What is this “Functioning Well” you speak of?
It’s a well! That functions!
The idea of this mod is to basically make life more difficult for your sims - Instead of being able to just use objects like showers and sinks with their invisible plumbing, your sims must first collect buckets of water from the well in order to flush the toilet, take a bath, wash dishes etc…
It’s great for off-grid/ living off the land/ old timey pre plumbing era gameplay.
How does it work?
The well object itself is the decor object “The Old Dried-Up Well” from The Sims 3 Store, that comes with the Brunch at the Old Mill set.
Except it’s no longer a decor object, or dried-up! Your sims can and need to actually collect water from the well in the form of buckets.
Each bucket is like one unit of water, and different interactions require a different number of units (or buckets) of water to be used. (See the Interaction List below for details).
The interactions that involve some kind of “plumbing” are replaced with new versions, that check if your sims have enough water before letting your sims do the interaction. If your sims have enough water, they can use the object as normal, and the required buckets of water will be used up.
Sims can either use buckets of water that are in their own inventory, or buckets can be stored in the stack of barrels object to be accessible across the household. So if you don’t want to have to keep collecting loads of buckets for each sim, you can just collect loads of buckets of water and store them in the barrels, and all your sims will be able to use plumbing objects as normal for as long as the buckets last.
Note about the barrels: The stack of barrels is the decor object from WA, but works as an inventory to store buckets of water instead. It requires WA for now, but hopefully soon I will try and make it base game compatible. If you don’t have WA you can still use the mod, but each sim will have to have buckets in their own inventory to use plumbing objects.
It’s also only active sims that need buckets of water to use stuff, so the rest of town shouldn’t be walking around with terrible stink clouds around them all the time.
Technicalities
Collecting water from the well:
To start with, you’ll need to collect water from the well, otherwise your sims will be living a pretty nasty life!
The well has one interaction, “Collect Water”, which is available to human sims aged child and up.
I have no animation experience, I’m afraid, so all that happens is that sims will walk up to the well and do a “swipe” animation, and a bucket will appear in their inventory.You can do this as many times as you want and have as many buckets in your inventory at once as you want.
Using the barrels:
The stack of barrels allows all sims in your household to access buckets of water to use plumbing related objects. It has two interactions -
“Add Water” moves all the buckets of water from your sim’s inventory into the barrels’ inventory.
“Check Water Amount” tells you both the total number, and available number of buckets in the barrel.
The total number is both the buckets that are free to use for interactions, and buckets that sims will need for their current interaction, but haven’t actually been used up yet. See below for more of an explanation.
Doing the replaced interactions:
If you have enough buckets, you will be able to use the replaced interactions. Once the interaction starts running (your sim begins walking to the object), the number of buckets required will be “locked”, which means they won’t count as buckets available to use for other interactions. Once the actual animation starts, the buckets are then destroyed or “used up”.
This means that if you cancel an interaction before your sim has actually interacted with the object, the buckets can become available to use for another interaction, and at the same time, sims can’t start interactions if the only buckets that are there are ones that are already being used for another interaction. Sorry if this is confusing - it’s not crucial to understand, just an explanation of how it works
Interactions that are replaced
All the interactions that are replaced in this mod to require a number of buckets in order to be used:
Wash Hands > 1
Wash Dishes >1 (Clean Up interaction is replaced to call the new wash dishes interaction)
Spongebath > 2
Flush Toilet > 1 (Use Toilet, Clean Toilet, Repair Toilet, Vomit (in toilet) are also replaced so sims will only automatically flush afterwards if they there is a bucket of water available to use)
Take Shower > 3 (For your very flammable sims, please note that they will need 3 buckets to Put Out Self, just like a regular shower. Same with Shower WooHoo )
Take Bath > 4
Take Bubble Bath > 5
ScubaAdventure > 5
Bathe Large Dog > 3
Bathe Small Pet (cat or small dog) > 3
The numbers of buckets required for each interaction are tunable - see Tunable Values below.
There are some plumbing objects that are not affected (sims will be able to use these without needing any buckets of water). Some I may add in the future, others likely not (see below for Future Plans)
Hot Tubs, Dishwashers, All-In-One Bathrooms I feel aren’t so important because they probably wouldn’t fit the playstyle anyway…maybe I’m just lazy?
The Outdoor Shower and Public Shower from the Store aren’t affected because they don’t count as regular showers, but I may add these in to also require buckets.
Installation
To install, just put the package in your mods folder.
Please note that objects already in the game before this mod is installed won’t be affected. You need to sell and buy new ones if you want sims to need buckets to use them.
I’d recommend starting an off-grid save after you have installed this mod, or if you have a save started, don’t build your house until after the mod is installed. That way you won’t have to replace all your sinks and showers etc to get them to function properly off-grid.
I would also recommend taking the mod out if you are playing a save that’s not off-grid, so nothing strange happens
Conflicts/Issues
This is a full script mod, and doesn’t override any core files or resources. However, on load it does replace the interaction definitions of the interactions listed above. So if you have a mod that also does that (though I don’t know any that do), either mine or the other mod likely won’t work.
One thing to note is that because this mod changes the interaction definitions, if you have mods that adjust the ITUN files of one of the interactions that are replaced, it won’t have an effect. You can edit my custom ITUN files to your liking though, they are in the package file. If you do find a conflict, let me know.
The only other thing I have found is that if you have nraas WooHooer installed, the shower WooHoo won’t work even if your sims have enough water. They do the social interaction and just stop. It does work if one sim is already in the shower though, so nothing too disastrous
Resources Used
With this mod, there are three objects: The well, the bucket, and the barrels.The well is the The Old Dried-Up Well decor object from the sims 3 store. [You don’t need the one from the store to use this mod]
Polycounts same as original: High LOD 990, Low LOD 413The bucket’s mesh comes from one of the decor objects from Pets, that has two buckets stacked. The smaller one rotated to be upright is the one in my mod.
Polycounts: High/Low LOD 364, (it just has the one LOD as cloned from bubble bath)
I used the Metal Eroded Texture by Giles Hodges for the bucket.The stack of barrels is from the decor stack of barrels from World Adventures.
Polycounts same as original: High LOD 1596, Low LOD 540 I also used the already exported and unprotected dlls by Inje A thank you to ani and her mods, namely the woodcutter and anvil mod, which greatly helped me figure out how to approach certain parts my mod.
Future Plans/Ideas
I’ve been working on this for quite a while now, and so I really wanted to get what I’ve done out before it drives me insane, but even though it’s pretty much done, there a few things I feel could function in a better way. I’d also be happy to hear any ideas/preferences that you have for how this could work. Here are just some things I have thought about:
Revamping the way water is represented. I know it’s not particularly realistic to have buckets as the smallest unit of water, but it was the easiest way I could think of implementing this system. I think a better way would be to have a sort of “pail of water” that you can buy, and then fill up from the well, and then interactions could use up a certain portion of water from the pail. This is something I’d really like to do but I think would be a big job!
Which sims and which objects are affected. Currently it’s only active sims that need buckets of water to use all plumbing objects in the world (at least ones that the interactions have been updated properly). This doesn’t make complete sense, as they’d be using water from their home lot for objects in different locations. I may change it so only the home lot is “off-grid”, or sims will need buckets in their inventories to use plumbing objects off their home lot. Or should all sims in town be affected and go round smelly? That might be preferable for a medieval village ?
A modern tank. It might be a good idea to also have a more modern looking way of storing water on your lot, for a modern off-grid style play, rather than using barrels.
Eco-friendly sims. I was going to have a different number of buckets for eco-friendly sims using the shower, but in the end didn’t get round to it. This is something I could add in, and maybe other lower values for other interactions if the sims is eco-friendly.
Anyway, sorry for the huge description
If you have any problems, or feedback, please let me know, and I’ll try to fix it.
I hope you like it :)
desiree-uk: I’m sorry for not adding the pictures properly, I can’t enlarge them here, but take a good look at them on zoe22′s post at MTS! :)
