Lock Skill Gain Progress - Make Sims Your Own

Adds a pie menu called Skill Lock that enables you to Lock or Unlock skill gain for individuals Sims at will. An important addition for making Sims feel like individuals, rather than slowly becoming amazing at everything.

Latest: Reloaded v1.0.1, released after EA Patch, January 21, 2021

Optional Setting: Download (Simfileshare) | Download (Patreon) | Change Locks To Cheats

Patch Notes

Reloaded v1.0.1

Added Paranormal Stuff Pack "Medium" skill to possible locks.

Reloaded v1.0

Lock Skill Gain Progress is now Lock Skill Gain Progress... Reloaded! I've revamped the mod with the aim of making it easier for me to add new skills in the future and in general the aim of improving/adding some features, which you can read about in the revised Features documentation, or get a view of the changes in the patch notes below.

Note that for now, the previous version is still available under Download (Old). I'm doing this temporarily in case unforeseen issues arise with the revamped version of the mod, but going into the future, I don't intend to keep the old version updated with game patches. The old version still only includes skill up to and including Get Famous, it's unchanged.

Make sure to remove the previous version when installing the new one! The naming is a bit different than before and the new Reloaded version of the mod restarts at 1.0 rather than continuing the numbering of the old version.

P.S. If you run into issues with the new version, let me know. I know it's going to be a bit different, but my hope is it's mostly a good kind of different. :)

Skill locks should now include skills up to and including Snowy Escape.
Skill Lock/Unlock is now a picker menu instead of a pie menu and you can pick multiple locks to add or remove at once.
Adding random locks has been reduced to one option, rather than base game or xpacs, and it automatically accounts for what packs you have.
Adding random locks to Child or Toddler is possible, but they add 1 instead of 5 and it's 1 from their Child/Toddler-specific skills.
Adding or removing all locks at once now accounts for what packs you have.
NEW Forget Skill: Sim will forget the picked skill. Note that if the sim has no skills, clicking this will do nothing, since there are no skills to show.
NEW Forget All Skills: Sim will forget all of their skills. Use with caution, there's no undo button, unless you count slowly relearning the skills or cheating them back somehow.
NEW Optional Setting (separate download from the main mod), Change Locks To Cheats: To reduce menu clutter, the Skill Lock menu only shows if you shift-click with testingcheats enabled.
Added Japanese translation by halapeco
Added French translation by CandymanGaming

Old Version / Old Notes

Changed the functionality of Skill Lock options, so that you can use them on any sim you can click on, regardless of who the currently controlled sim is.
Added Russian translation by KissaLopa.

Options

Lock All Skills: Adds all possible skill locks on the Sim.
Unlock All Skills: Removes all current skill locks on the Sim
Lock Skill: Opens up a picker menu, where you can choose from selected skills to lock and can choose more than one at the same time.
Unlock Skill: Opens up a picker menu, where you can choose from selected skills to unlock and can choose more than one at the same time.
Lock Random Skills: Locks 5 random skills if Teen or older. Locks 1 if Child or Toddler and only picks from the Child/Toddler-specific skills.
Forget > Forget Skill: Sim will forget the picked skill. Note that if the sim has no skills, clicking this will do nothing, since there are no skills to show.
Forget > Forget All Skills: Sim will forget all of their skills. Use with caution, there's no undo button, unless you count slowly relearning the skills or cheating them back somehow.

Teen or older

Sims that are Teen or older get access to locking every possible skill in the game, including those from expansions. This is up to date with Paranormal Stuff Pack. Any skills added after that have not been added yet, or I forgot to update this note because that's a possibility too. See the Options section for details on how the commands work.

Note that a few skills are not technically skills. They are stats that are made to be sort of like skills. For example, Chopsticks "skill." These use a string I could find that is close enough to describe it and a default icon to go with it, since they don't have one of their own. I'm not sure how much difference it makes to lock skills like these, but the possibility is there.

Child

Child Sims can lock the child skills Creativity, Mental, Motor, and Social. They can also lock some adult skills, depending on the current availability of it.

Toddler

Toddlers can lock the toddler skills Communication, Potty, Thinking, Movement, and Imagination.

How it Works

This mod sets up a multiplier of zero for any given "locked" skill. Anything multiplied by zero is zero, so it cancels out any and all skill gains for that skill, reducing them to nothing.

Note that if a skill is already visible under the Skills bar, locking it won't make it disappear. Nor will it reduce the progress. It only freezes the current progress.

Also note: Example time. You lock Parenting skill before it's even visible on the Skills bar. You go do some Parenting action that would normally give you a chunk* of Parenting XP. Instead, you get no XP, but the notification for Parenting being "acquired" happens anyway. And it will happen every time you get a chunk of XP. If you want to avoid this notification quirk, just let the skill become acquired and then lock it.

*This only applies to chunks. Skill gain that happens gradually, such as practicing on the Piano, shouldn't trigger the notification.