Ok, while pondering what to do I went back into the game and did a little testing.
* When I click on the ground at a community lot I get normal ground/terrain. Testing my own inquiry and answering my question. The book-ground is gone from the festival ground and things are normal everywhere OTHER than my house. Both sims in the household experience this.
When I try to move in the house, one sim sees books to read, the other sees 'Brianna is going home now' -- so a sim object that isn't there.
* I go into build/buy to see if this is related to (or if I now cannot) build walls. Lo and behold, I cannot manipulate walls correctly now.
I CAN build a wall, but I cannot delete the wall that I just built.
I CAN delete foundation.
I CANNOT delete wall.
I seem to be able to manipulate anything else in the house.
I have NEVER hung holdiay lights at this house.
Honestly, everything was fine until I clicked 'put away books from inventory' and/or started trying to delete duplicate copies of books.
WHEN I try to manipulate an existing wall, I see the K tool (delete tool) hover over pumpkins, elixirs of job boost, etc, other strange things. These things were in personal inventory during the move or are things I own now in the household.
It is not raining; it is 4 days to winter. It was raining when I saved out of the game to quit and restart (when I was suddenly having issues with the ground acting like objects).
I am tired of trying to get this to work, I am going to bed. Looking for suggestions on how to salvage this game. I can go back to the prior save before the ground turned to books and elixirs and lose a few game days. I don't know why this inventory duping thing is happening.
I don't know what to do about this issue or how to stop it. I have been wary of putting anything on the ground at all, and now I no longer trust the 'drag here to sell' option, but this is leaving me fewer ways to get rid of things. This does bring to mind that the last house I abandoned and bulldozed the lot on where I had this 'cannot manipulate the walls' issue, when I was leaving the abandoned empty lot, everything sold/bulldozed that I could, mouse hovered over stairs that I couldn't get rid of and I saw 'Ghost of some Goth' and I thought what the heck? Why is there a ghost stuck in my house. Is that the problem? I don't think it was THE problem, but now I think it is indicative OF the problem -- the whole game getting confused that a wall is a wall and should be treated like one, and not some player object that I can't just simply bulldoze and redraw.
Am I the only one experiencing self-cloning umbrellas? Delete that deletes, gives you money and also spits the object magically out on the ground, sometimes visible and sometimes not?
Anyway, like I said, suggestions please.
Copy to bin, evict, bulldoze, move back in etc etc? Go live at the firestation and give up on building? I need to eke out 1 or 2 more sim weeks to finish this stupid achievement before I can just scrap the entire neighborhood and go try over -- the sad thing is, though, based on forum activity, I don't think it's 'just me' and having a bad game file or something.
Should I try mods? I have not been using anything this install. Not any of the 3 I used to (and yes this is a fresh game untainted by mods).
Well faced with shutting down, and knowing I was not going to save...
* I went to edit town.
* I saved a copy of the entire household to the bin. This was very fast.
* I moved the family to the clipboard along with the house.
* Once family was evicted, I saved the house structure (I had done remodeling).
Even mousing over the house from map view I could see bottle of nectar I had never owned. Meh.
* I bulldozed the lot. No more strange things on the lot. Nice happy shiny empty lot.
* I placed the bin copy to the newly emptied lot.
* I moused over in map view, no more nectar or pumpkins.
* Made this the active household.
Seems ok now, for the moment. I know why I had been hesitant to do this, losing perfect items in the fridge etc. I also know I was forced to do this on my original house lot due to seeds and umbrellas that could not be deleted from the floor / ground. Seeds that spawned from the garden premium content that I never picked up eventually bugged and I could not EVER pick them up, and as mentioned before, one time replacing umbrellas, in addition to duplicating, well, they became unclickable/unmovable/undeletable even in build/buy mode. So I've used this "trick" (if you can call such heavy handed measures a trick) to address other inventory/item managment and trash management issues.
Also perhaps related, the singing plants v zombie sunflower I had in the garden, the items do not decay after the time they claim. Something seems just plain wrong with trash cleanup.
