Cottage Living Guide! Here is my guide to new features in the Sims 4 Cottage Living Expansion
You can also find handy Cottage Living Cheats
I have much more to come, since you can actually write a few guides about this pack!
Cheats for Cottage Living! - Here are Sims 4 Cottage Living's main cheats
Cottage Living Guide! Here is my guide to new features in the Sims 4 Cottage Living Expansion
The Sims 4 Dine Out Game Pack
Hiring & Training a Staff - Chefs, Waiters, and Hosts
From the main menu, a picture of the three types of restaurant staff in The Sims 4 Dine Out Game Pack
Restaurants require, at minimum, one waiter, one host, and one chef in order to operate. Their roles and the skills they need to perform effectively will vary. The early selection of staff is not great, but you can improve their skills and make them happier to work for your establishment. This will help your Sim to make more money, and help guests enjoy their meals. This guide will teach you basic and advanced concepts for handling your staff. Let's look at some of the common things between the three types of employment, and then look at the unique features of each job in the restaurant.
Manage Employees
Press the manage employees button from the restaurant management menu (bottom right) at any time and you can access various commands, including hiring, firing, promoting and demoting.
Commonalities Between Host, Waiter, and Chef Employment Types
Promote staff who deserve it and share success together.
Opinion, Praising and Criticizing
Beneath the worker's portrait is an opinion, which usually starts a 'Neutral'. The worker is neither satisfied nor unsatisfied with working for you. Check up on will give you the same information as looking at the manage employees menu. Sims who are being paid well will be 'Satisfied' or 'Very Satisfied', while they can also be 'Unsatisfied' and 'Very Unsatisfied'. There are two factors at play here. One, your treatment of them - are you praising good behavior, or calling them out for slacking? It seems as if there is a mechanic where if they ARE slacking and you call them on it by using the Criticize interaction, the relationship won't take as big a hit. They'll be extra-motivated for a while via a positive moodlet. If they're trying their best, you can make them ticked at you and lower their opinion of working for your establishment. Don't think they're staring at the phone the whole time, the waiters are usually checking orders.
The Praise Interaction encourages your employees to do better. Criticize may do more to whip them into action, but harms their job satisfaction.
The Praise interaction will give your worker a temporary positive moodlet that absolutely helps them with performance. You can't have the host being mean to the customer the moment they walk in the door. Additionally, and more importantly is their pay grade. When employees begin to develop their skills, they'll know they deserve more pay for what they do. A waiter with 5 ranks in charisma and fitness is going to grow dissatisfied with employment, and if you go too far they will quit. On the flip side, they will be generally happier and more likely to do a good job if satisfied and properly promoted. Each of the three careers has 5 levels for the employees and set amounts of pay.
Employees require skills to do a good job for you. Pay for training to help them learn faster. A nice touch by EA in my opinion.
Training & Skill Gains
Your restaurant's employees require two types of skills each. Chefs require cooking and mixology, for example. Training employees means getting skill XP between shifts, while employees will also get natural skill experience just working for you. They'll gain about 1 level, depending where they stand. It's good to do early on to make your staff better as level 1-3 of each skill greatly limits their ability to do their jobs. There are three types of training available:
- Brief Training - $150 - no requirement. Can help a new employee to catch up, but on-job experience is necessary to improve performance.
- Standard Training - $600 - Requires level 5 in a Skill.
- Extensive Training - $1500 - Requires level 7 in a skill.
Obviously, there are some gaps and staff will have to get on-the-job experience to fill them. It's better to do training as soon as it's available as the skill XP to level up grows greater as they progress, just as if you were leveling the skill with your own Sim. There are also good leaps from just a few levels in required skills.
Promoting & Demoting
As a general rule of thumb, a Sim should probably be promoted at least every 3 levels in their skills or else they are going to being feeling dissatisfied. This also depends how often you praise them. Demote should only be used if you have a 'Very Satisfied' employee who shouldn't be. Note the relationship is going to take a hit, but relationships DO NOT factor into the satisfaction of an employee (perhaps, unless it goes negative). Overall you should probably prefer the carrot (reward), not the stick (punishment). I guess Sims are good at keeping business and friendship from conflicting.
Employee Types
Let's look at employee types in the order your guests will interact with them:
Host
Hosts greet and seat guests. Their first impression on you is huge.
The host basically represents the restaurant and puts customers in a good mood when they arrive. Hosts are responsible for seating and greeting the guests. The host is important as their first impression on the customer cannot be changed, so I made it a point to praise my host (and use inspirational speech once it was possible) to put them in a good mood and keep them on track. Don't interrupt them from seating, though. Get them right at the beginning of service and between waves of customers. You don't want long wait times just to tell them they're doing a good job. Find moments of downtime. This position relies on the Comedy and Charisma skills exclusively. Hosts' skills are much like waiters in that at lower skill levels - regardless of the praise moodlet - they are more likely to goof and make a bad impression on a guest. Raising them to at least level 5-6 will stop those bad impressions from happening so long as the host is in a good mood.
The host position is an expensive one, but you'll only ever need one host operating from a lone host station. The host station is best placed nearby to tables, like all others. If the host has to walk to the back and then upstairs, back to the front of the building, it's going to take guests much much longer to be seated than if they're right there. You may even consider placing them in the center of a group of tables. Hosts make the following per hour:
- Host Level 1 - $3
- Host Level 2 - $6
- Host Level 3 - $12
- Host Level 4 - $20
- Host Level 5 - $30
Waiters and Waitresses
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Waiters clean up, take orders, and provide menus to guests. Station them throughout your restaurant.
At least one waiter is required, they use the waiter station and may idle near it when doing nothing - so keep it nearby to guests. You can zone out waiters this way. Waiters and Waitresses provide menus, cleanup, and finished meals to your customers. You can unlock 2 more waiter slots by purchasing related perks. Waiters are reliant on the Charisma and Fitness to do their job - charisma's role being obvious, but fitness having to do with how likely they are to drop a plate and their general energy levels. As Charisma and Fitness improve, the odds of a 'bad service' marker for star rating goes down and odds for 'good service' go up. For example, level 1 charisma/fitness and 40% chance at bad service. 2-3 is only 20%. Get to 7-8 and you are more likely to have neutral or good services and no bad service ratings. This should absolutely be rewarded, as waiters are also partially responsible for one of the most important metrics, wait time. If the food is ready and the waiter isn't on the ball, wait time suffers. It's also required of them to get the order in the first place! Here are the 5 pay grades for waiters, so you know what you'll be paying if you promote them:
- Waiter Rank 1 - $2
- Waiter Rank 2 - $5
- Waiter Rank 3 - $9
- Waiter Rank 4 - $16
- Waiter Rank 5 - $25
Chefs
If your chef gets insulted, praise them to help their mood. An angry chef = a bad chef. They have knives, you know.
The Chef's role in your restaurant is to make food and drink. Don't let them get less interaction from you just because they're in the back. The chef's mood and skill play into their performance, just as any other. I believe that Sims can cook level 5 foods at level 5, but not do it well until they surpass the skill level. Each level will make it more likely they are going to produce better quality food. Differing from other positions, the chef can be told to cook either quickly or carefully. These two both provide +/- 20% quality and speed. Quickly will sacrifice quality by 20% but speed up by the same amount. It is good to choose quickly if you have a high level chef cooking low level foods and you want to feed lots of Sims and move them out fast. Carefully is good for newer chefs who have low skill but might make use of the quality bump. This is particularly useful when you first hire your second chef. These settings will stay active until you change them back to normally.
Other Dine Out Guides
- Placing a Restaurant - How to use the new restaurants
- Making a Restaurant - Making a new restaurant from scratch
- Staff - Managing the staff of a restaurant you own
- Run/Own the Restaurant - advice for managing the restaurant as Owner
- Advertising, Customers & Critics Dealing with customers, and utilizing advertising
- Menu Guide, Markup & Food Difficulty - Selecting a proper markup for the restaurant
- Star Ratings - Star Ratings and how they're calculated
- Restaurant Perks - List of Restaurant Perks and their effects
- Restaurant Perk Cheats - Unlock perks without Restaurant Perk Points.
- Known Bugs & Tips for Usability of Restaurants
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Cottage living
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Dine Out Restaurants
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Comments (42)
Let me tell you, I've got two Allies and two Ritas. The restaurant owners Rita and Allie comes in to the restaurant, opens it and the staff arrives - including waitress Rita and chef Allie.
The staff sisters appear as a new entry in the owners sisters' Relationships and apparently owner Rita doesn't like the waitress Rita much, but likes chef Allie. Owner Allie on the other hand likes waitress Rita but hasn't met chef Alline (which is weird, because she regularly pays for her training, praises her and eventually promotes her).
Both owner sisters have the relationship bar maxed out with green (they're good sisters).
This is so weird. ;_;
Has anyone tried to hire playable sims?
Have a look at this tutorial that a simmer made on the USA official Sims forum. It's great.
Tutorial
Factory Reset
Question 2: Yes, there is the ability to run more than one restaurant at a time and make basically a franchise line of your own restaurants.
Don't know if playalot tried the eviction method. I haven't yet.
You can't apply your sims for the job either (via the "Find the job" method).
Factory Reset
This should fix the issue. If it doesn't we have a great forum section where you can ask for further help.
Dine Out Discussions
Quit out of your game and delete the localthumbcache.package file and then try again. This time you should see your made sims in the hiring menu at your restaurant.
If the sim was culled, hire a new waiter and place him/her into a house, again through the household management menu, but do not play the sim as this will cause the sim to lose their job.
The Sims 4 Bug Reports
EA The Sims 4 Bug Reports
I would suggest selling the restaurant in build mode (that way you keep your perk points) and replacing it from your library. This may just solve it for you.
We also have a discussion thread about this on the forum but there just doesn't seem to be a reliable fix just yet.
Forum Thread