Novelty, I think.  I haven't nuked the gossip memories from my 'hoods, mainly because I like eavesdropping on my sims.    That, and as a relative novice, my oldest 'hood isn't really that big.

I'm occasionally surprised that some very old memories (like those of a previous generation) will crop up in an unrelated family.  I think this happens more since I put in AutoSoc, because of its heavy reliance on gossip as a social interaction.  Before that, the autonomous gossip and chat bubbles were a whole lot less interesting.

Anyway, I kind of like the idea that the infidelity of the town's first mayor has become part of the 'hood's collective history through gossip. 

I get this in my game, too.  The cow mascot has limited interaction options, as you might see for the maid, gardener, or other NPCs when they are on your lot in a service capacity.  Greet isn't an option, nor Irritate, or Fight.  I usually just ask them to leave before they can crush on my sims, or bomb the greek house with water balloons.  The llama mascot seems to have the full range of interaction options though, so I really can't make sense of it.

Thanks Joe.  That's the system I use now, whether they have good beds or not.    I don't mind my sim-children going to bed right after dinner, but if there was a secret Awesome way to make more time for skilling, by god I had to have it! 

I frequently use this bed for children in some of my families who haven't become obscenely wealthy yet.  For them, it doesn't seem to matter because children drain their energy so much faster.  It seems like they all want to go to bed by 7 or 8pm, unless they have 7+ activity points.  Better beds re-energise them by 1 or 2am, but waking them up to skill just twists their sleep cycles.

After school naps take too long for my liking.  Apart from cheating them some activity points, is there any way to keep kids up longer?

I mis-wrote.  I knew there was no NL-specific AutoSoc when I installed OFB, because if there were, I know you would have coded NL-AutoSoc to use a 3-move cycle, and OFB-AutoSoc to use the 4-move.

Having a unified AutoSoc saves maintenance overhead for MATY, but makes the hack slightly less efficient in the NL-only game regime.  It's a small but noticeable difference, only because Awesome hacks are above all, incredibly efficient. 

Well, originally I had thought about using DAC on a test 'hood just to check whether townies can receive intermediate custom tones between the Maxis defaults.  Now that I have the answer to this (No), I won't have to think about how to use DAC. 

However, if I had, would the dangling SWAFs come haunting my other hoods, or would they be burninated when I deleted the 'hood that spawned them?

I think Pinstar is agnostic regarding the 'spare' households.  Like in Legacy, the extra households cannot contribute to the challenge so the player can do what they like with them, or nothing at all.  What I was wondering is what other players are doing with these households in the early stages when fewer restrictions have been lifted.  Those families can't lift any restrictions, so if the restrictions are global, I'd think their little sim lives might be sort of grim since they can't do anything to help themselves, and yet are deprived of the usual opportunities.

Anyway, since I'm not playing the challenge yet, I thought I'd ask. 

If you still have jammed phones or game resets after checking for EP-compatibility, post more details about each problem separately.  People here are helpful in direct proportion to how much information you're able to provide about your problem, I've found.  It's a pretty good system, actually.  

Can townies/NPCs be generated by the game with genetic skins in between the default ones, if they're available?

Thanks to another generous, long-suffering MATY-lander, I have an extensive system of geneticised custom skins, some of which have genetic values in between the game defaults.  What I want to know is if new townies/NPCs generated by the game have access to the full spectrum of genetic skins, or whether they're restricted to just the discrete default values.  Lacking SimPE I can't definitively confirm one way or the other in my own game.  Visual inspection is too coarse, given the number of variables I have operating at this time.

I could simplify my custom skin system by ripping most of it out, and force-generating new townies in a test 'hood, but then I'm still reduced to manually teleporting and inspecting the townies one by one, to check whether they all look the same or not.

I figure that MATY is pretty much the only group to possess this kind of arcane knowledge if it's already been determined.

Addendum:

Over on MTS2, Enayla has been making some very exotic coloured skins with beautiful markings.  I wish to use them for a special otherworldly enclave within my normal 'hood.  I wanted the skins to be heritable in the usual way, rather than having them simply dominate all the time, so that I would have the possibility of interesting matings between my normal playables, and this select population.

My first priority was to avoid having townies cheapen those skins.  Thanks to all of you, I've (mostly) determined that this can be taken care of by geneticising the skins at the extreme ends of the spectrum, or in the interstices between the default values.

My second preference would be to have these skins come up as a genetic option only if one of the parents already possesses it.  What I'm thinking of is that these markings would give the bearer the privilege of joining the elite, but that unmarked siblings could not.

Ideally, I'd like the skins to be blended into the normal spectrum so that children would inherit a skin colour that's of similar depth to their parents whether they're marked or not.  However, if the skins are classified this way, is there any way of conditionally restricting their inheritance?

It changed as of OFB.  I was playing with just NL for the longest time, and noticed that AutoSoc uses a 4-move cycle.  Before seeing the light that is Macrotastics, I always used ABG by clicky finger, you see.  Under NL, it always niggled at me that AutoSoc was slightly less efficient than I.

Not that I think this is worth the overhead of tweaking the NL version of AutoSoc, but I do note with some satisfaction that some Awesome hacks play less awesome-ly than I. 

I didn't notice whether it increased the background motive drain, but because the afflicted show multiple symptoms, the key motives related to each symptom can take an additive hit.  In the example I'm thinking of, my sim had a hacking cough from the biotech virus, and then he started horking after getting food poisoning.  Ultimately, he died of the virus first, but I kept getting warnings about his food poisoning for several hours after his death! 

Are you playing these, and if so how?  By that I mean, do they found their households with the original challenge restrictions, a subset or none at all?  It doesn't matter to the challenge, of course... just curious. 

Which is precisely why I didn't bother starting this challenge.  I don't have OFB, and won't have it for a while.  It's not hard to realise even without play-testing that snapdragons will be a powerful advantage.

A challenge of this complexity will need refinement, but why must it be 0 or 1?  Add progressively more difficult revisions to the Apocalypse, say bronze, silver gold, add flavours for different combos of EPs, whatever.  This way, a decent interval of time passes between significant revisions, rather than changes that fall down from the sky capriciously.  Let people who have started their challenges play them out with the rules they started with, or have the choice of starting over.

Of course we can all play however we want, but a huge part of the fun is being able to talk about the game with others and have a glimpse of how *they* play.  For that discussion, we have to have a common launching point.  That's where challenges bring some of the fun of multi-player environments to a profoundly single-player game.

Is it possible to make the plague drain motives faster, like pregnancy?  I notice that when I'm playing poor families, I do have to pay a little more attention to them.  Especially if you don't have OFB, feeding them before they pass out is non-trivial.

Add in some projectile horking throughout the sickness, and I think we'd have a pretty inconvenient plague. 

I think that clicking on a prof to ask for tutoring is different from asking to be tutored on an assignment.  Clicking on the prof gives a small boost to the grade meter, which I use sometimes if their relationship is already maxed, but the meter isn't full.  Normally, my popularity and romance sims fill up their grade meters as much as they can by socialising with their profs first.

Matter of fact, even woohooing the prof doesn't boost the meter much if they already have a great relationship.  Is it supposed to be this way?

Eh, I dunno.  I think it depends on how attached you are, or how attached you're going to get if you keep playing them.

I have a 'hood where a couple broke up after the wife got caught cheating, and I ended up moving her out with their baby and deleting both of them from the bin.  Obviously, since there was all kinds of drama, all the sims in the 'hood did a lot of gossiping about all those corrupted memories.  I did that in the first generation, when I had about 10 playable sims in 4 houses.  Two EPs later, that 'hood has close to 30 lots and around 100 playables, with some families on their 5th generation.  I expect it to blow up any day now. 

I started a 2nd 'hood after I learned how badly I had screwed up that first one.  I play both, and hopefully when the first one goes, it won't take down my whole game.

Enjoy your game now for what it is, and when the time comes, let it go. 

This is pretty much the blind leading the blind, so please take someone else's advice if they offer it. 

This is what I do (I think!):

Type Ctrl-Shift-C to bring up the cheat window.
Type 'boolprop testingcheatsenabled true' and hit return.
Select the messed up sim.
Shift-click on the mailbox and choose Force Error.
A dialog pops up with Delete, Reset, or Cancel.
Choose Reset.

If you're not familiar with the extra options in testingcheats, turn it off by
Type Ctrl-Shift-C to bring up the cheat window.  (Can't remember if it goes away on its own or not.)
Type 'boolprop testingcheatsenabled false' and hit return.
Type 'exit' to get rid of the window.

P.S.  The lot debugger is far more intuitive to use. 

http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/smf/index.php/topic,4248.0.html
OFB may make it considerably worse, but I only have EPs up to NL.  So, make room for me in that frustrated club, and no snapdragons to save me!

In that thread MissDoh started:

http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/smf/index.php/topic,4248.0.html

she finds that the bug is caused by a controllable sim leaving a community lot while other playable sims (presumably from another household who aren't controllable at that time) are still eating.  When you load up that other household, the playable sims who were last seen eating at the community lot have the clean-up bug.

Personally, I have not gone through the process of confirming this, but I do use her solution.  I use testingcheats to force an error and reset that sim.  If you have a whole family who's afflicted, it's probably worthwhile to use the lot debugger to force errors on all.

When I do have an afflicted sim, it doesn't matter whether they have cooked, served, consumed or participated in the meal in any way.  They do not get the option to clean any plates or bowls, even when they're green with flies.  If it's a sloppy sim, they get the option to Lick Clean if it's a plate.  If the sim is neat, they have no options at all once the food is eaten.

I haven't had the bug since I started playing with macrotastics, but if you do have it installed, it would be interesting to see if Macro...Clean lets them see the plates.

The biotech viruses must be very lethal for a low-logic sim, because as I posted _every_ sim I have quarantined without a chair nor a bed, died from it. 

Some take longer than others, but once their comfort is in the red, sitting on the toilet once a day isn't enough for them to recover.  Further, passing out doesn't even get their energy into the yellow.  Unlike pregnant sims who occasionally pass out while eating, these sims wake sooner, essentially when energy gets slightly less urgent than comfort.  Keeping both energy and comfort well below 10%, after the first day is trivial. 

I haven't timed how much time they spend awake and complaining vs. passed out, but possibly putting speakers (or something else which can't be turned off) in the death cell could speed their demise by keeping their sleep intervals as short as possible.

The difficult issue is having these sims in the household to spread the virus around.  There are so many actions which can increase comfort, that they require more micromanagement than I can tolerate to keep them sick.

The delete procedure works to get rid of the dishes, but the afflicted sim doesn't seem to get any better.  At least in my game.

The only solution I've found is to force a reset on that sim, as MissDoh reports in that thread.  I imagine forcing errors on all with the lot debugger would work too, but that seems like overkill in a household of 6 sims, 5 of whom are fine.

What would be the advantage of burninating extra NPCs which have already been spawned?

I mean, apart from the sheer fun   Their character files persist if you kill them, so it doesn't help with overpopulation... 

Just doggedly trying to get more awesome. 

But the
The problem with that is that you have to keep comfort in the red for days in order for the sim to die of disease, and in that state they won't do anything but complain.  They absolutely won't obey your commands to work out or anything else for that matter.  Further, even if you deprive them of chairs, they will gain a marginal degree of comfort from autonomously gazing out of windows!

I've managed to kill 3 or 4 sims from disease to get the green ghosts, and none of mine died in less than 3 days, even when I had them confined in a window-less, door-less, quarantine room with nothing to sit on but the cheapest toilet.  I've never had them recover either though, so if you're determined you can definitely kill them this way. 

Throwing up seems to send comfort down a good bit.  Not coincidentally, my fastest sim death (by disease) was a low-logic sim who contracted the biotech virus, and then was fed a steady diet of spoiled food, all while confined to quarantine.  During normal game play though, I can't see how any of my sims would die by disease.

I don't think hacks are the only cause of this bug.  It has happened on all my lots at one time or another, starting right after I first installed NL when I had no hacks or mods at all.  In my game, it isn't the 4pm calls; it happens about 50% of the time when someone invites one of the controllable sims on the lot on an outing.  If they choose to stay at home, the sim who called teleports to the lot.  Both townies and playable sims have been teleported.

I don't get any error logs, and there doesn't seem to be any other problems associated with this bug. 

I only have NL up to the latest patch, but I have dynamic thumbnails, so it's not just an OFB thing.  I notice it when my sim gets an invitation to go on an outing.  The dialog box sometimes shows the sim in work clothes, totally different from the thumbnail in the relationships panel or the address book.

It might have come with the 2nd NL patch, though I can't imagine why Maxis would put something like that in a patch.