What if I wanted to change a Sim's character (let's give Mamoru more Nice points, he does improve as the series progresses) or make that Sim obsess on aliens in conversation (goes well with the Mulder skin), or boost the Sim's cooking skills because I'm tired of seeing the kitchen go up in flames?
Case 1: I have the Sims Livin' Large on a PC. Lucky me! I can use various fan-made editors like Elisims, Sims Bodyshop or TSE. I can even buy the commercial Sim Enhancer, which may be compatible with more expansion packs.
The all-round utility Elisims was made for The Sims and Livin' Large.
Case 2: I'm on a Mac, or have some version no utility supports yet. Time to break out the hex editor.
And there are perfectly good Mac hex editors.
The file to edit is the neighbourhood IFF, and I owe most of the info in this section, as well as the previous character-editing sections where Sim characteristics are edited in the neighbourhood IFF, to Slink's Sim Data Structures (it's listed in the links page).
As with all the previous doctorings, find and note the name of the character file for the Sim to be edited. Let's say it's SimMulder and he's in file "User00023.iff". Open the file "neighborhood.iff" in a hex editor and search for the string "user00023.iff". At the end of this string are 13 bytes (double numbers, mostly pairs of zeros). And it is on the 14th byte that the stats block starts.
The stats block is 34 bytes long - some of them zero bytes - and consists
of double bytes, ie. each stat is 4 numbers long, in two pairs. Counting
from the first byte (the 14th byte after the character IFF filename), they stand
for:
14-15: nice
16-17: active
two zero bytes
20-21: playful
22-23: outgoing
24-25: neat
Then four zero bytes between the character points and the skill points,
which start at 30:
30-31: cooking
32-33: charisma
34-35: mechanical
four zero bytes
40-41: creativity
two zero bytes
44-45: body
46-47: logic
Now I know where the bytes are: what do I fill in? Most of the skill
bytes will probably be at "00 00". They can be any value between 0 and
10, where 0 is "00 00", and the range 1 to 10 is written as follows:
1 = 64 00
2 = C8 00
3 = 2C 01
4 = 90 01
5 = F4 01
6 = 58 02
7 = BC 02
8 = 20 03
9 = 84 03
10 = E8 03
If the value of a skill-related double byte is not one of the values in this list, the Sim was probably working on improving that skill when the game was saved.
After the stats block, I count down 54 bytes (all zeros) to the
beginning of the 20-byte-long interests block, where each interest
consists of two bytes:
1-2: politics
3-4: weather
5-6: sports
7-8: leisure
9-10: science fiction
11-12: travel
13-14: flower power
15-16: babies
17-18: beauty
19-20: spooky stuff
Hm, no aliens here. I can see only two relevant categories: science fiction and spooky stuff (wasn't he nicknamed "Spooky Mulder"?). I'll just change the bytes in those two places to the maximum value, which for interests is 20, or, as it's written in hex, "14 00". And if I was very cruel, I'd do the same for SimScully and the subject "babies"... ^_^
This is the old list from Slink's page, but since Hot Date, the
categories have been altered a bit:
1-2: Travel
3-4: Money
5-6: Politics
7-8: 60's
9-10: Weather
11-12: Sports
13-14: Music
15-16: Outdoors
17-18: Technology
19-20: Romance
My Unleashed installation lists: Travel, Money, Politics, The 60's, Weather, Sports, Music, Outdoors, Exercise, Food, Parties, Style, Hollywood, Technology and Romance. That's fifteen interests versus ten double bytes, so five double bytes have been stashed away elsewhere: to wit, Exercise, Food, Parties, Style and Hollywood. Also, the interests now only go to 10 instead of 20, and use the same system as the character/skill points. (In fact, this may be why old Sim editors crash and choke under Unleashed; they can't handle the high interest scores.)
Exercise and Food are in the stats block, in the four spaces between Mechanical and Creativity, at bytes 36-37 and 38-39. Parties have gone in the next two-byte gap between Creativity and Body, at 42-43. Style comes two bytes after Body points, so Body is at 46-47, then a gap at 48-49, then Parties at 50-51. From there, go down 10 empty bytes and the eleventh and twelfth make up Hollywood. That's the extra interests accounted for, with Hollywood as bytes 15-16 in a 54-byte block that used to be all zeros. This block is followed by the 20-byte interests block, with the interests in the order listed above.
I've read somewhere that in pre-HD versions, the interests are randomized before every conversation, so it doesn't really matter what you set them to; I have no personal experience with this, as Sim interests is not something I've ever felt the need to edit.
Immediately after the interests come the two career bytes, which for children
are always "FF FF", so to edit a child Sim I would search the first "FF FF"
after the character IFF filename and count backwards from there. And
since I'm quoting someone else's list anyway, here are the numbers
for each career:
FF FF = schoolchild
00 00 = jobless
01 00 = business
02 00 = entertainment
03 00 = law enforcement
04 00 = crime
05 00 = medicine
06 00 = military
07 00 = politics
08 00 = pro sports
09 00 = science
0a 00 = X-treme
(Careers added in LL:)
0b 00 = musician
0c 00 = slacker
0d 00 = entertainment
0e 00 = paranormal
0f 00 = journalism
10 00 = hacker
(Careers added in UL:)
11 00 = fashion
12 00 = education
13 00 = animal
14 00 = food
15 00 = circus
The career descriptions are in "Gamedata\careers.iff" or, for HD and upwards, in "work.iff" contained in "ExpansionShared\Expansionshared.far". If the standard careers have been overwritten by a career-editing utility, the numbers may stand for something else.
Right after the career number comes the career level, where a lower number equals a higher grade/promotion. There are sixteen grades for children and ten job levels for adults; setting the career level to "00 00" means an A+ or the highest job level. Hm, while I'm doctoring the stats anyway, I might as well give my Sim a promotion.
The fame track is not a job level; in fact, to employ an agent at all, a Sim's job setting has to be "00 00". This effectively shuts children out, although their job byte can be set to "00 00" manually with no effect on the game, as far as I've seen. But the fame score uses the same rectangle as the work/grades score, so it has to be one or the other.
In From child to adult I had to count down 125 bytes to get to the age byte. Finding the fame score byte is the same story, but this time I have to count down 268 bytes. (Obviously, there may not be that many bytes unless Superstar is installed.) This is a long way to count, but my hex editor shows 16 bytes per line, so I just go down ten lines from the last character of "user[nnnnn]" and count twelve bytes more; the twelfth byte is the "Star" byte. Unlike the promotion byte which runs from 10 to 0, this byte runs from 0 to 10 and should be set to "0A" (hexadecimal for 10; "10" would mean 16!) for instant Superstar status. A warning; the game checks per Simday whether the Sim has all the required skills and influential friends to be a star, and if not, bops the Sim down half a star level, so the advantage is soon lost!
Paw note: Sim pets being similarly yet differently constructed, their
character, skill and other bytes are probably not in the same locations.
I haven't bothered to check as I am finding it increasingly more convenient
to alter Sim stats with hacked objects within the game itself. (On which
a tutorial is planned to follow in the advanced hacking section.)