Stuck in the Future all by myself, time travel really plums. [HELP]

PikminW

Been playing with this family for about two days; household has 2 human sims, a ghost (only ITF and SN installed), and a Plumbot.
I've been traveling back and forth to Oasis Landing and Sunset Valley.

After being a day or two in the future, I decided to get my household back.

Apparently, they did, but I, the player, didn't.

They stepped onto the time machine and the loading screen popped up, everything as usual.
Except that when the loading finished, I was still in Oasis Landing. The game was still in Life Mode but I wasn't controlling anyone; my sims were nowhere to be found. I didn't panic, though.

I got into Edit Town and tried going back to Sunset Valley through the little whited-out button in the top-left corner. Loading screen loaded surprisingly fast, but I was still in Oasis Landing. (Except, this time I was thrown to the game setup, you know as if I had loaded Oasis Landing as a new town directly from the main menu.) Hmmm. I decided to Choose A Household to try and maybe send this futurefolk back and then be able to switch to my family. Nope, ErrorTrap caught a script error and reset my future family preventing them from visiting the present (past for them? who knows).

Saved the game, and opened up my browser-

Now I am stuck with a random, insane family from Oasis Landing, not being able to 1) Return to Sunset Valley, because this future family doesn't even exist there. 2) Switch Households in Oasis Landing because "you can't change households when traveling to the future". I feel like my original family died somewhere traveling the space-time continuum

I guess this proves that traveling to the future, means you can't go back.

So if anyone has been in my position or knows how to fix this time anomaly, your help will be incredibly appreciated.

igazor

A few thoughts here.

1 - You can't switch worlds using Edit Town. Those map buttons are there so we can edit EA worlds that aren't currently being played in, not to transition gameplay to them.

2 - You mention ErrorTrap, but do you have NRaas Traveler in play? I would never put my sims through a travel transition without it as it protects against so many things going wrong such as what you have described.

3 - Support for NRaas mods, including helping interpret ErrorTrap logs, is provided at NRaas. Not on this or any other forum.
http://nraas.wikispaces.com/How To Upload
(free Wikispaces account and NRaas membership required to upload and open up a support thread; ignore the warnings about Wikispaces shutting down as that won't affect us until October and we will have moved to our new site by then)

4 - If all else fails, do you not have the option to revert gameplay to a prior save from before your sims got stuck?

PikminW

@igazor

1- Right, I still couldn't access SVallley, not in normal gameplay nor in Edit Mode.

2,3 - I don't. I will download it. After applying the mod, what is it that I should try? I guess the game and ErrorTrap did not allow this future family - that I'm stuck with - to visit SValley because they just don't exist there? Where would they arrive and what would be their HomeLot?.

The game recognizes this family as my Active Household settled in Oasis Landing; which I suppose shouldn't be possible.

4- Stupidly, I overwrote the file instead of Saving As. So, yeah.

igazor

Traveler replaces the travel transitions with that of its own that look the same but work more reliably. It's meant to be in play before leaving home, not when things are already going wrong in a foreign (or future) world, but it's worth a try. It does sound though like this ongoing game might be broken.

"So, yeah" I'm afraid to say doesn't help. Even with all of the protective mods in the world, this game is fragile. Routinely playing without no viable saves to revert to (not even the one game generated backup save?) means you have no safety net. Going forward, or in your next game if this one becomes unplayable, I would strongly advise developing a Save As strategy with or without NRaas Saver through which you always have a number of safe places to retreat to when needed.

PikminW

I will try traveling to SValley with the mod installed.
However, if it doesn't work (which I hardly believe it will, logically, where would the game assign the HomeLot for this future family?), though I really would want to try killing this family off to see how the game will handle the situation, I guess I'll have to delete the save file. I don't want to end up corrupting my whole game.


Thanks for the advice! I really appreciate it @igazor.

igazor

What I expect will happen if Traveler does help is treat the household as if it's vacationing when they arrive in what should have been the homeworld and ask where they would like to stay for this visit. Traveler opens up the option to travel to any world on vacation. But in this case, probably (if it works) it will be treating Oasis Landing as your sims' homeworld and the original as a temporary destination where they no longer own their own house. There may or may not be an acceptable way to then proceed from there.

Badly or non-performing saves do not affect the game install or other ongoing games at all. But there isn't any point in keeping them, I have to admit, if they are only going to cause frustration or not be put to any use later on.

PikminW

@igazor

Ok and with the Traveler mod allowing me to vacation in SValley, will it be possible to switch households while in vacation-SValley? Say in any normal save file, are you able to switch households while out of your Homeworld?

igazor

Yes, absolutely and that would be the path to salvaging this game if you can get it and Traveler to cooperate with you.

When a sim or household is on a vacation, they will be staying in a base camp or a residential lot provided for them just for the visit. They must purchase a lot of their own (get one marked to Residential-Player Ownable in Edit Town first), move into it fully, then invoke Traveler's Change Hometown command, save (as), quit all the way to the Desktop or Origin, and reload. Your sim or household will now be a full resident of the world they were visiting.

See the Switching Homeworlds section of this FAQ, towards the end.
http://nraas.wikispaces.com/Traveler FAQ

Now this is backwards from what usually happens, so presumably the lot they will need to purchase and move into before invoking the command is what used to be their home lot. You will also, if successful, want to use MasterController to remove the Future Sim hidden trait from these sims if they have it as that will cause problems if kept in a homeworld in the present.


Edit: Oh sorry, I read your question wrong. But I'll let my answer stand since it's the correct answer (to the wrong question).

Yes, you can switch households when playing in a world that is not your sims' homeworld. But that isn't meant to be permanent and is not the way to switch active gameplay from one world to another. If you switch households and abandon the ones who traveled there without either using Traveler's Change Hometown on them or bringing them back home, they will get disjointed from the their true homeworld and the game will be very confused as to whether it's meant to be in vacation mode or not. The biggest symptom of such confusion is if you try to travel different sims back to where the original ones came from, a new never been played before version of that world will load instead and the original sims will never be able to get back home.

peculiarpotato

I’ve been trying to find a thread discussing this but I couldn’t find one, so I’ll just ask here.
Yes, it’s 2019 and I’m still playing Sims 3 but whatever.
Whenever I travel to the future, my sims get there fine and everything, but I’m always greeted by an empty base camp. The first two times there were people, but ever since then it’s only been my active household and Emit. There are still townies, npcs, and homeless sims, but nobody else stays at the base camp. Why is this?

Auroraskies

@peculiarpotato I don't know!

I vaguely remember something like that happening in a save once, but my controlled werewolf-sim visited their descendants at their house a lot, and often slept there and elsewhere in the world; and I don’t remember the aging settings; and I forgot to keep the save.

When I tried to go back and forth, five times, in a new one, there was always 'future residents' at the Community Living Center in Oasis Landing when my lone sim arrived. I did not wait long between trips (1/2 sim-day). My sim slept there every night and had several parties at evening time inviting the npc; and the rest of them was spent socializing with the ones at the center. Every trip was one-two nights. Maybe you did not do it the same way as I did.

There was at least 4 future residents there at day time, some the same and some exchanged; and from 3 up to 6 at night time sleeping over, more sims the more time my sim spent there. The sims were mostly npc/homeless, but sometimes a townie (having an actual home in the world) was there during the day, as well as slept there.

The 'desired sim count' for when the venue is popular for the player/when the player controlled sim is there, is 5 as highest, fluctuating during the day, highest at afternoon/evening; and I think this is leveraged by the quality of the processor (mine is medium gaming). But the incentive to stay put is low, if I understand it correctly.

And I also, obviously, play the sims 3; and it is even funnier that I do so, not having grown up playing the other iterations at all

Edit: Aging on; and on Epic.

peculiarpotato

Well thanks for letting me know your thoughts. If I figure out why or how to fix it, I’ll post that in case anyone else has the same problem. From what I’ve seen though, I feel as if I’m the only one.

Auroraskies

@peculiarpotato I could not find any reports on this either, searching on the different sims forums; maybe you will have better luck. But that is part of why I think it possibly could be an intended behaviour in the game; that is, if the actively played household is spending a lot of time on a specific lot/venue, the game will send that world's sims to that lot more often, and in a higher amount; this amount would be proper to the strength of the player's processor and rest of hardware, or how the game evaluates it.

So that is why I am wondering how you played in the save: How many sims were in your traveling active household, how and where did they spend their time in Oasis Landing, how long between trips, how long were their duration, how many Future Residents stayed at the Community Living Center (base camp in Oasis Landing) the first two times, what time settings do you have, is aging on, is your computer sufficient for The Sims 3 etc.

Other players here are very adept at reading dxdiags, if you want to provide yours:
https://help.ea.com/en-us/help/pc/how-to-gather-dxdiag-information/

Use a free filesharing site like pastebin.com. Since you are a new member you cannot link yet but if you put the link here broken up with spaces for instance, someone who can will put it together.

If you play with mods someone else needs to help you, I do not know their settings well enough and my game is unmodded; but listing which ones you have, for others to see, might be good, if it is on account of a particular setting.

And since good game management prevents a lot of issues with this game:
https://www.nraas.net/community/TIPS-FOR-BETTER-GAME-PERFORMANCE