Interest Adjuster



I've heard a LOT of people complain about the difficulty of making friends in The Sims 1.  There are some reasons this occurs that are easily worked around if you understand how the game works.  There's also my Interest Adjuster, which will let you set your sim's interests to a specific pattern.  Use this on every sim in your neighborhood, and you'll be able to make friends very easily.

There are two general types of Interest Adjuster objects and two flavors of each type.  They all have different GUID's, so you can have all four if  you want them, though you'll probably only want one or two.

What does it do?  The Interest Adjuster sets the interests that adults and children have in common -- Weather, Sports, Music, and Outdoors -- to 9, so that every sim in the neighborhood will have a set of common interests that they can talk about.  

1)  The MANUAL type of interest adjuster requires that your sim click on it to adjust their interests, so that you can control who has had their interests adjusted.  If you want to change the interests of sims in the neighborhood, you'll need to play their household for a minute or two, in order to have them click on the interest adjuster.

2)  The AUTOMATIC type of interest adjuster cycles through every sim on the lot and adjusts everyone's interests.  It takes from 10 - 30 minutes to get to a sim, once they've spawned on the lot, so give them a few minutes after spawning to let the adjuster work before you talk to them.  The automatic version will work not just on neighborhood sims that you could adjust manually if you wanted to but also on Downtownies, Magic Town residents, sims on Vacation lots, and so on ... provided that you've put an Automatic Interest Adjuster on the lot.

The "cycle though all the sims on the lot" code is by Inge Jones of Simlogical; the "adjust this sim's interests to a particular pattern" code is by Corylea.

Because the automatic version cycles through all the sims on the lot -- all day and all night, forever -- it uses more processing power than most Sims 1 objects.  But modern computers are so overpowered when playing The Sims 1 that this is only likely to be a problem if you're still playing The Sims on the computer you had back in 1999. :-)

So, I also said there are two flavors.  

a)  The TOTAL flavor, in addition to adjusting the four common interests to 9, also adjusts all the other interests to 4 or 5.

b)  The MODERATE flavor adjusts ONLY the four common interests and leaves the others untouched, so every sim will have both the four common interests and some personal interests that are just theirs.

The TOTAL flavor, in addition to setting those four interests to Level 9, also sets all of the other interests to Level 4 or 5.  Four or five points isn't enough for you to start a conversation about that topic, but it IS enough that you won't LOSE relationship points if someone else talks about it.  If you use this on every sim in the neighborhood, your sim will never have a bad conversation with another sim because of mismatched interests.  (You can still have a bad conversation if you use social interactions that don't fit the other sim's personality or if you use any given social interaction too many times in a row.)

I played with the TOTAL flavor for a few months and decided that while it was very useful when I wanted to focus on my sim's career or dog training or something, if I wanted to focus on social relationships, it made things a bit dull, because every sim in the neighborhood had exactly the same interest pattern.

So I made the second flavor.  The MODERATE Interest Adjuster still sets the levels of Weather, Sports, Music, and Outdoors to 9, but it leaves all the other interests alone.  So each sim will have some personal interests, in addition to the common interests that everybody has.  You can still make friends with a sim, even if your personal interests don't overlap, provided that you engage in activities that allow you to control the topic of conversation.  

If you're just standing around and talking, you have no control over what the sims talk about.  But if you're doing a shared activity, such as watching television together, playing chess together, eating a meal at a table together, and so on, then you can click on your sim and choose Change Topic.  If you change to Weather, Sports, Music, and Outdoors, you can be sure the other sim will share those interests if you've used The Interest Adjuster on them.

If you're looking for your sim's soulmate, though, you'll want to talk about more than just the weather. :-)  The Moderate Interest Adjuster lets you have lots of friends for work but still lets you search for someone whose personal interests match yours.

  The MANUAL Interest Adjuster looks like a lavender flamingo and can be found near the other flamingos in the catalog, under Decorative - Sculpture.

  The AUTOMATIC Interest Adjuster looks like a pink African violet and can be found near the other African violets in the catalog, under Decorative - Plants.


Download the Manual version, Total flavor:  ManualInterestAdjusterTotal.zip

Download the Manual version, Moderate flavor:  ManualInterestAdjusterModerate.zip

Download the Automatic version, Total flavor:  AutomaticInterestAdjusterTotal.zip

Download the Automatic version, Moderate flavor:  AutomaticInterestAdjusterModerate.zip


Other information about making friends in The Sims 1 can be found in my essay How To Make Friends In The Sims 1.


 Installation:  The Interest Adjuster is installed in the usual way; unzip the folder to your Program Files (x86)\Maxis\Downloads folder.


I made these mods for my own use, but I went to the trouble of uploading them in an attempt to make my fellow simmers happy.  So if you enjoy any of these mods, I'd love to hear about it!  I don't get mail at corylea.com, but you can leave a comment in the thread announcing these mods at ModTheSims or Reddit or send me a PM at either of those places; I'm Corylea at both.

Have fun!

Back to the list of Sims 1 mods