Edit: I am going to leave the following discovery process intact. My original post title was a question as to whether it was normal for plumbots to randomly lose Lifetime Happiness Rewards. In the process of writing the post I was doing some testing. During the testing I discovered at least one repeatable way this can occur. But I think it reads nicely as an emerging discovery, so here goes...My plumbots sometimes lose their Lifetime Happiness Rewards!
I have tried removing trait chips one at a time to see if it happens when I swap chips around and so far that hasn't caused the issue.
On the plus side, I have learned a few chip-related things:
- He stays married to his plumbot wife even without the Capacity to Love chip.
- He (of course) loses his job and some career progress when he uninstalls and reinstalls the Office Drone chip, much like when a Sim quits and restarts a career.
- He loses his Lifetime Wish without the Sentience chip (but he already completed that anyway).
- He does not permanently lose any skills when removing his Limitless Learning chip. They return when it's reinstalled.
- Limitless Learning chips do not store the skills in the chip. You can not swap skills to a new plumbot by swapping chips.
- The Efficient chip should be uninstalled prior to going to work if your plumbot has work related Lifetime Happiness Rewards. It locks the work experience rate at "Robotic Efficiency" speed, which gains work experience more slowly than do high mood and the Multitasker Lifetime Happiness Reward.
- Swapping or removing socially related chips does not affect current friendship levels.
Even after massive amounts of chip swapping my plumbot still retained all the Lifetime Happiness Rewards I had just got him.
I learned a few non-chip-related things too
(yay and the answer to "why, oh why is this happening"!):
- Having the family move to an owned private lot or even a new lot in town didn't affect his Lifetime Happiness Rewards.
- Traveling to China and back did not affect his Lifetime Happiness Rewards.
- Having him move out and become the new active family did remove all his Lifetime Happiness Rewards!
- Having his wife plumbot move out of the family did not affect them.
- Using Edit Town to split the family and then merge his wife with a new family did remove all his Lifetime Happiness Rewards!
This is doubtless why my plumbot lost his rewards prior to my making this post. I have a house next door where I split off my family's offspring from my main family and I have all the adult kids living next door where I can go see them but I don't have to run their lives.
The first one moved out with the telephone, which doesn't cause this issue. The rest required me to go to Edit Town and split them from the parents' household and merge them with their siblings next door, which I've done twice so far with this family.
Interestingly, it does not reset the Total Lifetime Happiness Acquired stat that you can see by hovering the pointer over the treasure chest icon in the Lifetime Happiness tab. It shows my plumbot has earned 113,651 Lifetime Happiness Points, but he currently only has 3,051 points to spend and no Lifetime Happiness Rewards acquired.
Can anyone else confirm these results? I can't imagine this is "working as intended." Does anyone know how to request that EA fixes this?
