Hello ! Sorry if this has been asked before.

I've always been bothered by the meal system in The Sims 2. To me, it doesn't make sense that some meals fill the hunger bar more than others, when they look just as nourishing. I end up always cooking that one grandma soup because it's one of the most efficient way to fill the hunger bar- but that's all my sims eat, at diner, at breakfast... I wish, for example, the cereals would fill the hunger bar just as much. It kills the realism for me, because, irl, we do a lot of different things, and they all satiate us in some way.

But not in this game, sadly.

I wish my sims could eat lots of different food without worrying whether it's gonna be efficient or not. I know there are ways to fill the hunger bar faster (vegetables, fishes, etc) but I'd prefer a change in default values, if that's possible.

Is there a mod that changes that? And, if not, is it hard to do, for someone who has no modding experience?

Thank you in advance !

Absolutely agree with you. I also don't know, how they can eat so much 😂 But my sims cook with products from their garden, cook fish. It's quite nutritious. Also high skill of cooking allows you to cook better food.
And if they are not full after eating a big hamburger, for example, I just drag their hunger bar up with testingcheats (same with their bladder bar, when they are in shower and if they don't have time )

SimBlender and Sim Manipulator will do the same thing without having to key the testingcheats in the 'hood first, and of course the blanket cheat "maxmotives" will top up everything.

If you use mods at all, you should have testingcheats on at all times anyway.

My solution to this problem is just to install custom food. Most custom food has higher food points. Cereal isn't really filling in real life either, I never eat it as a meal and only as a snack.

One good reason to avoid using testingcheats is to avoid getting errors on everything when (not if, when) something goes wrong.

If something goes wrong, the error log is the only way to figure out what happened and how to fix it. The errors still happen regardless of whether or not you have testingcheats enabled, you just don't get any information about them if it isn't.

It takes longer through SimBlender. And as for the maxmotives, it's not fun to play with, imho

YMMV. Your game, your playing style.

I prefer to leave testingcheats off unless I really need it, because it will throw never-ending errors under certain conditions - and most of all if you ever have to "Force Error" to unstick a Sim. (Experienced players generally advise turning it off, if you have it on, before doing this, for exactly this reason.) A lot of the popular cheat objects are just safer ways of accessing the same functions.

Throwing my 2 cents on this as a player who almost everyday experiments with testingcheats and turns it on:
Keyword is under certain conditions. If you have it turned on while clicking on the batbox to force error on everything, of course you'll be met with countless errors. But just having one error about a Sim and then clicking reset has a 90% chance of fixing it. Clicking cancel on the other hand wont fix anything.
I'm not sure why you say that forcing an error on a Sim generates thousands of errors? You can just click reset and it stops, at least on my game.
If you mean forcing an error with the BatBox on everything including Sims like I said above, that's different.
Errors can be useful if you have frequent jump bugs. It's preferable to turn on testing cheats, see the error (Even if it doesnt get fixed with Reset), quit the game and then search for a solution. :D

Then you most likely have some modification to your game causing the errors, and they are still happening if you turn testing cheats off.

I'm about as experienced as they come, I've been playing Sims 2 since release day in 2004. And I don't advise turning testing cheats off at all. (Unless you are using the FFS debugger to throw errors on all objects).

A difference of opinion. I've also been playing Sims2 since it's original release day in 2004 and I don't play with testing cheats on. I found that with it on, there were some errors which came up A LOT which the game could and would recover from without any needed action on my part. If the game could recover from it, then I didn't need to see it and I sure didn't need to have my game play interrupted to look at messages that needed no action.

Of course when I started experiencing jump bugs or other relatively common problems due to mod bugs or conflicts, I'd turn it on just to generate the logs so I'd know where to begin looking for the issue, but after that I'd turn it off again. And I continue to play happily to this day with it turned off.

What I was responding to was the implication that experienced sims 2 players advise people to play with testing cheats off. I'm not doubting that some people like to keep it off, but I'm doubting that any experienced player would say 'don't play with testing cheats on! Turn it off!'.

I've only played the game with debug mode on for like a decade now, and I've never had a case of repeated errors except when forcing errors on everything with the batbox, or once when the butler died. If some object is repeatedly throwing errors, the correct thing to do is to delete it - if you just keep resetting it and letting it throw more errors, it will seriously lag the game, and that's what happens by default if you have debug mode off, and you'll have no idea at all why your lot is so laggy. If you have it on, it will throw an error once, maybe twice, and then you delete it and it stops. This is not rocket science.

I'm the same as Hobbes. I only use testing cheats when I need them. Don't want to accidentally mess something up that I wouldn't have been able to mess up while they were off. I'm not saying that it's true, but I have seen people recommend turning testing cheats off when you aren't using them, so you can't accidentally mess something up.

To get back to the OP's question. XD Sorry, I don't know of a mod that makes everything equally filling. In RL too though, a bowl of cereal isn't going to fill you up as much as a turkey dinner. If you work on your sim's cooking skill, then there will at least be filling options available for every mealtime.

The only time I turn testingcheats off is before running force-error on everything. But the nuclear option isn't always necessary. If you know what specifically needs to be reset, the COE can be used to select it and then crash it.

My opinion of this is that you can't accidentally mess something up with testingcheats. In order to access the actual testingcheats interactions you have to press shift+click.
It's possible that advice was from the days of "Deleting tombstones will corrupt your entire game", because I've seen it in the more creative version of "Having testingcheats on will corrupt your game".
I can assure you nothing bad can accidentally happen if you have the cheat on, and I don't think you can accidentally press shift+click on an object. In all the times I've played with the cheat on, I never accidentally messed up with it. It's not as dangerous as people think.


Yep, I just mentioned it as an example of errors that will keep on continuing.

AFAIK deleting tombstones is bad lol.

But anyway, it's personal preference for testing cheats. It's not inherently better to have the cheat on or off.

Deleting tombstones isn't bad. It just unlinks the deceased Sim, which just then makes him unresurrectable. April Black debunked it in one of her videos.
I think so. Testingcheats is good for experimenting, but doesn't have that many useful options except maybe forcing errors on bugged objects/Sims.

Deleting the tombstone also doesn't even unlink the sim if you have nounlinkondelete installed. It just means that if you want the tombstone back, you have to respawn it.

I'm old. I remember all the 'do nots' from the stone age of Sims 2 lol. No unlink on delete was supposed to be an essential anti corruption mod. XD

Even better, deleting tombstones (or Sims from the family bin) doesn't even corrupt! Somehow the whole thing got muddled up.

What you're not supposed to do is delete files out of the Characters folder or use the DeleteAllCharacters cheat.

I think it was just a bad game of telephone. Pescado had never even mentioned corruption in nounlinkondelete's description, and some players who didn't understand what unlinked meant just assumed it meant broken thus freaking out about corruption.
I hate the fact that some players try to be incredibly careful with the game because they think it's made from spaghetti code and that EAxis made it so easy to corrupt. I've seen videos of "corruption horror stories" and the supposed corruption problem wasn't even related to corruption at all.
I highly recommend watching April Black's Neighbourhood Corruption video to get a better understanding of it. :D
I'd argue that TS3 is easier to corrupt than TS2. Whenever new players start playing TS2, they think that every little error or bug means that their neighbourhoods are all automatically trash and that they will need to reinstall their games and clean the registries in order to immediately get rid of the "corruption". And this happens because everyone keeps saying false things about the game's code!
There's also the other case which they notice a bug and then say that their neighbourhoods are doomed and they only have some time of gameplay before they spontaneously combust. April Black stated that corruption is instant, which is logical. When a toy breaks, does it break in slow motion or does the damage happen instantly?

Well it depends. Sometimes a toy can have a hairline crack that gets worse over time.

I should find this video. I keep hearing it mentioned.

I've played with testingcheats on for several years in TS2. I rarely if ever get any errors unless there are issues with a mod/CC item, or if I force an error on a stuck object. If you get random errors (or jump bugs with the cheat off) it's most likely from mod conflicts or CC issues.

(I'm a bit more concerned about the stability of TS3 with Testingcheats turned on, because it seemed the saves could go on for a good long while as long as the cheat wasn't in use, but seemed to destabilize shortly after the cheat was turned on, even if briefly just to modify motives - and I hardly had any mods in that game, so whatever else could've been causing the issues if it wasn't the cheat must have been TS3 itself. Hasn't seemed like an issue in TS4, though).

Anyway, Testingcheats is quite useful for a lot of things - error logs, cheating motives/interests/skills if need be, access to extra functions ingame, and getting out of sticky situations by forcing errors.

It's here: