Game Resets (at least I think that's what they're called)

I think this might just be a big enough topic to justify its own thread, rather than just a couple of posts in the Stupid / Random Questions thread. What I am talking about is what you get after installing a new EP or some mods. You see the effect when you restart the game after installing the EP or the mod and open up a lot to play it. What happens is that all the Sims on all the lots have stopped what they were doing and are standing to attention. Any Sims at work or school reappear on the lot, and they don't get paid for that day. Their motives all return to the default: their bladders are half full, and all the other motives are green. There are other things that I think may happen as a result of the reset, but I'm not sure. I thought there might be something on one of the wikis (either ours or the wikia one) about this but I can't find anything. So I thought I'd start this thread where we might list the causes and effects of these resets:

Causes
1. Installing a new EP
2. Installing TwoJeffs' Visitor Controller, or upgrading to a new version of it.
3. Installing Pescado's Drama Professor & Met Self Fix (dramafix.package) (At least installing the OFB version in my game caused one.)
4. Using the send teens to college button may reset the houses that had a teen removed.
5. Installing Jase's InTeen.
6. Installing Pescado's "Batbox" (FFS Lot Debugger) may cause a reset.
7. Installing some other Pescado mods.
8. Installing the patches.


I'm sure there are other things that cause it. I would have thought that big mods like InTeen and ACR would be likely candidates. I'm wondering too about installing the patches, which I'm about to try to do as it now appears that my game might not be fully patched after all.

Effects
1. All the Sims on all the lots stop what they are doing and stand to attention.
2. Any Sims at work or school reappear on the lot, and they don't get paid for that day.
3. Sims may lose their vehicles if they drove to work.
4. All Sims' motives all return to the default: their bladders are half full, and all the other motives are green.
5. Any babies that were in cribs before the reset, will be on the floor after the reset.
6. Pets sink into the floor.
7. The 'hood may become corrupted if there are off-world loiterers on a lot at the time of the rest.
8. Unpaid bills may get deleted.
9. Recently paid bills get removed from the mailboxes so that they have to be paid again.
10. The cowplant gets stuck (reset) and has to be fed before it starts getting eating Sims again.
11. In vacation lots, the bellhop may become a selectable NPC.


I also think that unpaid bills get deleted, but I'm not sure about that. (In my game there were no unpaid bills on the Dreamers' lot when I opened it. I think the reset when I updated the Visitor Controller must have deleted them.) I also wonder if visitors on the lot get sent home.

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Please let me know of anything you can think of to add to or change in this list, and I'll try to update this first post to keep it right. If I and other Simmers know exactly what to expect, then it will be easier to leave all the lots in a state so that the reset won't adversely affect the Sims. Any other thoughts or comments about these resets are of course welcome too.

Effects: any babies that were in cribs before the reset, will be on the floor after the reset. (babies on the floor is one of my personal major annoyances in Sims 2, so it always annoys me to have to go to every house affected by a reset and put the baby back in the crib.)

I don't know if anyone else besides me uses Christianlov's Custom Skintone Selector, but that will cause a reset when first put in a game. It's been so long since I put in ACR I don't remember if it caused a reset.

I do not believe ACR causes a reset - in fact, in households that don't have ACR already installed you get a little pop up that'll tell you ACR is successfully installed. Not that my word is gold or anything though.

Using the send teens to college button will reset the houses that had a teen removed.

I can't remember what-all in my massive number of hacks caused a reset. Many do. Some that you might expect would cause a reset -- like ACR -- do not. I THINK it might be because ACR is token-based and the pixels do not have to be on a lot to have a token applied to them. Other hacks do require that for the new programming to take effect. I don't remember if Inteen does; it was long ago that I installed it.

And really, it's not a big deal, although I suppose it can be a bit disconcerting if you've not experienced one before and don't expect it. In my experience, most mod creators will tell you if the hack will cause a reset, so that you know what to expect. But even if they don't, at worst, your Sims at work will lose their pay for the day and the kids might lose a grade for "not going to school." This can be remedied in several ways. If you have the EP that allows walking to school/work (I think it's AL?), then you can simply have the reset Sims who should be at work/school do so. The one(s) going to work will get the "OMG, YOU'RE LATE!!!!" message, but they'll get paid and the kids won't lose their grade even if they're walking to school five minutes before they'll come back home on the bus. If you don't have AL, then you could add the salary for the day to the household funds using the "familyfunds" cheat and you can add the grade back using various modded objects that allow you to fiddle with grades.

The thing that annoys me most is the motive reset. I tend to keep my pixels on a schedule so that they eat at certain, set times and go to bed at certain, set times, according to age. (This is why going to community lots without the Community Time mod annoys the hell out of me. ) The motive reset tends to mess up my scheduling for the day, so I have to fiddle with the Sim Blender to get them where I want them to be. But it's only for one day and if it's an important enough hack to me for my playing purposes, I don't mind at all.

The possibility of neighborhood resets is what started me saving and quitting each lot at a particular time every day, making sure that everyone was at home. I save every morning at 7:00 - any ghosts on the lot are in bed, and the motive that really matters - energy - will be full at an appropriate time if the house is reset.

In the course of developing Widespot and playtesting Riverside, these are the effects that I recall resulting from the neighborhood reset when the neighborhoods were loaded into non-BG configurations:

Widespot starts on Friday morning and all houses had paid bills before going to bed; after the reset, all the houses had their bills in neat little piles across the street, and they have to be paid over again on starting the house if you have any EPs loaded at all. This makes the Land and Weiss houses even poorer than intended.

Food left out, whether in the process of being eaten, prepared, or served, would all be spoiled. Broken appliances and fixtures would be fixed and dirty states cleaned (this was a huge pain in the butt in Riverside, where one of the stories Mark wanted to use specified a trashed bathroom), sinks and bathtubs that were in operation would continue to run and could not be turned off or repaired, and unmade beds would be rendered unmakeable. Broken electronics would work, but would have smoke billowing out of the back. (This meant I had to fix a broken TV and computer which had been contributing wonderfully to the "Angel died and everybody gave up" atmosphere in the Hart house; and I also had to train the Manns to clean up after themselves which, c'mon, is completely foreign to them.)

Children and teens with an existing A+ would generate little stars if the configuration that loaded them had added a certain EP - not sure which one.

Fish in a stocked fish tank were visible, but could not be fed or watched until the tank was restocked.

Candy Hart has already gone through her first pop before you load Widespot; after a reset, she immediately undergoes another first pop, which apparently resets the hours on her pregnancy, as she will subsequently give birth on the same day as the other pregnant ladies, although they all got pregnant the day after she did in development. They don't all give birth at the same hour of the day, so they are at least not all reset to the same point.

That's all I remember off the top of my head.

I have experienced very few resests myself, only when installing new EPs and once or twice after instailling mods.
But they are not big deal for me, because I always save about 6AM (to make sure the butler has not arrived and there are no neighbours walking by) or a bit later (up to 7AM) if there are active ghosts in the lot. So my Simmies are not at work, nor at school, etc.
The only little annoyance is the motives reset, and having in mind my Simmies schedules it is very easily fixable.

What did bother me was a LTW reset. Happened only once, I think, when I was installing certain EP -but I no longer remember which one.
It annoyed me so much that I never played that hood again.

That makes some sense: children, teens, adults and elders are left standing to attention beside their beds. (The first time In saw it I thought it looked like a 6 a.m. inspection at a boot camp!) Babies can't stand up, so they'll end up lying on the floor. I'm not sure about toddlers.

I try to always save at 6 a.m. (or just before) as I don't have ghosts haunting residential lots, but sometimes I have to do something other than play the Sims(!), so I end up saving at whatever time it happens to be. Some Sims though (golf caddies in the slacker career) are already at work at 6 a.m. so I'd have to make special arrangements for them. And I have lots of sleepovers. So I've got into the habit of opening every lot before an expected reset to see if there's anything I have to do. I didn't bother doing this in Pleasantview in the lots I'd never played yet, but the reset when I updated my Visitor Controller seems to have changed them.

That's interesting. On Friday morning the paid bills will still be in the mailboxes waiting for the postman to collect them. So the reset takes them out of the mailboxes so they have to be paid again. In my Pleasantview, the reset seems to have deleted all the Dreamers' unpaid bills so they never had to be paid at all. Very strange!

I'm relieved to see that the reset might affect the time that Brandi gives birth but it won't terminate her pregnancy.

Two supplementary questions:
(a) Does a reset clear off Sims who were visiting the lot or are they still there?
(b) Does applying the patches cause a reset?

I'll update my list in post #1 in the morning. Please keep checking the thread and correct me if I get anything wrong.

If I remember right, one house had a toddler and baby that were reset. The baby was on the floor, and the toddler was sitting beside her toddler bed (I use Rebecah's toddler bed http://www.modthesims.info/download.php?t=312770 for all my toddlers since toddlers drive me crazy in cribs).

Having off-world loiterers on the lot, say, a Sim on the phone, will cause problems if the lot is reset. Which is why I try not to save when a Sim's on the phone. However, if the off-world loiterers are residents on the lot, such as when they're at work, they'll just be teleported home when the lot is reset.

I think this is fixable by using Pescado's batbox, though?

As a general rule of thumb, most global, major game-changing hacks/mods are capable of causing resets, from my experience. The old version of ACR used to cause resets too, unless I remember wrong. And yes, patches cause resets.

For sims who were at work when the neighborhood reset - don't they lose their vehicles if they drove to work? If I remember right, the sim will be back on the lot when you load it, but not their car/truck.

I've also had pets sinking into the floor when there's a reset. They pull themselves right back out, but probably worth mentioning.

I always try to avoid saving when Sims are on the phone, but I suppose there's a danger from other off-world loiterers, like walk-by's who are just about to appear. I suppose the batbox can check for these, but it still means checking every lot in every 'hood that I play.

What about visiting Sims who are legitimately on the lot? Does the reset send them away?

Legitimate visitors that are on-world are not affected. Remember that Don Lothario is in the Goth's house when first played.

People are disagreeing, but it happens every time in my game.

Has never happened in my game egswanso, and I always play through college with my teens and I always move them to Uni via that button. I imagine the disagrees are others who has never seen it. Maybe you should test it with no CC in your game, to see if it is a conflict

The only time that have happen to me ( sometime ) is when I removed an item that may affect the Sims, It really seem to happen if I need to check my download folder for the cause of crashes,and take a few things out for testing.
Like sometime with beds or living room sofa I notice it will happen, then my Sims will Stand at the table or bed in attention.

So that's why they all stop doing what they are doing! I realised that it has to be due to a mod being added, (I am so new to mods ) - but somehow it did not occur to me that it was a reset. My Sims were all out of bed, standing attention. I don't think all of them are back in bed yet (I try to save when my Sims are asleep) because I have more than 100 households. I did put my 18 students back to bed.
First mod that I tried was InTeen - it caused a reset. (I don't use it any longer, hated it. Could not keep up putting all my Sims on birth control, could not deal with the miscarriages either, had a population explosion).
The Batbox - added that, had a reset.
Added more of the Pescado mods - had a reset. Can't say for sure if one caused it or all of them, because I did not add them one by one.
Added No Sim Load - did not get a reset with that one.
(Please note that, even though I added the mods, I am still not quite sure what to do with some of them, but I am learning )

@>> Justpetro>> The main thing to do is think about what you need the Mod for and if you really need it, Then read the creators notes on what their mods will do and not do.
Now when it comes To creator "Pescado" mods there are some you must or really need to have in your game like. Pescado always leave notes with in his mods to tell you how it work, just be sure his mod will work with your last installed.
1. No unlink on delete
2. No corrupt death
3. No Townie regen
4. Antiredundancy

@Simonut - thank you - I am following advice I am studying each mod properly now before adding it.

This is why for me personally I have several critical folders with different versions of the same mods for different EP configs. Just plop them in after the reinstall and boom no resets because all the necessary mods are there from the very beginning.

One of Pescado's "undiscovered shinies" prevents these resets from happening at all. I know I have it installed, but I'm failing at searching on MATY (this is the only mention of it I can find) and I cannot remember which one it is just by going through my folder of his mods. Possibly nostupidonreset?

I still tend to save shortly after 6pm with everyone home and idle, since I got in the habit of it long ago.

This is really such a nit-picky thing, but the inteen isn't and never has been by TwoJeffs. It's hosted on Simbology yes, but it was made by Jase and updated for the last couple of EP's by Madcat.

Perhaps it is, but a relatively harmless one I've adapted to since I had figured it was just the way it worked.