How to tweak a tuning mod - beginner tuning tutorial

Introduction

Sometimes you download a tuning mod that does what you want...almost. It would be nice to change some things about it, so it fits your gameplay better. This tutorial will give you the first steps in that direction. The example is the Improved Fast Food Career mod that Andrew and I made. Please note, every mod is different. This tutorial is meant to give you a foot in the door, not a one-size-fits-all solution to tweaking all existing tuning mods. If you're interested in making your own tuning mod and have no idea where to start, this may help. You could also use this to get started making your own EA career overrides. Please be sure to read the notes at the end of the tutorial before beginning.

What you will need

The AOM Improved Fast Food Career mod
Sims 4 Studio

Instructions

1. Download the mod and Sims 4 Studio. Open Studio and open the mod. It will open in the Warehouse (there will be no model viewer) because the package contains no mesh or texture data. You will see all the resources in the package in a list on the left and the .xml of whatever resource is at the top of the list on the right:


2. When approaching this type of package revision, it's helpful to know a couple of things. First, most changes you make in the tuning resource will also need to be done in the corresponding data resource. What do I mean by corresponding data resource? Take a look at the list of resources. Expand the list on the left by hovering over the blue line dividing the two sides and pulling it to the right when your mouse cursor turns into a double-headed arrow. You will notice that most resources come in pairs. One is a tuning resource, and the other is a data resource. Two such pairs are indicated by the blue boxes below. Note the matching names in the last column:




3. The second important thing to know is that some changes are easy and others are not as straightforward. What are the easy changes? The answer is anything that requires a single value change in a single field that has an easily identifiable name. This tutorial will show you how to spot some of these and take advantage of how easy it is to change them. Every mod is different. To know what changes will be easy to make to any given mod, you will have to open it up and take a look. 

4.  Let's begin by finding an easy change in this mod. First, as you can see by looking at the names of the Tuning/Data pairs in the last column, this mod presents a career with five levels. Since, in general, the tuning resource has more editable fields start by clicking a tuning resource line so that you can view the code for that resource on the right side of the screen. We'll begin by looking at the last level of this career - FastFood_Level5:



5. After selecting this tuning resource, drag the line dividing the left and right screens to the left to expand the right side. This will allow you to view the code in the tuning resource. At the top, you will notice the name of the resource. Below that are some fields that could be changed including the ideal mood, base performance, and missed work penalty. However, you will notice that the ideal mood is represented by a number written in black font. This is the number EA has assigned to the "Inspired Mood." Unless you know the number they've assigned to some other mood, you will not be able to change this. You could type in the name of the mood you want, but, as this is written in green font, this is a note rather than real code that the game will recognize. That is, the green font stuff is there as a helpful addition, but it serves no actual code purpose. You could change the number for "base performance, but unless you know what the number there means and what to change it to, you won't be able to make a predictably functional change. The same goes for the "missed work penalty.":



6. Scrolling down a bit reveals the "performance mod" sections. These sections determine which moods will be rewarded at work and which won't. These are easy to change. For example, the first one has a -15 with several moods listed underneath. All of these moods will penalize the Sim if they go to work in that mood. The section below that has a -10. The moods listed under this will also penalize the Sim, but the penalty is less. Rearranging these is as easy as copying a line and pasting it in the section that you want it in and then deleting it from the section you don't want it in:



7. Scrolling further down, you will come to a very easily recognized field, "simoleons per hour." Just as it says, this will determine how much your Sim will make at this level of the career. You can change the 50 there to any amount:



8. Scrolling past that you will see the work schedule and duration sections. The work schedule is set up as true and false fields. If the word in the field is false, the Sim will not work that day while if it is true, the Sim will work. To change the days, simply change the word. The duration field is the number of hours the Sim will work. Below that is the start time. This is set so the Sim will begin work at 9 am and work 8 hours but you can change that by changing the numbers:



EA uses military time, so if you wanted 6 pm, for example, you would take 12 and add 6 (put 18 into the start time field).

9. Once you've made changes in the tuning resource, in some cases, you will need to make identical changes in the data resource. For example, if you made changes to the simoleons per hour, the days worked, the duration, or the start time, you will need to match those changes in the data resource. You will note that in the data resource, unlike the tuning resource EA does not use the words true and false. Instead, they use 0 for false and 1 for true. This means that if you changed something from false to true in the tuning resource, you need to change the number from 0 to 1 in the data resource. If you changed something from true to false in the tuning resource, you need to change the number in the data resource from 1 to 0:



And that's it. Once you've made your changes, just save the package and test it in the game. Some changes, like mood reward/penalty changes, won't be immediately obvious. Others, like the amount paid and days worked, will be.

Notes:

1. You may run into optimized tuning mods. These have everything condensed into a long string of code. Studio has a reverse optimization feature that you can run before beginning to work on the mod. This will return the formatting to something a bit more human-friendly:



2. While Studio can edit EA's careers and any that were made with Studio, some mods you may run into were not made in the same way EA makes things, and they weren't made using Sims 4 Studio. Studio will not be able to edit mods that were made using tools that create resources that aren't like the resources EA creates, nor was it intended to. Studio expects mods to be made in EA's format and we have no intention of changing that at this time. We do not support atypical code formats. This is an example of a mod that has atypical code. If you're seeing this in the data resource and running into problems with the package containing this resource, I cannot help you with your question. Please do not ask about how to edit items that have this issue with Studio:



3. This is a beginner tutorial for people who want to make simple changes to an existing mod. Please do not ask questions that are not within the scope of this tutorial in this thread. The intention here is to show people how to make easy adjustments for their game - it isn't to answer questions about how to make an advanced tuning mod or to help make an advanced tuning mod project.