Rotational Play, Mods Questions, etc.
Been awhile (3) years since I loaded TS3. I was playing about four EPs about three years ago and didn't get around to reinstalling Seasons, LN, and University but was playing one household with not a...
Forum Discussion
Some really good answers thus far. I have a couple of things to add (shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone here...) ;)
1 & 2: There is no way to control what the game will do with sims and households if they are inactive residents, with or without story progression running, unless there are mods in play to protect them. TS3 is not designed to be played rotationally. Under EA standard, the inactive residents around the ones we are actively playing are meant to exist for the amusement and convenience of our one active household, we aren't supposed to care about what happens to them. The only way to carefully control what can happen to inactives if we choose to play rotationally is to embrace one of the two "big" story progression mods and leverage its settings to block various forms of progression from happening on the town, subsets of it (castes), households, and individual sims.
Here is the NRaas way of doing that, subject to all kinds of variation as the player decides which aspects of progression to nail down and for how many sims. This method can be as simple or as intricate as the player desires: https://www.nraas.net/community/Story-Progression-Rotational-Caste-Settings
AwesomeMod also offers ways to do this, although its form of progression called Story Mode is more heavy-handed than NRaas SP, is not modular (meaning you get all of it or nothing), and has far fewer options for the player to select if they don't want them all.
6: I can't imagine playing what is intended to be a long-running ongoing game without ErrorTrap and Overwatch present. Would also add to that the other NRaas mods designed specifically to enhance and protect game performance: Traffic, Register, to an extent GoHere, MasterController for its Reset Everything function as already mentioned, and Traveler if any form of world travel is to be used.
1 & 2: There is no way to control what the game will do with sims and households if they are inactive residents, with or without story progression running, unless there are mods in play to protect them. TS3 is not designed to be played rotationally. Under EA standard, the inactive residents around the ones we are actively playing are meant to exist for the amusement and convenience of our one active household, we aren't supposed to care about what happens to them. The only way to carefully control what can happen to inactives if we choose to play rotationally is to embrace one of the two "big" story progression mods and leverage its settings to block various forms of progression from happening on the town, subsets of it (castes), households, and individual sims.
Here is the NRaas way of doing that, subject to all kinds of variation as the player decides which aspects of progression to nail down and for how many sims. This method can be as simple or as intricate as the player desires: https://www.nraas.net/community/Story-Progression-Rotational-Caste-Settings
AwesomeMod also offers ways to do this, although its form of progression called Story Mode is more heavy-handed than NRaas SP, is not modular (meaning you get all of it or nothing), and has far fewer options for the player to select if they don't want them all.
6: I can't imagine playing what is intended to be a long-running ongoing game without ErrorTrap and Overwatch present. Would also add to that the other NRaas mods designed specifically to enhance and protect game performance: Traffic, Register, to an extent GoHere, MasterController for its Reset Everything function as already mentioned, and Traveler if any form of world travel is to be used.
