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The dreaded clay bug is back!
amber_ilumire
Posts: 1,714 Member
I will be reporting this bug next time I’m online, but is anyone else experiencing a return of last year’s ‘clay / future cube bug’ that was related to the EL release?
NAPs are turned off in my game, but sims are constantly moulding pieces of clay and doing autonomous animations with the EL tablet wherever I go! Last year I experienced this bug, but it was fixed in an update and only affected the sims in my main household when I switched households and then went back to my main again, so now I’m stuck playing just the one household because I don’t want to risk clay suddenly spawning continuously in their inventories.
Is it just me? It is possibly the most infuriating bug I’ve ever experienced!
NAPs are turned off in my game, but sims are constantly moulding pieces of clay and doing autonomous animations with the EL tablet wherever I go! Last year I experienced this bug, but it was fixed in an update and only affected the sims in my main household when I switched households and then went back to my main again, so now I’m stuck playing just the one household because I don’t want to risk clay suddenly spawning continuously in their inventories.
Is it just me? It is possibly the most infuriating bug I’ve ever experienced!
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Oddly enough, this particular sim has been having other glitches including the gardening glitch, there was a glitch with her tent that wouldn’t let her sleep through the night, her cat keeps phasing in and out of objects. Ugh, it really left a bad taste in my mouth especially because I usually have a glitch-free playing experience but maybe I just don’t play enough to see these things.
ETA: in the pics above from @LadyKyn it looks like Sims do actually make decor objects with the clay, but my Sim doesn’t do that. Maybe I’m just impatient.
i'm wondering why some of my sims are grabbing a future cube out of nowhere and using it and then putting it away after an emotional reaction. this has been going on for months, i thought it was just another feature of the game. obviously not.
When i mean nowhere, i mean they don't have any such things in their inventory before i switch out to another household, but for some reason they pull out this future cube and use it.
@Hoverael the clay bug and the future cube bug are essentially the same, just with different objects. Both are to do with the EL NAPs and had to be fixed in a patch last year.
I've submitted a bug report. Hopefully the Sims team will release another patch to fix it or something. I'm glad it's not just me experiencing this in my game.
I installed a mod from Bienchen called "noautonomousmouldclay" to stop the madness.
It doesn't stop it from spawning, but it DOES stop sims from becoming so obsessed with it they forsake all other activities to play with clay.
In my game, they will drop actions I assign to them to autonomously play with clay instead. It's one of those things that, for whatever reason, takes priority over literally everything else, including addressing needs that are in the red...so I stopped the autonomous clay obsession with Bienchen's mod. It works beautifully, and is WAY more efficient than having to go through every sim's inventory to delete lumps of clay that are just going to keep coming back no matter what you do anyway.
Bienchen has a lot of good mods that fix many, many things, and they all work very well. Highly recommend.
I'm kinda over sims peeing on themselves over lumps of clay.
So, I had to kill the autonomy on the clay because it got out of control and started taking over my game. My sims get obsessed with ONE thing (which changes from time to time) and it will take over my game. It gets frustrating. For a while it was dancing, then it was computers, then it was clay, then it was cooking/drink making, now it's clay again...and also walking to different floors of the house to put down toddlers they're not even holding to begin with.
Me: Hey, sim, go take a shower. You're stinky.
Sim: Nope. I MUST climb four flights of stairs to go put down a toddler I haven't picked up yet instead.
And so it goes...
The cooking bug was the bane of my existence for months. Soooooo glad that's finally fixed (and REALLY hoping it doesn't get broken again with patch we'll get for the upcoming EP). It's been so nice to be able to turn on autonomous cooking again and NOT have sims cook 40+ dishes in one go, and to be able to host events at the house without every party turning into 15+ sims crammed into the kitchen fighting to get to the fridge/stove even though there were two fully stocked buffets on the lot.
Sometimes the obsessions will work in my favor, though. I had a very large lot that had several lumps of clay on it - I'm talking multiple houses on a 64x64 lot with 8 sims living on it during the last clay spawning bug...so, exponential clay, basically. I wanted to get rid of every lump because I was at my wit's end with the clay obsession, so I let one of my clay obsessed sims lead me to every single lump of clay on that lot just so I could pause the game and destroy them ALL.
...and she did, too. She led me to all of them one by one. As soon as I'd destroyed one, she'd head for the next one, and the next, and the next, until she'd spent an entire day trying to play with them all because nothing is more important than clay to...athletes?
I only had one sim *actually* pee herself because she wouldn't stop playing with clay long enough to go to the bathroom. She had the childish trait, though, and she's kind of a derp anyway. She does that with toys, too, so she's by no means a benchmark for "normalcy" in any capacity.
I'll just say I do a LOT of cache clearing, troubleshooting, and factory resets and leave it at that.
The glitch where sims have ever-reproducing numbers of clay and future cubes in their autonomy is a separate glitch. It has a benefit though, as they are a nice source of income. My first-ever sims in sims 4 were brothers, one of them married Zoe Patel, she came into the marriage with enough clay and future cubes in her inventory to buy them a very nice house
Yeah, the NAPs were a mess. I turned those off and have been afraid to turn them back on again. The half-made herbalism concoctions clogging up every stove in town drove me bonkers, too.
...but yes, the clay/future cube spawning as it relates to autonomy is definitely a separate glitch, because it still happens even with NAPs deactivated...although for me, it's been the clay and not so much the future cubes.
I have found myself actually yelling "Where did you get it?!?!" at a sim playing with clay as I shift+click "destroy object" on their beloved lump of clay. Haha!
Clay is banned in my world. BANNED, I say!
Bienchen's mod does stop the autonomous clay molding obsession, though. It works very, very well. The cute little sculptures they make actually stick around for a while now, until you tell them to mold it into something else.
Somehow that stuff has a super high motivation behind it.
That said, I've been seeing this since April when I got Sims 4, so I just assumed it was normal. I did not realize it was a bug. For me this came about when I downloaded two different gallery lots that each had two lumps of the stuff set out as décor in the house. So it hit the two households I put in those houses.
One of my parks looks like this by the way:
Updated with Werewolf Diaries (1)
Kill! KILL!
@JustMeAlb "Kill! KILL!" Haha!
I'd actually like some of the NAPs like this one if they weren't buggy. Another that I had was guests constantly trying to brew potions though I haven't seen it recently.
If switching off autonomy would stop it, I might go that route if new bug fixes don't come out. I like playing with a mix of direction and autonomy but if I had to, I could play without autonomy.
You know what? I think you're absolutely right. Thank you for this. When I read up on the various NAPs just now (because I've had them turned off for so long I couldn't remember what they all were), literally EVERY game destroying obsession I've experienced can be explained by one of those NAPs. I only had them turned on for a very short time, but I think it was enough to break the world...and it explains so, SO much.
The saddest thing happened recently in my game. Quick backstory - I didn't get to have a family in real life, so I created a super realistic simself and had my kids in the game. My son was married to a girl who'd been his best friend since the day they met when they were kids, was his high school sweetheart when they were teens, and they had a wonderful relationship (always had completely full friendship and romance bars and were literally my favorite sim couple of all time, and I've been playing since Sims2) and they have two beautiful twin boys who are still just toddlers.
Even though my son and his wife had the same traits and were both romantic sims, he was ALWAYS faithful to her....but she'd flirt with anything that moved and was constantly cheating on him. In the end, she started dating one of his friends (as in, she *actually* became the other guy's girlfriend WHILE she was still married to my son) and made out with the new guy right in front of him at their family reunion (keg party), no less...so needless to say, they're divorced now, and my son is raising the twins with the help of his sister and her husband, who also have two boys.
My son's ex-wife moved to Strangerville with her new boyfriend, where they live in a haunted house with an evil clown, because #karma.
Anyway, the Free Love NAP was never active in my town, but it may have been in some other town that she visited at some point, and now I wonder if she somehow got glitched by that, and that's what caused all of this. It's the only thing that makes sense.
I know it's just a game, but I'm pretty invested in my little story for obvious reasons, so I've been truly sad about my son's divorce and my grandsons' broken home, and I could NOT understand what the wife/mother's problem was...but this really could explain everything. Not just her ongoing infidelity but every other thing my sims have gotten obsessed with that has pretty much taken over my entire game.
I turned the NAPs off long ago, but if the obsessions still stick around (which doesn't surprise me) then...yeah. That certainly does make EVERYTHING make A LOT more sense.
I've done several factory resets (just as general maintenance) but I haven't tried uninstalling/reinstalling yet. I know I can back up my saves (the same way I do for factory resets) but don't know that I could abandon my current story and start over. Instead, I've found various mods to help curb the lingering obsessions and tweak autonomy...but I keep NAPs turned off now (because they really were the worst thing to ever happen to this game) and I've been planning to start an "alternate universe" side game where my kids are both toddlers again, just for fun and nostalgia (and to see how/if the story plays out differently)...so that will be an even more interesting experiment now.
Thank you for this. This insight is really helpful to me in terms of providing SOME explanation as to what the heck was wrong with my son's wife (and the game breaking obsessions in general)...so seriously, thank you for the "light bulb" moment. It's much appreciated.
Also, side note, but we just finished the grandbabies' first Winterfest in my game. It was adorable...even though everyone got multiple lumps of clay while opening presents from under the holiday tree.