This started happening in my game, too, after the most recent patch. Granted, fires have always been a problem in Granite Falls (which is where I was when this happened) and are set to "accidentally" occur way too frequently, but I used to be able to send my sims on vacation for 4 or 5 days and have ONE fire, maybe two, the entire time they were there.
Today was the first time I'd sent them there since the latest update, and they stayed in the same cabin they've always rented. They were there for two days, and there were ELEVEN fires on the lot in the two days they were there - 2 fires on the first evening and then NINE fires on the second day, and always in the same spot on the ground.
One of my sims caught on fire as well. He wasn't playing in the fire or anything like that when it happened. In fact, he wasn't near the fire at all. He was standing off to the side talking to one of his friends. There are no seats slotted next to the fire, either. There's nothing near the campfire but the ground, and the lot does not have the "cursed" trait.
By the afternoon of the second day, there were fires breaking out on the lot every 5 to 7 minutes. There's no way to do anything BUT extinguish fires when that's happening. I couldn't stand it anymore and ended their vacation early to make it stop.
Whatever value in the code that dictates the frequency/chances of accidental fires definitely needs to be adjusted. Having the lot catch on fire 11 times in 2 days is excessive, to say the least.
I DID notice that the sims kept adding logs every few seconds. Unfortunately, they were NPCs (friends from other households who traveled with my sims) that I could not control. I could stop the two sims who were from my active household from doing it, but there was nothing I could do to stop the 6 NPC friends from adding logs to the fire. The "add log" value is set to overkill level in the code, too, it seems. If that's the only way to stop the lot from catching on fire, then Granite Falls gameplay is basically just canceling the add log interaction from sims' queues or constantly extinguishing fires now.
I think it's a bug. Actually, I think it's a problem with the way the game assigns autonomous actions to sims. (This is going to seem like it's veering off topic, but what I'm doing is providing examples of issues that have happened that I think are all related to the same core problem, so bear with me here.)
It's the lack of variety in autonomous actions manifesting in a game breaking way yet again. Sims do seem to get stuck on one autonomous action and it's a constant battle to get them to do anything other than whatever their latest obsession is, and for whatever reason, autonomous obsessions DO seem to override anything the user directs a sim to do, as well as any OTHER autonomous actions that COULD be chosen instead. Actions I assign to them are the ones that get dropped from their queues. Not the autonomous ones. There's basically no stopping them once they've decided to do one thing over and over again. My lot is full of fun things for them to do, but they all do the same things over and over again. (Maybe this is why players keep saying the sims have no personality, just a thought)
For a while, it was autonomous dancing to stereos. I had a sim refuse to eat and almost starve to death because nothing mattered more than dancing and anything I told her to do immediately got dropped from her queue. Pets and children were almost taken away for the sake of dancing. When Father Winter came to visit, he refused to give the children presents because he didn't come down the chimney to be the focal point of WinterFest. That man came to dance.
I finally went through every house and every lot in town and removed every single radio/stereo/speaker that existed. My game has no music at all now and nightclubs and DJs are a wash because of it, but at least my sims aren't dancing themselves to death anymore.
On my home lot, the current obsessions are either using the observatory or cooking meal after meal after meal and never eating them. They get hungry, they cook, but they don't eat, and the low hunger motive triggers them to cook another meal instead. Hunger no longer triggers sims to eat. It only triggers them to cook and keep cooking and cooking and cooking. I had one sim get hungry and grill 32 servings of food before I realized what was happening and stopped him.
I should also add that sims do not remove food they start cooking in the microwaves anymore. Instead, they leave the food in there and immediately cook another meal, which eventually leads to them not being able to do the dishes because there's something stuck in the microwave and it causes routing problems when it comes to cleaning up or loading the dishwasher, and then we end up with piles of dirty dishes dropped on the floor or mysteriously placed on shelves that are far too high for sims to reach. .
I am considering removing all fridges, microwaves, grills, and stoves from my game next and having them live off of harvestables to stop the autonomous cooking obsession and the plethora of problems it causes, because when I'm on the home lot, gameplay is all about trying to stop sims from cooking 40 meals in a row, and when you've got six hungry sims who are bound and determined to keep cooking while refusing to ever eat, it gets out of hand pretty quickly.
Remember CDs, how they used to skip? It's like the sims are skipping. Once they've completed an action, they don't move on to the next phase of that process (like eating, for example). They just complete the first step of the process over and over again, until they've piled an entire forest's worth of logs on a single campfire or cooked 30+ servings of food they won't eat. (Side note, but having sims autonomously get leftovers out of the fridge was GREAT. I'll never understand why that feature got removed (because they don't do that anymore at all.)
Point being, in Granite Falls, the autonomous obsession seems to be adding logs to the fire every 2-3 seconds, which results in the lot catching on fire 11 times in 2 days and it can't be stopped because NPCs are doing it. I had intended to take my sims on a little collecting/hermit befriending adventure, but the lot wouldn't stop catching on fire long enough for us to actually leave the lot. That's all gameplay was - putting out fires that wouldn't stop breaking out long enough for them to leave the lot and being too tense to do anything else, because 6 NPC sims became obsessed with adding logs to the fire on an endless loop..
It was a nightmare, basically.
There is SO much potential in this game. There are so many things Sims could do - so many skills they could develop or relationships they could build with other household members. Perhaps autonomous actions could be randomized or even put on a cycle, instead of having the sims autonomously do the same thing over and over again to the point where it renders real gameplay impossible.
It would be wonderful if there could be some variety added to autonomous actions. That alone would improve gameplay tenfold if not more. Perhaps this is what so many users are REALLY talking about when they say the gameplay is shallow. This kind of thing turns the game into nothing but a battle against whatever autonomous action happens stuck on repeat until the next obsession kicks in. There's PLENTY to do in the game. The problem is, those things can't be done because battling the autonomy obsessions is all consuming, especially when the obsession with a single repetitive action causes the lot to catch on fire every few minutes.
I know we can disable autonomy, but autonomy is what gives the sims "personalities." It's what gives the game its character, or did, in previous versions of the game (TS2 and TS3) Of COURSE players complain that the personality system and gameplay are lacking. Problem is, it's not the personality system that's creating what players refer to as "shallow" gameplay. It's the fact that there is no variety in the autonomous actions sims do, and when one or two actions take priority over literally everything else in the game, it causes game breaking issues to occur.
For example, there are so many other things the 6 NPCs my sims brought on vacation could have chosen to do, but they all chose to put logs on the fire, obsessively, one after the next, to the point where gameplay couldn't be anything BUT extinguishing fires every five minutes for two days straight.
Sims 4 has SO much potential and is so impressive in so many ways...but it doesn't matter how many bells and whistles or pretty things a house has added to it if there are cracks in the foundation, you know?
I should add that I clear my caches twice a week on average and repair my game via Origin several times a month. It doesn't solve the autonomous obsession problem. Resetting the sims doesn't help, either
...and that was all much longer than I intended it to be. Not complaining so much as I am brainstorming. Sims obsessively repeating the same autonomous actions over and over again causes MAJOR problems in this game. So many issues can be traced back to that one underlying problem.
I know I covered a lot of things in this post that weren't directly about constant fires, but it's because I think the same core problem that causes constant fires is causing most if not all of the other obsessive, repetitive behaviors that negatively impact (and in many cases outright prevent) gameplay from happening.
Anyway, for what it's worth, I hope these ramblings help someone figure something out somewhere.
Cheers.
