@lanlyn thank you. I launched the game again yesterday to start work on the next episode of this story. I think I'll continue posting this series until the Generation 3 heir is ready to take over and then I'll give it a rest for a while to continue with Oscar's story or one of the others.
Yesterday, in my game I decided to return Olivia to her home world which is Moonlight Falls. But, when I opened the game the active household was James' home, as expected, but Olivia wasn't there. I soon found her back at the base camp. That must have been where she was when I last saved after she returned from her brief expedition to Vice City so I could check it out as a probably next world I'll be sending sims to live.
I had a suspicion that when you travel to another world without first saving changes in the world you are leaving that the changes since the last save in that world would not be saved. It just didn't seem logical to me that it was saving those changes. There is a time stamp beside each individual file in the save and if the time stamp hasn't changed then that file wasn't saved. Anyway, I proved my suspicions were correct as the few things I'd done at James' house all needed to be done again. That's the reason I sent Olivia back to his world instead of sending her directly home from Vice City.
Well, I tidied up James' house then I sent Olivia to stay with Gary and Donna and their family. I saved the changes. At this point I should have quit and reloaded, but I didn't want to as I was getting tired. So I decided to tidy up Gary's place. Their inventories were full of fish, insects, rocks, harvestables, gems and other stuff that needed to be stored or sold. I sell small as they are high maintenance and tend to die if not cared for constantly and then they often still just die. So I sell them. As I emptied each inventory I kept telling myself I was wasting time as the game would not save as I hadn't shut down and reloaded. Anyway, I just kept on doing it and arguing with myself about this being a huge waste of time.
I wanted Olivia to have a party before she went home as several of her family members were living in Mountain Lake and I thought it would be nice to catch up with them before she returned home. I didn't want to move her around each individual household as that would take weeks. She couldn't have a party at Gary's house as 'she didn't know any sims well enough to invite them to a party'. So I tried inviting them to a venue and that worked.
By the time I'd emptied all of the personal inventories of the members of Gary's household I decided to shut down and leave the computer for the night. It was getting late. I Saved and turned off the monitor and left it to do its thing. I fully expected an Error 12. A few hours later I returned to shut down for the night and discovered it had saved successfully. Now I'm wondering if turning off the monitor helped as I am confused as to why it saved, even though I'm very pleased that it did. I had checked the memory use before starting the save it, it was over 3,000 KB which is a few hundred KB over what it usually is when I get an Error 12 while saving this world. I haven't launched the game yet today so I'm wondering if I was imagining that I had saved. I'll find out later when I do launch. It will be immediately obvious if the inventories are full of collected objects or not.
Happy Simming