Random Laptops and Collecting Townies?

BSIRegina

I've had some strange occurrences in my game and want to know if these are normal and at the very least what to do about them. I did a quick internet search but didn't find any answers.

I had seen this happen before in the family I was playing in that suddenly the household would be charged either §4,000 or §4,500 and an appropriately priced laptop would appear in one of my Sim's inventories. Although it was annoying I could just delete it and get their money back. Just a few minutes ago §4,000 was charged to my Sims' household and I checked every one of them and no one has a laptop in their inventory but I managed to track it down to a Townie. Why are my Sims paying for computers for the town? I suppose I should blame it on aging eyes that I somehow overlooked the shiny new laptop in one of the household Sims' inventories.

Also, what is up with random "collect" interaction my Sims sometimes get? Much of the time I just cancel out of them but now townies are running all over town collecting things? I had my Sim out collecting gems when another Sim appeared and pretty much stole it right out from under his nose.

So basically, Halp!

TreyNutz

I have never seen a townie collect anything. That's really surprising.

I don't recall ever being charged for laptops. I've had sims in the video game developer get laptops as part of a promotion, but they weren't charged for it. I think I have had sims charged for car purchases though. The expensive cars too (over $100k). That only happened once or twice. I just refunded them the money with MC.

BSIRegina

Well! At least it wasn't expensive cars then, right? The other day I got a pop-up saying that one of the Townie Sims, Oliver, did buy himself a bicycle and has been tooling around all over town on it. He's the one who also happened to be out collecting.

Yeah, I just do not know what is up with this weirdness. I switched over to Oliver using MC and he had a whole line of stuff to collect in his queue. She had a bunch of minor pets and a few gems and minerals in her inventory as well. I didn't have Dream Catcher enabled and I didn't want the Sims I was playing to lose all their wishes so I went to the main menu without saving then came back to the family then reset Oliver to get all the collecting nonsense out of his queue and almost as soon as I did there was a pop up announcing that Oliver was going to start writing a book and asking me to choose the genre. I'm now wondering if this is part of NRaas Story Progression or another of the mods. I hate to do this but *breaks out really big microphone and yells at the top of her lungs* @Igazor !!!

One thing I noticed when these Sims get these computers in their inventories is that they'll immediately get a forced command to start writing a book. When I switched to Oliver his wife had "write novel" in her queue followed by "paint". I think I was just so flustered by the whole thing I didn't even think to switch over to her to see exactly what she was planning on writing that on, whether it was the computer in their house or a spiffy new laptop. I do know if it wasn't her, someone in town got a new laptop. When I build their houses I always give them computers, easels, etc.

suzses

I have seen other sims collect things in front of my nose, but only in one case: when I had an alchemy station on my lot and new spawners appeared with it. The items from those spawners seemed to attract anyone nearby.

As for laptops, not sure. I've seen a couple $4k ones lately in the inventories of sims I've added to my household. Pretty sure I didn't pay for them.

BSIRegina

These are collectibles out in the world. They have those alchemy spawners as well but up until the last few Sim days were the only ones who lived in a house. I just recently moved a bunch of the NPCs in and back out to help populate the town.

Oh! Another odd thing is that when Oliver was living with my Sim family (he was there to maximize his photography skill so they could build a Chinese Garden) he'd occasionally get a forced action to visit the lot the grocery store resides on. I ended up cancelling it out every time so I have no idea what he would have done once he got there. I was thinking it might have been related to his photography skilling since he's the only one that ever happened with. As for the collecting, he isn't the only Sim I've seen do that.

BrianAndree

Wow this sounds like a odd problem @BSIRegina

igazor

Yells back, "I didn't do it!"

First of all, as for the actives being charged for inactives' purchases, do they own any residential lots as investments? When I let my sims become landlords, as SP Money allows them to do after they reach a certain level of wealth, I found my actives being charged for all kinds of kooky things that their "tenants" were doing. More so small stuff like hiring babysitters and other services, but I can see where they could get charged for outright purchases as well.

This can't be intended and I expect will be locked down with some release in the future. In the meantime, I don't allow the sims I play rotationally to become landlords and restrict their investments to commercial lots. Many of us have found the landlord feature to be buggy in other, less obvious and intrusive ways.

The other stuff reported here are SP pushes. On the Sim (Household, Caste, Town) level, you must have SP > Sim (Household, Caste, Town) > Push:Allow Skills set to True. Then if you have the SP Skill Module in play, check SP > General Options > Options:Skills to see what in particular skill pushes are allowed to do. Collecting is a skill, as is of course writing, among the others. Perhaps the module or some of its settings are recent additions to your game?

And finally, for pushes of active sims off their home lots and onto other places when you aren't watching them closely and issuing queues of user-directed commands, if you have the SP Extra module check SP > General Options > Options:Sims > Push Actives to Visit Lots > (set percentage chance of such a push, the default is 0). Some players love this option as they find out what kinds of things their actives want to do around town, left to their own devices. Some never get it to do much of anything because their game engine is too busy processing other things for the off-lot pushes to kick in. I never use it because I have enough trouble keeping track of my large households as it is without half or more of them running away on me.

Phew, all of this started happening all of a sudden? Sounds like you made some wide-sweeping module additions or settings changes there.

BSIRegina

Yay! At least you have an explanation for some of this insanity!

This probably wouldn't all be new if I hadn't had so many years of not playing and only last fall updated everything to be 1.67 compliant. Much of this I would never even notice if I was playing in a town with more population but with only five other households I pretty much "see" everything.

They aren't landlords, their only acquisitions have been community lots.

I have the following modules for SP:
Career
Money
Population
Relationship
Skill

but not the Extra module. I can imagine some people enjoying their Sims getting pushed off to community lots but I'm more inclined to be more of a control freak. As it is once in a while I even turn free will down when everything they try to do is the wrong thingif I really need to focus on a particular thing and make sure the others stay on task, though.

I would imagine I do have skilling set to true as I've never changed any of those settings and overall I do want them to get skills. But dag-gum it, they all have jobs and as it is no one gets into a house without my controlled family paying for most of it. See? Give 'em an inch and they'll take a mile. I'll look at that skill setting tomorrow and see if I can fix it.

On the up side, without any help from me none of these Sims have obsessed over making pet food yet. So there's that, right?

igazor

Then afraid I don't have explanations for the grocery store push, unless he's a secret vampire trying to raid the store for plasma juice or however that one goes, nor the being charged for other households' purchases. Are you certain they aren't sneakily purchasing up residential real estate, maybe if you ever switch active households even for a moment with the game clock paused?

I've never seen the pet food obsession glitch thing, but have read about it so many times that I feel like I have.

BSIRegina

It's only been the last few days that anyone else has even been living in that town. For two or three days all my play time was devoted to building houses for them to live in, moving in NPC Sims (true NPCs, not mini Sims) then moving them out to their own dwellings using the Split Household option in Edit Town mode. The only time I switched active households was tonight through MC then I exited without saving and reloaded back to the family I was playing. Is it not safe to use that feature if the game is paused?

When I saw the §4500 charged to them I immediately started scrounging through the family members' inventories--even checked the baby and toddler's just in case they had decided they needed computers for whatever reason. I mean kids ARE using electronics younger and younger all the time.

igazor

It isn't that it's unsafe to switch households with the game clock paused. But SP can "do things" to households that become inactive if certain actions, like purchasing real estate, aren't locked down. Like change their careers, break them up or form new romantic partnerships, move them out of their house...re-do all their investments which I am still suspecting unless you've already checked that out, without any of those activities being animated. But if you exited without saving, then there might not be anything to check on.

I never switch out of the household I am playing without tossing them into my Rotations caste first. Would be too afraid what kinds of chaos I would find when I get back to them. Unless my intention is to quit without saving afterwards, sometimes that's how I snoop around the neighbors without changing anything at the end of a game session.
http://nraas.wikispaces.com/Story+Progression+Rotational+Caste+Settings

BSIRegina

Oh yeah, I know what you're talking about there, I've done that in other towns where I switched from one household to the other for just a little while and forgot the one I had switched from was unemployed (this was pre-Ambitions and self-employed Sims SP way back in the day) and switched back a couple of minutes later (the game being paused this entire time, mind you) to find they now had some sleazy job somewhere. Haha. Yeah, since I exited without saving they were all fine when I reloaded, no chance for something awkward to happen to any of them. I also have SP flat-out set up to deny any romantic break-ups or affairs and what-not, as in sorry dude, once you're committed there is no going back without my help.

Thanks for the link directly to the page for setting up that caste! I may just go ahead and do that when I get back in the game just to make sure they're protected. Since I started playing again I've been enjoying TS3 way more than I should be.

igazor

Just to clarify, I don't try to protect and play everyone in town. One of my worlds has over 215 residents, that would drive me batty. I do want most of the households in town to be left to their own devices and SP to handle their progression as it sees fit, for the most part. But there are a few households I play in rotation in each world (it's so difficult to let go of siblings after they move out and establish their own families) and having them do all that random junk that the other inactives get up to was never part of the plan.

SP and Rotational Play is what keeps my game moving at such a slow rate...very slow. That and sim travel are my obsessions, I guess. It's all pretty much ruined controlled my life for the past few years.

But there are players with presumably much smaller worlds who do want to play everyone in turn and the two options on that Rotational page offer suggestions on how that can be done. We were hoping others would come forth with more strategies they have morphed themselves into over the years, but coincidentally they all thus far seem to be variations on the two themes my colleague and I mapped out there.

BSIRegina

From what I've read I think most people who play rotation probably just have their pet families they like to cycle through. One of my sisters plays her game in rotation like that. I've never got to that point in any of my playing, although I do know from playing Legacy families in TS2 I didn't have too much trouble choosing my heir and booting everyone else to the curb and wishing they could progress with their lives without my intervention so I'm hoping when I reach that point in TS3 I can actually do it.

The world I'm focused on right now is that NIF Challenge and as it turned out I was right in thinking this is a really good way to learn the new content I have in my game after installing three expansion packs that weren't installed previously AND give myself a good environment for getting settings on SP and such exactly how I want them.

BSIRegina

At the very least now none of the Townies will be collecting. It's hard enough to find moonstones and sunstones without them grabbing the goods! And I did manage to track down that laptop and it was indeed in one of my playable family's inventories. I really don't know how I missed it because he didn't have that much stuff in there but nestled between what he did have was a shiny new laptop.

I still haven't figured out the caste thing with stopping the pushes in the family I'm playing but it's not something I really have to worry about right now anyway. At least now I know there's a way to do it if I need to.