I have a huge lot with a large barn, a good sized house, etc...
A great deal of the lot is dedicated to a pasture which has jumps and race training equipment in it. I have one sim (plus live in butler), two horses, two unicorns, a dog and a cat.
The other day...everyone was outside and suddenly there was dramatic music that I'd never heard before....I didn't have a clue about what was about to happen.
My sim neighbors rushed over and were pointing up, standing in the pasture freaking out when all of a sudden a HUGE meteor followed by several more started crashing down everywhere, the jumps in the field were crushed to scrap, fires started bursting out all over, the horses panicked, and one of my sim neighbors was killed when she caught fire because she was too close to the large meteor that made a crater in the ground. Just an inch over and it would have crushed her outright.
I couldn't get control of my sims to get them out of the way... I just had to watch the mayhem unfold. (I could order them indoors but they just kept freaking out and not going where I told them to go.)
I had no idea this was in the game, so imagine my surprise? lol

When death came for the neighbor, her family was mourning. It looked like there was going to be a headstone while death was doing his thing but in the end there was only a pile of ashes and the only option my sim had was to "clean up" the ashes by sweeping them up and throwing them in the recycle bin! I thought that was a bit on the "wrong" side....shouldn't there have been a headstone or an urn? Throwing someone's remains in the garbage seems a bit harsh....
Is this happening in your games? No option but to sweep up a dead neighbor and toss them in the bin? I'm hoping that wont happen when one of my pets dies, they're starting to get older...pretty soon 4 of them will be elderly....

Immediately following the clean up of the mess and the calming of the horses, my sim took a horse down to the Horse Race and yet another thief came to the lot. I have alarms all over the place, including outside, but they come really often since I installed Pets. I used to hardly ever get a burglar but now it seems like I get one about once a sim week. I've read of other players that are being deluged with meteor showers to the point that they can hardly go outside.

I wonder if all the excitement is a glitch? I used to play for months in real time and never have anything exciting happen in the game (I've never even seen a protest in my game) but once I installed pets, everything changed. I wondered if that was the same for anyone else?

I have never had a meteor in my game...ever. My husband however got a meteor the first time he played after ambitions.

Funny enough I am still looking for a unicorn...guess what happened the first time he played after pets....

I am not amused and to make it worse I also play more than him.

I couldn't find a unicorn either until I installed claudiasharon's "more or less unicorns" mod

http://www.modthesims.info/download.php?t=459352

Try it, I have lots of unicorns in my game now...two of them are now living at my sim house, and at least one I see often near the wild horses.
They seem to be much easier to catch than the wild horses are. I didn't have any trouble adopting the unicorns....

Thank you for that! I will try it.

If you suddenly get not only unicorns but more thieves and a meteor shower to boot, will you come back by and let me know? I've wondered if increasing the chances of the unicorns being in the game might somehow have increased the other things.

I was serious when I said nothing exciting ever happened in my sims game until now but now when I start the game I just wonder what will be next. It's fun because it's not so often that it ruins my game like some people have said is happening to them - but I'm wondering if it's the mod or just the new ep that suddenly made the chances of chaotic events show up when they never did before.

I have yet to have a meteor in my game even with Pets nor have I seen an increase in burglars. I did have a neighbor die in a fire and the only option was to sweep up the remains.

Unicorns have not been a problem either. I don't think the Unicorn mod will affect other aspects of the game since it only handles the spawning of them and nothing else.

Thanks for that. I just wondered if increasing chances of random things for one thing increased them for all random happenings - because I didn't just get more unicorns, all kinds of random events started to happen.
I'm happy with it...considering how often the game crashes since I installed pets, it's nice to get a few perks to go with the pain.

To my understanding when a neighbor dies off their home lot the headstone goes to the Mausoleum in the cemetery, but don't quote me on that.

Although I found a unicorn, but nothing else out of the ordirnairy has happened. I'm glad about that, as even though I've not had a meteror I wouldn't what one all the time. I'm sure it would get old fast.

It gets old REALY fast when you've built, furnished, and decorated the perfect home, moved in your carefully customized sim, spent a sim week (which feels like a real week) getting them properly skilled, known in the community, developed some romantic interests, and are finally ready to actually PLAY them damn game, and a meteor comes along and takes out the whole lot.............. Even if your sim escapes by running like hell, you kind of lose interest in playing the rebuild out.

Unicorns give off a sort of rainbow light when they drink water. It's visible from afar so you need to follow the rainbow if you happen to see one. That's how I found my unicorn.

That's right, you go into map view and look for a mist of clouds floating - usually over a remote place with a pond or body of water - and you'll see rainbows...then you go there and when you see the unicorn, choose "watch" and just watch it for a minute then offer it produce...and the sniffing ritual...rinse repeat...keep going until it disappears. Then the next evening, look for it again and do the same thing. You'll get the option to adopt it then.

Oh and yes, the meteor showers ARE getting old. It happened AGAIN just now.
Thankfully, it keeps just destroying my pasture and jumps...and this time it set the garden on fire and I had perfect plants.
Thankfully, I had out-door fire alarms and my sim is brave.

When nature destroys more than I can afford to buy back, I pretend she has insurance and give her enough. lmao

The meteors actually LAND? I thought it was just a shower you could see in the sky. I think I'm going to take those spawners out of my custom worlds now... O____o

Oh yes. They land..... allllllllllll over your stuff and sometimes right on sims themselves.
It comes out of nowhere, as in, there is no time of day or activity setting it off....we don't even have a telescope and I've read this happens to some sims on public lots - though my experiences have always been on my home lot.

I didn't have any spawners...or didn't add any myself...so I dont know if that has anything to do with it...
"You're just going about your day and suddenly, you'll see a pop up that says something like "Rain Dancer wonders why it's suddenly so dark" and then LOOK OUT because the first one to hit is usually HUGE (dents the ground) and then comes a hail storm of meteors of various sizes, landing on everything, each one starting a fire as it hits.

You can pause the game right after you see the pop up and hear the music to give everyone an order to get out of the way - but what happens is that the fires start and you know how sims freak out over fires.... one or two horses or maybe the dog will have time to get somewhere safe and everyone else will do the "OMG ITS FIRE" dance right in front of the rapidly spreading flames, no matter what you've told them to do.
You know how sims are - they don't listen to you once something that can kill them starts to happen.
Unicorns will sometimes get the thought bubble to put out flames, and if your sim is brave, they'll try to battle the flames too...but you need the fire department to get a grip on as many fires as come with a meteor shower so it's best to have outdoor fire alarms, just in case this happens to you.
It seems like I'm getting a meteor shower about once every sim week or two....about as often as a burglar comes.
FWIW, Your sim neighbors will all rush over to witness the event, and you can't stop them from running right to where meteors are falling so expect to witness some rather gruesome deaths. You'd think after the first time, after watching a family member get roasted, they'd hide in their houses...but no....oh no...
Seems to me that, if fire were breaking out all around me in real life, I wouldn't put my hands on my head and run right over to dance next to the flames - I'm just sayin, it's not the most realistic thing sims do....

I was unable to interact with Death when he came for the neighbors, despite the fact that there is a death flower garden on my property and my sim was holding like 36 of them in her inventory. So, whoever gets crushed or toasted is going with the reaper. All human sims anywhere near the falling meteors will look like they've been in an explosion even if they don't catch fire....and from my game experience, they dont go home and shower, they'll just go around town looking like that.

When a meteor shower is over, the first thing you need to do after helping the firemen put everything out is go click on your horses and choose "Calm down" because they spaz hardcore over fire and will need your sim to pet them and talk them down from their hysteria. Unicorns, at least my two, are always okay and deal with whatever happens in a calm fashion to begin with.
Dogs and cats will get out of the way if you tell them to, but while my cat will go hide, the dog will run back out into the mayhem if her owner is out there fighting fires.
Unlike unicorns, dogs don't help battle flames, so I'm not sure why that is.

In the aftermath, everything that has been crushed by meteors will become scrap to collect (not much of a consolation) or ashes, and then you'll need to clean up, re-level the ground, replace everything that was crushed, and replant any plants that were caught in the fire. So far, none of my buildings have gone up in flames or been hit - just the outdoor stuff and some sims have been damaged/killed. So far, I've never seen a sim animal die in these events (thank goodness) just the human ones. I hope, if this is going to continue, that I never will.

If anyone else is experiencing this meteor Armageddon on a regular basis, I'd love to hear about it.

Well, given that unicorns can magically start fires, I guess they can extinguish them too. Dogs aren't really good at putting out fires in RL, so I guess it's realistic that they can't in game too (lack of opposable thumbs makes it hard to operate a fire extinguisher), although in the movies they're always good at barking little Timmy awake so he can escape the flames.

As for houses, yes, I've lost two. There were a lot of posts regarding folks who's sims were meteor "magnets" back when they first started falling (I think it was with ambitions?). For those of you running around holding your heads worrying "Am I next?" there is always http://www.modthesims.info/download.php?t=407315 (there's a link there to another mod updated for pets as well) which if you're into hacks, can eliminate this risk from your orderly game (after the second house went up in flames, guess what I installed ).

And for those of you who love to torture your sim families, there are options to increase the incidence of the rain of death, although I'm not sure they're pets updated yet. I would suggest reading through the last page of comments.

Once a week is definitely something broken. In contrast, I've had one...in the entire time I've had the game installed. Which is since release date on all the expansions.

Concerning burglars: If one sets a dog to guarding the house, there is a chance that a burglar will be spawned; 10% I think it is. So a burglar every 7-10 days is reasonable.

I believe I'm going to have to go an get that mod....because as said above, something's wrong for it to be happening so often.
Thank you for telling me that it can take out your house. I spent forever building that house and barn....and I'm not really up for rebuilding either one of them.
As often as I'm being hit with meteors, it's just too much risk.

I read on another site, and don't know if it's true because I can't find anything to confirm it other than this person saying this happened in their game, that sims who have been in meteor showers repeatedly get the want to poison somebody as well as the hidden ability to do so.
The simmer who was talking about this said they had their sim poison someone and would sometimes get notifications that the police were looking into the death of the poisoned sim. Anyone else ever heard of this?

I've read the same unconfirmed post. I would treat it as that for now, unconfirmed.

Agreed... but now I'm curious and will be watching my sim to see if I get the opportunity to do it.

I wouldn't worry too much if you haven't experienced one yet, you are obviously in my boat and if you do get one it'll be once in a blue moon.

If you do get it though, do NOT underestimate the distance away you need to get your sims.

You know that nice little park in the Appaloosa Plains mountain area? The one with the pond that the unicorn likes to spawn near?

Meteorite took out the entire lot. Absolutely every inch of it. How do I even fix that? I had to open up a new savegame, save the lot to the bin, and replace it in edit town.

Wow thats tough, I've only had two meteor showers and they only took out my paddock, it also burned one of my neighbours...

wow

At least you can replace an entire lot. How about a 5 bedroom home ready for generations of sims to wander it's halls that gets leveled right after the final (well, never final, but pretty much fixed up right) decorations are done, right before you remember to save??