Lock Skill Gain Progress ? Make Sims Your Own

November 7, 2017, Maxis Patch: Fixed!

This mod should now be working as before, with the November 7, 2017, Maxis patch.

Minor change made, since Photography is now a base game skill, it’s now included as a possible lock in the “base game only” random lock option.

New version is V2.

Enjoy!

– Triplis

Want to make a cook who is always a kitchen disaster waiting to happen? How about a singer who can’t carry a tune in a bucket and never gets better, no matter how hard they try?

Or maybe you just hate skill clutter… that annoying thing where your sim has level one in Charisma, Comedy, Cooking, Singing, Dancing, Video Games…. zzzz. You get the idea. Nope! No more of that.

Introducing…! I’m starting to sound like an infomercial.

Look, it’s like this. I made a mod where you can “lock” or “unlock” skills with the click of a button, under a new self-target pie menu called Skill Lock.

What It Does

It sets up a multiplier of zero for any given “locked” skill. Anything multiplied by zero is zero, so it cancels out any and all skill gains for that skill, reducing them to nothing.

Note that if a skill is already visible under the Skills bar, locking it won’t make it disappear. Nor will it reduce the progress. It only freezes the current progress.

Also note: Example time. You lock Parenting skill before it’s even visible on the Skills bar. You go do some Parenting action that would normally give you a chunk* of Parenting XP. Instead, you get no XP, but the notification for Parenting being “acquired” happens anyway. And it will happen every time you get a chunk of XP. If you want to avoid this notification quirk, just let the skill become acquired and then lock it.

*This only applies to chunks. Skill gain that happens gradually, such as practicing on the Piano, shouldn’t trigger the notification.

Ages

It’s made for Teen or older skills. Child sims can use the menu, but they won’t get much out of it. I allowed child sims to have the option, in case (for example) you want your kid to max Mental skill, but NOT get a head start on Logic skill. So you max Mental, but have Logic freezed at zero progress.

In short, I did not design anything specifically for Child or Toddler skills. It’s all for Teen+ skills.

What Does This Button Do

Commands are:

Lock All Skills (locks everything… keep in mind it’s going to add something like 30 hidden traits if you lock everything… if that hurts your game performance, then… you have been warned and I’m bad at making skill locks that are low on performance cost)

Unlock All Skills (unlocks everything)

Lock Skill… (pie menu, leading to individual lock for each skill in the game)

Unlock Skill… (pie menu, leading to individual unlock for each skill in the game)

Randomize… pie menu, leads to two options…

Lock Random Skills (Base Game): Locks five random skills, selecting ONLY from skills that come with base game

Lock Random Skills (Xpac Skills Included): Locks five random skills, selecting from all skills, including expansions

I don’t own everything, what will this do

Example: If you don’t own Spa Day, the Wellness skill will show up as a blank string in the Lock/Unlock options. That’ll help clue you in to the fact that said blank string option is not going to do anything for you.

Unfortunately, if you own no xpacs, this means you’ll have quite a few blank strings. You’ll just have to navigate the pie menu around them. I would have liked to separate stuff cleanly and be able to offer different versions, but there’s no actual issue if you don’t have a particular skill other than a few blank strings.

So I figured, shrug. No biggie yo. Like stuff and things.

That’s all, folks

I’ve tried it out a bit and am pleased to find that it truly makes a difference for me being able to lock sims out of certain skills, differentiating sims from each other more. I hope you will enjoy it as well.