My sim finally finished a song! The game text said he could sell it at the mailbox to make royalties. I checked his inventory and the song book was GONE! It vanished as soon as he finished the song! Is this a bug or did it magically publish itself?

This happened to me, on the song writing and book writing, the first time one of my sims finished them. No it didn't publish itself. This might be a stupid question but did you go to mailbox and click on it right after the sim finished the song? I don't know if it's a bug for the first time they finish writing ( I can't remember with the song writing if I open the inventory but I know I did with the book writing) or a bug with opening the inventory when they are done but after that when I have them finished books, songs, I don't open the inventory just clicked on the mailbox and it worked. When you click on the mailbox it asked you what you want to do, Like with the books, at first it will say self publish then when you move up in the writing skill you can sell it to a publisher. So your sim will have to write another song and then just click on the mailbox, they will go to the mail box after you click on what you want them to do with the song.

The songbook is only available in the inventory until it's finished, then it vanishes. I've been able to license songs a few times but still have songs that are not licensed yet. All the songs should be visible when you click the mailbox and then choose from what instrument you wrote your song (in my case the piano) and then select the song but as you already know the menu doesn't always show and I'm pretty sure that's a bug! =/
Also, it seems like you can only license one and then wait a day? to license the next one? Not sure how it works yet since it make no sense to me...

I clicked on the mailbox and he had no song. Later he finished a song and the guitar vanished

Did the guitar end up in his inventory? The sims will sometime put the guitar in their inventory but I have also have had guitars disappear if I place them on a community lot. Not sure if one of the townies that play it walked off with it or not. (putting in their own inventory, I don't even know if they have an inventory because they are not in the world) or it just disappears.

I've played with this song writing stuff quite a bit.

What I have noticed: Number 1 thing is that it takes about a sim hour to quit the action. Rather than reset the sim just cancel with an hour before he or she has to be somewhere. This prevents further bugging out.

If I have one song started and I choose to start writing another one, it often bugs out. I first noticed this before I figured out the song book was in the inventory. I kept clicking write song and starting more and more of them like an idiot. This will prevent completed songs from being license-able and from updating the Musical Genius aspiration.

You can license one song per day, per instrument. If you have a song written from all 3 instruments, you can license one song from each instrument.

The fun part is: When you stop receiving royalties for a song, you can re-license it and keep getting royalties for it.

Unfortunately that doesn't work for me! If I get the menu to license a song or not seems very random to me, definitely not every day or all my songs would be licensed by now. Most of the time the action for licensing a song is greyed out which annoys me to no end.

You can write a song one skill level before you can publish it. So this is another thing to take into account if you can't publish your song. And it is definately not every day that you can publish a new one. More like a week. It also seemed kind of inconsistent to me, but to be honest I didn't count the days.

Anyway, the limitation on licensing songs makes no sense. One song per instrument is strange compared to publishing books. Or it is made by a dev who wasn't aware that the dev that made the writing skill went about it completely different.



I click the writing action to cancel and then direct the sim to walk a few meters. That is the only way I can cancel song writing fairly fast. The whole song writing and publishing can use some fixes.

I realized too late that it's not daily. I actually was just playing and went It's one song licensed per instrument at a time. As long as you are getting royalties you cannot license another song from that instrument. Part of why this seems broken is that it's not like books. My songs are bringing about 350 - 550 per day royalties though. Books have to be pretty high level to get that high. I don't think I have ever written one that came close. But it's been a long time since I played my Writer sim so it could be my bad memory.

Edit: My last royalty report for 3 songs.

If your writer reaches top in the writers career, they work only a few days a week. You can write and publish a crazy amount of books then and get rich quickly from royalties. Writing a book is also faster then writing a song. You can also start earning at low lvl of writing skill. If you keep at it, it quickly adds up over a lot more then your example in the screenshot.
With song writing, you need to raise 3 different skills high before you can even start writing for those instruments. And you can just license one song per instrument at a time. So 3 running licenses at once max. While you can earn royalties of any number of books at the same time.

I really think that song writing is not working as intended atm. This also shows in your example, where if you stop writing a song and then start a new one instead of finishing the one you were working on already, the game messes it up. And how difficult it is to interrupt song writing.

I just had another weird bug with songwriting. My sim was doing a song on his guitar and somehow it credited him for writing a song on his daughter's child sized violin.

I'm starting to wonder if maybe I have mod conflict or something. I'm having odd bugs all around.