Check the Counters Before Auto-Cooking

Description

I finally found a check that can be applied to the autonomous cooking action to make sure paras don’t take food from the fridge, charge the money to do so, start cooking and then disappear the process when it gets to the putting the food on the counter stage.

Now, when counters are all full, paras will opt to snack instead. If a para clears off the necessary counter space, they will resume cooking recipes as usual.

The interaction MakeChickenNoodleSoup (which appears for paras who have Personality Trait Social_TakingCare with a sick para in the household), has an Interaction Usability Rule: ActionCanBePerformedForSkin: Interaction Skin: Remedy_ChickenNoodleSoup.

Somehow, because this interaction skin requires a fridge, stove, and counter to be usable, this checks all the above to make sure they’re available before allowing the action. In its case, it causes the Display Rule to GreyOut with the tooltip MissingCounterAndOven which reads in game as “You are missing free counter space and/or an oven,” if that happens to be the current state of the para’s house.

It turns out, you can apply that very same Interaction Usability Rule check to the autonomous cooking action ReliefNeed_Cook, but it’s not necessary to display the tooltip, since it’s an autonomous action that isn’t chosen by the player. And since all it does is check if that skin would be usable, it doesn’t alter or change the cooking process at all. It’s just a handy yes/no check to see if the full cooking process is possible.

Note

This may cause paras who could make a microwaved meal (counters have space) choose to snack instead of cook the microwaved meal when another para is using the oven (if it's the only oven). Until I figure out how that check above is implemented in order to create a new one that includes microwaves/other cooking devices, this is probably the simplest compromise.

In gameplay this situation is rarely noticed and avoiding paras repeatedly spending money to attempt to cook then cancelling due to no space is definitely worth it, imho.

Specifics

Within Interactions All Interactions:

Within CookSomethingRandom (what the paras do when they ReliefNeed_Cook):

• Interaction Usability:

◦ Interaction Usability Rules

▪ Added Item 0

▪ Type: ActionCanBePerformedForSkin ▪ Interaction Skin: Remedy_ChickenNoodleSoup ▪ Must Be True: TRUE ▪ Display Rule: Hide