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Lab Assistant
Original Poster
#1 Old 26th Aug 2026 at 1:15 PM

This user has the following games installed:

Sims 2, University, Nightlife, Open for Business, Pets, Seasons, Bon Voyage, Free Time, Apartment Life
Default Different colour sky in lot thumbnail
Hi all, I've been creating some new residential lots for my neighbourhood, and for some reason one of them has a different colour sky in the thumbnail - the sky is a lot more grey than the rest, which all have the normal bright blue. When I load the lot, the sky is still grey-ish and it looks like there's rainy weather.

The lot has never been played - it's a freshly created house, so there shouldn't be any weather there as far as I know. I haven't seen this issue come up with any of my other lots.

Does anyone know why this is happening and how I can fix it?
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Be like the 22nd elephant with heated value in space, bark!
retired moderator
#2 Old 26th Aug 2026 at 4:33 PM
It's because it's raining on that lot! To clear it, use one of Chris Hatch's later versions of SimPE. Open the lot file itself (Documents/ EAGames/ The Sims 2/ Neighborhoods/ Nxxx/ Nxxx_lotxxx.package- browse to your affected lot and open that in SimPE). Then you'll see Weather Info (WTHR) in the Resource tree window. Open that, and you can see a field named 'Sky Clarity'- you want to set that to zero and commit (you can set the precipitation type and level and accumulation to zero too if you like). Then save and close the file. As always, backup your neighbourhood first!
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Lab Assistant
Original Poster
#3 Old 26th Aug 2026 at 6:29 PM
Thank you, I'll give that a try

Any idea why it's raining on the lot? I've only just created it and it's never had any sims living there. I thought weather only started happening in Live mode, so I'm worried that there's a problem with my game if I'm getting weather on a fresh build.
Be like the 22nd elephant with heated value in space, bark!
retired moderator
#4 Old 26th Aug 2026 at 10:22 PM
Not sure why it's happening, but I've noticed this too in my game (which is why I remembered how to fix it! ). I know that sometimes the lot might go briefly into live mode when saving (sometimes a bar might spawn an NPC when saving comm lots, for example). Does anyone else have any clues?
Mad Poster
#5 Old Yesterday at 5:11 PM
Does a newly placed lot sync to the season the last played lot was in, or does it always start at the same season?
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