Its taking a little time to get used to what chips do what exactly.
I also seem to have encountered a weird bug where sometimes a plumbot that starts at a low level and then is upgraded later seems to decay just as if it were the old low level. To get around this, I just made a bunch of bots at level 10 till I got one with max level and kept that one and sold off the rest. Selling them you still get the full value of whatever level the bot is, so that works for me until they fix this.
Having a plumbot for certain things is way better than sims. There is a lot less motives to contend with keeping full. They make great gardeners and fishers with the solar power chip, that seems to be my favorite use of them. Especially the use of max fertilizing without taking any materials when gardening, and they do it automatically as they "tend garden." With the simulated emotions chip and manually starting a certain emotion on a crystal plant, the will also automatically top off the emotion when tending garden as well. I don't have free will up high so I don't know how well they self manage taking care of babies, but even with picking the tasks yourself they are great for that because you can put them in and out of their charging station is a flash without all the grumpy stomping around sims do when they are woken up before sleep motive is full. Giving them jobs seems to work okay as long as they are a high enough level that they wont run out of battery while working but without the right chip they don't get promotions as fast as a sim or bot in a good mood.
With so few motive bars, it isn't so touchy to get them all full. With sims, by the time I fill up one thing there are 2 others that need refilled. It's just so much easier to have them working on something in a good mood with so much less time getting them happy to do the thing you want to do effectively.
Overall I really like them and have spent a good deal of time with them over anything else new in the expansion.
