Beta Release: Career Overhaul Suite

This mod is a comprehensive overhaul of the game’s careers aimed at making career progression more difficult and engaging. This includes a crunch down of all pay rates at lower levels, more exponential pay growth with promotion levels for most careers, a re-thinking of top level pay rates to better align careers with their real life counterparts and game requirements, higher skill requirements across the board, and brand new promotion goals like degrees, friends, and fame level.

Main Features

Pay Rate Changes

The hourly pay rates of every job have been completely retuned. Pay curves have been crunched down so that pay rates at lower job levels start lower and rise slower at first. Pay rates at top levels are even higher than normal, and base pay at level 10 have been realigned to better reflect real-life careers and game difficulty. Pay jumps tend to be right after the job requires a university degree or after you pick a branch. The overall pay for most careers now has a more exponential growth curve. Promotions now always ensure a higher weekly pay instead of losing money due to working fewer days, except in very rare instances for narrative reasons (e.g. leaving a software development job to become a professional gamer).

New Promotion Goals

Careers will now ramp up their skill requirements faster and will require a greater variety of skills and non-skill requirements. Athletes will need to stay in good shape, botanists will need to learn about herbalism, doctors will need a lot of education, several careers will require you to develop and maintain a certain level of fame, and business-focused careers see the return of a friend requirement.

Entertainers have had their skill requirements completely redone. Before your Sim enters a specific branch, any kind of performance skill at all will now satisfy the requirement instead of the specific combination of comedy and guitar. Musicians can learn any two musical skills in order to advance; if you want your Sim to be a rock star instead of a pianist, the guitar and singing skills will work just as well! Comedians will still need to learn comedy, of course, but will now require some Acting skill at higher levels.

Degree Reward Nerfs

Most careers will now require some kind of degree to reach the top, but the starting position for Sims with degrees is now far lower. Honors degrees and distinguished degrees still provide a greater bonus, but now most jobs start around level 4 or 5 with the relevant degree. Degrees still provide the same bonus to pay and vacation day accumulation, and playing for the college soccer and e-sports teams still provide the same starting position as before.

Coworker Changes

Sims will now meet their coworkers passively while working normally or working hard, but will not develop any relationship with them. Actively socializing with their coworkers will gain relationship at an increased rate.

Work in Progress Features

Retuned Promotion Bonuses

Similar to how hourly pay rate has been retuned, I want to do a go-through of the promotion bonus cash rewards. For most cases, I want it to be close to the new day’s pay value. For special occasions, like for cases where you would expect such a job to come with a big contract signing, I would like to make it more substantial.

Reputation

I’d like to add reputation bonuses/penalties to certain career branches. Criminals and villains would have to deal with a negative reputation as a result of their actions. Perhaps politicians would receive random reputation changes over time as the political whims of the region changes.

The Effect of Fame

While I’ve added fame requirements to certain careers, even other careers without a direct requirement should benefit from fame anyway, or reward you for going above the fame requirement. I’d like to add multipliers to the hourly pay rate to certain careers when your Sim is famous.

Even More New Goals

Long-term, I want to add even more non-skill promotion goals for different career paths to make them more unique. Business Sims would need to wine and dine a potential client. Entertainers and athletes would need to impress a talent scout to advance early in their career. There’s a lot of possibilities.

Known Issues

The game isn’t really prepared for Sims to un-qualify for promotion goals. There’s a couple of oddities that can arise from that.

Sims who had careers before you installed the mod and had started progressing through some of their promotion goals will keep some of their goals in the complete state, even if they no longer qualify in the modded system.

Once Sims cross off a goal, it will stay crossed off for good, even if they wouldn’t be qualified at a later time (e.g. if a Sim loses their fame level and falls below the requirement). To counter this, there are duplicate goals on different career levels so you at least have to meet the requirement once per promotion.

If you notice any other issues, with goals or in general, please let me know!

Languages

English

Other translations are welcome (be warned it's a lot of strings)

Requirements

This mod uses assets from a lot of different packs. At a minimum, you must have following packs installed:

• Get To Work
• City Living
• Get Famous
• Discover University
• Eco Lifestyle
• Outdoor Retreat
• Spa Day
• Parenthood

Install instructions

Unzip the winrar archive. Add the package file and the ts4script file to your Sims 4 mod folder or a subfolder which is only one folder deep. For organization, it is usually better to keep the files together, but not strictly required.

Additional Credits

Andrew and The Sims 4 Studio team for making Sims 4 Studio

Alphabetsmells/LeRoiDeTout for his consistent help on the script portion of my mods

and the Deaderpool creator community for being supportive and helpful throughout the whole process