Trouble with Vacation Homes

[anubis1970]

This is my first post, so I apologise if this is in the wrong spot in the forum.

I've recently run into a problem with going on vacations.  I started a solo household and worked my sim to a level three visa in all three countries.  I have a vacation home in each place.  I then got my sim married and had a child.  When the child and her imaginary friend were both teen I decided to take a trip to France.  And that's when the game glitched on me.  Whenever I try to go on a vacation it skips the step where you choose either the base camp or a vacation home, centres on my vacation property and nobody shows up.

Has anyone else had this problem or something similar??

[Wai]

There is a known bug with sims not showing up for vacation.  Usually, when this happens, loading your last saved file and replaying the game to the point of going on vacation fixes it. 

However, I get the impression that this is happening consistantly for you.  Do you still have an older save that you could go back to?

Sometimes, when a sim, or sim family, is glitched, evicting them from their home and immediately returning them from the clipboard to their home fixes the problem.

However, there is an easier solution which may be worth trying.  Select "Edit Town" when you arrive at your vacation destination.  Simply go into Edit Town mode - do not save town, and then Return to Game - do not save town.  This has worked for me several times.

[Pam]

Welcome to our Forum, anubis1970.

When you say nobody shows up, do you mean you don't even have the pictures of their heads along the left side of the screen?

[anubis1970]

Correct.  No pictures on the side.

Before the problem started, it would always ask me to choose a base for my adventures.  Now it skips that and no sims show up on the screen and no pics at the left side of the console.

I'll try what Wai suggested and see if entering and then leaving edit town works.

[skybaker]

Have you tried to use your Sims' phone after arrival. I don't remember exactly, but One of the function under "Real Estate" is to select your Vacation House.

[anubis1970]

I'll try that too.  Thank you.

edit:  There was no image of the phone in the control panel.  And entering edit town and then exiting brought up the create a household panel from when you first start the game.  I think my save is just glitched beyond repair. 

[Wai]

Ok, I have just had another thought. 

This is absolutely a shot in the dark, but, might be worth a try.  I wrote up instructions for replacing the meta files in WA.  It is used to recover a game which cannot be loaded at all because of corruption.  You certainly would not do any harm trying it as your game is currently broken anyway.  Save a copy of your game files to a seperate folder first then follow the steps, message 87, in the "Fixing/Recovering Saved Game - Saved Game Not in Game Launcher or Corrupted" sticky above.  You need to be careful not to delete or copy over any files other than those listed.  If the corruption is in these meta files then this just might save your games.

[anubis1970]

It's certainly worth a try.  I've devoted a lot of hours and I'd hate to just have to abandon it.  Thank you Wai.

[Ricalynn]

The only way I get my family back is similar to what Wai suggested but I do an extra step.   When I get to China/France/Egypty and no one is there, I go into Edit Town then I choose the button at the top left of the screen that looks like a house.  It loads the game back into my home world.   Then I hit return to game.  This causes the game to reload where it's supposed to be and often brings my family back.


There are also known bugs for having celebrity gifts or anything that can be sent as a celebrity gift in the family inventory/personal inventory.  Try to keep as few items in either of these as possible and that might help tremendously.

[anubis1970]

Using the Edit Town/Home button worked.  I just had to delete and replace the tills in the market.  Thank you everyone.