PROBLEM:

When loading an existing neighborhood or creating a new neighborhood, the lots become separated from the terrain, with big blue holes in the landscape. This is commonly known as "blue lot syndrome" as the squares of the lots become blue, showing the sky or water below. In some cases, the terrain appears to be separated from the lot, and in others the lot is just blank blue.

CAUSE:

The most common cause of this is certain custom content, specifically objects made with an older version of S3OC. For information on that particular cause, see: Game Help:Blue Lots^wiki - the Dashboard can detect all those particular types of files just fine. But even after running the Dashboard, I was still getting blue lotting with my CC in place.

In my case, the problem was not object format custom content, but instead was due to unpacked World/Neighborhood files (in .package file format) placed in Mods\Packages. The terrain of the neighborhood would override that of the game's neighborhood (in my case, Sunset Valley), detatching the lots from the terrain.

SOLUTION:

Do not just unpack all your sims3pack format content and dump the resulting packages in Mods\Packages: most stuff works fine like this but Worlds/Neighborhoods do not!

Remove any sims3packs for Worlds/Neighborhoods before mass-unpacking sims3packs. If the problem is already happening, remove any World/Neighborhood files in .package format in Mods\Packages... they're usually the largest files there, 10mb or more each - Riverview is 75 mb.

The Dashboard does not currently identify World/Neighborhood files placed in Mods\Packages, but Delphy is aware of this (I certainly hope so with me bitching to him all evening about my testing) and hopefully will add functionality to the Dashboard for this soon.

Honestly, and no offense to those who make the programs, I would advice NEVER unpacking sims3packs. Unless you do it one by one, into individual folders, testing between each one.

It just simply does not work half the time. And when ti doesnt, the files are named so cryptically that there's no way to keep track of them all.

And I've had that issue a lot- a world layout appears above/on top of/inside sunset valley, and things appear destroyed. Removing the file fixes it. I never equated it to blue lots, though, as it was always a different world shape/style, not the same one with lot holes. I believe the game is loading it just like any other CC and the only thing it knows to do with that is display it. It doesnt wait in buy mode until purchased or CAS until worn, it is just told "Exist here".

SO it displays despite not being the loaded neighborhood.

Well, I've never had any problem unpacking sims3packs - been doing it for ages with most of my stuff but this was the first time I'd done everything all at once, since I just reinstalled the whole game on a new OS and didn't feel like screwing around with the launcher.

Perhaps you've had bad luck with the unpacking - but it's certainly working okay for most people. In any case I plan on packing everything up into one nice package so it'll treat all the stuff exactly like it would if I'd used the Launcher, just... not having to deal with the Launcher. I'm running with 813 unpacked sims3packs (all of my sims3packs except the 3 I had that were worlds) as package files and my game's running smooth as silk. Part of that might be Windows 7 but I'm really not noticing any difference whatsoever besides load times/thumbnail generation with custom content vs. without.

The actual appearance of the neighborhood varied a ton when I was testing - depending on which neighborhood file it was reading first, and how many chunks the neighborhood had in it (one small one only overrode a tiny part of a neighborhood). It wasn't really obvious that it was taking on the layout of the other hood, just that there were big blue holes punched in the landscape - it wasn't until I just put in one neighborhood file I'd made myself in CAW and saw the -very- distinctive road layout I'd created that it became clear what was happening. But as far as the average clueless user's concerned, "buncha blue squares where lots should be!" is about as far as I think their technical analysis of it will go, y'know?

Just figured this might be helpful to some - I've seen several people saying they've used the Dashboard and it detects no problems but they still get bluelotting - and if I (not being the average clueless user) can run into this issue, I figure other folks might have too.

Baically you just have to be really careful what you convert. Worlds apparently do not take kindly to it(especially since they are supposed to go in InstalledWorlds, nowhere else).

Which, if you've got a world you cant get to install, your best bet is to check for a .world file version. Bolded for skimmers to notice ;p

If there isn't one, ask the creator(or someone who has installed the world) to upload their .world file from their installedworlds folder. That can be dropped in no problem to anyone's game, no installation or converting required.

So sims3pack doesnt work? Package doesnt work? Look for .world!

Thanks for posting this!

Unfortunately, many "guides" and posts (some on this site, though I couldn't tell you where Google dug them up) tell you to do just that - extract the sims3pack... this is because the launcher can't do it anymore reliably...

So I was searching for a way to re-enable Riverview on a clean install. The best sources I found at first said to extract the sims3pack using the multi-installer. Another said to copy the .world file, but I didn't *have* a .world file, apparently since this was a new install... So I ended up having to download a .world file from a forum to get Riverview.

Meanwhile of course, I ended up with the .package files in my mods folder which I'm having to pick out one by one right now. It would be nice if Dashboard could detect this type of problem!

EDIT:

Okay... back into the game... My Sims were on vacation when this bug showed up.. all seemed well after applying this fix and deleting Cache (which again is almost universally recommended)..

HOWEVER... Now that they're back in Riverview, several things are broken!

First off, all lots & sims have their filenames instead of proper names. Such as World/Riverview: in front of everything.

Also, my teens no longer have a school to go to! Probably due to the name being screwed up, it says there are no schools in this town! Putting the .package files back fixes the names on everything, BUT, the lot where the school should be is blank! It shows up on map mode, but if you go there, there's no building on the lot and nothing to interact with.

Seems like if I fix one thing, another breaks...

EDIT 2:
Okay.. have read a lot about this... in Riverview, I've never had "BLUE LOT" syndrome... still don't. That was in China, and the fix proposed here seemed to have fixed that...

The problem now is that when I got back to Riverview from vacation, most of my community lots were gone. Not blue - the landscaping is all there - just the buildings are missing. Is this even the same issue? I'm loathe to start a new thread as I know I'll just get yelled at for "not searching" even though I've been searching and reading on multiple sites for five hours..