Case of the Missing Sim and the Insomniac Sim Glitch

[athena]

Hi, I got a glitchy household. There are two members of this house and both have problems.

The Missing Sim:

One of the Sims in the house disappeared, no icon, but present when I loaded the house (her picture is in the family portrait, if you know what I mean), but not in the house when it loaded. When the other Sim decided to travel, I was able to recover the missing Sim because she went along in China. I thought all was fine, but when the other Sim was out adventuring, this Sim got stuck outside the dorm. I can still control the Sim, so I let her use her cellphone to return home. She disappeared like all Sims returning home. Again, I thought the problem was solved. But when the other Sim returned home, she was missing again! Her character icon was there, but it was blank! This is how it is until now.

The Insomniac Sim

The other Sim cannot sleep. It all started in the Pangus Axe adventure.  He was able to get the Pangus Axe, so I set him off to do the Hot Springs adventure.  I didn't realize, the tomb had several levels down, I wanted him to finish the challenge within the day because he had only one day left in his trip. Unfortunately, it wasn't enough.  He was SO tired and energy level is down to red. But I let him go on the adventure, having him eat several pilmicans (?) morsels, hoping it gives him additional energy. So he stayed exhausted but not asleep, he didn't fall down from exhaustion, but just kept on. Finally, I gave up, he does not have the energy to smash the boulder, so I used the escape dust and sent him home.

OK, back home, I sent him straight to bed. Only to find out, he can't sleep.  Everytime he hits the sack, after a second or two he would appear awake standing beside his bed. No, he does not get up or awaken like a normal Sim, his figure just appears standing beside the bed. He can nap though, but can't get a full nights sleep.   

Please help me , what do I do with this glitchy household?      
I'm ok if I lose the missing Sim, how do I get rid of her blank icon on the screen?  I would really like to solve the problem of the Sim who can't sleep. He travelled and worked hard upto this point to get the Pangus Axe, and I cannot afford to lose him and go through the adventures all over again to get to where he is now.  My game is clean, I have no mods.  Any suggestion will be most welcome, thank you!

[Sportsfan]

Did you try resetting them?

[Pam]

What you're describing with the missing Sim sounds like a well known travel bug.  Unfortunately, when it happens, there's nothing to fix it.  The game file is corrupt.

As for the insomniac Sim, it's probably just a small glitch.  Try replacing the bed if using ResetSim doesn't work.  However, considering the other major issue, you may want to just start a new game file.  I wouldn't recommend continuing to play with the travel bug Sim because it could spread through the file and just get worse.

Oh, there's one other thing you can try.  In Edit Town, evict the family from the house and save them to the bin.  You can then place them into another game.  They will lose relationships in town, but you might still be able to play them that way.

[cathyknits]

I think the sim who keeps waking up has been caught by some kind of error checking routine in the game - he has a bug of some kind and the game is resetting him to fix it. When this happened to me in the past, believe it or not, what I did to fix it was....put him back to bed every time he woke up. Whatever error was causing the problem seems to have eventually worked itself out. My sim got one lousy night of sleep, but after that everything was fine.

But I'd agree that the missing sim is a sign that your save file is corrupt. You probably don't want to keep playing this file as-is. You might try emptying the inventory of the sims you can still control and family inventory (so you don't lose stuff) and then switching households for a moment, then switching back - but if that doesn't fix it you're probably done.

[athena]

Thanks for your replies, may I know if it is the household that is corrupt or is it the whole town?
I haven't tried ResetSim, how does it work? After I type the command, then what? Shift click on the Sim?

[athena]

Oh, there's one other thing you can try.  In Edit Town, evict the family from the house and save them to the bin.  You can then place them into another game.  They will lose relationships in town, but you might still be able to play them that way.

Hi Pam, you mean place them into another town? What about in edit town, if I split the household into two, put out the missing sim and let the other sim remain, do you think that will work?  Or I can instead pull out the active (non- missing Sim) and place him in another house using the split house function?

[cathyknits]

To use resetsim, type control-shift-C to open the cheat panel, then type resetsim (name), where (name) is the full name of the sim you think is stuck or otherwise bugged. "resetsim *" will reset all sims in the town.

And it probably couldn't hurt to try some of those things you're talking about in edit town, but there's no guarantee it'll work. What I'd do is make a copy of the file in the main menu so that you've always got a known starting point to go back to, in case you save after trying something that turns out to have not worked after all. (Idea: use the "move" interaction on the phone or computer to move the playable sim to a new house without his buddy, play that sim for a little bit (bare minimum past one game midnight), reset the invisible sim (maybe two or three times), then use edit town to merge the households back together. Don't know if this'll work. Couldn't hurt to try.)

As far as whether it's the household or the whole town - in a way the whole town is bugged because your bugged household is part of the town. It may be that even if you switch to a different household or move your playable sim to a different household without the invisible one, having the invisible sim running around will eventually cause some kind of error that you won't even see coming and won't be able to fix. (That said, my current town has had a couple "invisible" townies running around, and they don't seem to cause problems at all - you just can't see them. One of them got repaired when she aged up. But they weren't caused by the same bug, because I didn't have WA at the time and there's no way for townies to travel.)

In the name of not getting your hopes up, I want to tell you that the "green box when returning from travel" bug is one of the biggest stumpers running - I honestly don't think anyone's ever found a good way to recover from it. ("save to the bin, start a new file, insert the saved family" seems to work most of the time, but calling it "good" is a stretch.) If you do, you'll be something of a hero....

Out of curiosity (I've never had this bug myself), does the invisible sim still show up properly in the "family portrait" in the main menu?

[athena]

Out of curiosity (I've never had this bug myself), does the invisible sim still show up properly in the "family portrait" in the main menu?

Yes, the invisible Sim still shows up in the family portrait.
I've tried everything and these are what happened:  No luck saving the family in the bin, the game hung so I had to quit without saving; No luck moving out the invisible Sim by splitting the house in two, what happened was the whole house disappeared from town so I had to quit the game without saving; No luck moving out the active Sim to another house using the "move" command via cellphone, the game hung up again and I had to quit without saving.

Looks like all hope is lost with this travel bug. It's a good thing I have a copy of the original Sim in the bin so I could start his life all over again and I have no choice but to have him do the adventures all over again.

Since I have given up, what Do I do now with the glitchy household so that it does not crash the game, do I now delete it?
Thanks for your help! Much appreciated. 

[cathyknits]

Actually, I'd try one more thing: The patch that was released yesterday said in its release notes that they fixed a bug where sims go invisible when traveling - this has to be either the "green box" bug you have or the "no sims arrive at destination" bug that also seems to come up. Install the patch, load the bugged file and reset the sim. Again, couldn't hurt - and if you intend to have your sims travel it's probably a good idea to have the patch even if it doesn't work.

The bug shouldn't be "contagious" to other save files - essentially every time you start a new file at the main menu, you get a different copy of the town - so there shouldn't be a problem keeping the file around, but I'd rename it something like "NASTY TRAVEL BUG". On the other hand unless you're holding out hope for someone else to come up with a fix tomorrow, there's no reason to keep it, either.

[athena]

One very last question please, when you say save file, does it mean a single family is a file in itself, or is the town considered one file?
BTW, I will try out the new patch. Thanks!

[xFezIsAFreakx]

One very last question please, when you say save file, does it mean a single family is a file in itself, or is the town considered one file?
BTW, I will try out the new patch. Thanks!

The whole town you are currently playing is the save file.

[athena]

Thanks for the clarification. So my whole town is glitched because of the travel bug from one family. This means I have to save each family I created in the bin and then delete the town and place them all back? I'm willing to do this to save the other families in the town. Is this correct? (Sorry I've been playing TS3 for years and this is the first time I've been hit by a major bug) so I'm pretty clueless about it all. 

[cathyknits]

Umm....maybe? One problem we seem to be having here is that we're not quite sure how you play the game. If you're playing in a town where you've added a lot of your own families and switch between them (or added your own sims just to fill out the town). If you've got several different families that you play one at a time, and only one family of your sims is in the town at a time, you're fine, even if they all live in Sunset Valley - Fez wasn't quite right to say that "the town" is a save file. "A copy of the town" is a save file - or in more technical language "an instance of the town".

Let me give examples: Say at the main menu, when I first started the game, I picked Sunset Valley for my sims to move into, and made a household called the Smiths, and moved them into a house. Then the next time I played, I wanted to play a different family. I picked Sunset Valley for them to move into, made the Jones household, and moved them into a house. The Smiths and the Joneses both live in Sunset Valley, but it's not the same Sunset Valley - each got its own brand new copy (or "instance") of the town when I started it. They can't interact at all. If the Smiths were the bugged family, I would need to save them to the bin, but the Joneses would be fine.

If I wanted the Smiths and the Joneses to be friends, I could create the Smiths, move them into a house, create the Joneses, pick the Smiths at the main menu to load their copy of Sunset Valley, go to "Edit Town", and move the Joneses into a house. In that case, the Smiths and Joneses would live in the same copy of Sunset Valley, and if the Smiths were the bugged family, I would need to save both the Smiths and the Joneses to the bin to move them to a new game - in other words, a new copy of Sunset Valley that would be made when you selected "New Household" (or "new game" or "new family" - I don't remember exactly what it's called) at the main menu.

[Pam]

It's actually not a good idea to keep a bugged file in the game.  When a file goes bonky like that, sometimes it creates a file that has "bad" in the file name.  When this happens, the "bad" can spread to other files and corrupt them as well.  You could end up with several files that are "bad" in the game.

I suggest you look at the game files though your Explore function (if you have Windows) and see what's there.  The path is C:/Documents/Electronic Arts/Sims 3/Saves.  That's where you'll find all of your save files and the backups.  If you have one that says "bad" in the file name, it should be deleted.

[athena]

Thanks Pam, that's exactly what I will do, look at the "bad" files. How I play the game: I only have one copy of a town in my game where I create families all to live in it. I only have one Sunset Valley, and one of each of the other towns which came from the EPs. That is why my Sim families can become friends with each other, say in Sunset Valley. When my town got glitched due to town decay before, I had to save all my families in the bin, delete the town, create a new town and then placed the old families there. I guess this is the same thing I would do in case my Twinbrook town is a "bad" file.