NPC constantly "unroutable"

JayandMeeka · December 2017

I keep getting messages from my NRAAS mod that this one NPC sim is unroutable. I've moved her out and back in again. I've also thought about putting a new house there, but I love the pre built house and I don't want to destroy it.

Suggestions? @igazor maybe you could help?

igazor · December 2017

The trick is to find out why the sim keeps becoming unroutable. If you allow the sim to be reset or even reset the lot, unless it's simply a door stuck open and "in use," it could be that the problem is still there and it will keep happening. And are you sure that it's her home where this is taking place? It could be a place in town that she keep frequenting or trying to travel through. By the time she gets reset, she is back home and not standing where the problem was.

NRaas > Overwatch > Settings > Stuck Check > True
NRaas > Overwatch > Settings > Stuck Check Auto-Reset > False

The next time you get such a notification, if you can stop what you are doing and right-click on her picture in the message to focus on her. Or use MC's Sim > Focus. If she is on a lot you cannot see into, not a rabbit hole but I mean her home lot or a venue that isn't open to viewing such as those in highrise shells, then on the lot use MC > Open to zoom inside (and MC > Close it up again when finished).

Nothing like thinking your entire game or even just one household of it is broken when in reality there are dirty dishes or piles of clothes blocking their sims from getting around, or maybe a baby animal who keeps trying to go up and down stairs when they can't. Or maybe the sim keeps trying to swim or ice skate in totally unrelated places around town and then kind of gets lost. In urban worlds, sims who were in hibernation will sometimes try to instantiate (materialize) inside the darkened out hidden/private room areas of their apartment highrise and then can't get out or they can get stuck in elevators. Stuff like that.

JayandMeeka · December 2017

Thanks! I will try that and see what I can find

JayandMeeka · January 2018

Update, @igazor I narrowed it down to the house. And I switched active houses to this particular house, and I found the issue but I don't know what is causing it!

So I clicked "go here" in the area of the black box, and my sim won't go. Can you see anything that may be blocking his path? I can't figure it out for the life of me.

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26195354_10101365569385700_8406088149235123432_n.jpg?oh=766bb7213d4babdb8ce7a64b07a78bb3&oe=5AC11F37

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They can move freely about the house, but something is blocking them from leaving.

igazor · January 2018

Yes, there is a big rectangle with thick black borders in their way. You can see it clearly on the bottom of the second screen. It should be removed. (just kidding, hope that's obvious...)

On the ground of the lot or its map tag, run NRaas > MC > Object Stats > Non-Inventory. In the list of lot items that pops up, select anything with "jig" in the name to Flush (force delete). Be careful not to flush a sim or the active plumbob from that selection screen, that wouldn't be good. If necessary, then MC Reset the lot.

The other way to achieve this is to retreat to Edit Town, evict the household to the side of the screen, copy the uninhabited lot down to the household bin, bulldoze the original, replace it with a copy, and move everyone back in without having left the screen. The invisible jig objects usually cannot survive this kind of lot reset.

SemaviLady · January 2018

piggy backing on this one because of part of @igazor 's comment.........

igazor wrote: »

In urban worlds, sims who were in hibernation will sometimes try to instantiate (materialize) inside the darkened out hidden/private room areas of their apartment highrise and then can't get out or they can get stuck in elevators. Stuff like that.

It's been forever since I played Bridgeport, and when I did, I always put a created sim in the hills. Never played an EA sim in Bridgport apartment life. Now that I'm trying learn more about city life, I notice that error trap reports NPCs that are stuck in the dark hidden rooms, even though there is an NPC door there to let them go into the apartment lobby.

Is there a way to fix this so it doesn't happen every day? In one situation, I found five NPC sims all stuck in the same hidden room outside the lobby. I moved them out of the area, reset the doors, and everything I could think of for the apartment while using NRAAS, even resetting the town, but by the next day the same sim pile ups occurred in hidden rooms, including in same apartments.

Thanks in advance for any ideas to reduce these errors in the default Bridgeport. (all that suburban and rural living has not prepared me for Sim apartment life, apparently!)

igazor · January 2018

@SemaviLady - Can we hammer down what is meant by "NPC" a bit? If we mean true Non-Playable Characters, those who are really homeless like Service and Role Sims or homeless co-workers and street performers who do not have a household of their own, the darkened out rooms in LN apartments is where they are supposed to go to hibernate. And they should be able to use the specially designated NPC doors. I would probably replace the doors first then make sure that they pick up the NPC door designation and maybe give them some extra such doors or an extra wide one. That takes some cheat codes. First testingcheatsenabled true so you can get into Build/Buy mode on what would be an inactive lot, then also restrictbuildbuyinbuildings false so you can work with the areas of the lot that are outside of the one usable residential unit. And finally buydebug on if you need to access and place some fresh private or public room markers and see where they all are (this one should really be turned back off as soon as one is finished).

Sometimes after all of the above the true NPCs still keep getting stuck in there so I use MC to Open the lot and watch them for a while to figure out exactly where and why this is happening.

If we are talking about members of a real household, presumably the one that lives in the usable lot (upstairs?) in that building, then they will always get stuck in those private rooms if they are unfortunate enough to keep instantiating in there so fixing that takes some futher construction work.

Regardless, besides when sims get stuck in elevators which is another issue entirely, this always seems to happen on the ground floor. What I've started doing is replacing the ground floor private room markers with public ones, thus the true NPCs cannot hibernate in there, they have to find someplace else to do that or go off the map like in other worlds, and the door should become available for use to all. Or maybe the door needs to become a very wide archway. Many of my apartment buildings have public marked laundry and gyms/rec rooms on the ground floor now because of this, in some cases I've just torn down the walls, gotten rid of the ground floor private room markers altogether, and thus made the lobby bigger (depends on the lot layout). Note that any "rooms," including hallways, that have no private or public marker at all will be considered part of the residential unit, so leaving any of them unmarked might not be what was wanted -- the rent (er, property tax bills) can skyrocket if the sims' living space includes that much of the building. Also note that there is a hidden room marker that is meant for WA tombs, probably one meant for IP resorts, I get some of these confused, but the special ones should not be used on these properties because I don't think any sims can get out of rooms marked with those if they get stuck in them.

The upper floor darkened out private NPC rooms, for those buildings that have them, in my case always seem to be fine. Some players have gone to the extreme of actually having all highrise residents live on the ground floor only, but the view from a ground floor apartment isn't usually as nice. I've never done this, the point to me always seemed to be to fix or get rid of the private rooms down there, not force actual resident sims to live on the ground level.

TreyNutz · January 2018

@KatyJay88 , I've come across a few lots like that in CC worlds. Copying the lot to the bin, bulldozing the lot, then replacing in from the bin has solved the issue for me in the past. In my case it was a brand new save with a brand new sim moving into an empty house and not being able to leave. I just assumed it was a world/CAW issue.

SemaviLady · January 2018

@igazor - thanks for the tips!
I will try some of the solutions regarding the NPC doors and observing the sims for longer. I had thoought maybe the hidden room marker just needs to be refreshed with a new one to replace it, but that might not be the answer, so I'll look at the NPC doors more closely.

Yes, some of the sims are townies like mixologists clearly marked. Of course with the right cheats any sim is playable, but yes, I did mean these were essentially homeless sims, some of which maybe employed and others which are not.

You mentioned making utilitarian public rooms, and I'm so new to Bridgeport city living, I thought it would make sense for my sim's building to have laundry nook so I started making some edits to the apartment where my current sim lives (Elvira Slayer). Vending machines in the lobby, and laundry nook, sink, counters, seating and table as well as plants, windows and currently one video game. I do find visitors playing the game at most hours of the day.:

I also noticed that the basement apartment/hidden room, looked pretty well lived in, lol, mussed bed and in need of cleaning. It will be fun to watch the sims in the hidden rooms for a bit.

There is currently only one sim in my household, so I haven't experienced an unroutable family member in the home apartment yet.

I love the detail in your write up. Thank you very much for all the tips on this matter!

igazor · January 2018

@SemaviLady - Yeah, that's the idea! We all love the notion of having the appearance of neighbors in close living quarters but living in highrises is supposed to be fun, at least somewhat. It shouldn't be a constant fix this, reset that, redo all the doors, bulldoze this one and forget about it, that Bridgeport unfortunately becomes without some major reconstruction.

SemaviLady · January 2018

Speaking of elevators, I noticed a couple of times when different sims stepped out of the elevator, it would not be completely level with the floor and they would trip, splat on the floor. But so far no one seems to get stuck on the elevator. My sim got several "Gnome of the Darned" (ghost gnomes) from the Claw machine. When she released the gnomes they moved out to the sidewalk around the building. The elevator gets a lot of use from the ghosts that the gnomes bring to the lot.

I'm vaguely aware that elevators in the game tend to be dangerous. I guess I'll cross that bridge when I come to it.

igazor · January 2018

Uck, the sims tripping and falling on the floor or having the elevator doors close on them is by design and is supposed to be funny. There's a percent chance of those things happening each time. The first time I saw that it was my own active sim who was not only very pregnant but had just gone into labor. I was not amused, to say the least, but they emerged unharmed from the experience.

SemaviLady · January 2018

Definitely there is some black humor in the game.

Thanks for all your responses.

Karritz · January 2018

Thanks for all the great info on apartments. I almost feel inspired to have a go with setting one up for fun in my own game. I'll bookmark this thread just in case I decide to give it a go later on.

KatAnubis · February 2018

igazor wrote: »

The trick is to find out why the sim keeps becoming unroutable. If you allow the sim to be reset or even reset the lot, unless it's simply a door stuck open and "in use," it could be that the problem is still there and it will keep happening. And are you sure that it's her home where this is taking place? It could be a place in town that she keep frequenting or trying to travel through. By the time she gets reset, she is back home and not standing where the problem was.

NRaas > Overwatch > Settings > Stuck Check > True
NRaas > Overwatch > Settings > Stuck Check Auto-Reset > False

The next time you get such a notification, if you can stop what you are doing and right-click on her picture in the message to focus on her. Or use MC's Sim > Focus. If she is on a lot you cannot see into, not a rabbit hole but I mean her home lot or a venue that isn't open to viewing such as those in highrise shells, then on the lot use MC > Open to zoom inside (and MC > Close it up again when finished).

Nothing like thinking your entire game or even just one household of it is broken when in reality there are dirty dishes or piles of clothes blocking their sims from getting around, or maybe a baby animal who keeps trying to go up and down stairs when they can't. Or maybe the sim keeps trying to swim or ice skate in totally unrelated places around town and then kind of gets lost. In urban worlds, sims who were in hibernation will sometimes try to instantiate (materialize) inside the darkened out hidden/private room areas of their apartment highrise and then can't get out or they can get stuck in elevators. Stuff like that.

I came to look at a different problem, but I've been having this one too. However, there is no picture icon to click on in the notification (or I would have looked at what they seem to be finding problematic.)

I'm not sure what you mean by MC's Sim > Focus.

This mostly seems to be happening to my Sims when they go to Egypt. I was relieved when the main Sim who seemed to get stuck died and so she wasn't there the next time my Sims visited. But it does happen to others Egyptian Sims as well.

puzzlezaddict · February 2018

@KatAnubis When you get the notification for the stuck sim (or really, almost any kind that involves a sim not in your household), there should be a small portrait to the left of the text. Sometimes the square that should contain the portrait will be blank, especially if the sim in question has a broken outfit or is supposed to transition in some way—new age stage, new career outfit for work, etc—but usually you can still click it to focus on the sim. If you don't get a portrait, or clicking on it does nothing, you can use MasterController to focus. Click on City Hall (I think it's base camp in WA), select nraas>MC>sim>focus>(sim's name) and the camera will focus on that sim. If it's not focusing, maybe the sim is nowhere... which is undoubtedly its own problem, but an MC reset might fix things. Again, City Hall: nraas>MC>sim>advanced>reset sim.

If it's one lot that's causing problems, you can click on the ground on that lot, and select nraas>MC>reset lot, which works great for rabbitholes but might not remove a broken object or leftover action jig in a house or park. If that's the problem, nraas>MC>object reset>not inventory will bring up a list of objects on the lot, so you can see if there's something that might be broken or simply doesn't need to be there. You can also use MC to sell items if they're being stubborn, even from your own inventory.

igazor · February 2018

There is a bridge on the world lot of Al Simhara that sims get stuck on, under, and around frequently. There is no fix for this unless one has a redone underlying .world file to use that somehow repairs the bridge or whatever the rift is between it and the roads leading up to and away from it. But with Overwatch set to notify on stuck sims rather than auto-reset, at least we have a fighting chance of figuring out where the sims are getting stuck each time.

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NPC constantly "unroutable"

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