Today, on going to play my graduate sims, I've noticed that they only have 4 want slots and 1 lock rather than the 6 slots, 2 locks they should have. They still have their diplomas, memories of graduating university, and the YA life stage icon in their panels - the game still clearly thinks they went to university, it's just not giving them the appropriate want slots for having gone there. Their LTWs have also changed. I've tried restoring from a backup made earlier in the week (crucially, this was made before my most recent batch of downloading-and-installing CC, and before I noticed the problem - although I can't say for certain that the problem wasn't already there, since I was playing a no-graduates household just before I made the backup), removing all CC (Downloads & Saved Sims) and clearing caches, but the problem persists. Anyone seen anything like this before? I can use cheats to give back their want slots & old LTWs, but that seems... less than ideal, particularly if this is actually a warning sign of something more deeply wrong with my game.

ETA: on further checking, this problem only seems to exist in my Black Mesa/Land Grant University hood - my Maxis megahood is unaffected.

This happens to me all the time. It happens to non-graduate sims, too, only it's less obvious because they don't have extra want slots to lose.

The late great Mootilda thought it was probably the data in the Sim Wants and Fears history getting wiped, because despite having all the proper memories and relationships, sims affected by this glitch roll wants like a sim fresh out of CAS with no training or experience to draw on - generic Make Friend and Flirt wants rather than wants to do things with specific sims, for example. The hood where it happens most often, Drama Acres, is corrupt as all get out and has been for some time, but the glitch happens in other hoods that I don't know to be corrupted, and appears to be random. I haven't been able to identify a trigger or cause for it, which makes it impossible to pin down a solution. Presumably, since I get this so much more often than other people do, something in my game play style is making me more prone to it, but there's no telling what.

Your options are to restore from a backup or fix things with the batbox and some time spent retraining them to be themselves. Since there's no guarantee that the problem won't recur, I always use the batbox to Fix/My Want Slots and Locks and then Wants/Cycle LTW to restore the old one, and carry on. The second most annoying problem with this glitch is that for some reason the batbox won't always make the original LTW available (again, no one knows why; if we did, it's possible that would be the Big Clue we'd need).

The first most annoying thing is that locked wants are invariably lost, so a sim who has a locked want to get engaged, married, have a baby, or some other major life choice that I'm doing a full story arc for will suddenly not care or get the points for finally getting what they want.

You could restore the lost want in SimPE, though, couldn't you? I recently had to learn how to do that when the stupid "carefree" vacation "benefit" timed out on my sims and randomly unocked and re-rolled most of their wants. I imagine the same process would work here, though of course the original cause is much harder to avoid.

I didn't know you could change wants in SimPE till I read about you doing it. I haven't looked at them there for a long time as SimPE doesn't work as well on my new gaming computer and always crashes when I try, and I don't remember seeing anything that would make it likely. Also, I'd have to quit the game, open SimPE, restore the want, and get back in. I normally only open SimPE to change anything immediately after making the backup at the end of each rotation, and if the event is about to happen I'd have to stop the game to save the want. Still, it's a theoretical possibility and it wouldn't hurt me to figure out how.

Yes, it's certainly a pain, and even when SimPE doesn't crash, it still takes freaking forever to load...

The simblender has options to add want slots and locks.

Thanks, everyone! It's good to know it's not just me, & it's a relatively easy fix to set the slots/locks back to 6/2. After Peni's post I also finally realised I maybe ought to get Mootilda's hood checker and run my hood through it, so a few invalid relationships & memories are now fixed.

A confession though... I've never used SimPE I would like to get the old locked wants back (I had two sims about to get married who've now lost their wants to do so), though, so I guess I'd better bite the bullet & learn how to use it...

I only started using SimPE last year, and of course I got the "new updated better" version that is also apparently so much less user-friendly than the previous version... But as I understand it, any version is going to be a bit daunting and intimidating. But despite being completely lost at first, I did manage to figure out how to edit wants (with help!), and if I can figure it out, probably anyone can...

So how do you do it? Go to the More tab, and then -?

I think I figured it out. Go to the More tab, open Wants & Fears - you'll get a long list of wants, fears and history. To make things easier, you might want to deselect the "history" checkbox so you only see current wants and fears. Select the want you'd like to change, and use the options on the right hand side to select the new want for that slot, target of the want (if applicable - e.g. wanting to gain a specific skill vs. gain a skill point in anything, wanting to be best friends with a specific sim vs. wanting to make a new best friend in general), and aspiration/influence rewards for fulfilling it.

...what I can't figure out is where to find what the *usual* aspiration/influence rewards for getting married & throwing a wedding party would be, such that I can set them to appropriate values in SimPE.

I've only done this to fix wants on one sim, and I don't have SimPE open, but what cakeninja is saying sounds right. What I did to figure out the correct values for aspiration/influence was look at the values on other sims in the hood. For example, for the "have a baby" want, I looked at the sim's husband who had that want locked (they were both Knowlege sims, so the values would be the same). The skill level want I was fixing at the same time was a bit more difficult, because it was harder to find a sim with the same skill level want (I think it was lvl 5 or 6), but after looking through quite a few sims, I finally found one.

I never did figure out how to set the want as locked in SimPE. Apparently the older version just has a helpful little tickbox labelled "lock" or "locked" so it's 100% obvious, but this new version doesn't have anything like that. So I just loaded up the game, loaded up that household, and locked it then saved before un-pausing.