Sims disappearing when returning from University graduation

charleeheart

I have a household of two Young Adult Sims who both attended and graduated University. When their University time was up, the game loaded their Home neighborhood, and my household is gone. They are not in the library, and the house they lived in is now empty.

1. They were both CAS Sims.
2. One is a vampire and the other is a witch. This is my first time trying out supenaturals.
3. I have NO Custom Content, no mods, and nothing downloaded that didn't come directly from the EA store.
4. The default page that comes up is the Select a Household screen. If I go into Edit Town, I don't get the option to Return to Game. Instead, it says Return to Game Setup, as if I'm starting a new game.
5. The first time this happened, I went back to the Main Menu without saving, then went back into my game and started from my previous save. The same thing happened again. I've quit the game again without saving. How do I get my Sims back?

igazor

You could try to replay from a prior save or your backup one, if you have a prior save available.

But what you are experiencing is a broken travel transition. Although sometimes this also happens when there are guests from your homeworld attending the graduation who didn't have time to leave Uni World before your sims returned home.

I know you are playing without mods, but these are unfortunately very common in a modless game. The NRaas Traveler mod, working together with Overwatch and ErrorTrap, works very hard to prevent this kind of thing.

charleeheart

Well, okay. I guess when EA won't patch its own stuff, it falls to the community to fix it.
Can you help me with how to get my Sims back once I've downloaded Traveler, Overwatch, and ErrorTrap?

igazor

Traveler is intended to be used before your sim ever leaves home. But if you put the three mods in place from wherever your save is in Uni World, you may find that the travel transition gets fixed enough so that you are able to return home properly; they certainly shouldn't make things any worse. If not, I would suggest skipping the Uni graduation scenario especially any part that involves inviting others from their hometown to attend, if it's not too late to avoid that. A different NRaas mod, DebugEnabler, can be used to grant Uni degrees already earned and at the GPA designated once back home if the diplomas don't arrive in the mail and you need to do it that way.

But for now, just put the three mods in place and try again. ErrorTrap will likely start kicking up correction and dereferencing logs as it finds things in both worlds to clean up, but those are harmless. For any serious sounding error logs, you would have to zip them together, upload to us at NRaas and open up a thread if you want some help in interpreting them.
http://nraas.wikispaces.com/How+To+Upload
(free registration and wiki membership required to upload and post)

If you are new to using mods or package based content in general on TS3, this is how to set up the Framework to work with them:
http://modthesims.info/wiki.php?title=Game_Help:Installing_Sims_3_Package_Files/Setup_and_Files

charleeheart

It's fixed! They're back!! Thank you SO much!!

igazor

The real thanks goes to Twallan, the original developer of these mods, and the talented ones who took over their continued development after his retirement. But awesome, glad you got them working!