@DrangedCinderela, mine disappeared again last night, too, after 5 days of staying on the lot and not disappearing. I was so mad!!! (Haha.) It's so weird, though. I have several different households/games running, ALL of the households have pets, and it's just this ONE game (the game I created of my simself and sims of my real life furbabies) that's affected by this bug.
I still do think there's a script running in the game somewhere that's treating pets as NPCs, I'm just not sure what's causing that script to behave the way it does. I thought I was on to something with the key holder hypothesis because it did stop for a while after I tested that...but that's obviously not what's triggering it, because it happened again last night after several sim days of normal functionality. I will say that when they disappeared last night, I was able to click the "call over" whistle on their grayed out portraits and get them to come right back again...didn't have to go through the whole ridiculous process of calling them on the phone and inviting them to come back to their own home to hang out, so...that was an improvement at least.
I may try deleting the cache files on the back end to see if that "wipes" whatever script has gotten "stuck" to these two particular pets. If that doesn't work, I may remove them from the family and replace them with "clean" versions of themselves I saved to my library from CAS before I started this particular game...because for these pets to be affected by this bug and for literally every other pet in every other game I have to function normally tells me there's some script somewhere that's attached to these two for whatever reason, and it's causing the game to read them as NPC "friends" instead of household members. Maybe clearing the cache will fix it. If not, replacing them with unplayed copies of themselves might.
They don't have skills or anything, so all I'd have to redo if I put in fresh versions would be the relationship building, which is no biggie in the grand scheme of things, and totally worth it if it works.
It's just so weird that it's only this ONE household that's affected. All of my households have pets, and this doesn't happen in any of my other games. I've even tried moving to a new world thinking that maybe the neighborhood was borked or something, but...no dice. That didn't work either.
Really wish they'd figure this one out and fix it. It's clearly a bug...a big, annoying, game breaking bug. ☹️
I'll try the cache thing, and if it comes to it, the replacement thing, and I'll let you know how that goes. 🙂
