I'm trying to find 2 assassin bugs for the adventure in China, but I cannot seem to find a second one. I'm not sure if it's due to the fact that some of the spawners now spawn things like wild flowers (no pets in my game, sadly) or if a patch may have messed up the spawners. I know they are rare, but it's been 3 days for this trip and it's my second trip to china (3rd try at this particular adventure). Thus far, I have only found 1 assassin bug during both trips. I finally was able to afford the collection helper, so I'm just collecting everything on the map. Not sure if it will help to spawn anything or not.

If you have University Life and have a sim with high enough science skill, you can have them take a sample of the bug and then clone it.

(On the science machine)

I've found those to be particularly difficult myself. I usually catch one and clone the rest on the science station back home, but that requires UL and level 8 or so of the science skill. Occasionally I'll find enough spawning naturally, but that's rare. If you use Retuner and want to turn off wildflowers spawning on insect spawners you can set that chance to zero here:

NRaas>Retuner>Settings>General>By Tunable XML>Sims3.Gameplay.Objects>Wildflower>kChanceInsectSpawnerSpawnsWildflower

Default is 0.25. I set it to 0 in some games. I only recently learned about this setting and haven't tried it in China so I don't know if it will help with the assassin bugs.

You might also try the epic spawner mod from MTS and place the epic beetle spawner on some of the community lots. http://modthesims.info/d/509778

Thank you! I had forgotten about the science skill cloning. I'll probably tune out those pesky wildflowers too. My sims never pick them anyways.

I just use DebugEnabler: Click on ground>Debug>Options<Create>insect.