Stop Whatevering To Misery

Para, seriously, who does this?

You know how the paras will talk, or play instruments, or watch tv until basically their bladder is exploding, they’re near death of starvation, and they’re mad and uncomfortable?

I’ve been looking for a score based idle autonomy solution to that for ages within the mod tools. I’ve tried all sorts of things. But some actions are just made a little different. Musical instruments, for example, have their end condition set to the end of the audio container. I don’t know why, but that’s the only thing I can think that would make the score based autonomy decisions not work. This is all conjecture, but I think it’s because the score based idle decision (every 10m or less if you’ve modded it) would have to trigger the in-game-minute the audio container ends, which is just totes unlikely. Rules vs Score Based Rules; rules always trigger when the requirements are met. That’s how these long-action traps get interrupted by the vanilla critical needs stops, and I assume is why score based needs don’t trigger while doing certain actions.

So-- I gave up trying to get a score-based autonomy solution to work. I tried so many things, including autonomy chains, but nothing seemed to have the desired effect.

Instead, I caved and made a rules based autonomy action, and a custom social group to move-away (essentially a super short range moveawaysameroomstanding). This rule is balanced around time spent in activity, needs value checks, whether or not skills or needs are increasing, etc. Think of it as a situational and less critical stop for not-quite-critical-needs.

It has the effect that after the para has been doing something for at least an hour, if then their needs are low-ish but not critical, and no needs are increasing, they’ll make the choice stop what it is they’re doing, and then they get an actual chance to make their next autonomy action which generally is relieving whatever was bothering them that made them quit. If, however, their needs are satisfied, they’ll continue the action without stopping as usual until one of the triggers hits; ie. your para can still have long sessions on the guitar, but they will solve their miseries if something begins to bother them a little earlier than critical-needs. Eat a snack before the long study sessions! (good advice IRL and with this mod in Paralives).

Future Plans As a rule, I don’t like making mods that make all paras behave the same. Right now this mod doesn’t yet have differing conditions for personality types, vibes, etc. It’s more in the proof-of-concept phase in my mind, because of that. The focus at the moment is getting the balance for timing right. An hour of the same activity feels pretty decent to me, as paras will often after solving their pressing needs go back to whatever it was they enjoy doing. Except, because they took their lil break, they’ll be less miserable about it! I’m open to constructive feedback on all my mods, especially this one.

There’s a spot in the context requirements I’ve built that I can expand to include variations for different vibes/character traits, but I haven’t yet decided how to build that out.