My sim, Angela, was in the park singing for tips.
Suddenly, I heard an ominous sound and got the message that Angela was wondering why it suddenly got dark. Notice the shadow indicating exactly where it's going to hit.
Needless to say, I had Angela stop singing and run to the other end of the park. Unfortunately, the sims who had been watching her sing did not leave with her. They just
had to stay and freak out. Not only that, but other sims came along to freak out with them.
I had Angela start performing for tips at the other end of the park, in hopes that they would forget about the meteor coming down on them and go watch her instead. But no, that was too smart of a thing for them to do, apparently.
I could tell when the smoke and flames cleared that at least a couple of sims were now missing, but I didn't know who or how many. Sure enough, the Grim Reaper soon rose up out of the ground.
I sent Angela back to watch. I wasn't going to make her be so heartless as to start collecting the rocks and scrap before the deceased were properly taken care of, so she stood there and mourned with the rest of the living. The first to be taken was a teen girl, Selena Payne. She begged for her life on her knees, but it was too late for her.
The next to be taken was her father, Oscar Payne.
He wasn't any happier about leaving the present world behind than she had been.
While this was going on, I was watching in horror and saying NOOOOOOOOO! NOOOOOOOOO! Angela is probably traumatized too, but I forgot to check her moodlets to find out. Once she went home where her husband was just getting home from his after work jog, I saved and closed the game.
I am really torn about what to do about this. This is a world I made and populated myself. I'd made this world a few years ago, but had just re-populated it with an all-new population. I'd made the residents a couple of years ago, for a different world I was making, which I never completed to my satisfaction. When I make residents for new worlds, I don't just make a bunch of sims and stick them here and there and leave them for the game to deal with. I place them all in my build & edit world, an empty flat map I exported from CAW, where I use the world editor to place whatever lots I need for the project I want to work on. For new resident households, I have a save of it with some vacant houses and a 64x64 community lot with a science center and all the rabbithole portals from Lunar Lakes. I use NRaas Master Controller to assign them their careers based on their traits and LTW's, assign their career levels based on their ages, give them related skills at levels appropriate to their age and career levels, set the relationship values within each household, give them whatever they need in their personal inventory for their skills and personalities, including motorcycles for the rebellious and daredevil sims, set celebrity levels for the ones that should reasonably be well-known, and make two or three of the partnered women pregnant. Then I make a list of what each household needs in their home.
When I place them in the world I select the houses that fit their needs, then edit them to add cars and bicycles, skill items like easels, telescopes, etc, however many cribs and toddler items they need, and whatever else they might need. After I place them, I use the family funds cheat to give them enough money to pay their bills for several sim weeks.
I had done all that for these households, but found some issues when I played in the world I'd made them for, and after several attempts at fixing it, finally decided to start over at some future time, with a blank map, instead of taking an already made world into CAW. All of these households have been waiting for a couple of years, and I really wanted to play them. So I placed them in my older town, and was looking forward to getting acquainted with them as neighbors and friends for my active household. Then this happened
on the second sim day in the game! And the man that died was the only actual doctor in town, a trauma surgeon. The hospital is now staffed with only a bunch of homeless organ donors and one paramedic.
I have been feeling torn as to whether I should go back to the beginning of the day, so the meteor won't hit, or just going with what the game gave me. It's certainly a financial boon for my household, as the largest rock is worth over $3000. But I'm not happy about losing those two sims so quickly.
Comments
Players have different takes on this, but for me it would be a no-brainer. The game would have stopped as soon as the shadow and subsequent freaking out appeared and I would have reverted to a prior save. I realize that players want things to happen "organically" or "naturally" to their worlds as they progress in many cases, but honestly how many people do you know of in real life who have been hit by random falling meteors? The argument that it's meant to representative of other kinds of disasters that do not (usually) exist in the game holds some value, but I don't want to see such disasters. If I wanted that I would be out in the real world more often instead of playing and servicing this game. Or at least playing a very different one. It's difficult to "unsee" stuff like this once it happens though, hence my reflex to shut it all down before the scenario really plays itself out.
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Wherever I am friends call me Betty
Sim enim est vita
But also a little jealous. I’ve played for years and still not had a meteor strike.
My favorite meteor story remains the one where another player, soon after Dragon Valley was released, had set up a test game with an elaborate 10 x 10 grid of 100 evenly spaced apart dragon eggs, the point being to test out how talking to each egg on the various subjects would impact the kind of dragons who hatched from them. So that was at least six eight tests, each one for a different talk subject. One of the tests was ruined when a meteor fell on the lot destroying most of the eggs and the baby hatchlings. Besides sounding incredibly sad even though this was just essentially a series of lab tests and not a "real" game, the entire day's worth of work was apparently lost and had to be redone. This remains one of my not so favorite game features.
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I see there are three things that could work with this scenario @IreneSwift has just had.
1. Continue on playing and accept you have 2 new ghosts in town.
2. Go back to an earlier save and forfeit the money
3. Pick up the tombstones and take them home and get a Philosopher's Stone and bind the ghosts so you have control of them and get them to eat Ambrosia
I've done each of these things at different times in different games. They all work. It's just what will fit with the story.
Have fun and force it to work for you.
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCuW44b3uCMtCSaq4gwC8EZg
As it turned out, I decided to start all over from the beginning. I got a bunch of stuck aging notices, and when I looked at the residents' tags in map view, I discovered several whose "days until birthday" were negative numbers, some of them over 100 days in the negative! I don't want to lose my residents to premature aging either, so I'm going to go through the resident population again, in the starter save for this game, and change the ages of any who are too far from where they should be. I'm glad I only played 2 days so far, so I haven't lost too much time.
@MidnightAura I've been playing for almost 7 years now, and this is only my third. Normally it wouldn't bother me to lose residents, since I don't play in rotation, and am therefore not nearly so attached to them as to my active families. But this time it's very different. I'm attached to them even though I'm not playing them, because I spent so much time making them and setting them up, and this is the first chance I've had to see how they will actually live their lives.
I use a spreadsheet and have them all listed. Names, addresses, if they were originally a townie or not. If they were born in game I show who their parents were. I have lots of other info too, such as age or days to aging up and level of their skills I know they've got. Some sims have all of this detail and some have bits missing. Townies I hardly played have lots of missing info.
I also record how they are related to my 'founder' sim, Patience and each of her ex partners. Most of the sims in the currently 13 worlds in the game have no relationship to any of them. But I intend to continue this through the generations as I play the game. I think Patience has at least 1 great grandchild so far.
So I know how you feel about having something disastrous happening. While I was playing the other day the game threw me to another house. I have a single male witch in that house. I have only played him briefly a few years ago. He's really only there to be a prospective husband to any suitable and unattached sim who may require a husband at some stage. He was on fire. I panicked as I don't want to lose him. I made him about 3 years ago and haven't played him for at least 2 years but he's in the world and I don't want him to be lost to it. I thought fast and in the end all I could think of was to use Master Controller to reset him. That worked. I went back to my active household and I got thrown to him again and he was on fire again - so I reset him again.
I'm glad you managed to find a satisfactory solution to the meteor issue.
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCuW44b3uCMtCSaq4gwC8EZg
I'm like you and @Bettyboop55, in that I play to relieve stress, and I'm sick and tired of all the bad news and conflict in the real world. I do not need any stress in my game. But we may not all get stressed over the same things in the game. This one would have been OK, if it weren't for it being the first time playing with these residents I've been wanting to play for such a long time, especially with it being so early in the game. I don't play in rotation, so usually I'm not nearly as attached to inactive residents as I am to my active sims. When I do get attached to some residents I've made, I play them in a game of their own later. And I do tend to get attached to at least some of them, so I'm planning on playing most of the residents of another town I made in rotation someday. If I ever get to it, it will be my first experience with playing in rotation.
Anyone can accidentally post something were they might not have intended to by mistake, but it was the latter, I had just logged into the forums and noticed the subject line. It was kind of eye-catching. But I didn't see it was yours right away, I was recording my initial reaction before even looking at the thread.
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But I´m a bit envious of all of you! In my game there were 5 impacts within a few Sim weeks. I had so many that I didn´t even take screenshots anymore! And my Sims don´t force the meteor hits by using the telescope or so, it just happens!
The most annoying part for me is the cleaning up after it, because I always slip one or two items (mostly invisible lights) and my Sims then always beef about the dirty environment!
as you can see, I´m so used to it that I park my Sims at the pavement, where they either read or talk to each other, depending who´s at home at that moment
https://forums.thesims.com/en_US/discussion/953447/streuner-a-cat-s-tale
FWIW you can alter the chance of a meteor strike with NRaas Retuner. I don't think you can alter the chance of a sim dying if they are too close to the point of impact though. At least, I don't recall such a setting off the top of my head.
@TreyNutz Yes, I'm sure I could have reset all the sims and got them out of harm's way. Even a debug enabler reset might have saved them, because their attention would have been diverted from the meteor and they might have gone over the watch Angela perform. But maybe they wouldn't have. But I usually tend to wait and see what happens with things like this. I never stopped to think how I was going to feel if any of those residents were killed, because I wasn't actually expecting them to stay right under it. The only times I had a meteor strike before where sims were outside watching it, none of them were killed.
I had one I don't consider be an in-game meteor, because I was skilling up a sim before her game, to make up for the fact that I couldn't play her from a toddler or even a child without her game getting corrupted. Her motives were static and she was using the telescope around the clock for two or three sim days to get her discovered celestial body count up to where she had gotten it as a child before being corrupted. So that one was inevitable, and I didn't count it when I said this latest one was my third. But I was doing it in a populated world, and several neighbors came over to freak out over it, but not one was hit.
All of my meteor strikes in game have been on community lots, unlike yours. The first one, which I didn't know could even happen because I thought meteor strikes came with Seasons, which I didn't have at that time, hit the school while my teen was there. I thought the shadow looked like a meteor, but I didn't think that was possible, so by the time I realized it had to be a meteor, it was too late. A LOT of teens and children died in that one, but they were still inside the school. Nobody that had gone outside was hit. My second was in Lucky Palms. My sim was in the military career, and a meteor hit while she was at work. I got her out, but I was afraid her boyfriend, who was a co-worker, was going to be killed. He was late for work and arrived just about the time it hit, but he was at the front of the lot and it hit the back of the building. So nobody died in that one either.
@naniminna Thank you. I don't actually work nearly as hard on my worlds as most world builders do. I can't make decent looking terrain, so I gave up trying to start with blank maps and just take pre-made worlds into Create-a-World and modify them.
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCuW44b3uCMtCSaq4gwC8EZg
...but I have to admit that I sometimes have meteors in my game on purpose. My alien family calls down meteors on a regular basis to make enough cash to afford their house or pay bills.
Or I call down meteors on lots where their enemies are. *cough*
The result breaks my heart EVERY time! I feel the pain of your loss...
Especially when it hits one of my favorite characters of ALL time and I didn't have much time to get him out of the way before I knew what was happening....
Ooooh, I bet I can guess who that is. And I don't even need to tell you WHO I think it is, now do I?
Well I did post all about it years ago, when the meteor hit the school while my teen was there. But apparently I'm not the only one who has posted about a meteor hitting a school, because I quit without saving and started the day over. So no sims were crying about it for days, but I'm sure they would have if I had not been so quick to shut it down.
Hmmm... I don't think it was you. I don't remember them quitting the game after that.
The only time I have had a meteor in my game was once on vacation in China. I read somewhere that if you remove the fire station you won't get a meteor and since I usually do remove the fire station that may explain it. Although I don't think China has a fire station, so go figure.
And no, according to meteor strikes: no mod, no aliens in the family, no use of the telescope! I just think my game is a diva and likes to act like it!
https://forums.thesims.com/en_US/discussion/953447/streuner-a-cat-s-tale