Sims always cooking in free will, even with tons of leftovers

[thatlimeyweasel]

I've been searching around trying to find out why this is happening, but haven't figured it out yet.  It's driving me crazy.  Almost every time one of my sims is hungry, they will cook a meal, even if they're not good cooks and even if there's LOADS of leftovers in the fridge, which there usually is!  I don't know how to stop them from doing this other than turning free will off, which I don't want to do since I otherwise like watching what they do autonomously and don't always like having to control them.  I just wish they would eat the leftovers instead!!  It makes no sense!

Anyone know why they're doing this, and if it's possible to make them stop?

[Keoni]

I've noticed the same thing. I usually just make sure to get my Sims to eating whatever I want them to eat, and if I have a lot of Sims I try to get them taking meals at the same time so I can just use the "call everyone to meal" interaction. So I've never really concerned myself with it. To some extent, the traits a Sim has will dictate what they choose to do when left alone, so perhaps having the frugal trait might help? Just throwing ideas out.

[Shirin]

If there's plenty of leftovers, you can remove all cooking equipment and leave just the fridge.

Or you can wall/fence off the kitchen and put a locking door/gate on it.

[Pam]

Anyone know why they're doing this, and if it's possible to make them stop?

The reason why they're doing this is because of free will.  You just never know what a Sim will do and sometimes they just want to cook.  To stop them, you can cancel the action and/or direct them to eat leftovers before they start cooking. 

[thatlimeyweasel]

Yeah, I've started watching and just telling them to eat the leftovers whenever the hungry moodlet pops up, but I'm currently playing with an 8 sim household so keep missing it until I see the little money spending overlay from them buying stuff to make a meal out of the fridge. :/  I originally thought it was because I was storing the high quality food ingredients from gardening in there so they wanted to use them...but nope, even taking them out so they had to pay to cook didn't make them do it any less!

Also I've just added a gate around the oven and counters and locked it to everyone but the sim with level 10 cooking...will see if this stops them or if they'll take out ingredients and then get 'can't go there'...

[thatlimeyweasel]

Update on this...sadly the gate thing didn't work.  Did like I was afraid it would, which is that sims will go to the fridge, buy ingredients, then set them down cos they can't get to the stove.  Then they'll pick them up again, and set them back down, and just keep doing that till I manually tell them to eat leftovers.  Argh!

[Ricalynn]

Remove the stove unless you need to cook.  Put it in the family inventory with all other cooking paraphernalia.  They won't be able to do anything but autumn Salad but they can't do that either if you don't leave countertops out and about.