My sims had an evil rooster on their farm, and I knew that there was a potential for him to fight Grim, which I was eager to see as I hadn't played this aspect of the pack before. However, it caused a bug where once Grim appeared to reap my family's dog, he simply... stopped in the kitchen. Messages had been piling up for other chickens on the lot for days before Grim came for the dog, as well as for the evil chicken himself and the llama, and my goat from the Horse Ranch pack. I thought it was odd that none of my chickens were dying, but I attributed it to one of my sims having the reward trait from the Animal Caretaker aspiration that makes animals live longer.
Has anyone else here had experience with this bug? While he was idle, Grim was unclickable and when I tried resetting him, I got an error not found. Eventually, I tried a solution I found googling, which was to put Snuggles, my evil rooster, in the family inventory, and this did let Grim become clickable again, but when I reset him then, he lost his "Soul Reaper" special NPC status and stayed stuck. I tried leaving the lot, restarting the game, all sorts of stuff. Same result. When I came back, Grim was a regular stuck sim and not a soul reaper. At that point, I was afraid to delete him out of fear of corrupting my game, so I would quit without saving and try something else.
Eventually, and brokenhearted to have to do this manually, I used the MC command mod to delete the chicken that was older than Snuggles (who I believe he was sticking around for) and Grim poofed. Then I placed poor Snuggles back on the lot and deleted him, too. I never did get to see the evil chicken fight Grim like he was supposed to.
I tried the same trick with putting the past-expiration goat in and out of the inventory, but that seemed to erase the goat's age entirely (when placed back on the lot, instead of elder, it just had a blank line), and I fear it got bugged as well. That was three animals I had to delete by hand to fix the evil chicken bug, to get Grim working again. He did show up to get another chicken later that sim day so I believe it was fixed. That's the good news.
My question is, is there something I did wrong, or are evil chickens just something that are completely broken and to be avoided in games where aging is on?