BellaDovah's Sims 2 Aspiration Calculator

This is my own personal method of calculating which aspirations to give my sims. You can save a copy of this Google Sheet or download it as an Excel Spreadsheet for your own use. My calculator is inspired by TeaAddict's and Shirley's (the one PleasantSims uses), but mine is unique in many different ways.

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This calculator (optionally) takes both Personality and Interests into account. I play rotationally so I have a lot of different sims and its important for me that they each feel defined and varied. For many reasons, shown by my No Zodiac Chemistry mod, star signs have no meaning in my game so basing aspirations on these is out of the question. So, I personally use my calculator by filling in both the Interests & Personality at the same time and then taking the highest score as the Primary Aspiration and the second highest score as the Secondary Aspiration. However, there are many different ways you could use this - you could just use it for Secondary Aspirations or even just for Primaries, you could just use the Interests column and leave the Personality column blank or the other way around, you could use the Personality column alone to calculate the Primary then the Interests column alone to calculate the Secondary, or the other way around. There are also several different scales you could use for the Interest points - more on that later. There are so many different options but I'll do my best to explain how I personally use it and point out what you could choose to do differently as we go.

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Which aspirations some of the interests belong to are different compared to Shirley’s original calculator, such as Sci-Fi now belonging to Knowledge instead of Pleasure and a few other things like that that make much more sense to me. However, what is most unique about my calculator is that it actually takes opposites into account and subtracts from the scores. For example, if a sim has 10 playfulness points, their Knowledge score is reduced by -5. The interest points are also intended to have a similar idea. I previously used to calculate the interests on a -5 to 5 scale so that having 0 interest in Sci-Fi would have also decreased the Knowledge score by -5. However, I have since changed how I do this to reflect the fact that generally, a sim with 4 or more interest points in a subject will react positively to it while chatting. Therefore, the new interest scale I use goes from -4 to -1 then from 1 to 7, skipping 0 since they are either disinterested or interested in conversation, never really neutral. So now, I would calculate 0 interest in Sci-Fi as -4 therefore decreasing the Knowledge Score by -4. It would also work on a scale of 0 to 10 if you really didn't like the idea of interests decreasing the scores.

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I personally recalculate my sims aspirations every time they age up and use the ReNuYuSenso Orb or the SimBlender to change their aspiration if the calculator gives me different results because I like the idea that sims sometimes change as they grow, but that’s not strictly necessary. For this reason though, my spreadsheet has two tabs, each with a slightly different calculator, one intended for Teens & YAs and the other intended for Adults & Elders. This is because I wanted a way for the School interest to affect the Knowledge Aspiration for Teens and Young Adults, but affect the Family Aspiration for Adults & Elders. In the Teen & YA one, 5 interests affect the Knowledge aspiration but only 3 interests affect the Family Aspiration for them. The other aspirations have the same 4 interests as in the Adult/Elder calculator. I couldn’t think of an interest to get rid of from Knowledge to replace School with and I couldn’t think of an interest to add to Family to replace School. If you didn't want to calculate based on age, you can just pick whichever calculator you prefer regardless of age.

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How I suggest to use my calculator:

1. Click the button below to be taken to the Google Sheet and either make a copy in your own drive or download it as an Excel Spreadsheet, do not request edit access.

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2. Click the tab in the bottom left with the calculator you wish to use. The second one is intended for when Children age up to Teens, for Teen & YA Premades, and also optionally for recalculating when Teens age up to YAs. The first one is intended for Adult & Elder Premades and also optionally for recalculating when sims age up to the Adult & Elder stages, but you could just pick whichever one you prefer regardless of age if you wanted.

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Note: the middle table is purely informational. This is where you can see which interests and personality traits affect which aspirations. Changing this will not change the results of the calculator.

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3. Fill in the sim’s interest scores in column B. These are intended to range from -4 to -1 and 1 to 7 (with 0 points being -4, 3 points being -1, 4 points being 1 and 10 points being 7). It would still work if you instead entered numbers -5 to 5, or even 0 to 10 if you really don’t want low interest points to subtract from aspiration scores. You can also optionally leave this blank if you wish to calculate solely based on Personality.

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4. Fill in the sim’s personality scores in column D. The idea here is that only one side of the scale should be a number other than 0. These range from 5 to 0 on the left/‘bad’ side of the scale, and 0 to 5 on the right/‘good’ side, with 5 points being 0 for both sides. So, if a sim has 10 neat points, their sloppy score is 0 and their neat score is 5. If a sim has 8 neat points, their neat score is 3 (since 5 is 0 and 10 is 5) and their sloppy score is 0. If a sim has 3 neat points, their sloppy score is 2 (since 0 points would be 5) and their neat score is 0. If a sim has 5 neatness points, both their sloppy and neat scores are 0. If you wanted personality to affect the scores more, it would also work with bigger numbers like 10-0 & 0-10, however using negative numbers in this column will not work correctly with the current formulas. You could also leave this column blank if you wish to calculate solely based on Interests.

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5. Use the scores that generate in column N to determine which Aspiration(s) the sim should have. If calculating for both Primary & Secondary, the highest positive score should be their Primary and the second highest positive should be their Secondary. If calculating for either only primary or only secondary, use the highest score only to determine this. I give all my sims both a Primary & Secondary Aspirations unless they only get one positive score (or perhaps one score is whoppingly higher than the rest) then I would interpret this as them not having a Secondary Aspiration. I personally don't play with the Grilled Cheese Aspiration, however if a situation arose where all scores are negative, I would interpret this to mean they have the Grilled Cheese Aspiration, this hasn't happened for me yet though. The cells in this column are where the calculation formulas are, so be careful to not accidentally edit them as it will break the calculator. However, if you know what you’re doing, this is where you can make changes that make more sense to you, such as changing which aspiration an interest affects.

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I hope that all makes sense and some of you can find my calculator useful, do let me know if you have any questions.