WASTE MANAGER REWORK

I got really excited when reading about the new Reduce & Recycle lot trait from Eco Lifestyle, especially the part about external trashcans no longer being bottomless, and an NPC coming to empty them every week. That excitement quickly turned into disappointment when actually playing for the first time. I let my trashcans overflow and fill with flies and cockroaches, waited for a week and... nothing. No one showed up.

I immediately went to the files and found that Maxis implemented this in a really awkward way. The npc will only spawn if there’s a sim in the active lot (my sim was at work so they never showed up), will stick around for like an hour after collecting your trash doing random stuff around your house, and your sim can talk to them about waste management. That’s it. And then they charge you for up to 200 simoleons when they leave! Definitely not what I was expecting, so I went and changed it! Here’s what I did:  

The game will now generate a service sim, like the mailman, that will come empty your garbage cans every Monday and Thursday, at around 6 A.M. Right after spawning, the sim will check for the following:

- Does the lot have the Reduce and Recycle trait?

And, if it does:

- Are the external trashcans in the lot not empty?

If both these tests pass, then the sim will walk to the lot and empty all non-empty trashcans before leaving with a trashbag in hand. 

If one of the tests doesn’t pass, then the sim will just leave. I couldn’t make them not spawn at all, so this is the best solution I could come up with.

As you can see in the picture above, the sim is no longer called a “Waste Manager”, they are now the Garbage Collector.

The Garbage Collector will be assigned a custom career, so that the game always picks the same sim after it’s generated one (it also means you can get information if you use the Ask About Career interaction on them!). This career is NPC-only, like the Mail Carrier or Pizza Delivery careers, meaning it’s not available for your played sims. 

You can create your own custom Garbage Collector by using the cheat “careers.add_career lotharihoe_garbagecareer”, without quotes, on your sim of choice, then moving them out of the lot and putting them in the “Unplayed Sims” category.

The name changes and other text-related features are available in:

  - English and Portuguese (made by me)
  - French (thanks to kimikosoma!)
 - Simplified Chinese (thanks to Monica!)
- Japanese (thanks to maru dada!)

All other languages will default to English.

If you would like to help translating the mod to other languages, please send me a message.

OPTIONAL: 

Reduce and Recycle Lot Trait - Default on All Lots

If you use the “rrlottrait-default” package, all residential lots will get the Reduce and Recycle lot trait by default. It won’t show on the UI, so you’re free to use all 3 slots. If you use the trait on any of your lots, make sure to remove it before adding the mod, cause you won’t be able to remove it while the package is in your Mods folder.

No Name Change

If you like the name "Waste Manager" and want to keep it, download the "wastemanagerrework-nonamechange" package instead of the other main one. It maintains all other functionality without the Garbage Collector name change.