Re: Sims 3 household sim picture not appearing
@SaoMacnamara You can only play one household at a time, but you can switch between them as often as you like. When you want to change the active family, click the three dots in the lower left corner of your screen (where you have the options to save and quit) and select Edit Town. Find the house of the family you want to play and click its map tag, and then select "switch to this household."
Keep in mind though that your original sims will go on living their lives without your input. That means they can switch jobs, start or end relationships, move to a new house, and even have kids while you're not playing them. There's no way to prevent this in an unmodded game; it's just the way things are set up.
The other option, and maybe the better one for you, is to have several different saves, one for each family you want to play. Each time you start a new game in a certain town, the sims that live there will appear in their original form, not the way they progressed as you played a previous save. So for example, each time you start a new Sunset Valley, Bella Bachelor, Mortimer Goth, and Malcolm Landgraab will be children again, even if in your previous save they've all grown up and started families of their own.
This way, you can play each of these other families separately, without worrying about what's happening with your original sims. If you want, you can also save a household from one game to the bin and then place it in a different save. (The bin files show up across all saves.) The sims in that household won't know anyone in the new world, but they'll keep the skills they built, and the jobs as well, if the buildings that host those jobs are present in the new world.
By the way, whether you're rotating households or not, the game takes care of inactive sims. You might see them hungry or unhappy for some reason, but that's just the game engine calculating that maybe they should want something. (So if you see them at 6 pm, they're looking for dinner.) But they won't starve without your attention—their needs will be reset when you're not watching them.
