Practice Magic Tweaks — autonomy, learn spell chance and more

Tired of seeing your spellcaster Sims happily spending their whole lives not doing any magic? This mod hands that initiative back to them. Spellcasters in the active household will go practice magic on their own.

How it works

When a Sim practices on their own, they lean toward Untamed, Practical, or Mischief based on who they are — their traits, their likes and dislikes, and their skills. Evil Sims drift toward Mischief and Untamed; Good or Family-Oriented Sims drift toward Practical, etc. When you click Practice Magic, all three schools are still offered as normal.

Sims drawn to the occult practice more often: Macabre and Mystical Sims, and anyone who has finished (or is currently working on) Spellcraft & Sorcery, Purveyor of Potions, or Ghost Historian. Sims with the Fear of Magic practice less. A spellcaster with none of those is left at the standard mod rate.

Once a Sim has learned every spell their rank allows in a school, they stop picking that school on their own, and a Sim who has finished all three stops practicing autonomously altogether. You can still click Practice Magic on them any time.

How often

Left alone, a spellcaster gets the urge again roughly half a sim day after practicing, and each session shifts that by a random few hours. Even once they want to practice, they only actually start on about 15% of their autonomy checks, so it lands at an unpredictable time. There's also a 120-minute cooldown after an autonomous session. If you'd rather they just go the moment the urge wins, raise urge_percent to 100.

Always learn something

By default, if the session timer runs out without a lucky roll, the Sim still learns one eligible spell instead of walking away with nothing. Rank gates are unchanged — they can never learn above their rank. This applies to sessions you start as well as autonomous ones. Turn it off with always_succeed = 0 if you want vanilla luck.

Everything else about practice is vanilla: 90-120 sim minute sessions, a 10% chance to learn every 10 sim minutes, and a lucky roll still ends practice early.

Requirements

• Realm of Magic GP (GP08)
• Script mods enabled
• Keep HNRY_PracticeMagicTweaks.ts4script, HNRY_PracticeMagicTweaks.package, and HNRY_PracticeMagicTweaks.cfg in the same folder inside your Mods folder.

Settings

Edit HNRY_PracticeMagicTweaks.cfg with the game closed, or edit and run hnry.pmt.reload in the cheat console to reload the settings while it's open.

Cheats

These write to the .cfg immediately, so you never have to open the file.

• hnry.pmt.status — Show current settings and state
• hnry.pmt.autonomy 0|1 — Turn autonomous practice on or off
• hnry.pmt.duration <min> <max> — Session length in Sim minutes
• hnry.pmt.chance <percent> — Chance to learn per 10 sim minutes
• hnry.pmt.urge <percent> — How often the urge is acted on
• hnry.pmt.always 0|1 — Always learn a spell even without a lucky roll
• hnry.pmt.affinity 0|1 — Traits and aspirations affects school choice, on or off
•  hnry.pmt.reload  — Re-read the cfg file

Compatibility

It patches only the three player Practice Magic interactions and scores them with one hidden commodity of its own. Autonomy scoring is wrapped rather than replaced, so other mods that also wrap it keep working. It does not touch the sages' hidden practice, and it does not change spell learning from tomes, duels, or sages.

Disclaimer

The mod is liable to bugs, as most are. Please back up your save before installing.

Support

For bug reporting or support please contact me on Discord @henryvotril

Thank you for using my mods! 💕