I don't know if this is a bug or glitch but suddenly all the new immigrants into my neighborhood have the same last names as my custom sims. They are not common names, not particularly uncommon either, Finnegan, Taylor, Brown and Lyons. Every new family has one of those names, it's quite annoying. To avoid confusion (mine) I have to rename them. Anyone else having this problem? Is there anything that can be done about it? 

Yeah, I've been getting that, too. Very annoying. Another thing that has always bothered me since the game first came out is, sims don't always sit up to the table to eat. They sit at the table and hold their plate instead of pulling their chair up to the table. There's always 2 or 3 that do that; the rest of them sit up to the table.

I thought it had been fixed, too, but I guess it broke again. I'd never seen them do either of these things before. They used to walk to the furthest chair to read the paper. I had one go upstairs and stand in the middle of the nursery to read it.    Another thing that I think was fixed in the 1.7 patch (or JM did it) was the maids, they actually worked for a change, now they don't again and the repairmen just stands around thinking about what is broken but never enter the house to fix anything.  

ETA: brownlustgirl, it would make much more sense to read the newspaper on the toilet than eat dinner there! Sitting on the tub to read the paper would only make sense if you were reading something to someone in the tub.  

Here's a couple of add occurrences that happened after patching. It's not as if there were no chairs in the houses or a dining table. The daughter also chose to eat in the downstairs bathroom. 





Bug or glitch or intentional?

 Right-click WORLD in the 1. World Layers window and then choose ADD LAYER. (from the user guide)

I don't have lag in game play but I do when accessing build/buy mode and in CAS. I don't have WA, have lots of CC but I had lots of CC before patch 1.7 and never had lags. I also get a graphic lag when changing floors in game. It takes a few seconds for the graphic to go from gray shapes to normal. Never had that before 1.7 either. My graphics card is adequate, Gforce 9400 with 1Gb ram. I have deleted caches and am not saving all my user created stuff like I did before. On a side note - before 1.7 my caches (compositor caches, I have 2) would stay around 2 Kb and now are around 20,000 Kb. Why?

I don't have WA and got blue lots. It happened in an old neighborhood (third/fourth generation) with old CC, as soon as I installed the 1.7 patch.

You not only don't have to go on vacation, you don't even need WA to have blue (cut-out) lots.

The food spoiling is a problem. It spoils while they are eating it one day after it's made. I don't have WA so this one has to be patch related.

I don't know about the rewards problem, I had to start over and no one has enough points to buy any rewards.

If you have any stairs remove them. I've put back everything but lemoncandy and stairs. It's working, not great but playable.

The only problem with that is you will not be able to patch the game at all and AwesomeMod does not work with anything but 1.4 now.  You can't go back to that patch. It's either no patch or 1.7 and AM won't work with either.

I put everything back into my game except all custom stairs and so far everything is good. I'm too tired of the mess to try each individual stair so, for now, I'm leaving them all out.

I'm with you, Daisylee. I thought games were supposed to be fun.

Ok, I think I've narrowed it down to some custom stairs. I'll put everything else back in and see what happens.   

I'm with you, Krib. I don't have WA either and I'm sick of this. I just started the game and my one and only lot is blue. No CC, custom colors, nothing; I'd just built the shell and was going in to decorate. 

I'm going to try one more time then, I quit! EA can shove it.

I didn't have any lemoncandy stuff installed at all. 

I'm still testing. I'm now rebuilding the house in another new, clean neighborhood. I've save twice and no blue lot. I'm thinking maybe custom design colors, the ones you make in game, may be a problem. I painted some walls a custom color and a floor. We'll see. 

As I stated in a previous post, I do not have WA and was getting the "blue lot." So it definitely is a patch issue. (I'm patched to 1.7   ) I reinstalled intending to go back to a previous (1.4) patch but couldn't find them. I removed all lemoncandy CC and got rid of blue lots but still had a couple of other issues that I finally narrowed down to a few CC files. I'll test those one by one to see which cause problems. One problem was no thumbnail pictures on the active family list just a blank green square so I couldn't select anyone; whoever was selected when saved was the only one playable. The other problem was weird and caused sims to immediately jump out of bed when directed to relax or freeze if directed to sleep. On the pie menu when selecting the bed it had 'enterrelaxing' and 'bedrelaxing' plus the usual 'sleep.'  

ETA: I just started a new, clean neighborhood. I built a house, being careful to use only EA stuff, saved and exited. Went back in and the lot I was working on is blue. I don't have any lemoncandy stuff, I did not use any CC building stuff and I hadn't even started furnishing it. Now I'm really upset! 

I'll go with your last statement.    Go get some coffee. 

Taking out LC stuff helped the blue lots but not my freezing problem. That seems to be related to broken objects. The sim that broke the object immediately and permanently freezes.    Deleting or repairing does not help.

CC may be the problem now but the CC worked before the patch and now it doesn't. The patch screwed up the CC; the CC did not screw up the patch.

I have blue lots after a save. I do not have WA but I do have the latest patch 1.7. I have the additional problem of at least one sim in each house freezes soon after entering that house or one is frozen all ready when the house is entered. They don't unfreeze. I do have the latest of Tallwan's super computer, career mod and story progression but, of course, no AM. The one house that has a child and toddler, the new interactions do not work. I do have quite a few lemoncandy items. I'll remove those and see what happens. Why can't EA do things right? They have to patch a patch!    I thought patches were supposed to fix things not break them. 

Is this patch not available in the U.S.?  I used the launcher and it said updates were available and proceeded to download 1.5/1.6. It failed on installation (several tries) saying something about a missing file. I gave up. I tried again but the launcher said my game was up to date but it is still version 1.4. When I go to the web site it says the latest patch is 1.4. I'm now totally confused. 

I did the rapture thing and didn't get any new sims until I built some really cheap  affordable houses, then too many moved in. 

I only use the launcher to install 'free store stuff' and free stuff from TSR. The 'monkey installer' doesn't work on these for some reason. So I'll just copy the DCcache folder to the desktop and that should work, right? 

Where does EA hide their custom content? Due to some errors I'm going to have to reinstall the game and I want to save all the CC I have. I have copied the 'mods' folder and the saved game but EA puts their content somewhere else and I'm not sure where.

ETA: The error I'm getting when I try to start the game is: Unable to start game. Service initialization failed (0x6224dd27)

Any ideas would be appreciated immensely. 

Thanks, I figured it was easy. 

My neighborhood became corrupt and I can't open the saved file so I'm starting over. I started a new neighborhood using Sunset Valley. I 'raptured' the residents and bulldozed the houses. I am now in the process of updating the community lots. When I'm finished I would like to save the neighborhood as a template, possibly replacing EA's Sunset Valley, so I can use it again and won't have to go to the work of cleaning it up again. I'm lazy that way. 
How would I do that?