In The Sims 4, you can become an astronaut, make friends with ghosts or turn into a vampire. One thing you can’t do is smoke weed, which is why one player has spent months working on a mod to bring that and other drugs to the game. He’s earning thousands of dollars in donations for his work.
The mod is called “Basemental,” and it introduces marijuana, cocaine, amphetamines, and MDMA (aka Molly, X, Ecstasy) to the game, which the sims can buy, consume, and sell. It also added a “drug dealer” trait so you can create a sim that can supply the illicit contraband. The mod even has a relatively complex system that not only makes the sims act high, hungover, or crashed out, but also allows them to become addicted, overdose (fatally and nonfatally), and get arrested for drug possession.
Filip says the whole idea started after he bought the Sims 4 in the hope of using the home design features as a cheap alternative to a CAD suite to help him remodel his real-life kitchen. He had never played the game before and soon discovered that it does not make for a very effective CAD program.
However, he also discovered several clutter items in the game like bongs and lines of coke, and it got him to wondering if there was a way to make the sims use them instead of just being decorative. He started with lines of cocaine that would disappear when Sims snorted them. From there the mod grew to include the other drugs and gameplay features.
A fellow modder suggested he make a Patreon account so people could leave him donations. He started up an account expecting only to get a few hundred dollars from it. As it sits right now, he is making over $6,000 per month in donations on his Patreon.