Right, they're definitely not gone from the game, I can still visit them or have them visit me, they just don't show up randomly.
I have ruled out mods in the sense that A) I didn't add any major new mods right before the problem started, and B) I ran the game with all mods removed and it didn't help.
The characters I'm not seeing anymore have all been to the same type of lot before, so if it was just a matter of "habits," I can't think of any reason why it would just suddenly change. And there are some characters who seem to be constantly showing up at all the different types of lots.
It's just so weird to me, because I survived the "update-pocalypse" (when the game has an official update, you have to make sure all your mods are updated as well, or else it'll all fall apart) and continued playing after that, and everything was working fine and nothing was out of the ordinary. And then a few days ago, after seemingly changing nothing, it's like the game just snapped and started working completely differently. It's exactly the type of quirk you'd expect after a major update, but I had already been playing after the major update and it was still working fine. And there wasn't anything else I changed after the update either.
In fact, I even thought I just remembered one thing that did change; I added one more household full of custom characters. But I went back and checked my old saves; I have one file that was saved right after one of my main character's favorite girlfriends called him up and invited him over (which is something that just doesn't ever seem to happen anymore), and the new household is already there in that save. So, I added the household (which is the only major change I can think of before the point when it stopped working), and it was still working after that. The only changes I made since then were very minor mods (like, I added one the day after that save, that changes some animations slightly; I can't imagine that could possibly have an effect on the spawning RNG).
I haven't tried the club hangout thing. I kinda just wanted it to go back to the way it was without me putting my thumb on the scale to favor any particular characters, but I guess that's not really feasible at this point (I even deleted and reinstalled the whole program), so maybe that would be a "good enough" work around.
You know, I actually had forgotten about the importance of deleting localthumbcache, so I tried it this morning removing all the mods and that file, but the results were still basically the same (the first character that spawned on the lot was a custom, but then all the rest where the usual regulars that have been showing up all the time since the change happened).
@RandomBuzziness wrote:
I have one more experiment I want to try to see if I can effect a change on which Sims show up whenever I travel, show up at my house, etc. I'm going to make a few CAS changes to certain characters to give their data a newer date in my Tray folder & see if that makes them appear more often. It's a long shot but I'll let you know if it works.
This sounds kind of interesting. I would be curious to find out if there is some way to "hack" or manage the way the game chooses who to spawn.
