Title. I place my Sims down on the couch and tell them to eat, and then they run off to the most "appropriate" place to eat - an outdoor table on the balcony. No. Just no.

Can anyone help this here control freak out please? Thank you.

One of THE most annoying interactions the sims are programmed to do.
I'll have a look around and see If I can find any mods to your description.

Try using icarus_allsorts Set The Table & Call To Meal mod.

Great! Will that mod allow my SimHousehold of two to eat on the couch? There's seating for two on the balcony, right beside the living room, but I specifically want them to eat on the couch.

I think the problem here is that, when given a choice of any kind on a particular lot, sims will always prefer to sit at a table to eat or even have coffee. From what I have seen, they will only sit on sofas (easy chairs, the toilet, etc.) to do so when there are no seats at tables available to them. Could you perhaps lock the balcony door on them when it's mealtime?

I have and use this mod. No it doesn't let them eat on the sofa. What it does it actually lay out meals at the table for each available spot, and then the sims in the household come and eat. This mod effectively forces them to eat at the table. It does however stop the congestion around the food when you use "Call To Meal" which is why I use it in my large families. (It also has the added benefit or having sims starting their meals at about the same time so they can converse with one another more. A bonus, IMO.)

There is no balcony door, only an arch. I couldn't find a door I liked, so I went with an arch instead. I'd like something made out of glass, but the problem is that Sims' hair looks really weird when rendered over glass - it's something to do with the glass shader. It's the reason I never take screenshots of Sims sitting near windows. I can post a screenshot if you don't know what I'm talking about.

Not near enough to my game at the moment to check this, but can you lock an arch? (probably not)

How about, as a test to see if this sort of thing is going to work at all, throw the chairs outside into their family inventory temporarily or move them away from the table? I know you aren't going to want to do that every time your sims get hungry, but this would be just to see how they behave when there are no chairs already at tables on the lot to choose from at all. They might even eat standing up, just to annoy you.

Will do that, I'm loading up my game now. It's very likely they'll just eat standing up to spite me, indeed.

As the other poster said, I'm not sure if theres a mod but the best thing to do is get the sims all in the same room with the sofa. Then lock the door to the other areas of the house and they should eat on the sofa. To help with this you could use the cheat "moveobjects on" and move all the sims you want to eat with you in the room where the sofas are. That way the sims are likely to eat at the same times rather than one sim finishing a lot earlier because they were close to the food. Hope this helps.

I know this was meant to be helpful, but...not a good idea. The Moveobjects cheat (frequently referred to as MOO) should never be used on sims of any kind unless the player is merely setting up poses and has no intention of saving and playing forward. MOO can far too easily break sims and ruin games if it used as suggested.

MOO can be used with objects, most safely with fused together decor items that have no function other than to look nice. But not so much objects that need to be interacted with and sorry to repeat this but, never on sims.

Nope. I use MOO all the time, I've never had any problems with it. Surely it's a little off sometimes, they might clip through floors or each other or something, but there's no way it'd break my save.

Okay, I'm glad it works for both of you. But it's still not recommended.

I've been providing support for TS3 players and mod users for years at NRaas and the official forums. When I see a player recommend something that I know has the potential to be damaging to others' games, I speak out and will continue to do so. I've never damaged a sim with MOO myself as I never use it that way, but have tried to help many players who have over the years including when they were just trying to move stray animals out of the way (unfortunately these would be players who also don't keep a safe set of backups to revert to so that they can recover from things going horribly wrong, but that's another matter).

Happy simming.

You need to register at this site to download, but it's free (and well worth it)

http://simsasylum.com/tfm/index.php...-8-12-14/page-1

Try this mod and see if they sit on the couch to eat?

I was using that mod already. Luckily, my problem fixed itself. For a long time, my Sims' home lot was glitched, which made them throw routing errors when attemping to go outside. Now that they can autonomously go outside again, they eat at a café table next to the pool. I'd rather have them eat at the kitchen island, but it's better than the stupid friggin' balcony.