@BiffaBaker Are you playing with aging on for the non-active households and NPCs? You can shut that off in Game Options - Gameplay by changing Auto Age (Played Sims) to Active Household Only and unchecking Auto Age (Unplayed Sims). That way, only the active household will age. Work and school performance will be unchanged from when you played a household last. You will still return to a lot and find the sims standing outside but you can just send them on their way from the career panel and there shouldn't be any performance drop. One way to avoid some of it is to always switch households in the middle of the night or on a weekend. the game does use playable sims that are not in the active household to fill a number of roles like walkbys, dance parties, etc.
Pregnancies will continue though so it's a good idea to just wait to switch households until after the baby is born and named.
DU forces you to play through a term once started so you should play until you get the grades for the current term before switching.
If you are playing on a PC or Mac and are willing to use a mod, MCCC will stop the relationship decay. Nothing to be done about the motive drops except to cheat them with the debug Make Happy cheat.
I play a sort of rotation, just not a strict one on a firm schedule, and have a lot of households and always deal with these things when I return to a household after playing several others. Sometimes I play households a week, a season or even a full year. Other times I play to a certain event like a birthday or just after a holiday ends. But I always try to avoid having things happen in a household when I'm off playing another one.
Hope this helps.
NPC aging is off. Active household aging is on.
So I now have to plan when I return to households when in previous games they would freeze in time. This is my exact point. Pregnancies shouldn’t move on, friendships shouldn’t decline, work performance shouldn’t decrease. That’s my point.
