Hi!

I foolishly allowed a "Free Vacation" opportunity to happen, because I did not know about the problems it might cause before it was too late. As a result, one of the adults got "stuck" in vacation mode and I had to bring him back to the game manually using MasterController. Now the problem is that nobody in the household is allowed to travel: "The adults in the household are already traveling".

Some forum posts (http://answers.ea.com/t5/The-Sims-3/The ... td-p/40874) suggested packing the family to the library and unpacking it back into the world to fix this bug. However, doing this will result in them losing all relationships to the townies.

I decided to try using Porter to perform the same task. Here's what I did:

I saved the game, packed the household, exited the game, reloaded the save, evicted the "old" household, switched to a different random household, saved the game, reloaded the game, unpacked the saved household into an empty lot, saved the game, reloaded it and finally switched to the unpacked "new" household. The LTRs with the townies were wiped, only the family relationships stayed untouched.

Am I doing something wrong? Is it even possible to fix the bug using Porter this way?

Hi there, and welcome to NRaas.

That's a creative sounding solution for that awful Generations based issue, but no I'm afraid Porter isn't meant to work that way. What Porter does is allow you to pack up multiple households, how many depends on how complicated the sims are and how much stress your computer system and game can handle, and place them into a different world. The sims within the pack from various households will maintain their relationships and history with each other, this does not extend to sims outside of the pack. So, by packing up only one household, you aren't really accomplishing anything.

Also, by unpacking these sims into what is essentially the same world, you will without meaning to be creating duplicates. Once a world had had sims Portered out of it, it's not really meant to be played any further. You could try MC Total Annihilation on all of the sims you are trying to remove and duplicate rather than evicting them, but even that isn't exactly highly recommended and I would still be afraid of creating more of a mess than anything else.

Forgive me for oversimplifying the problem, but as you have your adult back in some form or another already, have you tried the old(er) fashioned method of resetting the household? Retreat to Edit Town (if you can), evict the household to the side of the screen, copy their uninhabited house down to the bin, bulldoze the original, replace it with a copy, and move everyone back in without having left the screen. Of course, if this doesn't work out right just don't save the results. And if you can't get into Edit Town directly, perhaps use MC to switch active household first?

Well, resetting the household fixed it. Haha, thanks, I really did make it harder for myself. But at least now I know the proper way to use Porter

Well, kind of. Usually the impossibly difficult part is getting the missing adult(s) to reappear when this happens, but you managed to find a way that worked that time on your own it seems. So kudos for that and I'm glad that the household is back to normal again. If I may be so bold, I would suggest not accepting the "free vacation" next time or, at the very least, carefully make a spare Save As so you can revert the game to the pre-vacation stage if something goes wrong again.

Yeah, when the Free Vacation ended one of the adults did not return from the trip and did not get re-added to the household. However, since he was still listed in the ancestry tree, I was able to pull a Nraas menu from his portrait, did a reset and added him to the household manually.

Is the Boarding school sequence prone to bugs like this?

Not nearly as bad, no. But sorry to say I don't trust the boarding school system as much myself as others seem to and prefer to keep my younger sims in places where I can see them.

I really do need to stick something into Overwatch to nuke this thing for good. It literally never works correctly because hibernating active Sims goes against everything the core was written for. The only reason the boarding school isn't quite as tragic is younger Sims often don't have as much inventory and other data attached to them to get nuked when hibernated.