Installation Instructions

Overrides and Defaults

Overrides and defaults function as replacements for in-game assets. Because they replace individual in-game items, they can easily conflict and will conflict with any other mods that override or replace those items. For example, if you have one creator’s mod that replaces the base game recipes with versions with better textures, you cannot have another creator’s override of those same recipes.

Custom Food & Recipes Mods

Almost every custom food creator has their own individual “Food Enabler” mod that is required to see their recipes in-game. Many of them are available by clicking on specific items added by the mod. These items are usually some form of clutter that can easily blend into a kitchen without sticking out, but that you can use to browse their recipes.

These are installed the same as any other mod, and I personally recommend that you separate your food mods by creator. Since these are generally all script mods, they cannot be placed more than a single folder deep, so keep this in mind. Separating them by creator avoids issues like duplicate recipe files, outdated versions of the food enabler mods, etc. Provide example of folder?

Please review our Mods & CC Installation & Maintenance guide. A simplified version is…

To add the items to your game on Windows, follow this folder path:
C:\Users\[USERNAME]\Documents\Electronic Arts\The Sims 4\Mods
To add the items to your game on MacOS, follow this folder path:
Macintosh HD/Users/User/Documents/Electronic Arts/The Sims 4/Mods

Once you’ve downloaded the files, make sure you have an extraction program installed. These can include 7Zip, Winrar, etc. After that, highlight one or multiple zipped/compressed files and select “Extract Here”. Drag the extracted contents to your Mods folder. You can also sort them into their own folders within your Mods folder, but it is recommended to not nest them too many levels deep as it can cause longer loading times, and some CC items and mods stop working when too deep within folders.

Tip: While many creators provide additional files, like .txt/ReadMe, .jpg/.png files, and more possible file types for previews or instructions, it is best practice to not put those into your Mods folder as they can also lead to longer load times and excessive clutter. Creators will often specify any files that need to be put into the folder, along with where, so primarily focus on .package and .ts4script files!

Sims 4 Custom Food

Sims 4 Custom Food Overrides by Creator

If you’re looking to just update some base game textures or improve the visuals of the base game without adding any new recipes, multiple creators have defaults or overrides for meals and other food items from The Sims 4 Base Game and DLC. Whether it completely overhauls the mesh and creates a fresh new look, or just updates the textures to make them look much better than the 2014 original low-resolution textures, there’s options for those that don’t want to install entirely new food mods.

Apricot Rush’s Food Retextures

Leaning into the cutesy nature of their custom content, ApricotRush’s overrides for the base game food including quick meals, lunches, dinners, pizzas, breakfast items, and more, are well-textured, vibrant, and delicious looking!

Cowplant’s Cake AI Upscaled Food

A fix for the issue of grainy or off-color textures in The Sims 4, particularly in the food found in the earliest updates of the Base Game as well as early DLC, Cowplant’s Cake has a work-in-progress AI-Upscaled food override.

Littlbowbub’s High School Years Food Overrides

Replacing the pre-existing lunch options for your teens, Littlbowbub’s overrides keep true to the title of the dishes themselves, but completely upgrades the textures and meshes, making the meals look more complete and filling for a growing high schooler.

*REQUIRES HIGH SCHOOL YEARS EXPANSION PACK*

While Bubble Tea was a well-loved addition, Littlbowbub’s overrides of the textures for the drinks makes them bright, colorful, and delicious looking. The pearls are shiny and a nice updated detail, with color schemes that match common Bubble Tea Shop flavor options.

*REQUIRES HIGH SCHOOL YEARS EXPANSION PACK*

Complete your family trip to the pier with a delicious snack, now overridden by Littlbowbub to include more items with well-done textures, bright colors, and a hint of childhood nostalgia!

*REQUIRES HIGH SCHOOL YEARS EXPANSION PACK*

Sims 4 Custom Food Mods & Recipes by Creator

BrazenLotus’s Sims 4 Custom Food

This mod is the required core for Brazenlotus’ recipes, allowing for simple and modular installation without tons of extra files. This avoids performance issues and mod folder bloat. It sorts recipes into custom categories including meal type, special diet, culture, seasonal recipes, animal food, etc.

BrazenLotus’ Recipes

Brazenlotus has a wide variety of recipes available on their website, with an expansive number of cultural recipes, delicious desserts, and even some occult or special recipes for different holidays.

Littlbowbub’s Sims 4 Custom Food

Grannie’s Cookbook

Grannie’s Cookbook is one of two core mods available for LittlBowBub’s recipes, appearing as a little cookbook with a variety of swatches, allowing you to access all your downloaded recipes in one place.

Homestead Helper

Homestead Helper is a secondary core mod, required overall for others like Grannie’s Cookbook, Medieval Cookbook, etc. This adds additional props and enables standalone functional items and recipes.

Medieval Cookbook

If you’re playing The Sims 4 Decades Challenge or a generally historically-accurate save set in the medieval period, you also have option for additional recipes that emulate early cooking recipes, while the core mod itself is made to blend right into the background of a historical game.

Other Mods from Littlbowbub

Canning Recipes

Recommended as something to work alongside Grannie’s Cookbook and The Sims 4 Cottage Living Pack, which introduced canning as a gameplay feature, this mod adds additional canning recipes for your sims to sell, preserve, or eat right out the jar! The recipes are a wide variety, but include soups, curds and preserves, puddings, salad dressing, etc.

Homemade Ingredients

While no homemade ingredients are required for recipes to be present, if you’re someone who plays a game that is rooted in realism, prefer a bit more of a challenge and preparation for cooking, or you’re wanting to use the Simple Living Lot Challenge, LittlBowBub offers a wide array of custom ingredients that act as standalones or work alongside other recipes.

Handmade Prepped Ingredients

Based around Home Chef Hustle’s prepped ingredients system, using the stand mixer to make pre-prepared ingredients and give your sim a speed boost in the kitchen, Littlbowbub has added more options for preparing ingredients to store away for future recipes.

*REQUIRES HOME CHEF HUSTLE*

Bread Recipes/Baker’s Corner

With so many people always getting into the hobby of baking, especially breadmaking, LittlBowbub added a great set of recipes to make a multitude of bread loaves. Once your sim has cut a piece off to eat, they can even select topping options!

AlwaysJustJay’s Sims 4 Custom Food

The Recipe Collection App/Food Enabler Mod

AlwaysJustJay’s food enabler is a sleek tablet with multiple swatches for its wood-grain stand, letting it mesh well with most kitchens and be easily tucked into a corner, by an appliance, or in a cupboard.

AlwaysJustJay’s Recipes

AlwaysJustJay’s recipes are typically released in collections on a monthly basis, with a standard theme. This can include a holiday coming up that month, a general weather type, a recent trend in cooking, and so many more options for creartive and well-made recipes.

AlwaysJustJay’s Functional Bewitching Brew Tray

Craft magical and medicinal beverages with the Bewitching Brew Tray! Acting as a drink tray similar to the Hot Cocoa Tray or the Sugarcane Juice Tray, you can serve an entire group custom bewitching beverages.

AlwaysJustJay’s Functional Heartbreaker 2000

Make single-serving trendy cakes for your sims to snack on with the Heartbreaker 2000. Let your sims cook them up and decorate them as a little treat for themselves, or a gift for a loved one!

AlwaysJustJay’s Simco Sno-Kone Dispenser & Kart

Cool off with a variety of snowcones and shredded ice on a hot day in Oasis Springs, setting up the Simco Sno-Kone Cart & Dispenser at any park or public place to help beat the heat.

AlwaysJustJay’s Gimme S’More Kit

Instead of being forced to sit by a raging campfire, or just miss out on this sweet treat because your sim lives in a San Myshuno high-rise, the Gimme S’More kit gives your sim custom new recipes for s’mores that can be made from the comfort of their home.

AlwaysJustJay’s Juice Dispenser

Serve small groups simple juices or delicious mocktails from AlwaysJustJay’s juice dispenser, from Citrus Coolers to Watermelon Punch, every sim should find something refreshing from this item!

AlwaysJustJay’s Apple Cider Maker

Cozy up in the colder months, whether its Harvestfest or Winterfest, and make a delicious variety of apple ciders. Go simple with some hot cider, or spice things up with Maple or Mulled cider options, the choice is yours!

AlwaysJustJay’s Chilled Seafood Tower

Perfect for weddings, large family gatherings, or your local seafood buffet! You can grab lobster, crab legs, oysters, and so much more from this chilled seafood tower.

Icemunmun’s Sims 4 Custom Food

Custom Food Interaction

This is the core mod for Icemunmun’s custom food recipes specifically, unlocking the ability to access these recipes from any cooking item in the game, such as fridges, stoves, etc.

Custom Drink Interaction

This is the core mod for Icemunmun’s custom drink recipes specifically, allowing your sim to grab and buy custom drinks from bars.

Custom Food Objects

Having issues with the custom food menu showing on your fridge? Add in the Custom Food Objects to act as standalone menus for everything Icemunmun offers in these categories, blending in with your kitchen clutter and being easily accessible without diving through the main fridge pie menu.

SrslySims

SrslySims’ Custom Cooking Menus

This is the base mod used as the recipe-enabler for Srsly’s mods. This can and is recommended to be used alongside SCCO or SCCOR, and is used so all of the custom recipes and ingredients provided by Srsly can be access through the fridge, stove, or any other cooking apparatus or crafting station.

SrslySims’ Complete Cooking Overhaul OR Srsly’s Modding Resource

These are two of SrslySims’ possible base mods to be able to add their custom recipes to the game. Srsly’s Complete Cooking Overhaul (SCCO) expands EA’s existing in-game mechanics to make recipes more in-depth, including adding more ingredients, expanding service size options, grocery shopping, re-allocating desserts to the baking skill, and so much more! SrslySims Modding Resource (SCCOR) can also be used instead, allowing other creators to provide compatibility with their recipes and the main mod. SCCOR does nothing on its own.

Make sure to read both download pages to select the option that would work best for you! Only download one or the other; SCCO includes the functionality of SCCOR, and therefore, you do not need both.

SrslySims’ Recipes & Ingredients

Srsly’s collection of recipes bring realism and suspended fantasy to the game. Adding simple recipes recognizable to many like new ice cream flavors, warm chicken noodle soup, and new steak recipes, while also adding interesting occult-themed recipes like Plasma Pudding and Chunky Hemoglobin Soup.

Individual ingredients have been both edited and added, to expand the EA ingredient functionality and to add compatibility for custom ingredients created by SrslySims and other creators who make compatible items with their mod. Ingredients and Recipes can both be downloaded on Srsly’s Patreon, and often come in sets or groups based around certain themes.

TianaSims

TianaSims Cookbook

This is TianaSims’ core cookbook mod, acting as the base for all of the recipes released thus far.

TianaSims’ Recipes

With a wide variety of recipes and a catalogue now spanning years of creation, Tianasims has tons of cutesy and yummy looking recipes. Many of them are family-based, but they come in a variety of categories, including breakfast, general meals, desserts, baking, etc.

QMBiBi’s Sims 4 Custom Food

Stirring The Pot

This is QMBiBi’s core recipe mod, enabling all of the recipes and ingredients found in the mods below.

QMBiBi Ingredients

QMBiBi has added real-world brands directly to the game, to go along with their realistically textured recipes. Stock store shelves for your sim to have a grocery shopping experience, or make it easy and order any of them through the phone.

QMBiBi Recipes

With recipes that have more realistic or “Alpha-styled” textures, QMBiBi creates great recipes for players looking to blend their game into their realistic style more, instead of maxis-match or base game items.

Somik & Severinka’s Sims 4 Custom Food

Cookbook S&S

Somik & Severinka are a CC creation duo, focusing on expanding their recipe book with hyperrealistic recipes and high-quality textures. They present another great option for those looking for items on the realistic side!

Somik & Severinka Recipes

S&S’ recipe collection includes basics like burgers and fries or well-known foods from a variety of cultures, or hyper-specific items like foods made to be cutesy and cater to children.

Sims 4 Default Kitchenware by Creator

If you’re also looking to change the look of the pots, pans, and utensils your sims use while cooking, many creators have replacements for those! Since these are defaults, you can only use one at a time and cannot have two mods for the same item.

Apricot Rush

Apricot Rush’s Kitchenware Overhaul set comes in three options; Pink, Blue, and White. The options are in a pastel color-scheme, so the pink and b lue options are both very light and the white is a nice, subtle, off-white color.

Channel4sims

Channel14sims typically releases replacements for individual items in sets, allowing you to pick from many options for a single item. From cutting boards and sponges to knives and spatulas, you can individually replace almost every item your sim uses in their kitchen and customize them to your preferred taste and aesthetics!

Lukaszu

Lukaszu has created a set of replacements, changing pots and pans to cast iron skillets, and increasing the quality and recoloring the cutting baord and other utensils to look more modern and smooth.

SakuraTrait

Sakuratrait’s set replaces your sims’ cooking pots and pans with simple black recolors, creating a concise and simple recolor set that removes the dated textures of the original pots and pans.

The Southern Simmer

The Southern Simmer’s set comes in seven color options, allowing customization and mixing and matching the sets to your preferred aesthetic and color palette. In fact, their pots & pans set is specifically intended to match and work well with Apricot Rush’s Kitchenware Utensils replacements.

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Are there any other recipe or food override creators you enjoy that you would like to see featured? Or any recipes you hope to find from custom creators that don’t exist in the Sims 4 normally? Let us know! Make sure to follow The Sims Community for more mod spotlights and custom content recommendations!