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aphrodite4120's avatar
aphrodite4120
New Traveler
20 hours ago

I want things to just stay the way I left them

I'm a "rotation player". I have several households that I rotate through. They all have a background, back story, and narrative that I'm playing with them. I tell stories with my characters. But I also love a good challenge and will stop playing to make some leprechauns for March or do the rug-challenge with my teen. And went I come back, everything thing I've done and worked towards is gone and I have to start all over again like it's a 1990 Mario game even through neighborhood stories and autonomy is turned off. 

While I am away playing another household...  relationships die, all the plants die, the animals die or run away - it's impossible to be a rotation player in sims4 apparently because it doesn't matter what's turned off it's never the same as you left it when you come back to that character. 

I build a relationship up to soulmates and have them get engaged just to return a week later ready to plan a wedding just to them having no pink bar and both sad that they're relationship is ending. 

I build up a garden just to return to dead plants. I bond with the bees and pets just to come back to them being enemies. 

And heaven forbid I play farmers... there are no animals left. They all died or ran away when I left them happy, besties with me, bathed and food full. 

And it's not just playing other households, I log off on a sims Friday with them at work and return to a sims Wednesday with days or sometimes weeks passed on the sims calendar. 

I made a household of first responders recently and made them all fit. I just made them and put them in the house, then my teen had a 12month challenge so we started that and when I came back to the all fit household... they were all fat. 

I got them back in shape and started their telenovela to return to my 12-month challenge people today to do "an easter egg hunt" with the April household and logged in and said "what the $%#*%& happened to them". I put a rock climbing thing in the apartment gym and now they all look like they've been taking illegal steroids to bulk out for a weight lifting competition, or were in the lab with Banner and hulk'd out too. I kept saying "hulk smash" each time I click a bush to "hunt for egg" - which I lost all of btw because it now crashes with each save. 

So my food for thought is: Well, after you fix the save corruption so that you can actually play the game that you review the years of these comments similar to mine about the sims not changing and the plants and animals not dying and leaving just because you havent logged on to them for a minute. (and no I don't have separate save files for each individual household because I'm building a universe with overlapping stories) 

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1 Reply

  • simvasion's avatar
    simvasion
    Hero
    11 hours ago

    I'm a rotational player and don't seem to have the same issues. When I switch to a different set of sims, play for a while and then return to my original sims months later, things like the plants are still alive - their status seems to freeze when I'm not playing them and even food I left in the fridge is still fresh.

    Relationships do decay though, which is unfortunate when it's romantic satisfaction added by Lovestruck - I'd like that to freeze when in the background, similar to how fame decay freezes in Get Famous. But I do also like that if I see my sims in the background doing stuff, it progresses them - e.g. if I'm playing some other family and see my original sims visiting the gym, when I get back to playing them in the future I can see their fitness has increased. That seems natural to me.

    Back when I played The Sims 2, everything was frozen in state when you saved and changed household, which preserved everything, but also made it really difficult for me to keep up with playing everyone equally. I prefer the way The Sims 4 has universal time passing and how if your sims are being simulated in the background, then the relationships are changing, their stats are increasing, and they are still living their lives without you directly controlling them. That's the more realistic life sim for me.

    So there's upsides and downsides to both approaches, but it really does sound like your plants dying is something happening on your side, possibly due to gameplay style - because it's not happening in my game, e.g. if I'm not playing a household, then I don't visit their lot at all - any time you have them on screen, time is passing and things are decaying/changing.

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