AntiFrustrationFeatures / Simulation Game

APICO:
- In the Accessibility menu, you can toggle the ability to walk through trees and auto-activate manual mechanisms to make gameplay easier. They don't affect your progress or lock you out of achievements.
- The Workbench accepts all items from all open menus, so you don't have to carry the needed items around to use it.
- When you break a tool, another one with the same function takes up its slot so you can start using it right away.
- If you lose any key items, they'll be automatically placed in the Lost And Found Box so you can retrieve them again.
- When you respawn, your boat will automatically be stored in your inventory so you won't accidentally strand yourself on an island if you docked your boat somewhere else.
- Both the Acclimatizer and Degrumpifier allow you to manually add rain and snow adaptation to bees and remove their grumpiness, respectively. That way, you won't have to continually breed these traits down or calm them with the Smoker.
Bear & Breakfast:
- If Hank gets stuck on the map, you can free him by pressing an emergency button on the menu.
- Quest items can never get lost; if you receive one while having a full inventory, they'll be placed in the Lost & Found menu.
In Crimson Skies, if you fail a mission repeatedly, you get the option to skip it.
Disney Magic Kingdoms offers daily rewards for playing, including a character and attraction for 30 days. Luckily, missing a day doesn't completely reset the rewards counter, just missing out on the reward for that day (in this case, a day of Magic).
Echoes of the Plum Grove:
- Survival elements, aging, diseases, the fishing minigame, tool durability, item decay, and even paying taxes can be toggled on, toggled off, or sometimes set to a middleground option. Three separate speeds are offered for aging. For diseases, the middleground option is to have only NPCs get sick, as epidemic induced deaths are a major source of population turnover.
- Becoming an elder makes the player no less capable than they were in their youth. They can walk, mine, and stay up no different from when they were an adult.
- The player usually needs to buy hairstyles, clothes and dyes to be able to use them on their character or any of their adult family members. On account of the minimal time spent as a child and the random nature of the appearance of children who grow out of babyhood, the player has access to all possible child hairstyles, clothes and color variants of the latter for free as soon as they have a child who is no longer a baby.
Grimshire: You don't have to go to the pantry to keep tabs on how much food is in there: you get a nightly newsletter that tells you, and you can check on the quest tab at any time. Your tools are on a wheel, freeing up backpack space.
Habitarium: If you lose all your Nesters and can't make any more eggs, Professor Clodbottle will give you a Nester egg to start over with.
Hay Day:
- You can only have a single one of most types of buildings, but since a smelter takes several hours to produce an item, you can buy up to 5 smelters.
- Also, regardless of when you buy your smelters, any mastery star benefits^note you build up from using the first one are automatically applied to all the smelters you buy after that.
- In the valley, you spin a wheel with numbers from 6 to 10 to determine how much fuel you get for free every day. Even getting the lowest number ensures that you still have enough fuel to visit a few houses.
- The notice board is where NPCs can post orders for you to fill. These orders don't have a time limit, and if you can't fill an order for some reason, you can ignore it or delete it with no penalty besides having to wait 20-30 minutes for a replacement order. Similarly, NPCs asking for individual items will not leave until you either give them the item or tell them that you don't have it. So if you don't have the item, you have all the time you need to harvest or produce it.
- When buying something with diamonds (a premium currency that is difficult to get in-game), the game interface gives you a "tap again to confirm" so you don't accidentally hit a button and waste diamonds when you didn't mean to. If you like buying things with diamonds, you can adjust the settings so that you only have to press a button once to buy something with diamonds.
- When fruit trees and bushes die, they can be revived once by another player after their owner puts a "!" signpost next to them. But some players have very big farms that make it hard to find signposts, so trees with signposts will also visibly shake and rustle to alert a visiting player that they need to be revived.
- If an item in your shop isn't bought after a certain amount of time, Greg (an NPC) will automatically buy it. (Items can't be returned to your inventory after you put them up for sale.)
The Hunter: Call of the Wild:
- Tracks are highlighted a color of your choosing, which takes a lot of frustration out of the game by making it easier to locate animals, so less time is spent wandering aimlessly and you're less likely to lose a animal that didn't die immediately when it was shot. They also can be turned off for players that prefer a more realistic and difficult experience.
- At night time, you can turn on a flash light so you can actually see what you're doing and don't have to stumble around blindly in the dark. Animals mercifully don't spook or react to it.
- Animals don't appear to react to the loud sound effect a bow makes when unloading an arrow when switching to another weapon, avoiding frustration if you happen to change your mind about what to kill it with.
- Need Zones. Animals visit certain areas each day within certain time ranges. This is useful for when you are trying to hunt specific species, such as for a mission.
- Many missions are location based. You can select them on the menu and it will highlight the relevant zone on the map. Being that the maps are very gigantic, this is almost necessary.
I Can't Believe It's Not Gambling is a parody of lootbox-based microtransaction games. Since it doesn't actually have microtransactions (lest it fall victim to Poe's Law and be exactly what it's making fun of), the "game" part of this lootbox simulator awards an actually substantial amount of the currency you need to buy more boxes.
I Was a Teenage Exocolonist:
- You can toggle Seen Dialog so that dialog choices that you already made in a previous run can be marked and skipped. It also speeds up parts of it so you can skip straight to the choices.
- If you don't want to spend time doing the card battle challenges or find them too frustrating, you can toggle them off and the game will automatically determine the outcome of challenges based on your skill levels.
- Thanks to your Past-Life Memories, you can instantly skip certain subplots once you've learned how to complete them in previous runs, such as finding the cure for Shimmer to save your dad.
- To compensate being only found on Expeditions and not gaining friendship when given gifts, Sym's heart meter increases by two full hearts (20 points) each time you have a full conversation with him on the overworld.
Kitty Powers' Matchmaker:
- The game explicitly states that it doesn't use timers to force you to wait for a client before you can start playing again; there will always be at least one waiting for you. You can also kick out clients that you find difficult for a fee.
- Makeover adds some QOL features and retools some of the minigames to make them easier:
  - Originally, a client's and candidate's opinions on horoscopes aren't revealed until the former asks the latter about it, making matching their star signs a bit luck-based since even if they might be astrologically compatible, their differing opinions would clash. Makeover amends this by revealing this for both parties before you start matching them.
  - There's now a pin feature in the Black Book to bookmark candidates and prevent them from being replaced when you match a new client. Candidates whose personal details have been revealed will also be automatically pinned.
  - The maximum number of candidates in the Black Book is reduced from 48 to 16 to mitigate choice paralysis when finding a match.
  - The Shell Game is made less overwhelming by having up to a maximum of nine restaurant invitations at once. Having more than nine restaurants unlocked has the pool randomized.
  - The Love Handle is changed from a slot machine to a panel-flipping board, allowing more options for date topics should you decide to cheat the minigame.
  - When a client's ex shows up, originally, your client either had to either tell the truth and risk annoying a Romantic candidate with it, or spin the Wheel of Misfortune to try getting away with lying. In Makeover, telling the truth gets the client a stink-eye regardless of their date's spiciness, but in exchange, a new minigame lets you try salvaging this faux pas via something similar to the "Thin Ice" one in Love Life — where your client has to literally navigate their emotional baggage by hopping across them to the other side while avoiding the bad ones, Minesweeper-style. This time, Spicy candidates will be more understanding of the client if the latter fails the minigame and admits to lingering feelings.
Lobotomy Corporation:
- Clerk deaths don't count for your score at the end of the day, which is good because Clerks are essentially the lemmings of your facility.
- We Can Change Anything is immune to Qliphoth Meltdowns, so if anything (such as a boss) triggers a Meltdown, you will never be forced to send an employee to their grave.
- To successfully end a day, you need to get a specific amount of energy. During the segments where you fight Gebura, Binah and the Claw, the player only needs to defeat them to end the day as the sheer chaos would make it hard to gather energy otherwise.
- All Core Suppressions will remain complete across sessions once finished, so it's easier to get back up to speed if you need to start over.
My Child Lebensborn:
- Getting clothing clean. The child's clothing can sometimes get wet from them playing outside, which counts towards the child needing either a bath or a change of clothes. If the clothing is cleaned as a byproduct of giving the child a bath, it will seemingly dry instantly, regardless of season. Clothing that is changed out of, meanwhile, will have apparently been washed off-screen next time the player needs to change the child's clothes.
- Going to the store doesn't use a time slot, which is a good thing as unforseen events (that can use up a time slot meant for cooking) or free time (turning out to have time to cook after all) can quickly change meal plans.
- Using the first time unit of a two-unit time period to feed the child with edible food that is already in the house, going to the store, then feeding the child any newly purchased item that doesn't require cooking doesn't use up the second time unit on the second child-feeding session.
- Helping the child study during the earlier part of the game doesn't actually use up a time unit, despite the fact that not having the time can be used as an excuse to not do it. In cases where the study session can be missed entirely by doing overtime at the factory, the game rewards the player for being present at the house during the evening at all.
My Leisure Time:
- Sending your pets on trips doesn't lock then out of being visible in your home or upgrading their skills.
- There are passive ways to earn coins outside of quests, leveling up, and event rewards. The most direct is the mailbox, which passively collects coins over time, and planting seeds to sell plants or selling furniture is also a viable option. This goes for the other shops in the town as well, which all generate more action points or items over time.
- At the diner, none of the ingredients require payment to plant more crops or order more meat.
No Umbrellas Allowed:
- You can replay any day at any time, and each new run is saved in a separate save file. That way, you don't have to completely start over if you want to try getting another ending.
- You only have to do the tutorial once. After that, the game will offer to let you skip it when you reach the tutorial scenes again.
- The fake ID won't appear in your inventory until the day you need it while the Lobster is immediately collected by Mr. Gong, so that you won't accidentally sell them away. For the rest of your items, you can lock them to prevent them from being accidentally sold, which is useful for safeguarding stolen items. Locking them also prevents Bokho from erasing signatures with a negative price impact that you don't want to erase (or the "Great Figure in World History" tag, which despite having the same signature overriding effect as the "Unidentifiable/Fake Signature" tag, it multiplies the item's value by 10).
Parkasaurus: Normally, when an animal escapes from its exhibit, it'll go on a rampage and will need to be tranquilized. If they can't move on land, however, they'll be instantly put into crates.
Planet Zoo:
- The sandbox mode menu has toggles for various things. One of the things the player can turn off is animal welfare, which keeps the animals from becoming unhappy from anything, like too many rocks, too much or biome inappropriate foliage, unsuitable terrain, wrong elevation, or not enough space. This is so the player is not hindered in making exhibits as they please by having to abide by exhibit requirements.
- Pressing "L" gives the player a torch, which is useful when trying to build in a dark place, like underground, in a building, or anywhere at night.
- In sandbox mode, the player can freely adjust time of day, which is useful in some situations like evaluating how the lighting effects exhibits and architecture, or just turning it back to day so you don't have to try and build in the dark.
In the browser-based nation sim Politics And War, if you lose a war against another player, the game would puts you in "beige mode". In beige your nation can't be attacked by other nation, but you will receive some income penalty.
Potion Permit:
- A shopkeeper doesn't have to be present in their shop in order for you to buy items from them, as long as they're not sick (for those who build upgrades) and it's still business hours, as indicated by a lit-up cash register.
- After feeding your dog new food, the food is marked with his emotion so you won't have to guess whether or not he likes it the next time you feed him.
- If a quest requires your dog to dig for items, the map highlights the exact places where he needs to do so.
RC Helicopter lets players replay earlier levels in order to gain enough money to buy upgrades and/or a better helicopter. This way they don't have to keep losing money from failing the current level over and over again.
Roots of Pacha:
- The handaxe removes weeds and dead crops only, so you won't accidentally remove a plant that's still growing. However, the axe can remove any crop, so you need to be careful with it.
- The watering tool will only be counted as "used" if it waters a farm plot or a MacGuffin such as the vines in the cave system or the Pyramid Seeds or fills an olla, so you won't accidentally waste water if you use it anywhere else.
- You can still use your tools while Acre's upgrading them, since she just makes new ones and replaces yours with them after a few days.
- When cooking meals, ingredients can be taken from the kitchen cabinet besides your belt inventory, so you don't have to carry them around until you can cook them.
- If you let your livestock outside, they'll graze any grass they can find, but they won't eat your crops.
- You can still collect dropped animal products such as eggs, horns, and feathers, even while the associated livestock are mating in the breeding pen.
- You can skip the cave challenges and mark them as completed for the purpose of fulfilling prophecies. However, you won't get achievements for them, so skipping them is recommended only if you're starting over after completing all the challenges.
- In the postgame, the items needed for fixing the time rifts only need to be discovered in order to be checked off the list. This is because some lists need more than 24 unique items (the max number of belt slots), and carrying them to the pedestals near Martina's ship would be a hassle.
Scritchy Scratchy is a game all about scratching scratch cards, and it comes with two additional options for gameplay to prevent wrist pain or fatigue. The first lets you hover the mouse over the ticket to scratch it, and the second lets you click and hold over it.
In Shepherd's Crossing, you can't pick up fences with your bare hands, like you can with every other item. This is to stop you from accidentally setting your animals loose.
The Sims:
- In the original The Sims 1, advancing up one's career ladder requires your Sim to have a certain number of friends. For example, reaching the level ten job in the politics career track, Mayor of Sim City, requires a whopping seventeen friends. This is made even more difficult by the fact that relationships degrade by a few points every day regardless of what you do, and once the relationship score falls below a certain threshold, the friendship ends and must be restored. It's very difficult for a working Sim to have enough time to form and maintain so many friendships. However, the friends requirement is actually household friends, not personal friends, meaning that the friends of all the people in the working sim's household count toward his friend total. A classic strategy is to have one Sim work and a second to do all the socializing.
  - Friendships are also counted both ways, so it's perfectly viable to load another family with the only intention of befriending your sim in career, save, then return to your previous lot.
- In The Sims 3, fulfilling your Sim's daily wishes earns you Lifetime Happiness points which can basically be used to buy anti-frustration features. You can make it so that your friendships decrease much more slowly over time, or various other needs of your Sim do not decline or decline much more slowly, among numerous other perks. Essentially, you are rewarded for keeping your Sim happy by making it easier to keep them happy in the future.
- NRaaS Industries is a mod group for The Sims 3 that specializes in ironing out mechanics and streamlining the game's coding in order for the player to have a more enjoyable experience. Some examples include preventing Sims from re-reading the same book, allowing groups to enter movie theaters (when only individuals can enter at a time in the vanilla game), and preserving wishes so they can never disappear before they're fulfilled/erased.
- In The Sims 4 expansion pack, Get Famous, it would seem that the developers had some foresight as to how easy to acquire and annoying some fame quirks could be. For example, the Vain Street quirk that famous Sims have a chance of getting whenever they interact with a mirror which causes them to need to look at themselves in a mirror frequently, or else they'll become tense. In the Acting career, practicing in front of a mirror and as such getting this quirk is pretty much inevitable. No need to fret, though. In the Rewards Store, there is a cheap Quirk-B-Gone potion that only costs 250 Satisfaction Points.
In Skynet Simulator, If you delete a file required to progress, the game informs you of such, and restarts.
Sticky Business:
- To prevent you from accidentally mixing up your orders, you're locked into one once you start packing the stickers for it.
- In the 2023 and 2025 Christmas updates, if you miss a day in collecting daily sticker parts, they can be bought at the upgrade shop anytime using hearts.
- The Quality of Life Update added new, highly-requested features:
  - Special customers requesting stickers are marked with an exclamation point while those whose stories are completed are marked with a check.
  - There's an end-of-day report telling you why an order failed.
  - The order rate for new stickers has been increased, improving your revenue in the long-term.
  - In addition to the existing layering features in the Sticker Creator, you can bring sticker elements to the front or send them to the back. There's also a Trash button at the bottom right of the screen to instantly start over.
Story of Seasons:
- In Harvest Moon 1, if you mess up the events where you can get the golden tools for free, the tool shop will sell them so that you can buy them anytime.
- In Harvest Moon: A New Beginning, the player unlocks the Multiplayer/Wi-Fi feature of the game. This allows the player to trade items and interact with other players' animals while there. This is not only a great (and fast) way to obtain animal produce from animals you have not unlocked yet, but also a way to obtain items that you won't unlock until much later in the game, like the infamously necessary Yam Seeds.
Tomodachi Life: Living the Dream:
- In the previous games of the series, it was up to complete luck if two Miis wanted to become friends with each other. While you can still leave it up to luck if you prefer, the player now has the option of forcing two Miis to interact by physically picking one up and dragging them to the other, similar to Miitopia and its relationship mechanic. This allows you to nudge Miis towards your preferred pairings, while still letting you leave it up to chance if you enjoy the wackiness.
- There are plenty of improvements to Mii customization compared to the previous installment.
  - When customizing your Mii, parts such as eyes have an expansive amount of extra options such as color and different styles. To ease experimentation between parts, each individual part has its options saved to it, so you can flip back between your choices without worrying about accidentally deleting your custom options.
  - When setting a Mii's height and shape, the background has several lines drawn to better illustrate height. If you have Miis on your island already, they'll be put side-by-side, so you'll be able to make them as tall or short as needed relative to your population.
  - Just before you finalize your Mii, you have the option to go back and revise some details. You'll also go straight back to the finalization screen once your business is done.
  - If you made Miis based off of fictional characters with canonical ages, they'll age up as if they're real people. You're allowed to prevent them from aging by checking off "Don't age", allowing them to retain their age as they are.
  - When creating a Mii, you can modify which Miis on the island that they're related to, completely avoiding the Surprise Incest problems that plagued trying to make families in the previous game.
  - Previously, clothing was given in full ensembles. Clothing has been greatly expanded to separate tops, bottoms, shoes, etc., allowing you to style your Miis in any way you want. The clothing store still sells full outfits, but they're treated as a bundle you can potentially take apart for your own custom fits. Additionally, if the player wants to give a Mii several clothing items that aren't part of a complete set at once, they can press the Right stick in the Y clothing gifting menu to assemble a full outfit from different categories and gift it to the Mii that way.
- The game allows you to save custom items and Miis that you're working on as a draft for later. However, you have to resume work on your current project(s), as attempting to start a new one will require deleting your draft.
- Pronunciations from Collection and Life could only be defined for Mii names and not much else, making it troublesome to utilize loan words or slang. This has been expanded to allow any custom word prompt to have their pronunciation defined, allowing you to, for example, start a conversation about a game that isn't in English. The custom words will also be stored in an Island Lingo dictionary, so your islanders will be able to use the word or phrase whenever. In addition to this, the profanity filter from the previous entries is absent, allowing users more freedom to input what they can get Miis to say.
- Previously, Miis that go to sleep for the night can not be interacted with until morning, making late-night hours less ideal to play in, aside from a small handful of Miis that choose to stay up for the night. Sleeping Miis can now be woken up, so night owls don't miss out on any activity if most of their populace is asleep. There will also always be at least two Miis wandering around throughout the night. There is also the Night Owl quirk that can be given so Miis stay up at night and sleep during the day to help account for this.
- In Tomodachi Life, each of the game's four versions have an exclusive roster of foods catered to the region that version was released in, such as the American and European version lacking many of the Asian dishes featured in the Japanese and Korean versions. Living the Dream starts with a predetermined selection of food that's more familiar with the region you chose at the beginning, but unlike with Life, food that's associated with other regions will gradually be unlocked.
- When making custom items while using the select tool, simply clicking a paint patch with the tool without defining an area will automatically select the whole patch.
- Within the Pro toolkit for drawing custom things, the Pencil tool has two "Handy Things": Outline and Lock Transparency. The former locks the paintable area to the outer edges of your drawing, expediting the tedium of giving your drawing an outline. The latter, meanwhile, only lets you paint on already-existing area, making it helpful for, say, adding shading to an object.
- Once you hit Level 10 with a Mii, you're given the option to gift them any previously-obtained outfit or clothing pieces for free, which the game explicitly advises you is a great way to get copies of expensive outfits. This is as opposed to the previous game, where this cannot be done until Level 20.
- The tutorial will sometimes ask you to buy things. If you spent your money to the point that you can't afford to follow the tutorial, you'll be given enough to do so. For example, if you spend all of your money on food before the Where & Wear is available, it'll be set to $100 (or the local currency equivalent) so you can buy clothing when it's asked for.
- If you're given a new building but can't find a place to put it, placing it over the sea will turn the tiles into grass.
- If you can't decide where to place a new Mii's house, the Mii can decide for you.
- Instead of giving the Mii an item to change their hair back like in the previous entry, if you permit them to change their hair—which can change style, color, or both—and you don't like the outcome, all the player needs to do is say they preferred the original style and rub the Mii's head to return it to normal.
- The "giving" menu marks a stamp icon on clothes, treasures, and food previously given to the Mii you've opened the menu for. This is particularly useful when feeding Miis and trying to learn their favorite/least favorite foods, as seeing which foods you've already given them helps in keeping track so you can continuously give the Mii foods they haven't tried yet.
- If a Mii is depressed from a rejected love confession or failing to patch things up after a fight, giving them a plane ticket will instantly restore their happiness meter.
- When a Mii is in their home, a cutscene in which they show the player what type of Interior they want next may play, making it easier for players who are having trouble deciding what to gift them.
Trauma Center:
- During one mission in the first game that requires you to work on five Kyriaki patients, if you've got at least three of them done and run out of time, the backup team takes over and you move on... so long as the patient who you were working on when time expired survives. If that patient dies, you don't get this relief and the Medical Board will be notified.
- Also when you to work on a Pempti patient, you're given a special high-powered laser. Gameplay-wise, this means the laser never breaks or needs to cool down and you can fire it for as long as you like. Given how much you need to use the laser on Pempti, this is definitely necessary.
In Village Life, all your villagers age by 1 year every 24 real-world hours from their birth, and they eventually die of old age. Since your villagers age even while you're not playing, it would be frustrating to come back after not having played the game for a long time, only to see everyone dead. To prevent this, the game automatically adds a married couple to your village when everyone dies.
In Wing Commander IV: The Price of Freedom, the map that you could pull up to navigate around your home ship also has markers to indicate where a conversation can be had with another character, after players complained that in Wing Commander III some plot conversations were missed because the player had no indication that they even existed, if they didn't have a guide book or website to point them out.
Yes, Your Grace:
- For the first eight weeks, Eryk doesn't need to worry about feeding his army. Considering that it's also impossible to keep the army from being huge for a few weeks, then lose the bulk of it, having to feed it during that time would make the game unnecessarily frustrating.
- One important questline involves buying at least two items from two different merchants who come to the throne room. If everything needed from each of them is purchased from them on their first visit, neither of them are ever seen again. If Eryk forgets to get something from them, they both visit a second time.

Simulation Game

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