You're running into what's commonly called the firstborn effect; every time you start the game the personality algorithms reset to the same starting point, and the sequence is the same every time through.  There is no direct hack to fix this, but the lot debugger has a rerandomize option that can set the algorithm to a random point, essentially breaking you out of the cycle.  Read the RTFM before using, and rerandomize at the start of each play session for best results.

Might as well start putting down some of the things for when we get around to an actual FAQ 2.0 thread.  Add or correct as as you feel the need.

Do not delete sims:  Whether from the simbin or with the DeleteAllCharacters cheat.  The problem is that what looks like one sim is actually many different files; the DNA is different from the relationship information is different from the wants/fears information etc.  Deleting a sim from the bin or with the DAC cheat will only delete some of those files, leaving stray bits that may override the normal data for some other sim born/created later.  On top of that, all memories and gossip about the deleted sim do reference files that are actually gone, so you will have corruption as the game gets confused.  Note, however, that killing sims doesn't cause problems.  All the required information for a dead sim is kept in the right places.

Mind your hacks:  This may sound funny coming from a site that produces a lot of hacks and other custom content.  However, not all hacks are created equal.  Some are just poorly made, some worked well for a given EP but don't work properly with newer games, and sometimes two hacks that cause no problems on their own will conflict and cause problems when they're together.  The modders at MATY can only be expected to take care of their own creations, so make sure to look for hacks that might be causing problems before asking for help, and ask the person who made it for help.  (If someone else could explain the details of binary searching and what hacks are most likely to cause problems, I'd be appreciative.)  On a related note, occasionally see how large your downloads folder is.  While a large downloads folder by itself won't cause any bugs, it will cause your game to slow down if it's lager than half the RAM available on your system.

Do not move an occupied house into the lots and houses bin.  Similarly, do not move a downloaded occupied house into your home neighborhood:  If you've already done this before, you might have an idea what it does to your sims.  In actuality, it's worse than that.  When you move an occupied lot into the lot bin, all relationships and memories dealing with them are severed, and instead attached to dummy files that are added to your game.  At the same time, every relationship or memory dealing with a sim outside the lot creates a dummy file that's attached to the lot, and is added to any neighborhood the occupied lot is added to.  Doing this once just severs outside relationships for anyone in the house in question, and adds invisible junk data to the neighborhood.  Doing this repeatedly can create enough junk data to render the neighborhood unplayable.  It is possible to take special steps to clean up a saved lot like this and make it safe for download.  Notably, the Kim and Kat residences that came with Pets are safe to add.  Some other downloaded lots might be similarly cleaned.  However, unless you know for a fact that the lot is cleaned up, it probably isn't and will cause junk file problems down the line.

As a fan of parsimony, I'm forced to ask why you need to inflict the specific engaged status on pre-adult sims, which would probably cause other bits of silliness unless the nature of "engaged" were altered as well.  (Off the top of my head, the inability to elope, the ability for the arranged to call off the engagement on their own, and the fact that it has no real effects besides showing a tiny icon.)  This mod would also come close to the issue of child brides, which is not something I see many modders being keen on.

Wouldn't it be much easier to just put a blurb in the individual bios of the arranged sims, and then use a forced marriage hack/object when they become adults (or teens, if you have one of those hacks)?  Sometimes it seems like people are too keen on specific game states for things more easily handled by player intent.

Good work, ERD, but but most of my issue with DC FAQ's is that it can be a hassle to find the one you want when the hack itself doesn't have a thread to itself.  If JM or some other kind soul feels obliging, it would probably be trivial to gather all the RTFM's individually, zip them all, and include them in the main directory near the hacks.  Otherwise the sort of person who's prone to looking through a list will just look up the standard RTFM, while the sort of person who won't will just come here to bug us again.

As for the FAQ 2.0, I'd actually like to see it broken into two lists.  The first shall be a list of simming commandments, full-out Thou Shalt Not style, where each is followed by a description in soothing, minimally technical n00bspeak explaining why doing so is a bad idea.  The second should be a Not Our Problem section explaining various common problems and their solutions.  Mostly as a shortcut for people to link to when they're tired of explaining the logic behind binary searches, or why MATYites cannot give proper support for non-awesome hacks.  Especially the commandments would be nice, however, as it's all too easy to break one's game with apparently trivial things if one is not careful.

Edit:  to preserve some peoples' sense of reality.  Also, Venusy, baaa.

Again, that's the difference between the real world and the sims' world.

People IRL can flirt without meaning anything more by it, but in the game such interactions are very clearly meant as a stepping stone to a more intimate relationship.  The real life equivalent of light flirting would be a conversation topic somewhere in the chat menu, not something meant to welcome a crush/love status and everything meant from there.

The ultimate problem is that the romance engine in this game sucks, no two ways about it.  Romancemod and noinstantlove help, as does ACR if that's the mood you're going for, but in the end you have to accept that there are ways that the reality for sims is fundamentally different from that for people.  Cleaning up the end results without cleaning up the causal factors would probably just cause more oddities than the current system does.

Thankfully I've never cared much for salons, as the chair always felt like a cheap knockoff of the vanity.  It might be nice to try again later, but for now I'm more curious about the new options.

And while I've heard nothing but good things about seasons, even in its unpatched form, the nhood graphics glitches just bug me too much.  It's a silly reason, but submerged lots and unmelting snow are too annoyingly attention-grabbing for my tastes.

I've been running OFB P2 for the past while, and have lately been considering bringing back the little furbags.  From what I've heard OFB P2 is the gold standard of stability, so I'm wondering exactly how much of a step backwards I'd be taking.  I'm in the mood for some added bells and whistles now, but I wonder just how much I'd be giving up for them at this point.

This is already easy enough to mock up with your favorite "make selectable/unslectable" cheat/hack.  Having done so has convinced me that I have no interest whatsoever in this feature until sims are significantly smarter.  Especially if the visitees have young children, which is a very likely situation if a "go visiting" feature were installed.

Hook's plan involves selling the business after a day's work to cash in on the stars earned as well as the actual money made through "normal" business means such as sales or venues.  The reason depreciation hits so hard is that the combined depreciation of everything on the lot eats into your profit margins.  If you're the sort who pays attention to such things, this scheme also seems prone to memory spam.

Putting deeds on display is the most obvious way to do real estate, and the one that allows for a good markup, but using the Hook method you can earn a fair profit by just selling the deed from your inventory.  It all depends on if you want to put aside the time and effort to make a space for this sort of thing.

If you can't find a good hack for it, death does a good job severing relationships.  Killing one of the parties and resurrecting them will terminate marriage while leaving the relationship intact.  They might still be in love, so there might be jealousy issues later, but at least "'till death do us part" will leave them open for other people.

...And because I feel pedantic today, the adventurer/journalism career rewards improve your motives just by being in the same room with the sim.  No interaction is needed to trigger this, nor are any triggering actions available.

IIRC, the "be uneducated" want only applies to teens, and it kicks in the moment they reach adulthood.  An adult can't do anything to trigger this fear, so there's no reason to worry about it.

On the up side, until this fear falls off the queue you'll have one fewer thing to worry about.  On the down side, since adults aren't supposed to have this fear, that means a borked SWAF.  I don't know enough to say what caused this, so I can't say just how bad this will be in the long run for your game.

Debug mode is boolprop testingcheatsenabled true.  As a general warning, read up on it before using it.

The lot debugger is down in the firing range.  I have a hard time understanding how one can be a MATY-ite without being familiar with it, but that's the one that can make sims smart or stupid.

Another "tweak, please" here.  I've never had an "accidental" death that didn't involve either a nasty bug or else my going far out of my way to set it up, and I would like a bit more lethality to risky actions.  (Even if proper precautions should prevent or limit said risk; fixing an appliance with 10 mechanical should have a very small chance of a minor shock, fixing an appliance with 0 mechanical while standing in a puddle should kill you no matter what your motives are.)  And on a tangential note, I do wish there were more nonlethal bad things that could strike our sims.  Suddenly having a sim kick the bucket can kill your inner storyline as well, but something to occasionally shake up their little pixelated lives is needed to keep it from the usual utopian daily cycle.

Just for the record, BTW, Maxis already implemented a "no deaths, thank you" cheat in the game.  Turn off motive decay and the major causes of death can't bother you anymore.  You're then left with satellite, flies, disease, cowplant, and old age.  The cowplant is entirely voluntary, old age can be turned off with a separate cheat, and it's almost impossible for disease to actually strike a sim down.  Flies can be bypassed if you just hire a maid, which leaves only one very rare "oops yer dead" that can't be disabled by base maxian code.

Most of the seasons bugs I'm seeing here are crash-related, so I'm guessing my particular issue hasn't been handled.  I have a few community lots where no matter what season it is in the house I'm setting out from, the ground is still covered with snow and snow-related activities still show.  The season clock still shows the proper season and activities appropriate to that season show as well (butterflies and playing catch, for example.)  I'm going to experiment a bit tomorrow to see if I can find out what causes this, but I wonder if anyone here can give me a heads up what to look for.

Unfortunately, there is no error log to attach.  Nothing pops up in debug mode, and my logs folder is empty.

This comes in from the opposite direction, but two pets-based hacks (petsp0-jobfixes.package and petsp0-servicecallfix.package) still show in the DC.  Has anyone actually had these problems since Seasons, or are they still around mainly because they haven't caused anything in seasons to mess up?

Getting struck by lightning was possible with the evil kite in OFB.  I haven't done that in ages, so I don't remember how that ties in with memories, or indeed how it would tie in with the more general "get struck by lightning" want now.  Getting shocked by an appliance did cause memories, but this was back in the base game when they were a lot more liberal with what did and didn't give memories.

I actually wouldn't be all that surprised if they tried something similar when they toyed with "unified time" in OFB, and I'd love to pick early playtester brains on the concept of why it never took off.  It's a good idea, but I have a feeling something about it must be more annoying than useful in practice.

Starting my first new neighborhood post-pets, I followed my usual habit of DAC-ing and cleaning up all the dangling bits before getting a proper clean start.  This time around, however, after nuking everything that seemed extraneous, I was treated to a cascade of errors that ultimately froze the game.  I went after the usual culprits (SWAF, SDNA, SDSC, SREL), and knocked out the sim score and family information as well.  Error attached if it'll help, but basically I'm wondering what I should leave or take out to have as clean a 'hood as possible without rendering it unplayable a couple of minutes in.

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I've only tried making one business post-pets, and it was a home-based one, but it seemed like nobody came by until I specifically bought the sign.  (I'd wanted an always-open venue to give my starting sims a bit more of a financial cushion.)  Admittedly a very limited sample size, but if pets changed that it might give you a workaround.  Otherwise, the problem with most hacked objects is that you have to interact with them somehow to get the effect.  And if that's the case, you might as well just queue an interaction with the sign, close your store, and do everything the official way.

Zombies can die of anything but old age, and in fact their motives are treated the same as any other sim of the same personality.  (Save, of course, the added time to get to motive-restoration items.)

I'm curious what pre-zombification data is retained after the fact, as an anti-zombie potion would be a nice addition to the gypsy's bag.  More to the point, I wonder just how feasible such a thing would be to add.

Makes me wonder if there are any hints left over as to what the romance skill was supposed to do in the first place.  Some part of me has images of skill-based animations locked away deep in EA's corporate vault.

Unfortunately, not changing aspiration when you use the orb doesn't do a thing to your LTW.  In fact, not changing anything with it doesn't even suck out a charge.  (I'm not sure how this would work with a cheese sim getting another failure, but I do know it allows you to chain-renu a red or green sim until they're properly cheesified.)  I used to use the orb to change out and back as an aspiration reroll, but that quickly devolved into memory spam.  If you're really looking for a temporary workaround, buy a cheap something like the money tree and delete it for each lot debugger reroll you use.

A button to re-randomize your LTW without other effects of the orb would be nice.  (As would uni-enabled LTW's, more generic LTW's in general, and a whole host of other features.)  But doing so would require EA to actually tinker with concepts from older EP's, which doesn't seem like something they seem interested in doing.

Where dates really shine is for the absolute aspiration bonanza they set you off on, and possibly to sell off your reward for a good date.  Having many predictable, easily fufillable wants lined up all in a row makes them far more efficient than most other forms of aspiration fufilling.

And although this is a place where EA's design actually avoided a major flaw (trust me, you don't want a date to continue when your sim is out of play), it suffers from a misplaced sanity check; date cancelation should happen when your sim disappears, not when the autonomous action pops up.  At least in this specific case there's a workaround, and if things were going OK you can just restart without too much trouble.

Sims who were created pre-uni really don't factor into this discussion; as soon as the EP is added, they're treated as if they were CAS sims.

Even assuming that the game did reserve unicareer LTW's for "eligible" sims (ones born in game, or ones created at YA or younger), you have to keep in mind that at the time of Uni, there were three times aspiration (and as such LTW) could be set.  They could be set at creation (if the sim were a teen or older), at the moment a born in game sim ages to teenager, or at the end of a sim's sophomore year of college.  Ignoring adults and elders as ineligible for the moment, the latest a sim's LTW could be set would be while they were still in college.  And while in practice the hardest part about university is putting up with the boredeom, in theory the game has to account for sims who either fail/drop out (thus stuck with an unfufillable LTW for the rest of their lives), or else simply chose not to go to college (ditto).  This as opposed to raising a pet or starting a business, which any sim can do unless dead.  So even if the game were set up to check for unicareer eligibility, at the time the unicareers and whole college mechanic were released there was no way to guarantee that a sim with one would be eligible; the last chance to reroll a crummy LTW was long gone by the time a sim's graduation status was set.

The way an earlier orb would change things would be that if the renu-u orb existed pre-Uni, it would be trivial to change aspiration at any point, and as such to reroll an unwanted LTW.  If adults/elders could pick up a new LTW through reasonable means, it would be much more reasonable for the unicareers to exist as special LTW's that needed to pass a check, as again there would exist sims who were rolling new LTW's and who were clearly graduates.  But as of the time of Uni, the only way to reroll a LTW after one became an unequivocally graduated adult was to satisfy your prior LTW, and while Maxis did cut a corner there, you have to admit there's less reason to care about secondary and later LTW's once permaplat is already in play.