Can you change what gender a sim flirts with in free will?

[thatlimeyweasel]

I know that you can manually control a sim to have a relationship with someone specific, but that's not what I mean.  Usually, a sim will just autonomously find someone of the opposite gender they like to flirt with, without being directed.  I'm wondering if there's some way to tell the game a particular sim is supposed to be gay/lesbian, without actually having to start a romance manually and still letting them find someone on their own?

[Korva]

As far as I know, that's only possible with a mod like Twallan's Master Controller, which allows you to set Gender Preference for any given Sim.

[thatlimeyweasel]

Hmm... I haven't tried using mods before, and it seems like it does a lot of things I wouldn't need, but I found this in its FAQ while looking to see what it does:

Note that under EA Standard, gender preference is only set :

- By the story progression system, when two undecided sims are chosen to be coupled
- When the user performs a user-directed romantic interaction

Because of this, sims can remain undecided for the entirety of their lifespan.

I'm not sure if 'romantic interaction' means anything in the romantic menu, or only specifically things that change relationship status to romantic.  If it's the former, it would suggest that the game is structured so that if I manually have a sim flirt with same gender at least once, it will make them start doing it autonomously from then on.  Going to test that.

[lvrugger]

Having a sim do romantic interactions with another sim affects that sim's gender preference. If a sim flirts with a sim of the opposite sex, 2 points are added to the heterosexual score and 1 is subtracted from the homosexual score, with the reverse occurring for romantic interactions with same-sex sims. So, if sim Suzy has 10 romantic interactions with women, she will have a homosexual score of 20 and a heterosexual score of -10. Once you've built up some points on the homosexual meter, Suzy should only autonomously flirt with girls. If you do enough of both, you can end up with a bisexual sim, but you have to balance it very carefully if you don't use mods.

**Please note, I don't know the names of the scoring meters, so I used "score" and "meter" here with "heterosexual" and "homosexual" as parameters. If anyone knows the real names would you please let me know? Thanks!

[thatlimeyweasel]

To lvrugger, ta muchly!  That's very helpful