Sim Ants

The Sims 4 MOD: Sim Ants

Available for download at Mod The Sims

Inspired in part by the original sims game, Sim Ant, pesky fire ants will now spawn on your sim’s lawn! I made this mod as a side project to learn more about how objects work and have many ideas for future updates.

This mod, like many of my other mods, requires the XML Injector

How it works
If the season is spring or summer there will be a chance fire ants may appear in your sim’s lawns. Every 4 sim hours a test is run with a 1% chance of creating an ant mount at a random spot outside. That doesn’t sound like much, but over the course of a week the chance builds to around 1/3. Sims are practically guaranteed to see at least one fire ant infestation before spring or summer is over, possibly more. Sometimes it’s in the open, sometimes it might be hard to see near outdoor furniture or plants. After around half a sim day, an ant mound will get larger in size and have the ability to create new ant mounds nearby every 17 hours. At first you might see 1 or 2 mounds, maybe even three. Soon, however, exponential growth occurs and those ants can take over an entire lot! (and they might become so many in number the game might get really slow.) Be careful, sims can get bitten if carelessly stepping too close!

Sims walking by may discover and approach the ant mounds on their own. Most sims will get angry but some depending on their interests in science or nature will find inspiration from the little creatures.

Poison
Fortunately, adult sims can spray ant mounds with Simdro fire ant poison for a small cost. Spraying one mound will poison many nearby mounds. A large infestation may take multiple sprays, so sims might get a little dirty. At least there’s a little boost to the gardening skill.

Friend or Foe
Children sims have the ability to talk to and make friends with ant mounds. And childish or insane sims too . Or they can make ant mounds mad, into enemies, with other social interactions.

Attitude
Ant mounds have a mood from happy, to neutral, to angry. Kicking an ant mound is sure to make them angry. This will merely spawn more visible ants. (In future updates I hope to add much more to the moods. Happy ants may bring treasures they find digging in the yard, for example. Angry ants will not be so friendly)

Future updates
In the future I want to add more interactions to the ant mounds, like ‘study’ the ants with a magnifying glass. Burn the ants. More consequential ant bites (death by ant even…?) I hope to have ant mounds affected by rain. Also I’d like to add a lawn treatment to prevent ants from spawning at all for certain sims. I’d like to add the ability to collect fire ants for recipes etc.

Overrides:
There are no overrides for this mod, but it does require Scumbumbo’s XML injector V3

Objects:
there is 1 object included with 229 polygons.

May require:
The visual effect of fire ants comes from Outdoor Retreat. The mod will work without Outdoor Retreat, you’ll just see ant mounds with no ants.
Seasons, the mod checks for the season to be spring or summer to work. If you don’t own Seasons, I’m not sure what will happen, but it is likley to not work.

Other:
A little quirk, If you are playing in the winter and the season changes to spring. As of right now the mod won’t turn itself on until the lot is reloaded. If you play like me, your sims will probably visit other places frequently so this may not be an issue at all.

Additional Credits:
Thanks as always to the late Scumbumbo for his XML injector and to all of you who help me with little issues on discord.