Random kid moved in with my sims, and other weirdness.

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indignantgirl
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Random kid moved in with my sims, and other weirdness.

Post by indignantgirl » September 6th, 2019, 3:22 am

Not sure if this is SP, but random people moving around town seems like a SP thing, so maybe. And they aren't really "my" sims, just one of several families I keep an eye on.

First of all, one family's baby came back after being removed by the social worker. I needed the baby removed for storytelling purposes, so I got it removed. Parents got yelled at by the SW, got the neglect moodlet, they went upstairs to woohoo, and all was well.

Next morning, I got a notice that their baby had moved back into their household. And then a notice that another child had moved in at the same time. This child wasn't adopted by my sims, and its relationship panel shows a big family, but I assume it's fake because I can't find any of them. AFAIK, in TS3 people don't get their babies back from the SW, and they certainly don't get extra children dumped in their laps. They still had the neglect moodlets and everything.

I know SP can move people around, but does it move children like that? Would some certain scenario trigger this? I'm imagining the SW being like, "Look, we're full up and don't have space for your baby. We'll give it back but only if you take this extra child off our hands as well. A twofer, if you will." That's probably not it, though...

At the same time (in the space of a sim hour), 2 sims in one of my main households quit their jobs, and one family was pushed to move because their home failed inspections (double beds, I think), BUT they were pushed to an empty lot with no house. Would all that be a case of an excitable SP? Or is something else amiss?

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Random kid moved in with my sims, and other weirdness.

Post by igazor » September 6th, 2019, 11:26 am

indignantgirl wrote:
September 6th, 2019, 3:22 am
I know SP can move people around, but does it move children like that? Would some certain scenario trigger this?
Maybe these sims should be a little more careful about the contests and sweepstakes they enter. The first prize that they really wanted might have been a car or a new kitchen appliance, but they are obligated to accept the second or third prize (read the fine print) if they win that instead. :)

Okay, but seriously the only scenario I can think of where this happens is when the last possible head of household of another family passes away. Just before that happens, an inheritance scenario runs and SP attempts to move their young children and pets into households of friends and relatives, if there are any in town who can accept them. There's usually notifications that appear explaining what is happening, but they are easy to miss if you get a lot of stories or routinely dismiss them without paying close attention.
indignantgirl wrote:
September 6th, 2019, 3:22 am
At the same time (in the space of a sim hour), 2 sims in one of my main households quit their jobs, and one family was pushed to move because their home failed inspections (double beds, I think), BUT they were pushed to an empty lot with no house. Would all that be a case of an excitable SP? Or is something else amiss?
That kind of thing is a side-effect of switching active households without some form of Rotational Play invoked to protect the ones you have switched out of. Even if you don't play in rotations in a formal planned sense, leaving an actively played household to control another with no such protections will enable SP to take control of them and do what it thinks it should with their lives. Although I can't really explain why or how a household could get deposited on an empty lot that I assume has no refrigerator or beds.
Story-Progression-Rotational-Caste-Settings

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indignantgirl
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Random kid moved in with my sims, and other weirdness.

Post by indignantgirl » September 6th, 2019, 2:22 pm

Thanks for the reply! And believe me, I do have my rotational caste set up that way. Well, it's a mix option one and option two, and it's worked out fabulously. I rule this town with an iron fist. I've figured out two of the issues, nothing to do with SP that I can tell.

1. My two sims' job was homeworld university and for some reason, on Thursday morning at 6am, they "graduated". Not graduated really, but they suddenly have full credits for their degree. I'm not having perfect luck with homeworld university but it's probably user error of some sort. I'm not worried about it too much.

2. The empty lot was one I placed a house on and 5 minutes later bulldozed, but I did go back into the game for those 5 minutes. It was only the sim-day before, so maybe the game didn't realize the house wasn't there. The notice didn't know what to call it, so it said they'd moved to "some house" at this address. Kind of funny that the couple moved from a house without enough double beds to a house with no house at all.

So. Onto the big issue.The baby: First, does anybody EVER get their exact same baby back after the SW? I haven't found anything when googling it. Mostly it's people who WANT their baby back. And it's definitely the same baby. The parents still had a relationship with it and he was on the family tree as their son.

The spare kid: I promise, I always watch the notices closely because I play a lot of families and I have to be sure nobody is doing anything they aren't supposed to be doing.XD Her bio family has, as far as I know, NEVER lived in this town and nobody seems to know them (going by relationship panels). They are listed in the options when I go to "add sim" but they don't live anywhere. I've been playing this save for several sim years with immigration off so an extra family of 6 would have pinged my radar. I hope. My sims who ended up with the kid live in SV but moved here from Appaloosa Plains a few years ago, so I can't imagine they have any relatives in town, and the kid's family tree shows her family to be alive.

And the fact that this couple's baby returned at the same time...I don't like it. But it sounds to me like, if there's no other scenario where SP would have done this, I guess the game itself just...hiccuped?

Anyways, I saved the baby and the kid to the bin and let them go to clipboard heaven. I might try adding some of the kid's family somewhere, to investigate this further.

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Random kid moved in with my sims, and other weirdness.

Post by igazor » September 6th, 2019, 2:28 pm

This is what we call in the trade a WAG (Wild something Guess), but by any chance have you been or had you then been saving this or another saved game and retreating to the Main Menu rather than quitting TS3 entirely before loading up again? There is a known issue when doing so that doesn't clear the contents of RAM out entirely in between game sessions and some of the data from one saved game can get superimposed on the next one with potentially unwanted mismatched results.

Sorry if that's not at all relevant, but some of this sounds like mild symptoms of having done that.

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Random kid moved in with my sims, and other weirdness.

Post by indignantgirl » September 6th, 2019, 3:03 pm

I usually don't do that, because I like to quit completely to clear the cache files when I've been playing a while. But sometimes I do, like if I don't like what happens in the game and I want to save without quitting to reload my last save, or if something gets locked up. So I probably do that once a day or so (me-day, not sim-day). Your WAG makes a lot of sense. For everything except the rando kid, anyways. For whatever reason, that whole thing infuriates me. Like. How DARE they? Don't they know whose town they're messing with? Whoever "they" are.

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Random kid moved in with my sims, and other weirdness.

Post by igazor » September 6th, 2019, 4:35 pm

Data bleed between game sessions could at least partially explain the random kid too, though. All the game knows is that sim number (some hex code) belongs in household number (some other hexcode). If some but not all of the data gets imposed upon a different game session, then those sims and households won't match up to give us the town we expected to see. The kid could have been a newspaper delivery sim originally, or standing by in the service pool in case a spare was needed. Or in the adoption pool even, but then that doesn't really explain the extended family tree.

For whatever it's worth, the presence of the Traveler mod makes this bug more likely to happen or have a more severe impact but players without it and with no mods at all have experienced similar -- usually relating to dead sims whom they knew were long since buried suddenly alive or showing up as resident playable ghosts and living on lots where they should not have been.

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Random kid moved in with my sims, and other weirdness.

Post by indignantgirl » September 7th, 2019, 11:23 pm

Well, that explanation sounds as good as any to me! I did get Traveler recently so we'll go with that. :D Thank you for helping me poke this thing with a stick for a while.

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Random kid moved in with my sims, and other weirdness.

Post by Serena » September 13th, 2019, 2:05 pm

What exactly is Relationship Panel...I don't understand the description of it;...I don't know whether or not to download it....??

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Random kid moved in with my sims, and other weirdness.

Post by igazor » September 13th, 2019, 2:29 pm

Serena - Hi there. The relationship panel is part of the game itself. It's the left to right scrolling list of sims that we see in the user interface, in the lower right corner of the screen that shows all of the sims whom the active sim has met and the nature/strength of their relationship. The RelationshipPanel mod, which hasn't really been referenced in this thread, changes the built-in panel a bit, reduces the chance of errors associated with it whereby sims might show up as red squares, and adds more commands to the sims who appear on it if they are in the same world as the active sim. It's perfectly safe to try out and, like most of our mods here, easily removable if you don't care for it.

The extra commands do take a bit of getting used to. If you invoke one that usually assumes the sims are in the same place as each other, such as a friendly, funny, romantic, or mean interaction, but in reality they are across town, your sim will attempt to go across town to where the target is to carry out that interaction as if you had clicked on the other sim themselves.

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