The Sims 2: Hidden Skills
I briefly mentioned “hidden skills” in yesterday’s post, and I wanted to expand upon that today. As the player, you already have access to a lot of the skill levels, and can make some good assumptions about how your Sim is going to behave.
For example, if your Sim’s personality scores towards the high end of the Neat to Messy scale, they are likely to spontaneously clean things. (One of my Sims is 10 for Neat. Every morning when he wakes up, the very first thing he does is take out the trash. It always makes me smile!) They will also clean things faster and more efficiently than a Sim who is messy. Furthermore, a messy Sim will frequently cancel your action out of their queue if you tell them to clean something (and you have Free Will turned on, of course).
Other skills are more obvious. As your Sim maxes out their Creativity by using the painting easel, they will gain the ability to paint better paintings, and to paint custom sill lifes or portraits. However, if you take that same Sim and have them use the guitar (an object that boosts Creativity), they will start out by playing badly. Although they will move more quickly through the guitar-playing developmental stages compared to a Sim with low Creativity.
This is an excellent example of how “hidden” skills manifest in your Sims’ behavior. In this case, “painting” is one hidden skill and “playing guitar” is another. Both of these hidden skills correlate with your Sim’s Creativity score, but not directly. The ability to paint well does not automatically mean that your Sim can play guitar well. Although it does mean that they will learn to play the guitar more quickly.
Homework is a hidden skill which you will want to leverage. The more your Sims do their homework, the better they get at it. If it takes two hours for them to do their first homework assignment, it may take them as little as half an hour to do their tenth assignment.
Another hidden skill involves the pool table. If your Sims spend enough time playing pool, they will eventually be able to do trick shots (like the Xylophone trick shot, shown here). They will also gain the ability to “Hustle” another Sim. This can be handy, because a good pool hustler can earn up to 100 Simoleons for successfully hustling another Sim!
Hidden skills are not the same as hidden attributes. The only similarity is that they are both, well, hidden!
One example of a hidden attribute is your Sim’s gender preferences. According to the maker of the Bonsai of Wisdom, whenever you create a Sim, their gender preference starts out as zero for both sexes. What moves their preference in one direction or another is the amount of same sex flirting which they both give and receive, regardless of whether or not the flirt action was accepted or rejected.
This is kind of demented if you think about it, but it can be handy if you want to “turn” one of your Sims. Just line up another Sim of the gender you want your target Sim to prefer, and have them start hitting on your Sim relentlessly. (Not to overthink things but… yeah. WTF, Maxis?)