A few lingering questions

I can sort of answer 6. I can't remember the percentage but there is always a chance that hair or eye colour will be random and not inherited. I always cringe when I end up with a child with a preset hair or eye colour because I NEVER use presets!

1. There are some documented glitches with this career on the wiki. I recently had a sim in the criminal career and experienced some of them. It took my sim longer than I expected to get promoted. The issues weren't game breaking though. Maybe try using MC's 'go to work' command on your sim's boss, if necessary?

2. I have no idea; I don't think I've ever played that situation myself.

3. I haven't experienced this. When my sims decide to pick up an infant or toddler I can always have them do something else and dismiss the 'pick up baby/toddler' interaction in their queue.

4. Maybe less of the male sims in my game would age up into female hair if there was such a way to do that, but alas...

5. There's a 3rd party program that made it easy to customize clothing categories and make clothing "valid for random" or not, which I think affects whether the game can use that item on aging. This program is Easy CASP Editor. Unfortunately it doesn't work for Steam installs or for patch 1.69. That was the only practical way I can see of making clothing unavailable for use on age up. I just take every active sim into MC>Stylist on age up. Occasionally I use that on inactives if their outfits are really terrible, but I mostly let those sims fend for themselves.

6. Yes. The mutation rate is 10%. http://sims.wikia.com/wiki/Genetics#The_Sims_3

1 - Try giving the sim a paid day off or two using MC Cheats. I haven't had much success with that strategy, but other players experiencing issues with work shifts that span midnight, which is I believe the cause of these problems, say that it helps.

2 - MC Resetting probably would have helped (or did help, but by then it didn't matter) fix this. Testingcheatsenabled sim resets really don't do very much, MC Resets rebuild the sims (object, lot, etc.) from the ground up based on the data that the game has on hand for them at the time.

3 - A DebugEnabler Reset of the sim (requires the DE mod, of course) will cut through action queues where things cannot otherwise be canceled or where they are so high priority that they aren't even going to bother showing up on the queue for the player to see what the sim is doing. DE Resets are the gentlest kind there are, they clear the sim's action queue and a couple of other really small things (this is also how to get back missing homework assignments), the sims may seem to jump to one side if they were involved with another at the time, but that's about it.

You might also try locking the baby's bedroom door on and off to see if the adults will leave it alone when their attention is not really required.

4 - There isn't a reliable connection between the child, teen, adult, and elder versions of what look like the same hairs to us. The hair has to be re-rolled, the version that the sims had in a younger life state wouldn't "fit" them if they kept it. If I misunderstood and we're really talking about the girl's pigtails on grown males or something similar, that one has a different cause.

6 - NRaas SP has a more user controlled and arguably "better" genetics system available, also requires the SP Population module to enable Advanced Genetics. It sounds like you are relying on EA's? As for the hair color mutations, Consort's Hair Color mod is very popular to control and re-roll such things within more acceptable limits: http://www.simlogical.com/ContentUploadsRemote/uploads/1779

Thanks so much for responding. It's always great to see how people are willing to help out a fellow simmer who maybe doesn't know what she's doing all of the time. And could stand to learn a few things.

@Mikezumi I'm always disappointed when the game *deletes* the custom features from my carefully curated genetic line. I made them special for a reason, and it feels like my influence is eroding as the generations move forward. I'll definitely resort to using MC to reroll the inheritance on a sim baby I want to keep, provided I remember to save right before birth (I often use MC to put the infant in CAS and age up to teen just to have a first look).

@TreyNutz I'd heard about some of the criminal career glitches before, but the wiki's list is... well, longer than it has any right to be. My problem has always been the last one listed—that the sim goes into the building but does not accrue experience, and the status on the career tab says "going to work" until midnight—but I'd never thought to force the boss to go.

A ten percent chance of mutation seems awfully high to me. I mean, I know IRL the general rate of spontaneous mutation is 1/10,000 base pairs (many of which are interchangeable enough to not make a difference) with some corrective mechanisms lowering the rate of permanent changes considerably from there. Even with epigenetics, the chance of a novel phenotype in a child is quite low. I wonder what EA was thinking. In this game, I had a ginger male and a blonde female together, and the fifth and final kid had brown hair. I imagine the guy looked at the toddler and said to his gf, "Is there anything you want to tell me?"

@igazor Of course you would know how to address my issues. The DE reset sounds like exactly what I want, and if that mod isn't too demanding, I'll probably download it the next time I play. I've just started locking doors for other reasons (most often to prevent an accusation of cheating), but I hadn't thought of using it for the baby. Of course, the babies live on the back porch, where toddlers can get the Loves the Outdoors moodlet, with the stereo blasting their favorite music and enough room for all their toys, so that might be a bit more complicated. What can I say, it's just more efficient when there are a bunch of kids being cared for by one poor put-upon sim.

About the criminal career, do you mean that adding and subtracting days off might fix the bug, or that my sim should just not go to work at all that day? I usually don't keep the criminals, which means I want them to get promoted as quickly as possible and move out, making my household only moderately overstuffed. And would using the MC "go to work" command on my sim force the accrual of experience? Like I said, I'm not above using MC to credit the sim with the actual hours worked, but I'd prefer a slightly less cheaty way to make things work.

As far as the hair goes, I haven't had any problems with hairstyles crossing gender or age categories (except one time before I used mods, but that sim morphed across all categories). I just think certain styles look terrible, especially on certain sims with certain personalities. Is the hair rolled at the age transition to teen, or is it predetermined like genetics? Because I think I've seen the same style appear when I've had to quit without saving after a birthday and then reloaded when that sim was still a child. But really, I asked because two of my last three females to age up to teen got Agnes Crumplebottom's hair, and I want that to stop.

And yes, I have EA's story progression because I'm stressing my game enough as it is, and nraas SP might make it unplayable (I think? I've crashed due to the 2GB cider-imposed limit three times on this computer, once in my current game, although that was mostly just me being careless. And I trashed the save that came immediately before). I take it the mod you recommended is compatible with the nraas suite? I really care more about the eye color, though, as that's the distinguishing trait in most of my families.

By the way, on the subject of crashes, the xcpt logs all say "free virtual memory: 0," which I expected, but "total virtual memory: 2047 Mb," even though they're from two completely different games and several days apart. Is there a reason why that number would be exactly the same every time? I honestly have no idea what I'm looking at.

Thanks again for the responses.

Back Porches: Those can be locked up too, or some combination of locks and gated fences can be used. But I think we've already established on a different thread that our preferred methods of child rearing are a bit different from each other. ;)

DebugEnabler: The mod is not at all demanding. It's really an interface into debugging commands that EA's developers left in the game but with no other way for the player to access them. It's like MasterController in that it just displays command menus on sims, lots, and City Hall but doesn't really do anything else all by itself. It's unlike MasterController in that the mod doesn't actually include the scripted commands, it just makes available what are already there. We don't even know what half of the DE commands do, some should be avoided entirely, but the ones we are familiar with can be very helpful.
http://nraas.wikispaces.com/DebugEnabler+Interactions
http://nraas.wikispaces.com/DebugEnabler+FAQ

Criminal Career: The point of giving the sim a day or two off is to let the game have a chance for the overnight work schedule to correct itself. You can try MC > Go To Work instead, but in my experience if the game doesn't think the sim is supposed to be at work at that time (even though they are), then they won't stay in the rabbithole for very long.

Re-Rolls of Hair Styles: These are not genetic unless (I think) the sim is a clone of one parent, they are determined at the time of age-up. Yes, Consort's mods are compatible with all things NRaas.

SP: Right, NRaas SP is the last mod you should consider adding at this point because of the expected performance hit. Just letting you know what was available out there.

Virtual Memory: This can happen to anyone, what the game calls "virtual memory" is not the same as what we in the rest of the world mean by that phrase. The usual culprits for using it all up are long (or not so long on a Mac) CAS and Edit Town sessions. When it runs out of it, you get an Error12 or a crash (or first one then the other). There is no solution for this on TS3 for Mac other than limiting your CAS and Edit Town sessions as much as possible, saving often, and purging RAM during and in between them.

"igazor;c-16280078" wrote:
Back Porches: Those can be locked up too, or some combination of locks and gated fences can be used. But I think we've already established on a different thread that our preferred methods of child rearing are a bit different from each other. ;)

That's definitely true. Maybe I should just say that I have an "alternative parenting style" from most simmers, or that I like to raise "free-range children." Would that stop the looks I keep getting on the street? I'd really appreciate that.

"igazor;c-16280078" wrote:
We don't even know what half of the DE commands do, some should be avoided entirely, but the ones we are familiar with can be very helpful.

Hang on, did you just say... that you don't know something? About TS3? That's... now I'm really confused. And I think I need to sit down for a minute. ::deep breaths:: The world is spinning. Why is the world spinning? This doesn't make any sense...

Okay, I'm back. I think. I've used MC>go to work before, when my musician (rock star branch) got promoted to level 8 or 9 and wasn't going to go to work for four days (the game skipped assigning the next day's shift). The sim was at work for the entire shift length minus the time between the top of the hour and when I used the MC command, something like 8:40 to 12:00 for a job level with a four hour shift. I'm going to try that when it next comes up, as my sims tend to get promoted every day and I don't want them losing the next night's shift every time. Whenever there isn't a promotion, the game corrects the problem by the next day.

With the virtual memory problem, I was just wondering if it was weird that all three crash logs listed the total as exactly 2,047 Mb. The last time it crashed, I was careless and having fun redoing all my teens in CAS, and I kind of knew it could be a problem, but I thought I was about to quit, so I let myself be lazy and didn't purge RAM. It actually crashed a bit later, when I quit after saving (btw I successfully quit, and once at desktop it just said "an exception was raised" and asked if I wanted to debug), so I went back to a save from a few RL hours before. I've known for a long time that Edit Town is also an issue (surprisingly, I figured this one out myself—there was a noticeable increase in lag every time I returned to my current game), so whenever I'm redecorating another house in anticipation of moving out a child, I save the completed house to the bin, quit without saving, and then just replace the original house with my upgraded version the next time I load the game. And then I make a fresh save after the move, just in case.

Side not about purging RAM: When I was using the Ambitions alias to launch my game, it really really didn't like being put in windowed mode. Every time I quit (never "save and quit," of course), I ended up having to force quit the game, even when I had just loaded so that I could see if I knew how to purge. But force-quitting wasn't all that uncommon with Ambitions in general, even with a relatively fresh game session, and I didn't usually see any signs of corruption in the save that had to be force quit, even on my old computer. I could have missed the corruption, obviously, but I came to see needing to force quit as just the game being difficult. Now, however, I have a new (for me) SP that's more recent than Ambitions, so that alias launches the game, and I haven't had to force quit once, even the time it crashed. I know that Ambitions causes a few problems of its own, but I'd never read anything about windowed mode being one of them. Any thoughts?

"puzzlezaddict;c-16280289" wrote:
Hang on, did you just say... that you don't know something? About TS3?

I know you were joking, but this game is so rich with so many kinds of content that speaks so much more to some players more than others that yes, there is plenty I do not really know about the game and I will readily admit that when asked about some aspect I am not all that familiar with. And players who hold, oh I don't know let's say Simporting, Plumbot building, pattern creation with CAP, horse training, or some other things I've never really attempted as near and dear to their hearts will be very quick to correct me when I get things wrong. As well they should. I don't even have all of the EA worlds installed yet, have never run a toy or other kind of savvy seller store as Midnight Hollow is still standing by on my someday to do list, as well as a bunch of other major things like that.

But more to the point, no one knows what some of these DE revealed commands do other than the, at one time active, EA developers who put them in there with no documentation for us mere mortals to follow. Neither Twallan when he was around nor our current lead developer have any idea what many of them do either, or else they would have added to that documentation page. Some of them we can guess by name. "Cause random puddle to spawn." Well, I think we can figure that one out. But the unknown ones are more cryptic than that and some can/will be game-breaking if one messes around with them in something other than a testing environment.

"puzzlezaddict;c-16280289" wrote:
With the virtual memory problem, I was just wondering if it was weird that all three crash logs listed the total as exactly 2,047 Mb.

The 2,047 MB is your game's total capacity for what it calls virtual memory (the limit is courtesy of Cider). The 0 MB is an empty subset of that at the point of the crash that the game had left to work with. But it wouldn't really be any more pleasant if it had 3 MB or 28 MB or some other too small to be helpful amount left to work with either. Again, this can happen to any of us who stay in CAS or Edit Town doing fancy things for too long, it just tends to happen much sooner on the crippled Mac version of the game.

No idea about your Ambitions vs. other EP purge RAM question, that might be a better one for Bluebellflora to answer. But sounds like it's not important anymore as your running of the game with a later released EP in play has made things better at least in this regard.

"igazor;c-16280337" wrote:
But more to the point, no one knows what some of these DE revealed commands do other than the, at one time active, EA developers who put them in there with no documentation for us mere mortals to follow. Neither Twallan when he was around nor our current lead developer have any idea what many of them do either, or else they would have added to that documentation page. Some of them we can guess by name. "Cause random puddle to spawn." Well, I think we can figure that one out. But the unknown ones are more cryptic than that and some can/will be game-breaking if one messes around with them in something other than a testing environment.

See, now I'm imagining that one of the commands causes some sim, somewhere in town, to make a fried peanut butter and banana sandwich, eat it, and then go to the bathroom and have a heart attack on the toilet.

Thank you so much for answering my questions. Some of them I've had rattling around in my head for years without resolution, which for me is more annoying even than knowing for sure that there is no way to address a problem. I suppose I could just try being a reasonably well-adjusted human being, but where's the fun in that?

And... I have more questions. Because of course I do. Thinking about this thread has made me remember stuff that I hadn't thought about in a long time, so why not ask if anyone knows what's going on?

7) Is there a way to turn off the gifts that arrive in my mailbox? I'm talking about the mostly decorative objects that just appear in the family inventory when my sims get the mail. I don't have the Late Night EP, so no celebrities, but my sims do have a lot of friends. I realize I can just sell the items, but I don't want the money either, and it would be a pain to keep readjusting the family funds every time I emptied the inventory.

8) In the medical career, a sim receives a research book to read after every shift, and "research" is a performance metric for the job... but I've never found a way to raise this metric to "outstanding." It also resets to "normal" after every shift. Is there something else that I could be doing to raise it? I kind of resent the hit to my sim's rate of gaining experience, although it doesn't matter as much during the longest shifts.

9) I know that the game is supposed to regenerate the Grim Reaper if you move him into a house in the neighborhood, but what can I do if this doesn't happen? A long time ago, I broke a game this way—there was no new Grimmy to reap an elder sim, so he just floated in midair indefinitely. Resetting made him selectable again and able to act normally, but I couldn't move anyone out of the house as the game still thought someone was dying. I had mods at the time, though I might not have installed Overwatch yet. I've avoided using Grimmy since then, but in my current save I have a particularly emo almost YA girl whose elderly grandfather is due for a visit in a week or so, and I'm getting ideas again.

10) I've noticed that collectibles seem not to start spawning right away when I load a save. At first, I wondered if this was just some sort of bias on my part, so I started using MC to monitor the total number of gems and metals on the map at any given time. Often, there will be nothing new at all for 12 hours or so, just a couple of new rocks in the next 12 hours, and then a much more rapid rate of spawning going forward. Is this normal? Or is there something I can do to kickstart the process when I open a game?

11) Years ago, an update to my game (maybe the one that came with Seasons, but I hadn't updated in a while and only did so when I decided to install mods) caused all of my plants to grow at the maximum speed. All plantables, from tomatoes to life fruit and money trees, were ready to harvest four days after planting, even without fertilizer. I should note that this only kicked in after I harvested some plants around town, so that the grape seed I planted on day one would grow at half the rate of the other common plants, but if I planted another one on day three (or fertilized the original), it would start progressing every day like my other plants. I actually posted about this on the nraas forums, but no one knew why this was happening. I play on normal lifespan, and it occurred to me that this change might have come with Seasons, to compensate for the winter hibernation phase of plants. But I wouldn't know. I also thought that it might be a indicative of an issue with my old computer's game files, but the same thing is happening on my new computer, with fresh Origin downloads. It doesn't bother me much anymore, but making well over §50,000 per day just on moneybags seems a bit unreasonable. That's just from one founder sim's own personal garden (24 money trees), and she hasn't even met Grimmy yet, although with half a dozen death flowers she'll be around for a while.

12) I've heard rumors that sims have hidden metrics for certain activities, not traits per se like the ones inherited from a parent with special abilities, but more like varying levels of skill that are independent of anything I might do in CAS. For example, maybe some sims would *naturally* be better sculptors or writers, producing more masterpieces or bestsellers, respectively, regardless of or separately from the traits I assigned. Also, in one game, even though I didn't do anything to change the game's default 75% success rate, my original couple and their descendants succeeded in their attempts to conceive 15 consecutive times. The chances of that are... hang on... 14,348,907/1,073,741,824, or about 1.34%. Other times, my family (from different CAS sims) has had a noticeably harder time reproducing. I'm just wondering if there's any truth to the rumor that the game has hidden metrics for sims, and if so, whether I can do anything to see them.

I think that's everything, but I'm half-expecting to wake up in the middle of the night with a handful of new questions. Maybe I should work on developing an off switch. But not yet; I'm having too much fun right now.

7. I think you are referring to the attraction gifts (and calls) that came with...Seasons I think. I use a mod by Shimrod to stop that. It's available at simsasylum (free registration required to view and download). Shimrod's mods are in the retired creators section.

8. I haven't played this career in ages. I'll have to try again next in my game.

9. I think moving in GR is bad. @igazor should know. From what I hear you are better off using the 'fake' GR that comes with the Door of Life and Death from Grim's Ghastly Manor.

10. I think that's normal, I'd imagine it helps reduce lag in new games so spawners are not all on the same cycle. You can force spawners to start their spawn cycles with a command in NRaas Traveler. Although objects won't be available immediately with that command they do show up a lot sooner.

11. I haven't experienced this. Plants do grow faster under the Swift-gro Gardening Station because it updates plants twice a day.

12. I've never heard of this.