wild The box where it says "a toddler's job is to grow up well" etc. didn't change, but the toddler I tried it with has the custom school as the only entry in their career history now."



I'm really excited about this - the only thing that is a bummer so far is the career tab not being updated with the custom career description, we can't have it all, can we?

Thanks for providing the code that you used! I'm still quite a newb at script modding so I'll definitely reach out when I get to progress on this mod, hopefully this week-end.

I did think about using Homeschool! In the end I decided I'd like to be able to have some sims in the world who are homeschooled for real (with homework and grades and everything) at the same time as others who just aren't in any kind of school, which I couldn't if I turned off homeschool homework to use it as the no-school option.

About your toddler career questions: I don't believe any sims I put in this school, including toddlers, have bosses or coworkers, but that could be because it's a school? Or because I'm pretty sure I set it to not require a boss and have 0 minimum coworkers. I'll try the same with a non-custom, non-school career and see if the toddlers get coworkers or career outfits. The No School school is tied to the school rabbithole; since no one ever gets called there, though, I can also try a regular school and see if the toddlers try to go. Oh, and I hadn't thought of using MC to check career status!

I've alway wanted an override for that glitchy automated school assignment and just wanted to have to enroll them in my choice of school manually or just have them remain uneducated which is a lot more like real life where not all children are in school.I hated that auto-assignment because it would sometime put chilren in a school way to far to attend without missing the entire day simply because they had to travel too far to get to school and the overcrowing was also so bad that it left one child taken by the social worker and resulted in a corrupted save.

I shouldn't laugh but In theory, you could make a mod that fixes that like this if you wanted to! I knows there's a method involved in routing that calculates the distance between objects (it's used in the SocialWorker situations to decide if sims should walk to the social worker car or teleport), so you could run that to check how far away the school is from a lot and then assign the sims living there to never-in-session school if that distance is too far.

1) "I don't believe any sims I put in this school, including toddlers, have bosses or coworkers, but that could be because it's a school?" Ah right! I never coded a custom school, only a FT career, so that could actually be why. I confuse custom schools with custom part time and full time careers.
2) "Or because I'm pretty sure I set it to not require a boss and have 0 minimum coworkers." Now that I think of it - I don't think school students have "bosses", but they do have coworkers if enabled in the code (and these coworkers show up in the sim's "status" via MC).
3) "I'll try the same with a non-custom, non-school career and see if the toddlers get coworkers or career outfits." You rock, thank you so much! Can't wait to hear what your experience will be.
4) "The No School school is tied to the school rabbithole; since no one ever gets called there, though, I can also try a regular school and see if the toddlers try to go". I assume that technically the game would cancel the queued action because TS3 toddlers can't go off-lot without caregivers, unless they are on the same lot of the rabbithole at the time the school starts, I guess...
5) "Oh, and I hadn't thought of using MC to check career status!" My thinking is: for my active toddler, I'd give them a custom active "Preschool" career, because seeing the description in their career tab would be important for realism, and also I don't mind if they don't have a boss/coworker assigned. But for townie toddlers, I don't mind at all the lack of career tab description and would love for them to be auto-enrolled in a school career. I'd just like to check which one they're enrolled in using MC status, so I could assign them with MC to various, specialty schools (creative school, "sports" school, etc. much like the children & teens' 5x boarding schools).

Quick update: I've tried this with the political career now, it still works and now the political career appears as the toddler's current career in both their career tab and their MC career status (which makes me think something must have just been weird with my earlier test). The toddler also gets a career outfit, and other sims in the political career appear as their bosses/coworkers; I couldn't send them to work, though. I just get a "it's not your work hours" notice, and the carpool never gets called either.

So I think you could make your mod do everything you're looking for like this, and with a rabbithole interaction or a phone interaction triggering the career assignment you wouldn't even have to make enrollment automatic if you don't want it to be!

Wow, this is really good to know! Glad to hear they have uniforms + career tab description + boss/coworkers. I guess EA has core-blocked toddlers from going to work since technically toddlers need to be active to fire up the triggers (hunger, hygiene, etc.) that prompt nearby caregivers to attend to their needs.

Now that I know toddlers can have the custom career in their job history, I feel more motivated than ever to progress on this Preschool mod. Appreciated! You're amazing, thank you so much again.

I would rather have a no school career replace the other one as the school the children and kids auto-assigned to so they'd have to manually enroll in the regular school to attend instead of just attending as that's why school routing was broken so badly I was forced to install AwesomeMod to remove the automated school assignment from my game.I originally got it just for that one reason and was willing to accept the changes in my game to fix school issues.