https://medium.com/swlh/the-sims-4-modern-python-modding-part-4-replacing-class-code-41fde4283f98

What we’re going to do is replace another piece of code to get more practice at it and we’re going to step it up a small bit to make thing just a tiny bit more challenging.

This tutorial was fairly difficult to make happen because it took a long time to track down the needed code and then go through the many road blocks that happened. I’d say it took me close to three days to get to this point and quite a bit of frustration, just remember patience and practice is key to mastering Sims 4 python scripting.

I feel this tutorial is a bit dense. The program we’re making is a little over 25 lines of code, however it really goes into a lot of explanation and breaks everything down properly. Please take it slow to understand each section and ask questions if you have any.

Make sure you start at part 1

The projects here assume your up-to-speed on how to mod for the Sims 4 using python scripting which I already covered. If you’re new to this series I encourage you to start at part 1.

What we’re going to make

We are going to be creating a mod called “Whimsical Charges” where the service pricing for maids, repair people, and even pizza are a bit more looser than advertised.

If it sounds complicated don’t worry it’s actually not especially if you’ve been following along up until now. In part 3 you learned how to replace regular function code and here you’re going to learn how to replace class code specifically marked @ classmethod which has to be replaced a tad differently. We’re also going to cover managing a variable and allowing it to be changed from the cheat console.

Where to start?

To save you hours of code searching, we’re going to start in simulation/situations/service_npcs/service_npc_tuning.py which translates to the package situations.service_npcs.service_npc_tuning. Inside that file is code related to Service NPCs and we’re interested in a class called ServiceNpcHireable

There’s one little method inside this class which is what we’re interested in replacing.

A few things to note:

• It begins with an @ classmethod meaning normal code replacement won’t work because the function is tied to the class in a special way. For us to replace the code we have to replicate that connection to the class which is still very easy to do.
• cls refers to the class, “Class Methods” like this one usually start with that instead of “self”. Looking at the code we can see cost_up_front and cost_hourly are inside cls.
• The other parameters refer to the amount of time worked in hours (It’s a float number (decimal number) so it calculates tiny fractions of an hour as well and whether to include a “Base Price” in addition to the hourly charge.
• We can see it calculates this as we think it would, multiplying hourly wage by hours worked and adding the base price if requested then returning the amount. It’s clear it wants to return an integer (Whole number) so we can presume not doing so may result in an error of some sort. (It’s important when replacing code to not change the expected behavior)