I have one sim who has hard reset three times while excavating a dig site, twice in China and once in Egypt. She's been on five trips and must have excavated at least 15 digs, so it's not a regular occurrence. Every time it happens, she's just found a relic; I believe it's always been one from the relic collections. At first I thought she only reset when the relic was the first she'd found within a collection, but the most recent time, she found her second Horus of the Sky. For what it's worth, she's never reset while in a tomb.

Also, the other sim in the house has never been reset while excavating, but he's only been around for two trips and six to eight digs.

I uploaded the most recent ET log, but I don't have the first two anymore. Perhaps I shouldn't have cleaned my computer so thoroughly.

Oh, I should add that I currently have only WA, Ambitions, and a few stuff packs running on a Steam install. I have a few store items, but I'm not using any store outfits, and I have no custom content. If it matters, the sim that keeps getting reset was sent to me (CAP on her hair, I think, but no cc), and I made the other one.

Any insight offered to this minimally competent mod user would be greatly appreciated.

Hi there Puzzlez and thanks for bringing the error and its log over here. As I suspected, we will need our developer to look at this one.

This is a stack overflow error. Basically it means that upon or just before your sim finding a relic, sometimes the game is stacking up far too many actions to happen in sequence than it can actually handle. Instead of crashing, which is what I expect would happen otherwise, the error is "trapped" and the sim gets reset in order to get out of the impossible situation. I expect this would be a game/WA bug and not anything we can really do something about other than play around it by not excavating for a while.

But Chain may very well see something different there and have further suggestions.

Hi igazor, fancy finding you here. (And perhaps this is the first time I didn't procrastinate with fixing my game, although I guess it must be noted that it took me three resets to do anything about the problem.)

I'm curious how the game would be stacking so many actions. Is it the locals, or something else going on in the world? I do remember the first time my sim was reset, it was late at night, so I'd expect most sims would be hibernating in their houses. (This time it happened in the afternoon, and the second time was late morning.) Or am I missing the point? (again)

Fancy finding me in my own house for a change?

No, that's not what I meant. Whatever else is going on in the world probably isn't relevant. The game engine does "know enough" to do things in a certain order and if it's overwhelmed then it begins throttling things it can't handle like Free Will and other forms of autonomy, action queues get dropped, sims stand around looking like they are stoned out of their minds (more so than usual), it takes the game 30 sim minutes to even respond to a player-directed command, etc.

Related to this one activity that this one sim is doing, excavating, the log shows us that 64 things are lined up to happen behind the scenes. That's a lot and likely over the limit of what the game can handle related to that one action. And probably way over what its programmers really intended to have happen.

When the game encounters an impossible to carry out or undefined transaction, it would be items #0 or #1 that would tend to be the culprit and ErrorTrap would tell us something like a null value was found where it wasn't expected and other variations on that theme. That's often how we catch the presence of mods from other parties that might be outdated or conflicting with something else. Instead this error comes out and says
"System.StackOverflowException: The maximum stack depth for the interpreter has been exceeded."

Another example of this kind of programming error that can't really be fixed on the player end would be recursion, where a sequence of commands calls itself to run within its own sequence and unintentionally gets caught in a never-ending loop in the process.

Too bad, I was hoping I could MC-reset away whatever was causing the problems. But if you think it would be better for your developer to look over the log, that works for me. Especially seeing as how I'm still not completely understanding what exactly those 64 actions are or where they're coming from.

And yes, I've seen enough ET messages like "a null value was found where an object instance was required" to have internalized a few workarounds, like cancelling any fishing actions that are running or queued up when I load a save. (And not saving mid-woohoo, but it's unsurprising that that would cause problems.) The really fun ones are where ET says something about a sim having a sloppy jalopy or big lemon as a parent. As long as it's not the same sim over and over, though, I tend to ignore that kind of thing.

The 64 actions are coming from the game's own programming. Basically the game says oh look, your sim found an excavated artifact. Okay, here are the things are going to happen next. Everything in the game has sequences of code like this, including mundane things like routing to a lot, changing clothes, and cooking dinner. Except in this case there appears to be something very wrong with the sequence thus causing the errors.

Where ET refers to parent-child on objects like that, it means in a programmatic sense. Not a genetic one. If a vase is sitting on a table for instance, we might say that the table is the parent of the vase object or if a sim is sitting inside of a car we might say that the car is the parent of the sim object temporarily. But we don't mean that one gave birth to the other.

Oh I know about the car/parent thing, at least on the most basic level. It just amuses me. Still, when coupled with the very real threat of a massively corrupted game placing anything from pets to household furniture in the family tree, I always get a bit nervous before reminding myself that it's probably fine.

Thanks for the explanations. This isn't something I have the background to figure out on my own (as you well know by now), but I'm always curious as to what's happening under the hood, so to speak. I've been wondering if the sim is supposed to be celebrating the discovery or something—the last one at least was expensive enough to satisfy the promised wish of finding a relic worth §2,500—and the fist-pumping is the source of the problem. But of course if it's something completely invisible during gameplay, I'd have no idea. I mean, without you telling me otherwise. Which I always appreciate.

Yeah, EA really screwed that one up. There's a fix here: http://modthesims.info/d/411913 - it allows you to get the treasure without resetting but their relic journal, buffs and wishes doesn't update which is what is causing the errors.

Thank you, Chain. It's funny, now that you mention it, it's possible that every reset occurred when a relic find fulfilled a wish. (Maybe not the second reset, but definitely the other two.) There was also a sound that accompanied each reset—the whooshing noise of a new wish appearing in the selection window, but loud enough to indicate three or four wishes being rolled at once.

As for the sim not getting credit for the find in her journal or promised wishes, there are more than enough tombs to address it.

By the way, igazor already knows this, but I just wanted to say how grateful I am for all the work you've done with these wonderful mods. If not for nraas, I would likely have walked away from TS3 years ago in anger and frustration. I'd never been able to maintain a game for more than a few generations until google introduced me to ET, OW, and MC, and then of course I just had to get a bunch more. So thank you for putting so much effort into keeping this project going. Your contributions are a huge part of why people like me can still enjoy this amazing game, even nine years after its release.