I apologise if this is a redundant question - I've searched around for existing threads about it but have not found anything that seems to address my problem.

When I load a saved game, and choose the household I want to play, their home lot opens up okay but the little portraits at lower left are greyed out and each has a little lightning-bolt arrow symbol on it. If I mouse over these I'm told that the Sims are at home, but I can't see them on the lot and I can't control their actions other than telling them to "Care for self" or socialise with each other. Can't get them to make a phone call, either; the phone button does nothing.

I don't know why it's happening, and it's happened with multiple households in multiple save games.

At the moment I have a sort of workaround for it. I go back to the map of their neighbourhood, click their lot and choose Travel; then I pick one Sim and have them go to another lot. When they arrive there, they're in normal play mode and can summon the others to join them by inviting them to hang out at that lot. Getting them back home again involves doing the same, but with one going to the home lot and then summoning the others. I've found that if I try to make them all travel at the same time - even just one couple - the game goes into loading screen mode and never comes out of it. As you can imagine, that's a bit of a hassle to do every time I want to play, and I'd love to know if there's a way to just... play normally, the way I could when I first started playing the game last week.

This first showed up after I first played with one of the Get to Work professions - I went to work with my doctor Sim, and then when he went home he was the only Sim active and his housemates were greyed out. After saving (because I had to go and do something else), exiting and coming back to the game, he was greyed out too.

Does anyone know if this is related to Get to Work itself or is it more likely to be a clash with a mod or some CC that I've installed? If you can't answer that question without knowing what the hey I have in my game I understand.

What mods do you have installed?

I would suggest the same what simmythesim was pointing you to with his/her question. Try starting the game without mods. Especially without script mods or any custom content that is adding additional functions

Hello, do you use this particular mod - http://www.modthesims.info/download.php?t=548957

The same effects as you have described have been experienced by users of this mod since patching. If so, it can usually be cleared by deleting some cache files. Even if you do not use this mod, clearing your cache files can always be a benefit.

I'll assume your game is installed on C drive. Go to (C)/Users/MyDocuments/ElectronicArts/TheSims4 and look for the "cache" folder. Alphabetically, it is usually the first folder in there. Follow steps 1-5

1. Make a backup of this folder first
2. Open folder. Everything that ends in .cache you can safely delete.
3. Delete any picture files if there are any.
4. Do Not delete the FileCache.ini (Leave this as the only file in there.)
5. Come out. Start game. See if it cleared up the glitch.

(If you are using this mod, you can leave it in all the while. The cache clearing seems to get everything back on track. If the glitch persists, then you'll have to remove this mod and/or others and continue testing.)

Try moving them out of the house you can do this at the screen where you press play to get into the family. Move them into a new house and see if they all arrive there. Then you can move them back to the original house.
This has happened to me and it ended up being the only way to get them back so I could play normally.
You still could have an outdated mod but in my case the game just glitched. I just moved them to another house and they were all out the front...

Thank you for the feedback, everyone. I admit, I was hoping someone would have a quick fix! By process of elimination, I've managed to establish that it wasn't any of my mods causing the problem, so now I'm adding back CC a little at a time. Hopefully I can figure out what the duds were and avoid them in future. (I should probably have mentioned that I'm playing on a Mac.)

Yep the Mac bit would have been helpful..... Did you try moving house?
I play on Pc so can not help with Mac issues....