Download:

Last Update: Feb. 25, 2025, 4:55 p.m.


💾👇 1-Click Install (It automatically installs for you. Recommended if you're new to installing mods):

If you own a copy of The Sims Legacy on Steam: lpx_childrencancook_steam.zip — 8.6 MB

If you own a copy of The Sims Legacy on the EA app: lpx_childrencancook_eaapp.zip — 8.6 MB

If you own a copy of classic The Sims (2000-2005): lpx_childrencancook_original.zip — 8.6 MB


💾👇 Manual Download (Contains files + instructions for manual installation. Recommended for advanced users who are familiar with downloading Sims 1 CC):

lpx_childrencancook_2.zip — 8.4 MB



Child Sims are virtuosos since birth:

Really geeky Sims 1 fans might know that, for some reason, child Sims have a quirk where they are deliberately born with randomized skill points, anywhere from 0 to 1000. Have you ever noticed how some of them are mini MOZARTS when playing any musical instrument, even though players are not capable of developing their skills!? Well, that's why.

With this mod installed, however, child Sims will be assigned to different cooking points depending upon their school performance:



"With this mod, can child Sims use a stove and set their house on fire?"

Yes

Toaster Oven Fun Fact:

Did you know Maxis toyed with the concept of allowing child Sims to cook? More precisely: cooking exclusively using a toaster oven? Whew, no knives involved in the process.
I was browsing the base game's cache of leftover/unused animations back in 2020 and I was caught by surprise to see that child Sims had a specific bank of animations exclusively dedicated for the toaster oven object.

c2o-toasteroven-putfood


c2o-toasteroven-foodcheck


c2o-toasteroven-get-food

Importing the animations back to their appropriated contexts wasn't as easy as it should. c2o-toasteroven-get-food, for instance, contains in its programming a whole bunch of event IDs that simply do not match those that are actually listed in the object's scripting trees; we can assume that the child Sims animation files accomodate the toaster oven's script in its early/beta state, where the animation event indexes obviously happen to be very different than the ones used in the final product. As result, forcing child Sims to grab the prepared food off of the (final) toaster oven originally results in a rather buggy routine where they hold the item, but it isn't actually in their hands. Check out...



My mod fixes this tiny oversight, so child Sims can use the toaster oven the way they're intended to, without sacrificing their original animations versus the way the final stack objects event IDs work:



Plans for the future:

> Child Sim-enabled barbecue grills;

Let me know if you encounter any glitches or have suggestions!

Demo video:

Well, THAT makes it a lot more fun to have a kid around! Thank you.

Thank you! I love having kids as family members but their gameplay is so limited compared to adult sims. This is a game changer!

That's a great addition to the game, thank you for that & keep up the good work!

After having conversations and getting feedbacks from people, I was considering to allow players to have some autonomy over the kids' cooking abilities instead of having their cooking skills silently assigned to 2.

Let me know, pals, if you're on board with either of the ideas:

> Assigning skill points (0 to 3) based on school grades

OR

> Assigning skill points from 0 to 3 depending on the child's Neat score.

I like the idea of basing it on school grades. The adult sims READ cookbooks, after all, so it's a studious skill. :-)

Yeah! We can kind of build a little "SimCity Elementary School built new cooking class facilities!" narrative, which would justify their cooking abilities aligning with their grades! Great. I'll bring it to life in the new update, together with giving them barbecue grill access.

I forgot to polish "Wait for Notify" (halt the cooking if the players cancel the interaction last minute) for the kids . That's a problem. I'll take care of it as well!

Is it setting *to* 0-3 or is it incrementing *additional* 0-3 points past any they might randomly have been assigned? *eyes the two child sims I have banished to the ether (put in the Default family. I'm testing something) that have 865 cooking and 208 cooking respectively* (I suppose I could just download and look at the object to know this, huh? )

I'm sorry! Setting to 0-3. The idea is to get kids competent enough to cook decent meals with minimal fire risk—but still maintaining the risk there. Another potentially valid approach would be mapping it so that an 'F' student has zero cooking skill, an 'A+' student has ten, and everything in between follows the same proportion — but maybe it'd make simming unfavorably easy



Lol Each one of the skill points are counted by the 100's in the control panel; so while it might show over 800 points, that’s still "just" eight bars in practice (they still cook better than I do IRL...)! You’ve probably already noticed this since you’re also certainly cracked Edith’s bible at this point!

About freaking time, here's the first mod update!

lpx_childrencancook_2.zip — 8.4 MB

Better interaction cancelling:

Now, manually halting the food preparing halfway through completion causes children to remove their step stool, other than having their avatars abruptly snapped to the ground, letting the stool on its own until it's killed. That's because the stoves' and counters' preapring loop trees have now a global Wait for Notify branch that calls another global, Remove Stool, provided the active Sim is a child.





School grades influence cooking score:

The SimCity council approved the construction of brand-new cooking school facilities in all of the city's Elementary Schools! Now our little girl and boy geniuses can take their first steps into the art of legally cooking the chicken, green beans and red potatoes of everyday at an early age.

That being said... your child Sim's cooking performance entirely depends upon their school performance! Here's the chart with the relation between their grades versus the cooking score they are assigned with upon starting to cook:



Friendly reminder: This specific behavior is not applied to adult Sims. They will still need to learn cooking by reading books as normal.

This looks great, Lucpix!

This is really great, what a lot of work! You rock. I like to tinker with a kids-only house. Also, a pets only house.

Thank you!

Just downloaded this. Works great, thanks.

Great to hear, pals!

To players that are new to the art of installing Sims 1 custom contents, I built a safe automatic 1-Click install executable for this mod (check out this thread's first post!)! Just click "Extract", and it'll do the rest.

(screenshot)


p.s.: (does anyone know the Epic Games Legacy version files path?)

This is awesome! Thank you so much! I have Making Magic game. I put all the folders into GameData, but one animation missed...
What to do? And it seems they can't use microwave



Can you help me please?

I put it into C/Games/TheSims/GameData/

Maybe it not works because my game has another path to GameData folder?

Would've just been fine with a mod that only makes them able to cook quick meals, but this... This is very nice...

You are awesome. Thank you!

Still waiting for help...

Hey. I overlooked the troubleshooting potential of this thread given the success cases that I came across in the early months of the project + in this thread.




1) Definitely not! The fact that you have the game installed in a custom folder shouldn't be a reason for major issues, as long as you opt to extract the mod files manually, instead of using one of the self-extract exe's available. From what you've said, it seems to me that you decompressed the files exactly where they were supposed to be extracted to in order to make the mod work. Just to be sure, a straight-forward way of doing so successfully is simply moving the contents in the zip folder (in this case, cmx7, Global and Objects) directly to GameData.



But be careful: If the program warns you about any file conflicts (and therefore asks you if you want to replace those files with the ones you're attempting to extract), it's safe to say that you previously installed another kitchen/food related default replacement mod that also handles the resources of at least one of the kitchen/food items that this mod wants to modify. Such conflicts are rare to some extent, but in no way impossible. Being aware of them is amazing, though; makes me want to work on some ways of making both default replacement mods co-exist, if the author of the other mod is active and do want to make a collaborative effort.



Your comment also brings an excellent point and technical boundary that I failed to pinpoint originally and I will do now. This mod will not work as smoothly when the kitchen objects are CC, because (most of) the animation data that this mod modifies is stored locally within each Maxis appliance/counter file rather than a single iff that globally handles all animation behaviors at once, even for downloaded objects. Obviously the programming of the custom kitchen objects is not well suited for child Sim use, so even though the children will have enough smarts to go ahead and reach a custom appliance/counter, the custom appliance/counter does not have any type of information related to child Sims animations stored in it, hence why the missing animation overhead error message pops up. Please verify if the issue persists if you command your child Sims to prepare food using Maxis objects only.



Currently it's an unfortunate major boundary and challenge that this mod is facing. I will emphasize it on the main post. Getting to the core of it is in my to-do.