Multi-tasking - Eat, Drink and sit down

[Lord_Joutja]

Hi, my sims seem to find it hard to drink coffee and eat at the same time. Not only that but they also seem incapable of sitting down with this combo.

A typical situation may be that I'll tell my sim to get a coffee and breakfast. They'll grab the coffee and stand by the machine for an hour, maybe have a couple of sips. I may be able to get them to pick up the food as well if I cancel the drink coffee task and collect the food, then click the recently put down coffee and select Drink. However, then they just stand around not drinking or eat with both in their hand. I would click a seat for them to sit in and they just won't move. 

When I've done this for food and drink pulled from the fridge, e.g. milk and cereal, they seem to do this ok for the most part and sit down at the table like a normal human. It seems that it is only coffee that appears to have the opposite affect of being a stimulant and instead acts like something used to induce a coma. 

Not sure if this is a bug or just a technical issue. Might be just that no-one thought about drinking coffee with food before. :P

[crinrict]

Are you using mods in your game ?

[Lord_Joutja]

Hi Crin, thank you for the reply.

I don't have any mods in it. 

[blacksatelliteai]

A little more in-depth from what I see:

Eating has no 'concurrency' with talking or drinking. The task, when 'multitasked', is queued against other actions and can greatly extend the time it takes to consume a meal. Conversations will interrupt the eating process (and take priority over drinking), and the eating task takes priority over the drinking task.

This differs from, say, watching TV or listening to music, which doesn't interrupt the eating task itself. The above behavior is frustrating because it's 'false multitasking', each specific task winds up being more productive when done seperately.

If you can't talk, sip coffee, and have some toast at the same time, the eating/drinking tasks should be better interlaced (alternating priority) when multitasked (like laughing at the TV) and both with a higher priority than socializing.

[crinrict]

@blacksatelliteai Are you having exactly the same issue as the OP or are you saying multitasking is prolonging actions ? Cause while that is certainly true, my Sims still sit down to eat and drink without an issue. It may take longer but they still do it.

As I understand it, that doesn't happen at all for @Lord_Joutja which would kind be a different issue from what you describe but I could be wrong of course.

[blacksatelliteai]

Sims cannot 'grab a serving' and 'grab a cup of coffee' concurrently without an incredibly obnoxious process of dropping items and action interruptions to get both quote-unquote 'multitasked', even though the actions are queued, not multitasked.

You need a single serving of food in the world, get the drink, then instruct to eat. in that order. The sim will *then* proceed to take around 2-3 hours to consume the meal in full (even 'quick' meals such as cereal+milk). In Joujta's case, they probably never thought of such a long, nonsensical workaround because it simply doesn't work.

Enjoy the three hour meal :robotsad: and hope you didn't have someplace to be