[FIXED] [ECO] Future Cubes/Clay Spawning in Inventories

Yes, I agree completely as it makes them completely unplayable when all your sims want to do is play with a future cube that makes them sad on the regular, bake cakes, and practice programming. I had to delete the computer from my lot so my sims would stop programming. 

Yes, I also noticed how my sim wants to practice programming. Its getting to the point where I don't even want to play anymore till its fixed. I have autonomy off, but my sim will still cancel stuff to play with future cubes and lumps of clay.

I've gone round my played households and deleted clay and cubes from inventories and lots (and cheated away the money that generated). I've only noticed one single clay appearance in an inventory since then, and the sim might have picked it up off some surface I overlooked rather than spawned it. So, I'm cautiously hopeful that patch plus aggressive deletion might have solved the problem, but I'm not sure yet.

Meanwhile, one of my sims is still playing instruments that aren't in her inventory and rushing to the mirror to practice acting all the time. The performing arts NAP has never been active in her neighbourhood so I don't know how she picked it up, but it started a couple of weeks after I installed EL. Since the patch, I tried cheat-enacting and cheat repealing that NAP but it hasn't helped. I did it while playing her household though. I will try getting another sim in another neighbourhood to invite her over and try it again. Any advice would be welcome (I don't use mods though).

I have seven saves but have only played one since EL. I still don't dare open any others for fear of NAP contamination. Since the patch, has anyone completely sorted the NAP madness in a contaminated save, or opened an old save and played it safely? I plan to turn NAPs off in all my other saves before playing them again, although I think I will allow environmental change.

@KLoxxon Cheat-enacting and repealing only works to fix NPCs, so it won't fix the active household.  Doing it from another household should work though.  Sims can get infected any time you switch households with the annoying NAPs active, if they're in the zone, whether they live near there or not.

I fixed my contaminated save back in mid-June, and I've been playing (NAP-related) problem-free since then.  I did it by disabling the pack, saving without it, then re-enabling it - a fairly destructive (but faster for my 84-Sim save) method.  I'd only been playing a week with the pack though, and didn't know about repealing fixing things too - I don't think I'd want to do it again now.  However you choose to fix things, make sure to turn off NPC voting and repeal the problematic NAPs first.  Even with disabling the pack completely, when I re-enabled it, the NAPs were still active!  (So I ended up disabling the pack twice.)

I do stick with the same four NAPs in every neighbourhood though, so I lose a little bit of gameplay not really using NAPs (or influence, since I don't have to out-vote NPCs - but most of my neighbourhoods are entirely populated with my own Sims though, so I don't want them voting for weird things anyway).  I use Green Gardening, Eco-Friendly Appliances, Upcycling Initiative, and Clean Energy Production.  They all have weekly inspections and fines for non-compliance, rather than buggy autonomous behaviours.  Water- and Energy-Conservation should be safe too, if you don't mind the utilities going out occasionally.  They only lasted one week in my game, before I got annoyed and repealed them, so I'm not sure how playable they are long-term.  We Wear Bags also doesn't seem to affect played Sims.

If you don't have 4 NAPs active in a neighbourhood, you'll still get notifications every Monday evening that something won the voting - but it doesn't actually take effect.  That, and things like Sims with the Active trait still doing push-ups or Sims playing with clay I forgot to delete, had me jumpy for a few weeks after I cleaned up.  I still get suspicious and check every time they start to cook something on their own.

The Eco Footprint can be a bit glitchy, and has some odd effects on gardens, but overall it's nowhere near the level of brokenness as the NAPs.

Any saves that haven't been opened since installing EL should be safe - but turn off NPC voting before loading any households.  I just opened one of my old ones, and there were no NAPs active.

@Rhaynn0124 thanks very much for the comprehensive advice. I'm reluctant to disable EL entirely because I've made progress in this save that I don't want to lose, but I will try everything else. I've already tried cheat-enact cheat-repealing performing arts from another household while my sim visits, but not played enough to gauge the result of that yet. I have unfortunately spotted some sims playing with clay again after I deleted it all from their inventories a few days ago, which is disappointing as I hoped I'd got rid of that.

I'm relieved to hear that as long as I disable the NAPs before opening a household my uncontaminated saves will be ok. I still haven't done it yet. I'd like to know how far and how well I can clean up the conaminated one first.

Your help is much appreciated!

More generally, I do think it's a great shame that I have to turn off NAPs, such a promising sounding feature of EL before release, to make my game work properly. It's a very poor outcome that all but a handful of them are game ruining. I don't usually do those 'favourite pack' type polls that run in the forums, but if I was taking one now I'm afraid I'd have to say EL is easily the worst EA has released to date because so much is unplayable

I must agree with you.

The patch did not solve the problem.

With voting off, and offending NAPs not active, Sims are still doing what they should not, including mixing destressing drinks, grilling and programming. All of this completely ignoring toddlers needs.

The only solution so far is disabling EL, which means you end up with hairless/naked people, as well as with objects that are no longer there, like vertical planters.

The most ridicolous thing is that EA officially denies EL is broken (I have tickets open with Support, and they just reply with copy pasted text, denying the obvious, treating ppl as fools), so that you can't ask Microsoft or Sony a refund.

It is really time to take responsibility.

It would be as easy as temporarily add the option to completely disable all NAPs, and hidden traits that come with it.