You may be familiar with the concept of the careers added by expansion packs being higher paid than the base game ones and Cyjon’s Lower Wages mod to apply a flat percentage decrease to the salaries of the EP careers. Well, I did some digging and found that this concept isn’t necessarily true across the board and sometimes when it is, its for a good reason like the skill requirements being much higher. For example, the 4 Careers added in the University EP are the only careers that require 4 different skills to be built instead of the usual 3, so they do deserve to be the highest paying…just perhaps not quite so much!

So, I completely overhauled the pay for every level of every career so that it is now proportionately based on the requirements needed for promotion and to advance to the top of the career. This then means that the EP careers are now fairly brought in line with the BG ones.

I’ve also edited simsfreq’s University jobs enabled for teens mod to bring those in line in the same way. See the details below.

In the images, you can see how the new salaries compare to the old maxis ones and how much effort is required for each career and at each level (see how this is calculated below). Generally speaking, salaries at the very early levels have been slightly increased but most mid-late levels have been decreased, and Part Time Careers pay a bit more overall. There are lots of exceptions to this, but that’s the general result.

The logic and maths behind these changes:
Firstly, let me introduce you to what I call ‘effort points’ which are what all these changes are based upon. To get a skill from level 0 to 1, that’s one effort point. To get one more friend, that’s also one effort point. However, since higher level skills take longer to build, these are worth more effort points - so getting a skill from level 1 to 2 is actually 2 effort points, and getting a skill from 9 to 10 is a whopping 10 effort points. This is to proportionally reflect the time and effort it takes for sims to build the skills needed to advance in their career. Because say if one career required you to get a different skill from 0 to 1 at each level but another career required you to get one skill from level 0 to 10, it would take much less time to advance in the first career so its only fair that the second career be rewarded for this extra effort.

Here’s an example:
To get from level 8 to 9 in the Science Career, you need to increase the cooking skill from 6 to 7, the cleaning skill from 7 to 9, and the logic skill from 8 to 9, and get 2 more friends from 3 to 5. So, getting the cooking skill from 6 to 7 is 7 effort points. However, with the cleaning skill, you have to get to level 8 before you can get to level 9 so that’s 8 effort points then another 9, so 8 + 9 = 17 for the cleaning skill. Then the logic skill from 8 to 9 is 9 effort points. Then since making friends doesn’t get harder as you make more unlike skills, each friend is always 1 point so 2 more friends is 2 points. So this career jump requires 7 + 17 + 9 + 2 = 35 effort points.

Now for how this actually ties into calculating the new salaries…
For each career, I also worked out what the total effort points is to get from level 1 to level 10 of the career. All careers have 5 working days at level 1. So to calculate the level 1 salary, I used the formula of the total effort points x 10 to calculate the weekly salary, then divided it by 5 for the daily salary. This means, careers that are more difficult to progress through are higher paid at level 1.

For example: it takes a total of 146 effort points to get from level 1 to level 10 of the Athletic Career. So the Salary of level 1 in the Athletic Career is (146 x 10)/5 = $292.

Then for each level after that, the formula is +10(+effort points)%. So to get to level 2 in the Athletic Career only requires 1 effort point so that’s an 11% increase to $324. However, a big 32 effort points are required to get from level 8 to 9 of the Athletic Career so this jump has a 42% increase. This means your sim is proportionately rewarded for how challenging each career jump is.

There are 2 exceptions for this however. I personally see the Slacker & Criminal Careers more like a series of side jobs rather than real careers. This is also reflected in my More Sensible Career Tracks for University Majors mod as in that, no majors give a specific bonus to those careers (education doesn’t get you far in those). So, instead of +10(+effort points)%, they get +5(+effort points)% instead, making the increase per level lower but still proportional to effort required.

The Part Time Careers work a bit differently. The salary at level 1 is calculated by 10 times the total amount of effort to get from level 1-3 (the top). Then for levels 2 & 3, its the pervious salary + 50 + the amount of effort points for that level.

I also made some other changes worth noting. The skill requirements in the Slacker & Business Careers have been slightly increased to avoid them being underpaid. The Slacker is already a low paid career and even more so with the harsher formula, so your slackers need to work a tiny bit harder for their pay now. As for Business, I was surprised at how easy and low paid this career is since its like the main career ambitious Fortune sims strive for, so I made it harder and therefore higher paid. On the other hand, the skill requirements for the Paranormal, Show Biz, and Natural Science Careers have been slightly decreased to bring them closer to the requirements of the other careers and therefore not be as higher paid (though still rightfully the highest). As well as this, I replaced the cooking skill requirements in the Paranormal Career with Logic as I think that makes a lot more sense. If anyone wants to see a spreadsheet with the specifics of the skill changes, let me know.

Lastly, I’ve always hated how the top of the Natural Science Career works, your sim works just one day a week but for a whopping 21 hours instead of the usual 7! So that’s why its always seemed like 'wow $10,497 a day is a lot!’ well its not really as a weekly salary! So now, Sims at level 10 of the Nat Sci Career will work Tue, Wed & Thu 10am-5pm (7 hours) and get $4,045 a day as per the formula which is a lot less than the old daily salary but now they’ll actually earn more in a week than before.

Recommended Mods:

• More Sensible Career Tracks for University Majors by me
• Edukashun Iz Gud by Cyjon
• Traits Project: Naturally Good at their Job by Hexagonal Bipyramid + my addon: Ambitious Sims are Naturally Good at their Job too
  

Check out more of my mods on my website.
Credits:
simsfreq for their Part-Time Uni Careers,
SimPe