I want to switch families for a while. I have story mode (or whatever it's called) off. What exactly will happen to my original family while I play the other family? I don't care if their wishes or opportunites change, but I really don't want anything else to happen.

My understanding is that, unless you use AwesomeMod or some other hack, switching to Family B will clean out Family A's inventories. In addition, unless you have aging switched off as well, Family A will continue to age.

Under the latest Patch, EA has removed that most vile inventory purge.

Cheers.

Switching families is risky with WA.It can cause your neighborhood to crash and the neighborhood becomes useless.I hope this is fixed with the update that is coming.It happened to me and a lot of other people.

Not quite. While the inventory is no longer immediately obliterated, anytime something is removed from the inventory, such as a book, any attempt to put it back results in it being vaporized.

I also have Story Mode turned off and the only thing I notice when switching families is the wishes dissapear but thats it. They don't progress or anything, just stay where you left them.

Keira, they don't age? (I thought Story Progression and Aging were two separate switches.)

That I was unawares. Probably explains some odd happenings users have reported.

Thanks.

Mangaroo you are right they are different switches, I swap between families all the time, aging on (I want the babies and toddlers to age up), story progression off as I don't want random changes to my families. I tend to use longest lifespans so I can move between families and more or less keep them on track like you could in Sims2, works fine for me.

I must admit havn't had much time to play WA as I have had other things to do, but have the last few days and was so pleased that the personal inventory seems to stay as you left it, it was such a pain to keep moving things in and out of family inventory. I think EA had to change this for WA as they couldn't keep deleting stuff collected in WA all the time.

I need some clarification on this topic as well. I'm currently playing a house of 3 couples--3 YA males, 3 YA females. Managing six sims is becoming tedious now that they've levelled up skills and some progress toward lifetime wants. I want to separate them into individual homes. I want to switch and play each individual Sims2 style. I have WA and no mods or hacks installed. I'm fully patched. I want to continue to play with Story Progression and Aging OFF.

Under these constraints--SP and Aging Off--What exactly is happening to the individual's personal inventory as a result of switching active families?

What happens to anything in family inventory?

How does switching affect resetting of Tombs and the types of Adventures offered to members of different households in the same town? I mean, if I play with say, Indy Jones, go on trips and get a certain set of adventures and loot all the tombs--when I play later with Buffy Summers in HER house, will she find the tombs reset to their pristine state and will she get the chance to fill the same adventures Indy was offered?

Indy and Buffy are at this point best friends and I don't really want to separate them from each other or the other roommates all into separate towns just to get fresh tombs. But will I have no other choice?

Thanks for any help or advice. I've been reading around and have only gotten confused by some of the stray comments I've caught in various discussions.

I do switch between households and have found that since WA Family and personal inventories do seem to remain rather than being deleted. I have not split a family yet since WA but think that all of the stuff in inventories stays with the active household, and depending on how you do it the sims who have moved out will either have nothing, or if you make them the active household on moving they will take the family and their own inventory stuff with them.

The tomb resetting could well be a problem, both of my households have gone to China, and when the second one went to the same tomb it hadn't been reset but they did manage to complete an adventure in that tomb, but I can't remember if it was the same adventure as the first ones, so it is a bit confusing as how this works. I'll take more notice next time and try to do the same adventure with both families to see if that resets it.

more info

There is a thread under WA discussions which is all about the tomb resetting problem, and I am afraid it is a problem, there are one or two tips on how to reset. Looks like everyone is hoping it's a bug which will be sorted in the next patch, don't hold your breath.

Assuming a stock, unmodified game, with no aging or story progression, an individual sim's personal inventory will be retained as long as he never attempts to remove any object from the inventory to use it. If this occurs, the objects removed will not be returned to the inventory correctly when they stop using the object, and it will be lost. Objects that cannot leave the inventory under a sim's own volition will be retained until the death or disintegration of the sim. Without aging or story progression, this will only occur if you murder that sim.

AFAIK, nothing. The fambly inventory is largely ignored and nothing is removed from or added to it. The fridge inventory may be destroyed, however.

The tombs will not be reset to a completely pristine state. You will no longer receive the "new tomb smell" effect, and any objects that have been disturbed will remain disturbed. Statues remain pushed, IIRC rubble piles remain cleared, traps MAY remain destroyed, and secret doors remain opened. However, the tomb will be refogged and you will be able to receive the same adventures, and the treasure spawners will repopulate themselves with fresh loot.

If you want COMPLETELY fresh tombs, yeah, pretty much. If you're willing to satisfy for sloppy seconds, and/or do a little extra work to clean up by pushing everything back the way you found it, a second-revisit in a mostly-clean, if not entirely pristine, state, may be possible.

If you absolutely MUST recapture the complete new tomb smell, it is possible that experimental file manipulation and purging the game down to the .nhd file may be able to completely reset a foreign destination, but the long-term effects of this are unknown.

Sheesh, well that all stinks. Thanks for the detailed answers, J.M. Pescado and Baileywll. I guess I can live with the tombs not resetting but personal inventories going weird like that will suck. I can certainly think of workarounds for items that can be removed and stored somewhere in a house. But some items do not seem able to come out of personal inventory unless the Sim is using it. Like the scooter. I've not ever been able to remove it to repaint it or park it.

EDIT...haha. went to FlutterEyes forum. I learned there that the scooter goes up against the bicycle rack. Gee, though I'd tried that but must have had twitchy finger fail when I did. Okay, well now at least I have THAT tiny issue solved.

I can attest to this, all my valuable fish/fruits disappeared from my fridge when I switched active families.

If you sim has bought a building they wont be the owner anymore if you switch to another family.

I really hate it that they made the game in this way that they discourage using more than one family.

In this respect it should have been the same as sims1 and sims2.

I learned about the disappearing inventory the hard way. I had a master gardener and an angler in a family, and they had tons of produce and fish. Moved a son out and switched over to his new place to get him married. Came back to the original house and the produce, the fish, the books, the gems... it was all gone! I nearly lost it. However, I'd saved as before editing the neighborhood so I went back every which way I could think of, including placing everything, including the fridge, in the family inventory. There was no way that worked for me.

Soon after, I discovered Twallan's Story Progression Mod which allowed me to play my game as I wanted to play it. I was in a good sim place once again. Then, along came WA and it's not worked for me since. I followed the instructions completely for moving the framework over to the WA folders and checked and double checked but it simply does not show up in my game. I am trying with version 92 I think.

I was online early this morning trying to get just the inventory saver and found that his was obsolete, so I made a few posts and was directed here. The only thing I can think of is that I installed WA with the mod in the game because I forgot to pull it. In TS2, I just did as told and pulled mods before install. I was going to uninstall and reinstall the whole thing but read some problems that others have had and I haven't so I figured I'd just leave well enough alone.

I hate being limited to one household so I'm going to save as, edit the town, marry someone off and see what happens. What would make EA think that we'd want to build all these skills, learn all these baits, collet all this stuff and leave a family for 30 minutes realtime to have it all vanish into thin air?? I don't even want to let myself get started on that. Off to save as and see what happens!

Poohmom

This has to be one of the most discouraging threads I've read yet. My breeding project will be a real pain in the ass it seems.

Or you could get AwesomeMod and have seamless, no-hassle switching. Accept no Kewian-based substitutes!

Yeah, I was just on your? site/wiki reading about all of it's features. Needed to know all of the ins-and-outs before I decided to install it. BTW - I cannot create an account on that site. Despite using google, and whatever else, I still seem like a spammer to your system. Do I need to specify MPH/miles per hour/kph/kilometers per hour or what.. bah.. whatever.

If it is reporting you as a spammer, use a different email. A lot of free email services are heavily used by spammers, but we don't actually use email, so just make some shit up. Although if you don't actually want to post anything, there's no point in registering.

Crap....no? Really? Oh gosh thanks for letting me know. I didn't know that, never heard about that one and it would certainly be an issue that impacts how I play. My sims rely on their business ownerships for funds a lot right now as I work on improving their skills. I already played through the career building scenario with a previous family and that just wasn't my "thing" sending them off to rabbit holes to make money.

I need to sit down and think about my options. I would indeed consider Awesome Mod but not at this point yet. I'm still lurking and trying to understand how I'd use something like that. I know that forum doesn't suffer stupid newbie questions lightly. And I prefer to keep my stupid newbie questions to myself anyway and research the existing answers first. It would be a huge step for me to take. But jeez, looks like I might have to.

This game is more seriously screwy than I thought. It's not been too glitchy for me...yet. But then I haven't asked a helluva a lot from it, either. I've just had a bunch of sims in one house, eating, bathing, pooping, peeing, skill-building, half-heartedly romancing, becoming good friends...basically doing the college dorm life thing for them. But they're maturing now and I'd kind of like to play the game and send them out to live a little more...only dang thing doesn't really work all that well out of the box, does it? Sheesh.

PoohMom, I had experienced an inventory loss, too, so what I did was I went back to my saved game where the inventory was still intact. I took my Sim that had all the high quality fish and produce and other items I'd worked hard to procure and put it all in her personal inventory. Then I saved her to the library. I went to my new game where she existed without her inventory. I took her clone from the Library and moved that "twin" with the full inventory into the house, had all the items from the clone's inventory transferred to the girl who'd lost her inventory. Then I went back to Edit Town and removed and deleted the clone--as her sole purpose for existing was to restore the inventory to the later version of herself.

That way I was able to restore all the lost goodies, but still keep the newer version of the girl and still keep her relationship with the town as it was. The clone had no relationships with anyone, since once you send them to the bin they lose relationships and are in essence, different people. So deleting her had no ramifications to my story or relationships whatsoever.

Anyway, that worked for me before WA and the last patches. I don't know if that can still work or not.

Yep, that's how it was with me. You play the game in a very basic way, and when everyone else around you is complaining about bugs/issues, you don't seem to notice or care until you finally get bored and want to branch out into doing different, fun things that you were meant to do with this game. And then you finally understand where everyone else is coming from.

Pretty much. The game is designed for a very confined, railroaded play experience. If you try to break out of that "one fambly" gameplay box, the entire thing falls apart rapidly.

Well there are funnies definitely when you switch familis, but as the inventories remain, apart from losing wishes and promises which I can live with as they usually turn up again, I find it OK to switch families all the time. I can't play just one, get bored with that, and I like to create generations of families. I play with story progression off and aging on, but with Epic lifespan, so plenty of time to nip back and forth and keep them all on track Another thing is if you go off to another world it freezes aging for the whole neighbourhood while you are away, so your other families are still the same age when you get back.