Dude, if you need a drink so bad that you sleep in front of the pub until it opens, I think you have a problem.

Speaking of animals... my castaway teen has just adopted a dog.

He's adorable with his fluffy fur and alien eyes - hold the phone!


...he likes pop music, does he...


Brain power ftw I mean wtf.
He doesn't have an option to restore brain power, and I don't see how he would.

So in short, TIL to pay more attention when loading CAS. Probably had an alien in there somewhere and created the dog on top of it, if that makes sense...? Either way, I'll keep him for now unless he starts throwing errors. Alien dog will fit in well with dragon of death, genie lamp and grave next to trash bed that rapidly cuts hygiene. Oh yeah, the buydebug IP $0 bed reduces hygiene, who knew? :p

My game crashed when my sims, now married, tried to return from University.

I'm trying to decide: start over, or try again from an older save... if I use the older save, it's likely to crash again and be a waste of time.

The world I'm playing, "Haunted Valley 2", is buggy. I wonder if that has anything to do with it?

Travelling is just a terrible process in itself. I was severely put off using any content that required travel when I played TS3 as the chances the Sims would come back intact were not always great.

That's good to know about this world. I still have it on hold in a separate user folder with worlds I need to test first. The only thing I noticed immediately after playing it for a few minutes once is that some community lots are built wrongly with front doors leading to unroutable rooms and things like that.
I can't even put the blame on the creator wholly. She makes rather flawless worlds in themselves, I think, but isn't a very good builder and should have better testers. It's her testers who suck, I guess. I once had a fight with one of them over an error this person refused to acknowledge, claiming that they tested the world extensively. Yes, fine, but apparently not with the right thoroughness, when I can find that error within one Sim day.
Broken travel or broken alarms are not something that is apparent to a world builder. Only play testers can find out about these. This is what made me cautious with all Rflong worlds.

It's a beautiful world with excellent well thought out sims. Most rflong7 words are not populated, some are just empty lots.

In Haunted Valley 2 the alchemy shop is totally inspired. The Fixer Upper house is okay. The Barn apartments? Great idea, wonder how rflong7 did it, but I am never going to put my sim in that one again until I can figure out how to fix it because it's totally honked up. Right now, my sim lives out of Alchemy House - an interesting home but the devil's work in expanding it.

I totally did not expect to find a hellish venue in the corn field. That was fun. As was the find of the heavenly venue in the church.

I don't think all the necessary spawners are there for Supernatural, tho. Couldn't find a moonstone or sunstone.

Great to hear you've heard of it Don!

I'm always looking for populated worlds, I don't like populating empty ones. I already spend days preparing a world for a new game. If I had to spend even more time for populating it in the first place I would never see the day when I actually start playing.

But re: the spawners. AFAIK there are no special Supernatural spawners. The three gems have been added to the existing base game spawners, so it might just be bad luck that you haven't found any yet.

I've seen a Supernatural spawner, but you start having that one add itself to lots after you start doing alchemy on them. Or maybe it's a set. One for bugs, one for gems, and one for metals. They don't spawn anything that other spawners don't cover, but they do spawn them onto your lot.

Just found out that by aging down an elder that uses a cane, can still use it as a young adult or adult. Time to make my sims suffer.

Don, speaking on behalf of world testers, that is a little harsh. Testing a world is a huge, time intensive job. It almost makes me cut EA a break (almost, I mean it actually IS their job). Worlds have to be tested for routing and game mechanics and objects working. They need to keep sims out of certain areas. The rabbitholes need to not get chocked at peak times, and at least 1000 other things that are too numerous to mention. When I test a world, I check each lot and as much off lot terrain as possible. Then I just play, to see what issues will reveal themselves. I am sure I don't catch everything. Hopefully, a world creator can find enough testers who are willing to invest the time and attention to perfect their creations. Not that any world will be perfect, because it is still run in buggy as heck TS3. I do think I could test a world for a month and you could find something I missed in your first day of playing, because we all play in different ways. I don't know if the creator you mentioned had good testers or not, but I do know it is a tough job.

@simsi45 I love aging down my sims, but only those I am not too attached to. Aging down will eventually bork a sim.

Harsh, maybe, but not unjustified. I know what a tough job world testing is and I base my judgment not on obscure issues.

Here are a few examples.

1. I downloaded a world from the exchange that was praised and lauded because the creator is some sort of EA forums celebrity. The praisers and lauders, it then turns out later, were also the creator's testers. The world was broken. It failed to trigger the 3am alarm that cleans community lots and inactive residential lots and repairs broken stuff. I tried several times and redownloaded and reinstalled the world. Always the same result. So I went to the official forums to report this. I was accused of making things up by one of the trusted testers. Only after other users confirmed that they see the same issue the accusation stopped. (And the creator pulled the world from the Exchange)
ETA: This is one of the instances that I had in mind in the above when I said that a creator cannot see some things but only the testers can).

2. AFAIK the CAW manual says that creators should avoid fences that run along a lot border, because Sims can get stuck in them. I downloaded a world from one of my favourite creators (who has issued less than perfect products recently, though), looked at it in Edit Town and noticed that most lots had fences on the borders and some weird CFE usage on some lots (foundations as fences). I tried it nevertheless and got stuck Sims on my first day, went to the forums and saw praise heaped upon praise from the posters and one poster who lauded the impeccability of the world and that they tested it pre-release. I recalled that name. Same tester for the other creator and the one I got into a fight with.

3. Another creator, this time a world from a blog, but a respected creator, a famous one even. The world came with decrapified Store content that installed alongside the world. I mean, when you test a world you do this in a clean folder first, don't you, before you add it to your regular user files, and so something like this would have been noticed quite from the start.

4. 4th world, this time from a tumblr. Lovely world, nice custom content made specifically for that world. It is almost like a new Store world in scope. The first thing I do when I have a new world that is populated is I choose a single pre-made Sim household and send them around. In this case, once the household was active I sent the Sim to the community lot across the street. The Sim could not enter the building because the lot creator had used CFE and thus borked the staircases leading up into the building. It was the art gallery so not some obscure lot inactive Sims will never use.

I think what happened in the case of the creator of Mr Brown's world is that over time there had formed this mystique around her and her testers became a clique that didn't really test anymore because her worlds were "perfect". And I fear that something similar has happened to my former favourite creator, too. His most recent releases are painful to play because while the worlds look amazing as usual there are so many flaws that my saves hardly survive the 10 week threshold.

The CAW manual actually says that?! EA should give it a read sometime then. Lunar Lakes is a huge offender in that respect, as well as some other worlds. For example, I quite like the library in Lunar Lakes but left as is, it is a cause for instant HUGE lag. The library usually attracts quite a number of sims, so several times throughout the day, Overwatch will send a notification. And that's a world you pay good money for. I'm rather more lenient with free custom worlds, as long as it's not glaringly obvious, such as excessive MOO usage or floating build items. YMMV.

It may have changed some time after Pets. Sunset Valley is also full of "wrong fences". You just have to watch inactives walking along the central park walkway. They circle around the fence posts at the lot border and once in a while one of them apparently heads straight into them and gets stuck whenever you don't watch.
Later worlds follow this rule, however. Most of the time at least, there are two rows of empty tiles surrounding a lot. The creators of Midnight Hollow messed up in an interesting way, though: while the main fences always keep their distance from the lot border there are also those small iron fences around the paths leading to the gates. And those go straight to the lot border. Consequence: stuck Sims every other day.

ETA: The "whenever you don't watch" part is important here. Routing in high detail mode seems to take fences into consideration, but low detail routing is more simplified and then Sims cannot route around a tricky fence.

Some of the worlds I have installed I know so well that I can almost always predict where to find a stuck Sims when I get unusual lag moments. In Dragon Valley, for example, it's the corners of the park towards the Library and a spot between the bookstore and the armchairs in front of it. In Lucky Palms it's several lot borders where they used MOO to place those desert plants, the footprints of which now extend onto the walkway.

Lucky Palms also got a new problem after the IP patch. It is now better to fence in all those lots on that pier, including the parking lot. Otherwise Sims will try to leave them by boat and then fail. And in that case the fence will have to go on the very lot borders, leaving only the entrance open. Otherwise those sneaky buggers will find a way to get stuck between the fence and the pier border.

When you test a world for general routing I'd suggest to use a mod that allows you to tag every inhabitant and then watch from Map View for several days while your test Sim is on static needs and autonomy is off. Isla Paradiso, for example is much better than most people think when it comes to world routing. Not a single Sim stuck in odd places of the map for two weeks, but stuck Sims on lot borders, limited to some 5 specific spots that no CAW magic can fix.

That's interesting, because I have hardly any trouble in Lunar Lakes, and none with the library in particular. But maybe I've modified the lot layout without me remembering. Whenever I start a new game in a world I've played before I replace the lots with the ones from the previous save. I know that I've changed the interior but I think that I've left the exterior as is.

On routing issues, apparently, the game hates this setup. Sims are always getting stuck if this is the front door layout of a house (stairs perpendicular to the door).

I once killed a certain Sim because they always get stuck on their front yard. Even Nraas SP treated it as a joke. But then other Sims got stuck on the same place and in the end, I bulldozed the lot. And the problem was solved.

Worse yet, my home lot is partially off-limits for my household because the game thinks it's an apartment they don't own.
And the lot next to it is a bar, located over the water, where Sims bunch up on the waterside to get in boats, only to get stuck as there's no need or room for boat-based routing.

My bad. I thought I saw a routing problem. I was wrong.

Both are actually EAxis made houses. One in University, and one in Midnight Hollow. And looks like my pictures are too small to begin with. And so I will make an example to illustrate my point.



Other examples include a certain house in Twinbrook, and the Broke and the Ivanov's residence in Riverview.

As for that poor Sim, I actually restored her back to life and made an elaborate back story in the process.

Don, I always learn something new from you. I did not realize there was high detail routing and low detail routing. This does explain some situations. There was an apartment complex very popular with townies. I kept getting stuck sims reports. When I set the camera to watch, there were no stuck sims. When I moved the camera to another part of the world, the stuck sim notices started again.

I always test a world in a clean game folder, but I don't know if this is standard practice. I also use NRaas tagger to watch the sim routing, though this has a tendency to give me a god complex.

Sometimes, after removing a ladder, the floor cutout remains and I can't cover it with anything, not even if it has direct support underneath it (like a wall or column) and the ground is perfectly even. What I've found is that adding normal stairs that cover the tile where the ladder was, makes the bad cutout go away and I can cover up the hole with flooring

I don't know whether it is called like that or whether there really is such a thing. But it's what I concluded from observations. Sims in the far distance don't animate anymore when they walk, they just move along a straight path, like on wheels, and with their own speed. There used to be an exploit to this, until EA patched it: in Map View mummies and ghosts moved with the same speed (running) as regular Sims. That's how I managed to get a mummy to firefighter level 10 very quickly, by going into Map View whenever she was supposed to cover great distances during her jobs. It also saved time when I went on vacation with my ghosts to get them to the various tombs that were not reachable by any vehicle. I think it was even mentioned in the later patch notes that they "fixed" this exploit.
High detail mode and low detail mode are, however, common terms. And as I have never so far watched a Sim getting actually stuck in a fence I conclude that it must always happen when they are "off-screen" in low detail and several high detail processes are inactive.

What you describe with regard to the apartment building is also related to a different issue that concerns Overwatch itself. The mod cannot very well distinguish between Sims that are truly stuck and Sims in low detail that are merely idle and simply haven't moved for hours and so you'll get a lot of fake notices in towns with a high population or on computers with lower specs. The more Sims are in low detail the more the game will drop them off radar, so to speak, and Overwatch might then consider them as stuck. But it has gotten much better over time. The early phases of Stuck Check were a nightmare, especially when you've set OW to reset stuck Sims. It reset mixologists in empty bars, reset the unicorn standing on a beach, reset every apartment dweller and so on on a regular basis. I have since then disabled Stuck Check and only run it manually from time to time while playtesting a new world.

> I play small worlds
> worlds never have more than 20 lots
>whenever I need townies the pool I get is really small and not super diverse
SOLUTION
> (Bigger) Builder's Island (Updated!) by QBUILDERZ
>add a bunch of small lots,
>plop a family onto a lot
>Debug:Populateworldwithsims!

Now I have a huge personal pool of townie families to choose from connected to a single world. I guess this isn't really necessary for many people but for me a perfectionist who is constantly changing saves and stories and having to make sim after sim just to fit the story this is really helpful. There looks like there could be a limit as not to overload the world but not sure yet and I've already got plenty to choose from

My sim of the Midnight Sun Challenge is fishing. Her toddler son is playing with the playtable beside her and they are chatting along.
How was that? TS4 introduced multitasking? I don't think so.

I learned that when two sims have broken up, if one of them has learned the 'Smooth Recovery' interaction from the Charisma skill, using it will restore their relationship status. They still have a low relationship score, but I found this very convenient since I was dealing a townie couple that had just autonomously broken up when I went to check in on them.

Meanwhile I'm also beginning to suspect that either Overwatch or ErrorTrap have some unintended interactions with the Uni world.