Reading between the tines

Uh oh, now Mariam has a fork stuck to her hand.  It's even more interesting when she tries to do other activities with that hand...

Hmm, maybe I can mass market a fork as a bookmark... Oh, wait, it's already been done.

The strange case of the sliding wall door

One of the big upgrades in build mode with The Sims 4 is the ability to move around and plop down fully made rooms.  I tried using this feature to build a house only from premade rooms, but something still isn't quite right...

The door from the dining room to the kitchen didn't update the wall well enough.  This house was built only with premade rooms that are preinstalled with the base game, so this isn't a custom content issue.  On seeing this, I tried moving the door and furniture around, but it wouldn't display the open archway correctly no matter what I did.  The sims living here didn't seem to mind since they walked through the phantom wall section without any problems.

Come inside and see my painting...

Christie is still very involved in getting her painting done.  Now she's trying to convince a townie to come inside to see her painting, still with the brush stuck to her hand.

The brush might not stick so thoroughly if she was actually using paint instead of paste.

Painting her lunch

Christie is a collector.  She wants to collect everything, but knows that she has to create the paintings before she collects them.  But she's mixing the cooking skill with the painting skill when she eats...

The paint brush got stuck to her hand when she went to make lunch.  Maybe she wants to slather some barbecue sauce on her meat...

Strange shadows in the bedroom

I tried watching for a fun screenshot opportunity that would be appropriate for the holiday today, but didn't see very much that I would consider bonk-worthy.  The best that I got in the last couple months of simming is this curiosity (which I would classify as a lighting bug) showing some unusually shaped shadows near the romance light.

The lighting system in The Sims 4 has always seemed a bit dark, but I don't see anything in the room that would cast these triangular shadows under the window, especially when the baseboard on that wall is compared to the baseboards on the two adjacent walls.  This scene was captured in the default the large corner bedroom of the Parkshore house in Willow Creek.  I only added the romantic reward light from TS3 Late Night to the room.

Glued salmon

It seems that sims will often carry things completely wrong.  Here, one of the sims I created, Piper Wilkins, has a plate of grilled salmon she's just prepared.

She's supposed to have it in her left hand, but it got stuck to her right hand instead.  Good thing she used the extra-sticky oil to grill her meal today.

Light a fire under it

When The Sims 4 was released, like many other simmers, I spent a lot of time playing different families and learning the ins and outs of the new version.  As a bit of a foodie IRL, I made a foodie sim and leveled her up through the basic and advanced cooking skills.  One of her dishes turned out to be hot enough that the stove burner followed it around the kitchen.

It's a little hard to see, but that bright blue circle under the counter is the stove burner animation.  I was half expecting the kitchen to erupt in flames from this.

Not the footwear that I was expecting

When my sims age up, I usually let them pick what clothes they want to wear and what hairstyles they want to show with them.  It’s pretty rare for me to take time out of playing my sims’ lives to adjust their decisions, but sometimes I have to step in.  In this case, Michelle chose a pair of shoes that have invisible heels.  I like seeing my female sims in casual heels, but I couldn’t let Michelle go on tiptoes all the time with no support.

I forget where I got these shoes or even if they were an official EA release or not (I’m sure one of you will be able to tell me in the comments…).  They kind of look like shoes from Into the Future, but even with heels, they didn’t quite match the Generations top and Island Paradise skirt (at least I think that’s where the skirt comes from).

I did change the rest of her outfit too, but it was the shoes that got me to take her through CAS on her birthday.

What are those things?

I’m working on a new lot with a number of levels this week. Sometimes in build and buy modes there are these diagonal pieces that become visible. The lot has to be rotated at a certain angle to see them and they don’t appear to affect how the lot works, but they are really ugly.

In this screenshot, we see two pieces at the floors of two basement levels. These are phantom ceiling pieces that, as far as I can tell from a few searches around the interwebs, are a byproduct of the autoroof tool. Luckily they are easy to remove. Just use the sledgehammer tool to delete them. The tricky part of removing them is getting the sledgehammer in just the right place; sometimes you’ll only see a very small sliver of the edge, but if you’re careful, you can remove them.

Too spicy too late

With the addition of World Adventures, sims are now able to try some dishes from regional cuisines that use hotter spices than they might be used to. When they do have a spicy dish, there is often a reaction when the sim is still seated with smoke and flames coming out of the sims’ mouths and ears, but there seems to be a bug in when this reaction is triggered. More often than not, I see the reaction after the sim has risen from the table and cleaned the dishes.

Sims tend to stay in this seated position, in this case on an invisible chair with her legs stuck into the front of the food replicator, until their next action.

Not that far back

I’ve written before about how I will often add a rocking chair into my sims’ nurseries so they can have some quality bonding time with their offspring. Sometimes sims still don’t quite know where to sit even if I don’t use the moveobjects cheat.

I guess it’s just an extra soft cushion in the chair.

Gardening – you’re doing it wrong

I finally got my copy of Into the Future this week, and I was anxious to try it out. Many of my sims learn the gardening skill and spend a lot of time tending their gardens, and being able to finally place gardens indoors was one feature that I’ve been waiting for. But the first sim I sent to the future didn’t quite get how to harvest watermelons from a plant she found in Oasis Landing.

There must be a cloaking device installed that offsets the plant’s true location to non-sims.

Terra cotta in the sky

Edith visited the museum at Champs Les Sims recently. One of the exhibits there showed off a rather strange talent.

The terra cotta army exhibit is on the second floor of the museum, but when you page down to the ground level, the exhibit is still visible, floating above the museum.  Whoops!

Underground foliage

I had my sim doing a workout in her basement gym this week, but when I zoomed out to see if I could spot another family member, I saw these two trees underground as well.

The two trees we see here are exact copies of trees immediately above them at ground level.  They’re white because they are snow covered in winter, but they certainly shouldn't have appeared underground like this.

Sims can walk on water

With the update that was released last summer upon the release of Island Paradise, sims learned how to wade into the ocean and go swimming.  But the code that was added to control the wading missed a little bit of edge detection correction, because once in a while, a sim will walk on the water rather than wade in it.

This new ability doesn’t seem to affect how the sim feels about herself, however.

An imaginary imaginary friend

So I know that the imaginary friend doll eventually comes alive and is only visible to the child who befriended it, but when the child is still a toddler, it’s still supposed to be visible.

Lexie is getting some quality time with her imaginary friend, but when her father sim reset himself (I still don’t know why he did that), her doll turned invisible.

Standing at attention?

About half the time that I have my parent sims try to teach their toddler sims to walk, they step back and take this position.

It seems to be a default soft reset pose, and is probably something that the animators start with when they create motions for the game.  It looks like the animator who made the “teach to walk” animations didn’t clean up his work properly before exporting it to the game.  So I’d call this a bug because sims are not generally supposed to take this pose during gameplay.

Gem jumble

Whenever I have my sim cut more than one gem at a time with the gem cutting machine, the pile that she drops into the hopper just doesn’t quite look right.

It doesn’t matter what kind of gem it is or what cut she chooses, the gem pile always looks like this jumbled mess.  The only time that the gem looks right when she’s adding it to the hopper is when she’s only cutting one gem.  So this bonk is definitely a bug, but unfortunately it isn’t a bug that I can sell at the science lab for extra cash.

Arrggghhh!!!!!1! I can’t move in a sim!

I’ve been having this issue for a while now but it’s been awfully frustrating, especially now when I actually have some time to sit down and play again.  I created a new sim to try a few things that I hadn’t done yet and got her a house in her base neighborhood.  Her lifetime desire is to be a super spy, so since I have University Life installed, one of the first tasks I have her do is to enroll in university in the Technology major.  I get her to the university town and select the sorority house for her residence and hit the checkmark to begin, and wait…  and wait…  and wait…  and wait…

For some unknown reason, the game never proceeds from this point.  I’ve tried it with mods removed, with custom content disabled, with the movein mods installed, nothing seems to work.  The only time I can get a sim to university is if I send a sim who was born in the town I was playing.  I don’t have time for that!

I’ve found also that I can’t use the “Move in family” option from the game setup either as I get the same freeze.  Something is wrong in Denmark, Louie.

Double bonk – Diving reset

So I told Delia to go explore one of the caves in a scuba diving location.  She got there and swam to the cave entrance, but instead of entering the cave, she instantly reset to the nearest beach along with the other two sims that were diving at that location at the same time.

Delia (in her scuba gear) shared the reset space with a fairy and with a mermaid for a few seconds until they all realized how awkward it was and stepped apart.  I’ve seen several instances of two sims sharing the same location, but this was the first time I’d seen three in one spot.  Delia didn’t autonomously change back to her everyday outfit, so when she got home and flirted with and subsequently kissed her husband Triton, she kept the mask on.

I guess the oxygen was more alluring than a real kiss, and he is a merman, after all…

I’ve seen similar resets in various Let’s Play videos, so I know I’m not the only player encountering this issue, but it does get annoying when my sim is trying to fulfill a quest that includes cave exploration.