Freelance Entertainer Career, Patreon Preview (updated)

The Freelance Entertainer mod adds an active-gig type Freelance career to the Sims 4. All active gigs are actually gigs — you perform shows at Lounges, wedding receptions, music festivals and more.

The jobs available are based somewhat on performance skills and largely on your sim’s fame. Unknown performers have to pull morning shifts, while famous players headline on the weekends. In addition to gig pay, musicians earn tips from customers and comedians earn the standard bonuses for comedy routines.

Event performance is based on the number of 1 hour sets your sim performs as well as how many sims were watching them.

While there is not a dividing line between comedians and musicians, both can do either if they have the skills, there are separate comedy shows and musical shows, since I have to set up the event scoring differently for each one. The shows available to your sim are based on both their skill (comedy or musical instruments), their union seniority, and their fame.

You can become an entertainer without any particular skills, but you won't be offered gigs until you reach at least a skill level 2 in either comedy or a musical instrument.

Types of Gigs:

All gigs are active gigs, so you’ll be transported to the location when the time arrives.

Lounge shows. Available for all shifts for both musicians and comedians. You’ll need to be fairly famous to headline a weekend nighttime gig.

Wedding parties. Available for pianists. While I tried to get a wedding event working from a ‘third person point of view’, I ended up just making it a party at a wedding venue that you play at. Excellent tip income at these.

Outdoor Music Festivals. Available for musicians that have contracts with MusicTV (see below). Currently three available:

• Burning Sim (in Oasis Springs)

• Newcrest Jazz Festival (in Newcrest)

• Simsplash Island Music Festival (in Sulani)

Outdoor festivals are extra long, pay very well, and present an excellent opportunity to increase fame. You need to be pretty famous to be able to get these gigs, however. They run once per week at the moment, but I’d like to find a way to schedule them once per season (looking for a way to do that).

Comedy Television Special. If you have a contract with the Comedy Channel, you can get a gig to record an hour long television special at the Movie Studio in Del Sol Valley. Also available once per week.

General gig notes:

Don’t worry about accomplishing all the goals — you can still have a successful gig without getting them all done. That being said, there are benefits for overmax performance. The more famous your sim is, the easier this will be, and they'll become more famous by playing gigs. So keep playing. :)

I set up the gigs to be moderately easy, in that you have to ‘do the work’, but you are able to let your sim take some breaks, etc. If you can manage to play two sets (1 hour each), and some social interactions, and maybe get some people watching you perform, you’ll easily get a Gold performance score most of the time.

The score on sims watching the performance is a little tricky. They need to be actively watching your performance to count. Sometimes sims will stand as though they are watching but are actually doing something else, and they may switch back and forth from watching to not watching somewhat randomly, based on their own autonomy scores. The more famous your performer is, and the busier the club is, the more sims will watch your performance. You'll often see a little musical note balloon above the head of a sim that starts watching you play or sing.

After playing a lot of gigs in a lot of different Sim gin joints, I would say that the layout of the lounge is one of the most important factors in how many sims watch your performance. If your performance space is on a different floor than the bar, fewer sims will watch you perform. Also, if customers can get to your performance space within a brief walk from the front door, without a lot of distractions in between, that works best.

Banter Interactions

Different banter interactions, where your Sim talks to the audience, are required by various gig goals. You run them by clicking on the microphone stand, and selecting an item from the Banter menu.

The success of your Banter interactions, such as 'Promote Bar Drinks', is based on your Sim's Charisma, and they count as part of your performance set.

Promote Stream provides a bonus to your stream followers, if successful, and Promote Next Show provides a bonus to Fame.

Video Recordings of Gigs

Every time you do a show, you should receive a video recording of the show afterwards. The quality of the video is based on how well you did in the gig situation. You can edit and upload these videos like any other, and have the trend tags to match either music (Guitar, Singing or Piano) or Comedy. Royalties work the same way as any other video station upload.

NOTE: The video will be placed directly in your sim's inventory, instead of in a drone, etc. You can just click on it to transfer to the video station (or open the video view on the video station and drag it in).

Syndication Contracts

If you upload a Good quality gig video, you will get an offer from either The Comedy Channel or MusicTV to syndicate your videos on television. If you accept, you'll need to upload a video at least every three days to keep the contract. With a syndication contract, you get an additional flat fee bonus for each upload, and additional followers.

Additional Features

On some of the instruments, in particular the piano/keyboard, I’ve added a ‘Play Performance Set’ interaction that shows up when you are at a gig. This causes your sim to just keep playing a particular style of music, one song after another, so that you don’t have to manually keep queuing up song interactions. The piano is the only instrument that I’ve been able to get this to work with so far.

I’ve added two new musical instruments geared toward entertainers.

Farfisa Organ. Yeah, I’m pretty old, and I’ve actually played a vintage Farfisa (with a reverb bar, no less!). It’s basically a portable pipe organ in the game, but in case you wanted to roll out some Hammond B3 vibes, this is here for you. This way, you can carry the organ to the gig, and it’s a lot smaller than a pipe organ.

Performance Microphone. This only works for singers (not comedians), but it’s a microphone with a built-in backup band. Basically, it’s a portable karaoke machine that looks like a microphone. If you have a singer entertainer, they can put on a much more entertaining show using one of these.

Rapid Roadie Service

To handle the fact that some lounges may not have all the instruments you’d want available, you can order a new instrument instantly via the Rapid Roadie Service interaction that will appear on your sim when they are on a gig. NOTE: This only appears when you are playing a gig. Also, the costs are bit higher than usual (better to plan ahead).

Finding the Festival Gigs

I have some code in there to get your sim to travel to the stage on their own at a festival gig, but they don't always listen. Just in case you take one of these jobs and can't figure out where the stage is, here are some maps to the festival grounds:

Burning Sim

Newcrest Jazz Festival

Simsplash Island Music Festival

Technical Notes

I figured out how to inject a new freelance career without overriding anything for this mod. I haven't seen another example of that in a mod, so be aware that if you add another freelance career mod that overrides the freelancer tuning (as many of them do), it may prevent this career from showing up. If other freelancer careers inject the career as this one does, they should be compatible.

Change Log

• 8/2/2023, 1.0.1b, Initial Patreon Preview

• 8/29/2023, 1.0.2b, Automatic video recordings of gigs, bug fixes

• 5/6/2024, 1.0.b3, Re-do of gig goals, lots of bug fixes

• 12/18/2024, 1.0.4b, fixes post-patch script error, more bug fixes

• 1/21/2024, 1.0.5b, bug fixes, advancement tuning, elimination of dependency of Better Bars mod

As always, please let me know if you run into problems with this, as well as any suggestions (gameplay and otherwise).

Thanks for your support!