This is wonderful. Gone are the days my sims prepare lobster thermidor in the potting shed at the far edge of the lot!

I can't thank you enough for this mod! So badly need this.

Thank you for this. I get so frustrated every time my Sims start wandering away from the kitchen to go prepare food at the farthest possible bathroom counter.

I NEEDED THIS! I play with MOO always on and my sims are such frickin idiots that they always prepare food on the counter the microwave is on. ALWAYS THAT ONE. I'm gonna disable the heck out of it now. Good luck Sims.

OMG, I almost died laughing. Scumbumbo, how I missed you. Thank you for returning.

excellent, lately my sims are walking right past kitchen counters to prep food in the laundry room...

@scumbumbo, this mod not working with MC Command 4.20!
I gonna cry

Not sure what MC Command Center could be doing that would interfere with this mod, but I'll give it a look. I'm still running MCCC 4.0 myself. The exception errors you posted appear to be related to commoditys and buffs, neither of which are used by this mod, but those may be caused by something else unrelated to the issue you're seeing. I'll have to download 4.2 and see if I get problems as well and I'll post back.

I have 4.2.0 in my game (actually I'm a Patron, so I also played through the testing phase of it) and I don't have this problem in the screenshot or the LE issue. I haven't patched my game for the March 8th patch though, so I wonder if that has something to do with it? I'm waiting for Maxis to fix the apartment bug they created with last week's patch before I update. So, could be something introduced with the latest patch, or else a mod conflict.

@Pawlq - I've updated my MCCC to version 4.2 and I'm not having any issues with food prep and this mod. My guess is that your Sim had a routing issue that wasn't related to either mod. That exception error appears to indicate an issue with a mod (or the game itself, that can and does happen!) that is doing something with buffs and commodities, possibly a custom trait or an object or action that adds a buff to Sims.

ETA - Just to be clear, I am running the latest game patch.

Ok, I solved problem. I don't know why but with MC 4.1.2 works fine. When I update to 4.2.0, sims wont prepare meal on counters.
When I deleted all counters on lot and bought new one it solved the problem.

And yea, buffs problem generated another mod :D

I have the same problem, sims won't prepare food, even after I replaced all the counters. The first time I try after reloading the game, they start preparing, then they wave their arms and I get the thought bubble with the red x and they stop, then they won't even start at all. It happened after the latest patch.

So to be clear, I specifically removed the entire mods folder, and then just added pack this mod, to see if there was anything else that could have caused it, but I immediately got the same issue, so it's definitely this mod that is doing it. I also tested without any mods, to see if there was just a glitch in the game itself, but when I did that everything worked as it should. I can't help but make the conclusion that it's this mod that is the problem. Sorry.

I'll be looking into that when I get the chance. Thanks for helping diagnose the issue!

ETA - Well, as is typical with problems such as this, I cannot reproduce this issue in my own game. I have tried with several different counter types and stoves, and Sims will merrily cook food that I throw away and make them cook again. Different recipes, oven and stove, counters in a different room from the stove, I even turned off a counter while they were prepping food and they moved it to another counter which was enabled and continued without a hiccup -- no curveballs I try throwing at them seems to faze them.

In short, I'll need more info from someone experiencing the issue:

• The only counters and stoves I have are from the base game, Get To Work or Get Together. I do have some custom content counters and those work fine. If the objects you are having issues with are custom content I can attempt to make them functional with the mod. If they are from a game pack I don't have then all bets are off.
• Given the above criteria, what model of stove and counters are you using? If they are custom content, please provide a download location for the objects.
• Are there cabinets or other objects above the counters you are enabling which could intefere with routing? Typically this doesn't cause problems, but a previous user has noted that some cabinets have caused issues with certain counters.
• Is the food prep process halting when food is attempted to be moved to a counter, or after counter prep and the food should be moved to the stove?
• Do you have at LEAST two counters enabled that work normally for food prep? This helps to avoid any temporary routing issues that can cause food prep failure (pet in the way, someone in another room coming to clean the counter, any number of things can cause a temporary route failure).
• Have you tried a different style of counter or stove? (I'm not considering that a solution if a replacement works, but it helps to identify if you're seeing a mod issue or an object that is incompatible with the mod issue).
• Are you getting a notification of an exception being generated? If so please provide a copy of the lastException.txt file as an attachment to a reply (don't just copy/paste it into the message).
• If you are using standard counters/stoves, can you upload a copy of an affected save game for me to test?
• Anything else you can think of, either info or questions!

@Scumbumbo, I don't remember for sure which pack the counters I used are from, but I believe they are from Cats & Dogs. I can double check that ofcourse. They worked fine before the latest patch. If I knew what code you used for this and I knew where to look and stuff, maybe I could help expand the mod to those counters? I'm really new to modding, but I'd like to help if I can.
I'm confused how a single patch could change so much for pack specific counters, isn't it basically the same code?

There wasn't a new kitchen set with Cats and Dogs. Could it be the kitchen set from Jungle Adventure?

I'm not on the March 8th patch yet (waiting on a fix from Maxis on the broken apartment issue), but in my game on 1.40 and this mod I don't have any issues, except I haven't tried using the new kitchen set from Jungle Adventure yet. I use the Parenthood kitchen counters and cabinets in a lot of my homes, and they work fine. I don't know about the other packs (Spa Day or Cool Kitchen), because I rarely ever use those kitchen sets.

The tuning for all the counter objects should be the same though, I would think. I don't use any custom content kitchen counters except for the no backsplash overrides by Plasticbox. Those are fine as long as they're batch fixed with Sims 4 Studio.

@aparkinson I might have been mistaken about the counters then, all I know it's one of premade lots from cats & Dogs, and I didn't change the counters. They've worked great with this mod before, so it must be a patch that has caused this.

@scumbumbo An update: I made a new game, plopped down all the available counters I have on a lot and enabled food prep on all of them, and I still get the arm waving. It's definitely not a pack based issue.

I just finally patched my game this morning for yesterday's update since Maxis fixed the apartment bug and I'm not having any problems cooking and using this mod. I've even used it in a tiny kitchen with only one available counter space and no issues. Plus I tried swapping out Base Game and DLC counters and different cabinet arrangements above counters.

Do you start with all counters disabled and then enable them, because I use the version with all counters enabled and pick which ones not to use. I have no idea what difference that would make. I'm just reaching for answers here.

Aha! I use the other version, maybe that's it then. I can't test right now, but I will when I can.

@Apsalar - I reread your initial description of the problem, and it sounds like your Sims are moving to a counter and starting the prep cycle

To me, that sounds like it might actually be an issue with the stove you are using. This was the same behavior I would see occasionally before I updated the mod to support the canning stations, the Sim would make a plate, chop it up, whatever, at the counter and then fail to take the plate to a stove because they'd chosen the canning station for the cook surface and that object didn't have the enable food prep state until I updated the mod to add that in. Recipes that didn't require them to use a counter would fail completely.

Do all the stove surfaces on the lot have the enable/disable control on them? If there is even one cook surface type object on the lot that doesn't have the enable/disable control, then that could be the issue. To clarify - having two stove surfaces on a lot with one of them disabled doesn't cause any issue, but if there is a stove surface that doesn't have the enable/disable menu choice at all (it didn't get the custom state added to it by the script) that can cause issues.

Hmmmm, do I have to reenable the stove after loading the lot the first time for each play session? I can't remember if I checked the stove or not, but I did try disable/enable the counters, so maybe I forgot about the stove? Tbh I was just frantically clicking at one point. I'll double check to see what option is on the stove next time I play, maybe I just have to rebuy the stove.

Update: well I finally got it to work! It seems I did forget to re-enable the stove before. I did notice I had to re-enable the counters aswell - do I have to re-enable them every time I load the game?
Either way, I feel a little foolish right now. Why the heck did I forget about the stove? I was probably over thinking it.

If anyone is still having issues, make sure you check if both the counters and the stove is enabled when you load the lot, it seems the setting can get removed - I'm not sure if it's tied to the localthumbcache file because I usually delete that before I load the game.

The setting is stored on the object itself in the save game, deleting the thumbcache won't alter it. You should only have to do it once when you first go to a lot, but if you replace the stove with a new one that will reset it to whatever default you are running - likely one of the reasons folks seem to prefer the default enabled version.

Oh, so maybe a patch can change the setting then? Because I have specifically played the lot before and had the mod working perfectly. I dunno, that specific lot has been wonky generally, so maybe it's the game acting up in a glitchy way. At least it's all figured out, and that's all that matters. Hello, game, why are you doing this to me?

Don't feel bad, I have one house in all the worlds I play that I can't do laundry in if the washer and dryer are right up against the wall. And I have no idea why it's doing that! It has nothing to do with shelves or anything else around them, just being up against the wall. Sometimes I think this game likes to test our patience to the outer limits.