Mods ruined my game?

[Kyzan]

Hello everyone, I am not sure if I should post this here or in Technical help, but since it's about Mods, I figured here would be fine.

Know that what I am presenting to you is a complete nightmarish mess. To clear things up, I have to describe everything I did to try salvaging my game (and how it made it worse).

Expansions and stuff packs: All except Katy Perry's Sweet thingy.

Mods when starting:

MasterController
MasterController Integration
Woohooer
Mover
PortraitPanel

All from Twallan's Nraas.

Location: Sunset Valley.

I had 8 sims and 3 cats, after playing for 3 generations, planning to build a new and bigger house for my legacy.

First bug encounter: Can't build a house with more than two story.

Looking up online, I find it may be caused by Season and the Autumn leaves that get in the way.
Move my family to an empty lot, delete the house lot. Replace it with a clean one. Build the dream house in Edit Town.

That is when Island Paradise came out. Naturally I got it, installed it. Naturally as well, I wanted to try it out. However, not with a new save, and not wanting to live in Island Paradise for the rest of my game.

So I get Traveler from Nraas.

Since I had 3 cats and planned on coming back, I left a couple with the cats and brought the rest of the family (3 adults, 1 teen, 2 kids) to Island Paradise.

Upon arriving, I set it as my Hometown like the Mod said to do, since I still wanted school and work and aging to continue as normal.

Second bug encounter: Sims won't go to work or school.

Looking it up online, I tried different things.

Moved my family to another home (in Island Paradise).
Then it asks me where I want to live for this term. (Pretty sure this isn't University  )
I select a home anyway, then my family is no longer pinned, and I'm in the chosen house with no family at all, but on live mode.

I change household to my previous family. Of course, I can't select it.
I try selecting an EA premade family.
Same problem.

That's when I get Debug Enabler.

I use Fix Hometown on the City Hall.

Bug solved: Sims now go to school.
Partial bug solve: Sims try to go to work, but enter the building and exit it immediatly.

Knowing it could be caused by a Multi-purpose rabbit hole, I demolish the problematic rabbit-hole and replace it with Sunset Valley versions.

However, the bug remains.

Note: The female Adult sim got pregnant while in Island Paradise.

This is when I notice that this same female sims has the "Romantic" social menu with her son.
Looking up the son's relationship panel, I notice that he, along with his two sisters(that are now teens), no longer have a family tree. It is also not even showing everyone they know (Only their Mom, as best friend, and Uncle, as Distant friend).

(My adults' family trees are intact)

Looking it up online, I learn it can be solved with MasterController Cheats.

So I add this Mod to my collection. Load the game.

The game loads (much faster than when I had no bugs), but I can only select one sim, and he can't do a single thing. Not even using the mods.

As a backup, I save the family to my bin. Exit the game, restart my computer.

Start a new game, in Sunset Valley.

Select my household from the bin. Try placing them on a lot. Can't select any lot.
Try moving in with a EA premade family. Same problem.

Exit Game to Main Menu. Make a copy of my Main game, just in case.

Get rid of Master Controller Cheats, Traveler and Debug Enabler. Load my game.

Using a dresser, I save each sim to the bin, planning to redo the whole family myself.

Click on computer and want to choose "Move to other Hometown". Knowing very well it would break the family tree but just wanting to get the Couple and cats I left in Sunset Valley to save them to the bin as well.

I can't move because the Mom is pregnant. Fair enough, I shall wait for her to give birth.

When her water breaks, everything seems to go as it should, only, when she's about to give birth, the action "Have baby" gets cancelled and I get a message

"Woohooer Scrip Error" over and over, everytime she tries to have her baby. I tried going into the hospital, same problem. Now the mom is going back between the house and the hospital, and I can't cancel her actions.

I exit the game. Look online for solutions. Can't find anything.

Get rid of Woohooer Mod. Load my game.

This time, the Mom has the "Baby is coming" moodlet but isn't acting like it and she can't do anything. Click on her and "Have baby at Hospital". She goes, but never comes out, the action "Have baby" is there forever (about two days now).

Eventually the dad decides to join her in the hospital. Once he's inside, I cancel his action and he gets out.

I then separate the family and have the loner move back to Sunset Valley. (Still trying to salvage the Couple and cats)

Once in Sunset Valley, the Couple and cats and all the edits I had made on Sunset valley (Houses mainly) were gone.

Quit game without saving. Reload.

While the Mom is being crazy at the Hospital (at least her mood is stable), I invite the male from the Couple over (Invite long distance).

While waiting for him to arrive, I notice that whenever I try to have more than one person watching TV, the sims just randomly "teleport" on the lot.

Decide not to care since I'm only trying to get the couple here.

When the Male from the Couple arrives, I use MasterController to add him to the active family. His wife is not in his relationship panel (but the cats are). Neither is she in his inventory in her Imaginary Friend doll form.

Save him into the bin using the dresser, figuring I could recreate her from memory. Same for the cats.

Go to Edit Town, Create a Household. My sims are in the bin, as I hoped. I click on one to try loading her, but it won't load.

I then try clicking on a EA premade sim from the bin. Won't load either.

This is when I stop and look for help.

I know I screwed up somewhere, but I don't know where.

At this point, all I want is to be able to unbug my game and be able to play it.

I suppose I need to reinstall everything?

Is there any way I can salvage my Legacy family in the process?

Will there be any way for me, suppose it gets rid of all the bugs, to re-download the mods?

Is Traveler bugged or something?

My plan was to leave Sunset Valley until my family had enough money to buy the dream house, giving me the time to enjoy the expansion, then come back to Sunset Valley and live there forever and ever. Is that plan something possible? If so, how? (Once everything is fixed, of course).

Please, help me  I've never seen a game with so many bugs.

[Vinyl]

Ouch, that's a lot of bugs everywhere.  First thing you want to do is make a copy of your save files before doing anything else, so you've got something to restore in case the fixes don't work.

If you can find older save files to recover, hopefully before the family was split and sent to Isla Paradiso, there's info about doing that in this thread.  This topic has all sorts of great links on the technical side of saves and recovery.

You'll want to make sure your mods are up to date.  After every patch they need to be updated.  It's possible one of the old ones is out of date and that's why everything's going wrong.

If you want to try loading the game without any of the mods to see what happens be sure to follow the directions on the Nraas pages about how to remove them.  Some of them add unique animations/scripts, and I think doing a 'resetsim *' is all that's needed to make sure no sims are currently doing any of the things you're about to remove, but it won't hurt to double check.

If neither of those things lets you do what you want with your family your best approach might be to salvage them as much as possible.  By that I mean trying things like saving the household to the library in edit town mode, or using the mirror to save every household member that can be saved.  If you've still got updated master controller installed you should be able to edit every sim in CAS using it, including the pregnant wife (though that might not work if she's actively giving birth). 

Sometimes files get corrupted and it's through no fault of the player or the mods - the game has lots of potential bugs and other issues.  Good luck with recovering what you can, and hopefully some of the more technical simmers have other great suggestions.  Be sure to save in stages once you've recovered (example keep a unique save file for big events, like moving to a new neighbourhood, sending sims off to travel/university, etc. - it's easier to try and recover a family before they get corrupted and having 'bookmarks' of their lives can help with this).  Let us know how it goes!

[Kyzan]

Alright.

After saving a copy of my family to the bin plus each sim individually in the library, I salvaged an older save.

It is sadly still in Island Paradise, but less buggy already.

It is at the point where I found out that multi-purpose rabbit-hole caused my man to enter the building and exit it immediatly. My female sim is pregnant, but far from giving birth, and my two girls are still kids.

I updated every single Mod I had.

There, the bugs that still need fixing are:

Entering and exiting rabbitholes when it's for work.
Broken family tree for the two kids and the teen.
Probably giving birth when it comes.

Okay, so, main difference with my own tries is that previously, when I was at that point, I couldn't select any family member and make them do anything.

Now, I can, and MasterController is working properly, which means I can repair the family tree.
However, they still can't go to work.

Any suggestions on what I should do from here?

[Turoskel]

I know you are probably fairly sick of mods by now but I see no mention of you trying overwatch and error trap from Twallan, those two mods are the main bug sorters, overwatch should automatically fix your family tree for you without the need of master controller and error trap might find some of the things causing your other troubles.

I've used many of Twallans mods problem free but I have to say Traveller is one I stay away from now, it has bugged games for me in the past, I like the idea of it but in practice it has never quite worked as advertised for me, my last attempt I used it to send some performers from Riverview to Starlight Shores and it started off okay but got buggier and buggier to the point I had to abandon the game 

Honestly though if I could only pick two mods it would be the two I mentioned above as they do the most for keeping games bug free, if you haven't tried those yet I'd say give it a shot and see if they find anything.

Back up your current working save first though as always.

[Pam]

With that amount of bugs, I would back up the files and do a clean re-install, leaving out the mods.  I don't use mods at all and my game runs as good as any.

[Dellena]

I just want to add to a point above.  You should update ANY mods not only after a patch, but also after the release of an expansion.  The patches will add new features and gameplay and mods need to be updated.  But expansions do as well and mods need to be updated again.  A lot of people think, ok, patch 1.55 just came out, I've updated my mobs to 1.55 so I'm good until the next patch.  This is wrong.  The expansions themselves add a lot of elements that the modders cannot account for until they are released.  Example:  Overwatch was updated to 1.55 and working fine.  Then IP came out with houseboats and it was deleting them.  There was no way for Twallan to know this could happen until the expansion was released along with the coding.  So it had to be updated again.  I often see the advice of "make sure your mods are updated to the current patch" but this can be misleading if people don't follow their modder's sites as well as here at the lovely Carl and Pam's site.  I would highly recommend that if your modder has a means of keeping you posted on updates, that you use it (Twallan does).  That way, you get an e-mail notification of a mod being updated so you know you should update as well.

As for being unable to go to work, I seem to remember someone posting something about some of the rabbit holes not having enough room at the doors or something.  Maybe someone could clarify.

[Vinyl]

Dellena's right, there's now an issue in the game with several rabbitholes (mostly Lunar Lakes, but some in other towns).  If the entrance to the rabbithole isn't at least three spaces back from the sidewalk sims can't enter them (or it might be four, I can't remember where the thread is to double check). 

Another cause could be something to do with the career outfit.  Trying the usual fix of making a new one with a dresser then changing your sim into it before work starts might help. 

Kyzan, I know you definitely want to save the family, but are you worried about saving the rest of the town?  If you don't care about the townies at this point I recommend repairing the family tree, possibly using mastercontroller to end the pregnancy (though you can try running the game on high speed and if the delivery happens without problems it should be safe to leave it), and saving a copy of the repaired household and their house separately to the bin.  Split them if the household size would need a mod to be able to move/play them.  Be sure to grab the couple in the hometown as well. 

Then you could start a brand new game in whichever town you like and place the bin copy of the families and their homes where you like them (and of course you can recombine them once you start playing).  The new game will have a smaller file size and the town should be relatively bug free.  At that point if things start going strange right away then you'll know your people or their home might be buggy. 

If that happens copy them all to the mirror, abandon the house, and start a brand new game and create brand new households using the mirror copies.  With mastercontroller family trees, career levels, happiness points and rewards can all be quickly changed to where you need them.  It's the nuclear option, but at that point there really shouldn't be any corrupted data attached to them at all.

Also I highly recommend Errortrap and Overwatch as well.  Unless I need to remove those mods for an official challenge file they're always installed for my games.  They make me positively fearless of bugs when they're active, compared to the huge list of things my sims Shall Not Do when they're not.  Sims 3 is a great game, but it's got a lot of buggy parts too.   

I'm glad to hear your game is almost there.  Good luck stomping out the last bugs, and let us know how it goes!

[Kyzan]

About the rabbit holes, he is very able to enter it, he just gets teleported out.

Okay, so I now have Overwatch and ErrorTrap.

I do plan on starting a new save, once I can. I will only travel to Island Paradise as a travel destination instead of changing it to my hometown, which is when everything started being buggy.

Okay, loading the game to see what state it is in...And see if I can do as suggested and grab the couple from Sunset Valley.

Overwatch did not fix the family tree. However, everyone they are supposed to know is in the relationship panel.

Now, I will wait for the pregnancy and see how it goes.

I will then travel to sunset valley and try to save the couple into the mirror somehow.

I will keep you guys posted.
---------------------------

Good news!

Pregnancy went fine and she gave birth like any normal sim should.
I was able to Travel to Sunset Valley (on Vacation), find the couple, and save them all with the mirror.
I also noticed that visiting Sunset Valley fixed the family tree!
I'm guessing it was caused by making Island Paradise my new hometown.

I will still restart a new clean slate game. And see how good it is. I kind of wanted to change the family name anyway. XD

[Sharonde03]

I can't believe I just read all that and the ending was hysterical !!!  Thanks fo all the tips....have a good one!