I'm about to start a new neighborhood, and it'll be the first time I start an equal rotation of families with Seasons installed.

It made me curious - what's your rotation schedule like? Do you do it based off seasons, or based off days? And, if you do it based off seasons, do you keep every family in the same season? If so, do you only introduce a new family in the right season?

I ask this because I sent a few kids of college, but now that they're ready to come back, they'll be off of the season rotation. I can't decide how to do it.

And I'm just curious about how y'all all play. =) :D

I generally just go by season, myself. I'm not overly controlling on my rotations, generally play a bunch of my families until they reach the next season, and then I don't play them again until the other families are caught up.
When it comes to college, after I'm done a regular rotation, I generally play my students until they're graduated or graded, depending on how my aging works for that neighborhood.

I tried playing to keep the seasons aligned, but that means the baby brother born during freshman year is in middle school by graduation, which is too big a skew. But one-day rotation is the best way to do what I want to do with the community, so University is its own mini-rotation; I play three one-day rotations of all the University lots for every single rotation of Downtown and Drama Acres lots.

The way I deal with the seasons disjunction is adjust my sense of the climate to suit. All the neighborhoods are on a spring-summer-fall-winter schedule. This means that, regardless of when you graduate, if you move into a new lot from University it'll be spring, and every time you move after that, you'll also reset to spring (unless you move into a previously occupied lot that was moved out of during one of the other seasons). Instead of letting the disjunction bother me, I define my geographical location as being analogous to a high-altitude region of the Upper South; so the weather is generally mild with short, severe cold spells. This actually suits with the culture of my core families, who are arguably Appalachian hill people. Because I play one-day rotations, if people get offset from each other it isn't generally by very much and remains consistent for the duration of a residency, so I don't often find people in summer outfits visiting people in the snow.

It occurred to me when it was too late to do it that it makes a certain amount of sense to define University as being on a fall-winter-fall-winter, or fall-winter-spring-fall schedule, and just make sure that you invite your University students to visit in the main neighborhood during an appropriate summer stretch to simulate getting off for the summer. But I personally went straight through and there's a lot of summer stuff to do on Sim State campus now that I've put in a swim center and added gardens to my residences.

If you move a sim back in with their families after they graduate, they will be in the same season as the family.

My uni students don't often get to move into their own homes. I make them move back in with their families. Sometimes, just long enough for them to show off how smart and mature they are. After that, the graduates can move into their own homes. If they don't have a family to move in with, I just move them in with one of their friends that is in the season I want the graduate to be in.

I do my rotations in weeks. Although my rotations aren't strict.

Hmm, this is all really interesting.

I kind of like your explanation Peni Griffin. I basically have to play more than one day rotations, simply because my game would take FOREVER to load, but as a person who lives in the upper South, I can totally attest that there are those weird cold/warm spells. And since I don't do holidays, it's not like having Christmas or Thanksgiving in the right season really matters.

Hmm... =)

I do rotations only by days. If I wanted to sync the seasons that would mean every lot would need to have that weather machine and I just don't feel like dealing with that. It seems like when a sim moves into a house that already was mid-season when the last owners moved out, it would be in that same season again. It seems like seasons are about the lots, not exactly the sim who goes there. So a sim can move out of a spring season apartment straight into a winter season house, and I don't care.

I played a 3-generation 'hood I started last year for just a self-dare to see if I could do it. I did.

What I did was I rotated every 3 days and kept the seasons as Spring Summer Fall Fall because snow used to slow down my machine before I upgraded. For Uni, I played the same way, but with 6 days each time to even things out.

What exactly does the weather machine do?

I don't pay much attention to the seasons. If one lot is in winter and the other in summer, oh well. As long as the friends Sims bring home in summer aren't wearing winter coats....

But it would be nice if, when you move a new family in, the lot doesn't start in summer (which appears to be default) but rather in the season the rest of the neighborhood is in. Like I said, though, I just shrug.

As far as college graduates...if they were supposed to age up to adult on Wednesday evening, they come back on Wednesday evening, since I view college as a pocket of time, so to speak. Lots of times I'll have them get married to another playable whose "birthday" is on Sunday evening, and have them get married on that Wednesday evening, so as to keep everything in sync. Another option is to move them into the 'hood and turn aging off until after 6 pm Wednesday. That's another reason why I play multigenerational families--I can have a Sim marry into another family. And I also time pregnancies the same way--if your Sim becomes pregnant between 4 pm Saturday and 2 pm Sunday, if you age up the child as soon as the game allows, their toddler-to-child transition takes place Sunday evening.

Here's an example of how I'm playing Riverblossom Hills: Jacob Martin's birthday is Wednesday evening, Jules is Friday evening. I'll play the Martins until Wednesday, and the O'Mackeys until Friday, then send them both to college. Jacob will move back Wednesday evening or Thursday morning, and I'll have him and Jules get married Friday evening/Saturday morning--they will live with Jacob's father.

And then Jules has a younger brother whose birthday is Tuesday evening, and Fiona McGreggor is the same age, so when those two get married, they'll live with Gabe and Alexandra. They'll get married Tuesday evening/Wednesday morning. Just move them both in when they graduate, and they can either propose marriage right then and there, or head off to the wedding chapel I built.

So that's how I do rotation. I also note who has an age transition coming up so I can do those in order.

I personally don't play my neighborhoods in rotation, (although i keep meaning to!) which is why i have the Sync Timer from MATY http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/s...pic,2386.0.html It pretty much does everything everyone here mentions (or at least thats what the RTFM says)

I play by days (Mon 8AM-Thurs 6PM; Thurs 6PM-Mon 8AM) and I use the weather controller from simwardrobe.com (allows season changes like the weather machine, and also allows to set the days left in the season) and the day changer from this website to make sure everyone's on the same season/day. One year of college in my game equals one day in the main 'hood (although if a sim starts college on a Monday, I play through their rotation until graduation), so I need the day changer to ensure they start their rotation on the right day.

I don't usually try to keep everyone in the same season (usually because I forget to align everyone), but I am trying to do so in my build-a-city 'hood as having one household in winter followed by one in summer does not look right.

You use it to set/change or extend by 1 or 3 days the season in your active lot.

Play each family independently... or should I say 2 - 3 families along each other?

Hard to explain, but I basically just take full advantage of the independent progression of each family.

When I'm playing in rotation, I go by days rather than seasons. As far as Uni is concerned, one full year (2 semesters) counts as one day in the Main hood and sims going to Uni leave with 4 days of teenhood remaining.

As long as each family gets played the same number of days (Uni years) then I don't worry about the seasons. Children move out at the end of their family's rotation to keep ages synced. Students graduating from Uni move back into their parents' house unless their graduation day happens to be Monday (rotation Mon to Mon). They can move into their own place straight away

A lot of y'all do an amount of bookkeeping that would do my head in...

Alexandra, a lot always starts in the first season for your neighborhood. Since the game designers couldn't know how people would play, and a lot of people don't synch their neighborhoods, that was the simplest way to do it. If you set your neighborhood to have another season first, it will; but you can only set neighborhoods, not lots.

One thing that threw me when I was playing test games after first installing Seasons was that Riverblossom Hills in my game started in winter and the downtown to which I attached it started in summer. I expected downtown community lots to synch with the lot I visited from, and they didn't! They do now, when I'm playing with most EPs and all three subhoods arranged sp-s-f-w; I don't know if this is the result of a patch or what.

Another thing to pay attention to if you care about this stuff is which day of the season a particular lot starts on. All but one of my Drama Acres lots starts on the first day of spring; that one started on the last day of spring. I brought that family into closer synch with their neighbors by playing everybody else with a two-day rotation on weekends. Now their days don't match but their seasons do; only now I've had people moving into new lots from University and they're all out of seasonal and weekday synch; but I've settled on my climate model and stopped fretting about it. Most of my Downtown lots start on the last day of spring, but the weather's always a little warmer in built-up areas in the South anyway, because of the traffic and all the HVAC exhaust.

My University lots are the most out-of-synch because of moving in and out of residences, dorms, and Greeks. A lot that's been lived in before picks up where it was left off, so a residence that was a love nest for senior year plus the final 72 hours and then uninhabited for a year will be three seasons behind a residence that you moved a set of friends into on the same day that the love nest was occupied, and which added new inhabitants as the original ones graduated. I didn't start playing the Greeks till members of my core families moved in, which they did at different stages of their university careers, so you can look across the street from Urele-Oresha-Sham on a summer day and see the snowman on the lawn at Triv-Var house!

I live in a state with the motto "If you don't like the weather, wait awhile," and I can't stand fiddly bookkeeping, so I got over all this pretty quick.

It used to bother me that I could move a family mid-winter into a house where it was the last day of summer, but now I appreciate the seasonal variety that brings to my "rotations" (which are based on syncing to the neighborhood average, not a set number of days per lot). I just checked how long it took me to get through the most recent five-day span in my neighborhood: 62 days. If my seasons were synced, that would have been two months of gameplay where I was stuck playing the same season. Instead, when I am feeling particularly seasonal, I can target the lots that are in the right season for my mood.

I only started caring about keeping my rotations closer in sync after I installed Seasons. When all the seasons are different (i.e. that full complement of spring-summer-fall-winter), I don't have to put any particular effort into keeping track of each family's progress. I play each one until they get to the next season, then I progress through the neighborhood until everyone is advanced. This gives me a bit of wiggle room if a family is in a particularly boring or interesting stage: if boring, I move on earlier and just come back to them later, since it's obvious that lot is a little behind the others; if interesting, I might play a few extra days into the next season but no further, so they're still in roughly the same spot as everyone else.

When Sims get moved out to a new lot that's defaulting to the first season, I will break out the weather machine or the previously mentioned modded weather vase to match them to the lot they moved from. I try to only move Sims at the very start of a season for simplicity. If not, then whatever, a couple days off isn't going to bother me, and with all the mods I have at my disposal, it's not too hard to force them back into sync (by aging off-schedule or tweaking seasons' times or whatever). The very few Sims I introduce straight out of CAS depend on how far from the hood norm season 1 is, and what plans I have for them. If I'm trying to start them in media res--middle-aged parents, teenage kids, established careers--then I'll use mods to tweak them appropriately but also take advantage of their existence outside the normal time stream to let them build up some natural memories.

University Sims I haven't perfected my system with, and my current batch is terribly out of sync to each other. I think in the future I'll just keep all the Sims in one cohort living together, and try to keep the lots in the Uni hood better synced by season. I figure 1.5 seasons out in the "real world" (the main hood) evens out to the time spent in college. No numeric conversions or anything, I just figure that 4 "years" of college is enough time for a child to reasonably become a teen, and an infant to be on the verge of being a child, or an adult parent to become an elder, so allowing ~6-10 days in the main hood to pass seems reasonable to me.

I tried to keep seasons in sync once, but I found it to be just too much maintenance. Even discounting Uni, whenever a family would move (and my families move often, since I don't allow them to change the foundation of their home; if they outgrow it, they must move) they'd be back to the first season when in their new lot. So...meh. I don't worry about it too much.

My main concern when it comes to rotations is much more with keeping the ages of the playable Sims in the neighborhood in sync, not the seasons. So, I play each household for a Sim Week, from Monday to Monday. I play Uni in two rotations of two college "years" each; with the semesters reduced to two days each, Uni lasts more or less for two weeks and this keeps ages more or less in sync when graduating students move back into the main 'hood. (I only have to not play for a while those who drop out, since they age up to adult when they drop out. Occasionally, it requires that I add/subtract a few days from non-Uni siblings of Uni students, particularly twin siblings, in order to keep their ages in sync, but it's nothing drastic. And I don't obsess about it too much in any case since my returning Uni students never move back into their birth households. So, if they are a few days older/younger than their twin, it doesn't bother me all that much.)

I think my problem is that I'm just really OCD about everything, tee hee.

*laughs* Well, considering that with this game, especially with the proper cocktail of hacks, you can control pretty much anything you want, you're at least playing the right game.

I guess I'm just more OCD about some things than others. Some things I have to have just so, other things...not so much. The former is probably why I'm sticking with TS2 over TS3, however.

I don't have winter in my current hood. It is an island, so I haven't really noticed much difference going from one house to another. I have a mod that makes each season longer, but all lots start with one day of summer.

My uni hoods are always only Autumn because the sims earn their skill points faster. There are only a few Uni houses in play, so my sims move into existing houses where it is the same season as it is for all the other houses on campus.

So, I think I've finally worked out my own system.

Everyone made some good points about how to organize it without caring about Seasons, but in the end, I'm just too OCD for that, haha. Just within the neighborhood, I play rotationally by Season - so one season (aka 5 Sim days) per rotation for each family. I use the modded weather vase (thanks for the tip!) to manipulate the season when a family moves into a new house; I'm like iCad because my families move around a lot. I don't really allow any construction on an existing house, so when the family grows, they've got to find a new house.

Having the seasons hack is also really helpful when I have two Sims who need to be the same age, but one goes to college and the other doesn't. In that case, the Sim who doesn't go to college sits around in the Sim bin until their friend graduates. Then they'll move in to their respective houses, and I'll use the seasons changer to catch them up.

As for University time, I've found that I like the agree progression if two college years equals one season in the neighborhood. That means that neighborhood Sims age up about 10 days - not too man and not too little, in my opinion, but I'm not entirely sure about this fact yet. I might make it less if I feel like the ages get all weird here.

I have to remember to set the seasons for any sub-neighborhoods so they match the main 'hood.

I keep in mind that Sims is only a representation of someone's life. In real life you don't get a promotion every day...that one day is representative of, say, several months of someone's life. That's why keeping seasons in sync isn't even an issue for me.

I don't bother keeping seasons in sync, and I didn't bother rotating families until very recently. I had a now-elder sim have 10 children (3 biological, 7 adopted) who are now all, except the youngest, graduated and have families of their own. This means she has 18 grandchildren! I didn't want the grandchildren to age 'wrong': that is to say, I didn't want one of the supposedly younger grandkids being in college before the others are even teenagers. I don't do 'three days here, three days there', or anything, but generally play each family for as long as I want up until a birthday. One of the grown-up children isn't going to get married but she's going to adopt a kid once she has 5 level 10 businesses, so right now I'm playing her with aging off, because I want her to adopt a kid before her youngest step-sister graduates.

I tried keeping seasons in sync but it got to be too much work. My head was hurting trying to plan everything out. I just go by days now. I personally play 1 week and then stop Saturday morning at 7am. That's just me of course.