Though the For Rent pack is still quite a buggy mess for many, we can't deny that the room-assignment mechanic for the residential rentals works and seems quite detailed.
Idk if they did this first to test out before doing it for commercial lots-- but I think this exact system should work for commercial lots.
I have a mod that can hire NPCs for certain objects, but you can't do it for restaurants. I think the sims team should try (if not already trying to do it) to create the exact system for commercial lots. So that you can make "separate buildings" that are attached, etc., and they can still work different as intended. Cafe on one side, restaurant on the other. Or bookstore on the bottom floor and cafe on the top floor! Or even possibilities to mix community with res rental. Retail store on the first floor, Apartment for the owner on the top so that they never have to leave lol.
It really is time for this type of system. The game is a decade old and I know many have been wishing for this!
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Having the ability to do a residential lot and a commercial lot together, on the other hand, would be very useful. Currently, I just do it by making an area for my sim to live in and locking the door, only unlocking it to let him in, and then locking it again. I have a sim who lives above a spa this way. He has an official residence lot, but there is nothing on it. He lives at the spa. But it would be a lot better if he could actually have it marked as his residence.
However, the multiple lots in one lot idea (both the community lot type in Eco Living and the rental residence from For Rent) are causing problems. Apparently, the game treats them as actually more than one lot and stores them as multiple lots in memory (according to discussion on the threads talking about the issue both here at at AHQ). So they really balloon up the amount of memory being used, causing problems in the game. I'd want so better way of doing it if they were to try and do multi-purpose lots.
Like, maybe, just give us a blank lot type that simply can be used for whatever we want, by placing the types of objects we want sims to use, plus the ability to lock doors on commercial lots so that only specific households can enter certain areas. And make it so that the store owning gameplay is functional on residential lots just by placing the right items in a space that visiting sims can enter without being invited in. A special door function that sets open hours and closed hours could work for this.
Home businesses don't work because you can't hire played sims as employees. Whether you like it or not, you need to hire and train your employees regardless of whether you have a household sim who is perfect for the job and want its. The way businesses are set-up in TS4 it makes me think that some of the developers never played previous Sims games and that they don't play TS4 much either. 10 years later we can't work as bartenders even though we seem to get a new bar in every EP and we have a mixology skill and aspiration. Even with the sales tables you barely make any sales and you need to sell expensive items in order to earn enough money to make that a full time type job. Try selling vegetables by the piece and see how long it takes your sims to pay their bills. I set up quite a lot of businesses but I never have my sims run them because they are simply not designed to be profitable.
I don't think generic lots are the answer to home businesses. They basically don't do anything except keep sims out. Not sue if that is the default state of TS4 lots or whether keeping sims out is an enforced rule. They really need to look at how businesses were done in TS2 and work from there. You could open a business on your lot or on a community lot. You could tend any bar or coffee bar and earn money for it. If you put an open business sign on your lot then sims would start coming in, if you had items for sale they would buy them, if you offered haircuts they would come sit in the barber chair, if you had a bar they would buy drinks, etc. You could hire other sims as employees to fill some positions if you didn't have suitable sims in your household, like a second sim to tend a barber chair or a restaurant waiter. Technically, we get something similar with the sales table, once you start a sale sims start coming in, so it's not impossible to add home businesses, but for whatever reason they made a decision not to add them. They made so much fuss about the home chef kitchen pack, but it's still basically a sales table even though you can technically cook there as well. But maybe I want a nice bakery, not a dubious looking sales table, why can't sims cook in a kitchen and sell their waffles from a bakery shelf from their own lot? And sales tables don't even work if you put them inside a room, they need to be either outside or accessible through an archway. And if you use the home chef sales table to make a bakery other sims will come inside your house and using your stuff even though you locked the doors.
This is exactly what I had in mind regarding home businesses. Maybe I didn't explain it well. I never played Sims 2, so I was reinventing the wheel trying to voice my idea.
My suggestion about generic lots was for multi-use community lots, not residential businesses. If we want to, for example, combine a library with a spa. We'd want sims to do spa activities, but also library activities. The fact that, as you say, generic lots "keep sims out" is exactly the problem with them. They are pretty useless because of that. But if the devs made the one change of letting sims spawn at generic lots and do whatever activities are associated with the objects we have placed there, we would have the ability to totally customize a community lot to our liking. We could make that spa-library on a generic lot by having both spa items and library items and sims would use both. I originally thought that was what the generic lot type was for, but since they don't let sims spawn there, it doesn't work.
The library is a library simply because of the lot type, it summons the librarian, otherwise it's just a room filled with books. You can have books in a spa and maybe some sims will read them and then leave them scattered around. I would love if they enabled NPCs on all lots for the objects manned by NPCs and the option to tend them by your own played sims. That way we could put a coffee bar or stand in a library for example and sims will still do mostly reading and coffee would be a secondary activity. I tried adding books to a coffee shop but sims don't read much. This is the issue with the lot types, it hard codes for certain behaviors, and I don't mind that, by all means sims should do what the lot is intended for, but would be nice to have more flexibility so you don't have to visit two lots if you want a certain experience.
It would be so nice to make multifunction community lots. Lots are at such a premium in the game. Del Sol Valley, San Sequoia, etc. Having multi family lots is a game changer. I'd love to see the ability to create multi-story, multi purpose community lots.