Hua, Part Three
Now my actual favorite baby in this dynasty gen was Maka, a cute white puppy. Heiva actually found a lot of tiberium on his own, but lest I have to supplement with...
[shudders]...
pink diamonds, a dog had to fill in.
Little Hua absolutely adored him as a tot! Finally someone in the house who's her size.
Unfortunately, Hua aged up both without a party and also without potty training. I can deal with random traits but this one was...Athletic! Heiva weeps! And yes, I replaced it with Couch Potato the moment that the Midlife Crisis LTR was available (thank god this is legal for the decadynasty), which is only for YA and up. It actually made teenhood very precarious for Hua, because she wanted to work out all the time and the only thing I could to stop it was keep an eye on her queue.
She turned out fat like Heiva, but also was definitely in the ranks of cute sim kids like dad once was. Maka grew up alongside her as well. He was the first big dog I ever got in a decadynasty!
And as it turned out, I had a lot of photos of him for when Hua was being boring. She had the usual job of meeting youths around town.
I was really disturbed by her declarations of love at first. Aren't you a little young for this? Can you at least wait until you're the same age as the Jayne kids? But as it turns out, that's just the animation for sims who love the outdoors when they go to the park. And new for me, because I never make me sims go outside.
I had my ideas for Hua's spouse that didn't necessarily involve Trinity Jayne, but he and the rest of his family liked to hang out at the park. Hua made friends with him and his sister, but the screenshots may remain lost. Here's Winter getting madeover instead:
Cute!
Her getting close with the Kahale kids, meanwhile, may have had a few more pictures devoted to it...but maybe later in her life. Unfortunately I'm getting close to having to recount disaster for the Lings, which I'm dreading, and Hua's generation yielded far less filler than her dad's for those moments.
So Maggie's ex, Len Tsang, was cured of his lycanthropy and moved in before Maggie actually made him her ex. I swear she was a sweet woman! Just ruthless with her LTW. But actually finding a purpose for him was going to be much harder than it seemed.
The best way to handle decadynasty babies (i.e. leaving mum out of the household) means leaving things like the sex of babies out of my control. This usually works out and I get a male-to-female sex ratio I can work with. Never do I recall having so many boys born or at least surviving and remaining useful. And a lot of the girls, if they survived to adulthood, had brothers who were more useful in some way. For instance, I used Omar Keilani because his sister, Mitzi, turned into a werewolf and probably would need a Fountain of Youth elixir if I cured her for breeding. Those were in short supply. Courtney Grantham was used because his fairy sister shacked up with Pearl Yang, who was higher up on the breeding list than a Grantham woman because she lacked other family. Some families were boys only, such as Harold Sapota's (himself having only a brother) and Auguste's, but only one was girl-only (Gilberto Gonzalo and Nina Aolani had two daughters after all).
Now the population of generic new female sims was larger, as it tends to be, but I wasn't going to propagate those features if I could help it. What's a watcher to do? Praise the lord that I enabled Pets?
I had fun with Caryn Sowers, a former elixir store clerk with a gross hair color and now a better face.
Sometimes it feels like cheating to alter townies. There aren't any rules about changing them through in-game means but some of the fun of reading others' decadynasties is the wacky townie fashion and not knowing anything about your new spouse and maybe even dreading when a whole dynasty loses any unique features (can't relate!) It's like violating a cultural norm, if not a lawful one, whenever I think my heir's future spouse could use a stylist makeover or I use the power of intermarriage to look at a family tree and get a potential spouse's traits. But then I remember that culture is fake and I can do what I want.
Actually affording the $2,800 for facial surgery was a little hard for the household at that time. Unfortunately no one was a huge cash cow and that would have to wait for Hua. Guess that shows what my values are, huh!
Len and Caryn had one surviving son: Nikolas. He looks mostly like her.
Heiva and Iris were sitting on wishes for a child for a long time, and the age gap between them and Hua was only going to grow if they didn't act fast. And Maggie was getting old and needed to meet another grandchild! Iris even got some new lingerie for the occasion. Stockings
were remembered, praise Pam.
Taurus looked menacing with an axe.
And I got the only screenshot of Maggie's one other grandchild: Kim. She was supposed to be around Hua's age but unmodded townie aging is just...
like that. I want to mention her because I had a theory that only children would not be culled from households. But the past tense is key here because she died as a young adult, and I'm very scared.
Alright alright, I told myself that I wouldn't start on Hua's supermax so early. But then I thought the headstart would get her some good headway on the Angler career, especially because fishing lacks a lot of the easy high-value sellable items like, say, sculpting or painting. My original plan was to put her in law enforcement for the ops, but I figured that finishing a self-employment career early would at least get that requirement out of the way (especially because the skills for law enforcement are off-limits for her)
The self-employment first/rabbithole career later idea worked out well for Hua, but at the cost of skill ops. She actually only had to use one law enforcement op in the end, freeing up the career for anyone else, but I also used all her alloted travel ops and a little more vacation time than I had planned. Well, it at least confirmed my theories about skill ops.
She could be a cute fishing kid though! They really do pull the cutest faces.
And the birth of Liwei is where I have to rip the bandaid off about disaster. I actually had to redo his birth a couple times, so it's the point where I know it's unavoidable.
Here's a disclosure: in my many years of playing The Sims 3, I never got the "green box bug". It's actually rare that I end a file thanks to true bugs. The closest I got was, no joke, one related to plastic surgery in another decadynasty save. I realized that while teens can get plastic surgery, it's never successful. Or at least it wasn't successful for my heir's teenage stepbrother, even with the expensive option. He'd come out with the wacky plastic surgery failure face with each try, and I figured I'd just
restore it at the hospital and try again later.
Do not do corrective face surgery! Or at least not on teens? It restores the face...
to have all sliders set to zero. And I only wanted to make the stepbrother look more like his bio-dad.
Anyways.
The bugs were catching up to me in Sunlit Tides ever since my first attempts here. Aging bugs for the whole household in one save. Another was even wilder: sometimes inactive sim toddlers/children would not age up correctly and not appear in the world. They'd still be in the relationship panel if an active sim knew them and still take up a household spot in their household. But the household would be unselectable from Edit Town. The game would crash if I tried to move in anyone from that household as well. It truly was one of those errors that was fixable only with Overwatch/ErrorTrap. I didn't use it as my solution (I'd hesitate to offer it officially to someone else as well) but I did a test. My solution was to ignore the problem and fail with a mudbath instead. Next attempt had my consignment system break. That NEVER happens to me. My sims are awesome consigners who sell everything within 5 days.
Heiva had an aging bug but as the only sim affected and no solution on the horizon, I waited for a birthday to fix it and it did. Talked about this already. But Heiva's household was much wackier than any bug could be. Hua was in a normal nuclear family with some extended relatives. No one cheated. Even Maggie was just a serial monogamist.
We made up for that with the Green Box Bug.
If you're a lucky duck like I once was and never experienced it,
here's the rundown from Crinrict. Or from me: it's when sims in a household become unselectable and unable to be interacted with, and their portrait on the side is empty/a green box.
So here's how severe this was: three sims were affected. Heiva and Iris were down for the count, as was one pollinator and even worse, Maka the dog. Taurus, Hua, baby Liwei, and Taurus' new spouse (shh!) were okay at first, but during my many stabs at saving my dynasty, they too would get "infected". So moving out the offending sims (one solution I read) was actually off the table, and I wouldn't recommend it either.
I make a backup every...time I remember to. Every 1-4 sim days, usually. I'd lose progress of course, but I'm used to that because I'm a CAS addict who doesn't know her game's limits. That was the actual good solution I read, so I sucked it up and fired up my last backup.
Same bug, same sims.Jesus!
Every file I opened would succumb to the bug. Four backups deep, gone. I even tried my save from right before Heiva got married and the same horrible deal happened, but with different sims. These saves were permanently messed up too. I put my backup into a factory reset folder (well mostly, I had to install Sunlit Tides there of course) and it was broken there as well.
Look guys, I cleared the cache. I cleared the CurrentGame folder. I tried moving the household to the clipboard and back. I tried moving them to a different house (kind of against the spirit of the decadynasty but ya know). I tried selecting another household...and they were fine, but my actual dynasty sims still weren't.
Drastic solutions were on the table now. It was going to be a town move in the middle of a generation, or using ErrorTrap and Overwatch. I mean I had to test both of them, at least.
Here's the funny story: ErrorTrap actually made the issue worse. My sims were so bugged that its solution was to delete them, or at least delete them from the household? Including Hua! That's a line I can't cross yet I'm sorry! (I know NRaas experts sometimes lurk here and I'm willing to be educated on this but in that heated moment, it sucked)
But the EA function for moving towns? Preserved everything. In a test file, they arrived in Moonlight Falls with everyone selectable again. If my breeding project in Sunlit Tides wasn't so extensive (and just getting started!) then I'd even consider it my fix. But I wasn't ready to let go so easily. There had to be another way.
It took a while for me to figure out that every save I opened was going to be gone forever. And it took even longer to accept losing nine or ten days of gameplay, because that was my best bet for an extant save.
I reinstalled my game entirely, saved my CC and store content from the previous folder, and set up my new factory reset folder. And finally, I had a save I could open.
To this day, I don't know what caused my issue. It wasn't travel, as Heiva hadn't traveled since well before he got married. I thought it was my pollinator, as he was an original service NPC who had been living for far too long, but I moved him in post-recovery with no bugs. Same goes for Taurus' spouse. Perhaps it was the Liwei who was born that time? Contrary to popular belief (I'm sayin' it!) there is no sim before birth. My recovered save was towards the end of Iris' pregnancy and I didn't get the exact same sim each time.
Are we good?
I lost a lot in the recovery, redid a lot of it, but here's stuff that couldn't be replicated.
Originally, Maggie died at age 90 after work. She was about 2,000 points shy of getting a medium tombstone that time. Also hello Kiwi! He would fade into the aether not too long after this. My good backup found her at 89 days old again and ready for a second chance.
And you at least get to undo your regrets. I sacrificed one of Iris' NPC friends at first for our original service NPC friend and designated pollinator, Papaya Cruz. And maybe I didn't quite know what I wanted to do with her new face. She looked too sour when I wasn't trying to aim for that.
As it turned out, I was having difficulty meeting another babysitter, so the chance to leave Marlana as one was graciously accepted. We'll see Papaya later, and I'll even include his absurd age upon moving in!
The first teenage Hua was a stellar big sister to Liwei. I don't have as many screenshots of the two of them the next time around. She feels wholesome for now, but she also wanted to get a head start with romance with two different boys: Gregg Kahale and Arnold Alto. I didn't like either of them that much but I tried to invite them out for a date, but never made it to the kissing stage. I figured she would go for that monogamist lifestyle but then again, she
is Heiva's daughter. I remember all his dates with non-Iris friends!
And we dodged a meteor. No sims were harmed though.
We will be back to our normal decadynasty proceedings next chapter! That's a promise!
