Sometimes I could just hug my past self, and when I fired up my Sims 3 game after a 3-year hiatus and got a hankerin' to pick up my custom recipe project, I found one of those times. I could piece together a tutorial from my conversation with Icemunmun: https://modthesims.info/showthread.php?t=566571

I have been putting together some custom foods/recipes using kelp to fill the hole left by the, "Discuss Kelp Recipes" mermaid interactions. I have two in a testable state: seaweed salad (kelp) and miso soup (tofu and kelp). I have 2 more planned: fish sandwich (grillable, any fish and kelp), and spicy tuna roll (ghost chili, tuna, and kelp).

(That came out sounding like spam, spam, eggs, and spam....)

Issue with the recipes:
- The mixing bowl contents (foodPrep?) and saucepan contents (foodCook?) are still using textures from the recipes I started from. I welcome advice on how to find the bit to change.

Things I would LOVE to be able to do:
- Identify the kelp content to Mermaids so that they get proper hunger reward without requiring a bigger mod like icarus_allsorts Ingredient Moodlets From Meals
- Allow Mermaids to roll one of these recipes as favorite foods
- Make the Discuss Kelp Recipes interaction DO SOMETHING, i.e. have some chance of teaching an active sim one of these recipes

Oh, yeah, would be good to post the packages.

As I said, they're pretty close. They're made with CCLoader, and I see that it's possible to add buffs using CCLoader. Perhaps it would be possible to attach a mermaid-only buff to these foods to increase the hunger reward?

Heya! Nice to see you back! :D

I will admit, custom recipes I only really know the basics of it :p So if anyone else has some better feedback/tips/etc that would be great, but here goes!

1. Identify the kelp content to Mermaids so that they get proper hunger reward without requiring a bigger mod like icarus_allsorts Ingredient Moodlets From Meals 
If we're really talking about restrictions for example, then it might need some scripting. but it does sound doable when it comes to adding a buff with the food!  See: https://modthesims.info/showthread....090#post4930090
(I'll be honest, all the examples Icemunmun added there are actually quite helpful to get an idea on how to approach it). Now for the kelp thing you want to do something similair to this: https://modthesims.info/showthread....280#post5069280

2. Allow Mermaids to roll one of these recipes as favorite foods
hrm that is actually a super tough one unfortunately :/ The game already has a predefined list that we modders can't edit unfortunately. So sadly, that would be quite difficult to do, unless you've got an example? 

3. Make the Discuss Kelp Recipes interaction DO SOMETHING, i.e. have some chance of teaching an active sim one of these recipes
This would be possible, though that would require actual script modding, though. Although that kind of interaction is pretty easy to implement since it's really just one function that takes care of it all. So i'm perfectly fine writing something like that for you

Hope this helps at least a little!

Hi! It's good to see you!

My current strategy for the bowl and saucepan textures is to see if I can find the offending _IMG resources in the in FullBuild or Gameplay packages and do a search on those RKs. There's no reference to, say, foodCookHotAndSourSoup, and the images aren't in my recipe packages, so I have to assume that something I cloned still points back to the original.
[ETA: This the bit about external vs internal resource keys seems like a good lead on the problem. Now I just have to read it over very carefully to sort what to try: https://modthesims.info/showthread....58#post4610658]

That bit about buffs is really helpful! I was just reading about adding buffs with CCLoader, but I couldn't find examples of buffs that filled motives. The example you pointed to gives me a launching point for that. Maybe:



Or is it HungerMotive? I don't know what any of these things are called!

The next question is how to make those buffs ONLY affect mermaids?

I'm a software engineer by trade, and in spite of this (or perhaps because of?) I've never been able to maintain focus on script modding. Animations, modeling, textures, etc. have been a bigger draw. I don't know if this iteration will be different, and I'll finally get beyond the development environment setup tutorial and actually do something . It's too bad we can't tweak the favorite food lists. As I understand it, all Mermaids have "kelp" as a favorite food. #3 was a flight of fancy. It seems like it would be a good starter script mod if I ever get that far with scripting.

My first recipe project was Escargot, and I got that complete except that I crashed and burned on texturing. I am equipped now with a better image editor with a DDS plugin, and I have a better understanding of what I'm trying to do. Still shopping around for a good food model to retexture though. Cookies won't work. I'm considering just retexturing spaghetti as I did with seaweed salad -- the annoying part is that it uses the same texture for group vs. individual portion. When you have a countable bunch of snails on a plate, it'd be nice to have the individual portion feature FEWER snails on the plate.

OK, I have all the textures working. Despite the fact that the prep and cook stages are only using TEXTURES for the existing bowl and saucepan, I had to find and clone comparable objects from the game with models. I was able to find the textures used in the base game mixing bowl recipes by opening FullBuild01.package and searching on "mix," but I've never figured out where the models and VPXY resources are. I ended up using foodPrepGourmetPetFoodCatDog, which was in my DeltaBuild02.package I think.

I'm going to guess that what I really need is the VPXY resource. It does seem silly to be loading in models I'm not using, just so I can point to a texture. I don't know if Icemunmun is still doing any TS3 stuff, but maybe I'll reach out to her to see if she has a different method or at least knows what cruft is safe to remove. I don't know that I have the energy at just this moment to just start deleting out resources and testing over and over again. I'll see how I feel in a week or two .

Now I just need to figure out the syntax for a buff that fills the hunger motive for Mermaids only. I pulled the Buffs XML out of ccmerged.package, but I'm still not seeing an example I understand. I'd expect to see what I need with the Mark of the Green Dragon buff, but the closest I see is
I don't see motives mentioned by name in the file at all. Off to pick through somebody else's mods for a bit .
ETA: I missed that DouglasVeiga posted a buff reference. I think what I want is HungerResolved. Now to go figure out how to target Mermaids.

I guess this thread really should go in the feedback forum, shouldn't it?