The Hobby Mod ~ Version 3.3.3.6

Compatible with Patch 1.118

6th October 2025 ~ Version 3.3.3.6 ~ Please delete older versions!
~ Updated to include compatibility with the new expansion.

9th March 2025 ~ Version 3.3.3.5 ~ Please delete older versions!
~ Updated to include Pottery and Tattooing in the Arts & Crafts hobby.

3rd November 2024 ~ Version 3.3.3.4 ~ Please delete older versions!
~ Fixed an issue preventing the ‘horror’ and ‘reaper manual’ options from appearing when writing books.

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The Hobby Mod adds 14 Reward Traits to the game, for children through to elders. Each of these traits are inspired by the Hobby Tracks from Sims 2 Freetime, plus a few new categories to fit The Sims 4:
Arts and Crafts
Cuisine
Fashion & Beauty
Film and Literature
Fitness
Games
Learning & Discovery
Music and Dance
Nature
Paranormal
Science
Sports
Tinkering
Travel & Culture
You can read more about each Hobby in the mod by clicking the hobbies above.

These traits add a hidden need, or enthusiasm, to your Sim. This need will gradually drop over time if your Sims aren’t doing anything related to their hobby for a while. More about this below.

• Lot51’s Core Library ~ It doesn’t add anything to the game, it just allows the mod to work as intended. This is essential.
• Custom Wants Mod ~ This is a loader mod for all my custom wants, so if you want my new custom-made wants, you’ll need to download this too. This isn’t essential but it does make for a better experience.

Acquiring A Hobby

There are 3 ways to acquire a hobby:
1) The Reward Store ~ This is probably the easiest and quickest method. This is ideal if you know what hobby you want your Sim to have. The traits all cost 5 Satisfaction Points.
2) An Interaction ~ With cheats switched on, Shift+Click on your Sim and navigate to The Hobby Mod menu. From there, you Add, Remove or Randomise a hobby. The randomise feature will produce one hobby (providing you don’t already have one) and will factor in your Sim’s traits, skills, aspiration and preferences to produce a Hobby that makes sense for your Sim.
3) Via Gameplay ~ With Version 3.3, Sims will now be able to gain a hobby through natural gameplay. Each time your Sim performs a hobby-related interaction, there’s a 5% chance they’ll get a pop-up, asking if you’d like to add the hobby to the Sim. This will only happen if your Sim doesn’t have a hobby assigned.

This does allow your Sim to have more than one hobby; they can have as many as they like. To add more than one hobby to your Sim, use the Add Hobby interaction or the Reward Store. Only the first hobby can be gained through gameplay.

Hobby Enthusiasm

Once your Sim has a hobby, they will have a hidden Hobby Need assigned to them. You won’t see this in game; however, if your Sim’s need drops too low, a notification will come up to tell you and let you know a small example of the activities that will help. Sims will also receive an 8 Hour moodlet to inform you that they haven’t done anything hobby-related for a while.

It takes 3 days in-game for this need to drop so low if your Sim does nothing hobby-related, so it’s hopefully not too frustrating.

The Hobby Hub

Since I’ve created a lot of new computer-based interactions, I wanted to store them somewhere. That somewhere is The Hobby Hub. It’s a new category that appears on the computer and will contain all the hobby-related activities.

Each hobby will have its own Sub-Menu in the category and you’ll only see those relevant to your Sim.
Inside each sub-menu will be interactions that will help to boost your Sim’s hobby enthusiasm. More details on these interactions can be found on the individual Hobby Pages.

Wants

Each of the 14 hobbies have their own Whimset and so your Sims will receive a variety of wants to suit their hobby. Many of these wants are from the game itself but others have been created by me and will only show up if you have The Custom Wants Mod installed as well.

Each trait has it’s own set of Wants and those wants are directly inspired by the Hobby track. They will act as a guide for the things your Sim wants to do, relating to their hobby.
For example, a Sim with a Nature hobby may wish to garden; a Sim with a Science hobby may wish to use a telescope and a Sim with Music & Dance hobby may wish to visit a nightclub.

As far as I can tell, this mod has no compatibility issues.
The mod does override a few files: the recipe files for Bar Guides and Cookbooks and the group storyteller interactions. So the mod will conflict with other mods that touch these files.

I have worked to enable compatibility with other mods. So this mod acknowledges and recognises the following mods:
Pottery (By MiraiMayonaka)
Perfumery (By Simsonian Library)
Weaving (By Pied Piper)
Mead Brewing (By Pied Piper)
Nectar Making (By icemunmun)
Little Chef’s Toy Kitchen (By Pandasama & Ravasheen)
Drums (By Cepzid)
Preferences Plus (By heleane)
Bird Watching (By Lot51)

So a huge thank you to these creators for allowing me to add acknowledgement of these mods inside The Hobby Mod.

The Hobby Mod is Base Game Compatible. Every hobby has some activities from the Base Game included but the more packs you have, the better the experience. In general, you’ll benefit from having the following packs. Some hobbies (like Sports, Travel & Culture and Paranormal) would benefit from having other packs installed to really flesh them out.

To install the mod, make sure you delete any old versions of the mod. Then download the new version and extract it into your Mods folder.
There are 2 folders inside The Hobby Mod folder: CORE and OPTIONAL.
The CORE folder is essential, so do not delete anything from this folder.
The OPTIONAL folder contains 3 files at the moment:
ClubRequirements ~ a file to allow all the Hobby Traits (and the Book Club Member and Archaeological Society Member traits) to be added as club prerequisites. This will conflict with chingyu’s More Traits For Club Filters mod. If Vicky updates her mod to include these traits, then you won’t need this file but if you don’t use that mod, keep the OPTIONAL file if you want this feature. This file is also not compatible with LittleMsSam’s No Auto Club Gathering (Active Household).
CustomPreferences ~ a file containing preferences for Archaeology, Fabrication, Flower Arranging and Juice Fizzing. If you use heleane’s Preferences Plus mod, you probably won’t want/need this file.
HobbyDevelopmentPopup ~ this file contains the popups for hobby development during natural gameplay. Since not everyone wants more popups, this file can be deleted if you don’t wish to have this feature.

The mod currently supports the following translations:
English (Me)
Chinese (GreenOnionC, 1beijiu, Download Here)
Dutch (Britt Boons)(GothiqueAngel)
French (Kimikosoma)
Polish (Julia) (Full translation by Daisy1728, Download Here)
Portuguese (abronte)(Maluk)
Russian (Origamika, Joliebean)
Spanish (Dianuckethead) (Full translation by Laura, Download Here)

In the future, I plan a few updates for the mod:

~ Book Club Meetings ~ The next update will include an event for Film & Literature Sims who’ve joined the Book Club to host meetings.
~ Book Genre preferences ~ Much like the movie genre preferences, I’d like to include book-genre preferences for Film & Literature Sims to declare.
~ Writing Travel Guides ~ For Travel & Culture Sims.
~ Sentiments for shared hobbies.
~ Plus more interactions and wants!

SimFileShare (Free) | Google Drive (Free) | Patreon (Free)

If you have any problems, please head over to my Discord server and I’ll do what I can to help.

Without the following people, this mod would never have come to light:

Scumbumbo for creating the XML Injector and Triplis for updating and maintaining it.
ChippedSim for her help with the older version of the mod and for playing a major role in the creation of the affordance lists.
Lumpinou, Basemental and adeepindigo for ideas and suggestions. You’re all wonderful!
Lot51 for the TDESC Browser and Core Library
Zerbu for the Mod Constructor, where this project began.
The creators of Sims 4 Studio
The wider community for being so supportive and for hyping me up. Thank you all!
Origamika, Julia, GreenOnionC, Kimikosoma, Joliebean, Maluk and GothiqueAngel for translating!