Do you have any rules/input surrounding these?

Mostly I just ignore all aspiration rewards unless I want to use a feature of one e.g. change the weather or season in order to re-synchronise a household with the rest of the hood, change an aspiration, and I don't want to use a mod object for some reason.

It does seem though that in general with all EPs aspiration points are just handed out like candy and they are way too easy to get. In fact to the point that I forgot about them existing for the purposes of challenges etc!

At some point, I decided I would use smart milk if my toddlers had been breastfed as babies, but I find that kind of stupid now and don't really use it as a reasoning any more.

So I thought, OK, maybe sims can get the rewards if they seem to have some reason to be able to access them, e.g. they are a scientist, they have high tinkering enthusiasm (they "built/invented" them) - or witches might be able to access these "magic objects" or high gardening skill = money tree, criminal career = counterfeit machine.

This works in that they are inaccessible to most sims and they remain "special" but I was playing my inventor sim last night and realised she could buy basically all the items without any issue at all. And some of them seem to last forever. Or I am spectacularly bad at noticing when they have "run out".

What do you do in your game?

I forget that they exist. XD Strangely, that fixes the problem of all sims having them lol.

The only Sims who are able to use them are the Beakers, and they can only use the ones already in their lab. If a Sim wants to counterfeit simoleons, they can do that. The only rule I have is for smart milk, and that is that both the parent and the toddler have to have the want to teach/learn the same skill to use the smart milk. Between this rule and the fact that toddler parents rarely are in a good enough mood, my use of smart milk is limited to just a few families, and that seems appropriate.

I never use the love tub, thinking cap, etc. Just seems cheaty. I only use the elixir of life if necessary for some sort of storyline.

If you don't go on dates, then aspiration isn't that easy to get. I use the elixir of life, kibble of life and smart milk often. The others I don't find realistic or practical. Nobody dies in my game except in an unusual disaster; they all use the elixir. Nobody's a fool to be conned into thinking that becoming old is growing "up". But smart milk is fixed to expire, so it isn't as strong. The smartness of it is often wasted because the child needs to go to sleep and can't do skills. I like that smart milk can be placed near children who are usually far from the fridge where basic milk is found.

I rarely use the love tub because it's design is unrealistic and sort of hollow. Because you don't hear the satisfying money sound when it is built, it seems to be made of paper.

I don't think a child who was breastfed should get smart milk. Quite the opposite. It is a technological item that people who live naturally might shun.

I've been thinking that these items should instead cost money to buy because they are really strong. But I've not made them so.

I find myself using the elixir of life often and the aspiration machine if I change my mind about what a Sim wants in life, but all the other stuff, I just ignore them. I like career rewards better, I agree that aspiration rewards are just too easy to get.
That being said, I do use a mod to unlock the rewards so that I can use them in community lots. I've made a mad scientist lab community lot and placed some of them like the SimVac or the Seasons weather changer.

I add more items to the Aspirations catalog to give them more options for their points. twojeffs' Find-a-Mate Crystal Ball, some SimSlice objects like the auto-cleaning litterbox and the magic rake, other things I can't think of.

I like the function of the energizer, but despise how it looks like. Now to apply that same argument to just about every object in that catalog...

I mean, cool shades? Not with those shoes. Renuyu orb? In a small apartment downtown??

Ooooh I like the idea of adding extra objects to the reward catalog! I had a ghost-banning painting I think from MATY which is in the catalogue, which is useful for banning ghosts from bedrooms while allowing them to wander the rest of the lot.

Hmmm that is a good idea about seeing the smart milk as a technology thing and some sims wanting to shun it perhaps for some perceived fear about side effects, while others embrace it. How interesting. I wonder what potential side effects I could think up.

I think the love tub must have some kind of love potion or aphrodisiac poured into it. That does make it a little bit sleazy like the love potion itself, which I rarely use as I tend to think sims ought to have the option to consent freely or not. But actually, maybe there are some sleazy sims who would not care.

Unfortunately I am banned from looking at toddlers' wants (or needs) until they have learnt to talk, so I can't use that suggestion.

I do take my sims on quite a lot of dates, which is probably why they have so many aspiration points.

The special effect of the love tub expires before you know it as people autonomously enter to use it. Then it becomes a normal tub that is a bit ugly and free of charge. I wish we could turn on the candles when wanted.

I just downloaded the MATY asprecharge which makes it not autonomous any more.

That's from JFade, not MATY. JFade also has a wolf attraction and wolf repelling signs as aspiration rewards, I believe.

Edit: He has lots of other ones too, actually: https://sims.jfade.com/index.php-ca...1&subcat=3.html But the ghostbuster sign isn't there, so maybe it really was from MATY.

I put restrictions on aspiration rewards and career rewards.This does mean that sometimes I forget these two things exist and/or never use them at all, but I am overall ok with this. After all these years, I like the increased challenge.

So my rules; I might have talked a bit about this before, but I tie career rewards to Greek House membership. Only sims who are members of a Greek House may use career rewards, and if I'm feeling extra strict, graduates of the Fraternity must actually earn the reward by getting promoted to the appropriate level, and then they would either donate the reward back to the Fraternity/Sorority, or keep it on their home lot for their personal use only, with an option of passing it back and forth to fellow Greek House members. The headcanon is that members of Greek Houses create the "Old Sim's Network," a play on the "old boy network." Members help each other out by sharing perks, helping each other skill, get hired/promoted, meet other prominent sims, find suitable spouses, etc. So this works nicely as a perk, and I await the day I finally get around to letting my upper crust fraternity/sorority members take over their neighborhoods with their classism and schmoozing.

For aspiration rewards, I usually follow some challenge rule (I want to say the apocalypse challenge, but I honestly forget) and restrict it to aliens and the households of sims who are abducted. So in my game, aspiration rewards are alien tech, which explains the magic-like qualities and cheaty behaviors. Usually I have a sim who is also a fraternity/sorority member get abducted, and that will unlock aspiration reward use for the Greek House. Sometimes I let it unlock for just while members are on campus in the actual Greek House, but other times I let it unlock for all members of the fraternity/sorority--but with no extensions/exceptions for members' spouses or future household members. Basically you gotta be in the frat to receive frat privileges.

But I was just thinking about shaking up my rules for aspiration rewards because I never use them and they can be quite useful perks. I don't use all of them, but I do have my favorites. Anyway, I started a new hood a few months ago and am playing the Academie Le Tour premades. I decided that Jonah Powers and Phineaus Furley would not only start a Frat but also use the Frat to try and spread some strict Patriarchy rules throughout Sim City. So to facilitate that, I let members of the Frat use aspiration rewards. I think I let them unlock it once they found and obtained the voodoo doll, but if I expand this idea to more neighborhoods, I'll have to come up with a more interesting challenge to unlock aspiration rewards because they're so powerful.

I like the idea of adding custom objects to aspiration rewards, too! I just did this for Cyjon's Personalit-O-Nomitron--turns out just a simple re-categorization was all that was needed. I like the idea of Greek House members using these objects to cheat through life. I also use BoilingOil's Reward Catalog so while they're in university, they can pool points together to buy items to benefit them all, and then when they graduate, they can steal their household members' and dates' unused aspiration points to give themselves more rewards and perks. To balance this a tad, I did download mods to reduce the number of days the Elixir of Life gives. And there are a few mods out there were you can use aspiration points to buy things--like Monique has a cowplant that lets you buy milk for aspiration points. So I can't wait to check out all the objects everyone mentioned so I can find more items to help Jonah and Phineaus takeover the city!

As for magic, while I don't usually play aliens, I occasionally play witches, and they have plenty powerful stuff and spells (I use mods to unlock spells by skill level, regardless of alignment). If I find a cool cc magical object or some other thing that could conceivably be caused by/made with magic, then I'll restrict it's use to witches. But magic isn't something I give every sim, and sometimes I make sims do something/give something in exchange for learning magic. For example, in my game a head evil witch is definitely going to ask sims to be made a playable or to give up their firstborn or something, in exchange for magic. A head good witch will be nicer about it, but will be way less likely to teach sims--I'd probably do a coin toss to see.

But I think you get the gist! I do let my sims use cheaty items, but I generally try to make sims go through some hoops/pass a milestone to get them.