I tried the CTP but i don't know if this was the supposed outcome. So i thought if a sim leave the community lot at 5pm when he gets back it would be 5pm. But it looks like you still need to play trough the day with the sims that stayed at the lot and wait for the sim to be back for whatever time they were left. I wasn't quite expecting that. From one side i like this idea this way i still get to play everyone for that day. But i play so slow that this would mean that one play session would be one sim day. Is setHour a better option?

Update: Actually i played i little bit more and it's been amazing, I have been to improve on my stories and i feel this way is way more realistic i don't know how have i play without it. And when i think about it how i thought this would work was kinda dumb who the heck would like to play that way?

It really depends on what you want.

I love Community Time. I will send one sim downtown on a date or for an outing, and concentrate on them. Then I come home and they aren't there, so I can focus on the other Sims.

I really enjoy more one on one time with Sims.

Plus you can miss you carpool or forget to come home to watch your kid after school or get home from shopping to your husband with a lover; stuff that's not possible without the mod cause you know exactly what time stuff is supposed to happen.

CLT makes the game play like reality. If you left home at 8am to go to work and got back home at 5pm then 5pm is when that sim gets home. If your sim lives alone it will speed through on speed 3 until he gets home. If there are other sims at home it will load back on speed 1 ready to play them. If you left for work or school at 8am you would expect your family at home to have had that day to do their own stuff too. When you arrived home you would probably ask them what they had done. You wouldn't expect them to be frozen in time. So once you have played your sim away then the family left behind has to be played too. If it skipped to 5pm then what about their day? Also you are playing exactly the same amount of time as before, it's no longer. Before you played your sim away all day then loaded the lot back at 8am and again played it all day. The only difference is your sim that left at 8am for work at their shop or whatever really was away that whole day. They don't get to come back home at 8 am and play that same day back over at home. You can set hour if you want, but then only one family member is getting that day to live their life.

Also CLT works on time tokens, it calculates that your sim was away 9 hours, not the time. If you set the time to 5pm he may not arrive back home until 2am until he's been away 9 hours.

As i said the idea on one side seems really fun, but on the other i kinda doesn't. Can i delete the mod if i play with it for a while?
Thank you for such a detailed description

Ahh I was still asleep when I wrote that, reading it now, it seems really muddled! Sure you can remove it, maybe make sure everybody who was out is now home though.

It's fine Jo, i understood everything and now i love the idea. I wont be deleting this hahahah. Thanks for so much all the information so far about the game you have no idea how much your knowledge has helped me to get back to TS2

Aww thanks :lovestruc

I don't know if you saw what I'd written in the "What age span do you play?" thread, but if not you might want to go take a look, as there are some issues with the mod related to vacation neighborhoods (because time runs differently in them and the mod was never updated for BV) and university, where time also runs differently and the mod doesn't really work but it does create an artifact of sorts that will affect the first off-lot your Sim makes post-graduation, if they've visited community lots as a uni student. I'm not going to write it all out again, but if you didn't see it, check that thread for it.

I really appreciated that information. It cleared up why some things happened the way they did and come up with solves for my game

Ok wow sometimes i really need to pay more attention, just read trough it, The BV issue is not a problem since i hate hotels. As for the UNI i think ill be removing it whenever i play in Sim State. Thanks

That's true, so what I plan to do now (since I forgot last time my students came home) is take them out for a very short time, arrive and leave basically. I am hoping then the time run won't be so excessive.
The BV thing doesn't bother me too much since I don't mind cheating on holidays/vacations so I just up energy on the simblender half the time and keep them doing things. It shortens the holiday but again most times I feel that they had long enough anyway. Quite often my sims take a holiday in a 'shopping hood' hotel. No tours (who cares about them 15 years later?) but they still get room service and no airfairs.

There's also a major issue with the visitor controller in all versions of the game, and also with Chris Hatch's slower time hack. I have both and cannot play with CLT although I'd love to.

What's the issue with the visitor controller?

My plan for my Uni kids is to move them to a small lot one by one once home and have them take a trip. I love going to community lots. This explains why Dustin Broke disappeared for 4 days when he dropped out!

Oh darn it, maybe that explains why my sim didn't come home when I tried CLT last year. Would it be possible to make them compatible? not that I have the skills to do that but

I haven't noticed an issue with the VC. CLT and the slower time mod yes that was quite bad, I borked 2 lots and had to replace them as even moving out and back in didn't fix it. The sims motives were all nearly stagnant and they didn't age. It was the lots not the sims that it borked.

I have used the VC (in various versions) and CLT together for years with no issues. My current HCDU conflict list doesn't show any conflicts between them, so I'm pretty sure they are fine together.

I would expect a mod that slows down time to be incompatible, though. I would imagine it would really mess with the tokens that track the amount of time a Sim spends off the home lot.



Dustin must've spent a total of 4 days on community lots while at Uni, yep. Pretty impressive for someone who dropped out. Or maybe that's WHY he dropped out.

In any case, this is an easy fix. On their first off-lot trip in a regular neighborhood, just note down the time they left the community lot. Back on the home lot, also note down the day/time that CLT thinks they should come home. Then, at the actual time they left the community lot, use the batbox to force an error on everyone off-world. This will return the "missing" Sims to their home lot. (Note: DON'T have them use an owned vehicle to make this first trip or it will be lost when you do the force-error...although on occasion, I've forgotten this and have actually had a driverless car return home at the proper time. That doesn't always happen, though, so I wouldn't risk it unless you're good with just family-funding them money to buy a replacement car.) This way, the traveler is home at the right time BUT this does not clear the token of the time it has saved on it. In order to do that, you must wait until whatever day/time CLT thought they should have returned home to send them to a community lot again. Once that time passes, the token will clear and you should have no further problems like this. This issue doesn't really bug me; I've gotten used to compensating for it.

The BV issue is a little more serious, which isn't surprising because, like Uni, it's another situation where time runs differently, plus the mod was never updated for BV. The issue it causes pretty much makes hotels unplayable after a day or two because the tourist families don't check in/out and clear off the lot properly while your playables are off of it. You can end up with 50 or 60 Sims on the lot, often multiple iterations of the same tourist families, and things slow to a crawl and it's just....ridiculous. So if you're a person who does BV vacations a lot and has their playables stay in hotels, it's....really annoying and if you want to continue to do that, you'd be smart to take out CLT before you head off to play the vacation. Then you're back to reliving time on the home lot, of course. If you use owned vacation houses, it's fine, though. What I do is build "rental homes," just small houses with the hotel room door as the only exterior door and a check-in desk on the lot somewhere. So then it's still a "hotel" but no tourist families check in to get screwed up. If you do that, keep them small, though, because the daily fee is determined by the "square footage" of the "room," and if you build big "rental" houses, you'll end up with gigantic daily fees. If you don't want to do that, I suppose you could use the ownable house as "rentals" of a sort. Just family-fund the traveling household enough money to buy it, and then after the vacation sell it back and then subtract the money from their funds.

One more thing about playing with CLT in vacation hoods, though: You need to watch the time when you're on community lots. If you stay on one past midnight, the vacation clock subtracts a day. But, when you return to the home lot, and the clock passes midnight again during the time "catch-up," it'll subtract another day, thus cheating you of a vacation day. So, you'll want to leave community lots before midnight. Just like Cinderella.

It's actually the slower time hack that does a number on CLT. Although I could have sworn there was another hack that seriously interfered with it. But no matter, it's not usable under those circumstances. Pity.

@FranH what are your issues with the visitor controller?

@iCad That is what I did, force error on the batbox, but I did it since I thought they were stuck. maybe putting them on a blank lot directly from UNI might be the thing and either running or forcing error since forcing error on all sims on the lot included the parents which weren't ideal since I waited until the mother came home from work.

@Joandsarah77: DM'd you about this. I'm going to later drop it into the hack folder and run an HCDU report on it to see what pops up. I'll post the results.

Update:
I did put it into my downloads folder and the results came back:

12 notifications of conflicts with:
downloads\cars\cars\Mel_CarOptions_global.package (a hack to let sims drive to a park, casino or hotel-plus washing the car)

and 1 that interferes with a Moghughson hack:
\downloads\parking_hack\driveway-as-a-parking-space-Mog-20101104.package

After taking out the first hack, Mog's hack was the only conflict left in the report.

So it might have been a mistake on my part to confuse any problems with the VC, and-although as noted, it might mess up with Chris Hatch's slower time hack. I'm pretty leery about putting it into the game to run this though, because the BV issue could be a real problem as well.

I'm surprised though that another modder has not updated it to work well with BV and Uni-even when Crammyboy did release it as is, and I'm sure that he really doesn't care about the issue any more. Perhaps it's not possible, either, given Maxis coding is some of the most confusing mess that ever hit the game.

So that's the Visitor Controller clashing with those 2 mods? ^
I don't use the Slower Time Mod as I use CLT. Apart from the horrible borkedness that I had above, I didn't care for it anyway. I also don't use Mel_CarOptions, but I do have driveway as parking space.

The VC is not the ogre, I've figured out. But other things might be. Giving up the slower time hack is not acceptable to me, and because I like to play the vacation spots once in a while, I guess CLT is not going to be in my game for now.

It's a juggling act, and something always ends up having to go, unfortunately.

If you use CLT with Lion's Base Hood Uni (the gold record), time passes as normal. However, your "time remaining" stays static while you're on the community lot and ticks down when you load the home lot, so be careful when on community lots close to finals!

I was just told on Discord the @Chris Hatch had updated CLT? But that it may have a pets bug?

A blank lot would probably be a good idea if you normally move Uni returnees back in with their parents. I never do that, myself. They always get their own place, often an apartment, and the first thing I do is send them off to a community lot and then immediately send them back home so that I can clear their "time token."

@FranH Yep, if something fatally conflicts, you have to choose which is more important to you for your own playing. That's a decision only you can make. I would suggest maybe playing around with load order with CLT and the time mod, if you haven't tried that. Maybe one order or another will work...but I wouldn't be surprised if it didn't. If it DOES work...Well, the BV issue can be gotten around. Another thing you can do, if you still want to use hotels, is to use empty BV templates to create your vacation hoods. Then you will have no tourist families or locals. It's the tourist families checking in/out of the lot when there are no playables on it that causes the problem. (i.e. when you've sent your whole traveling party to a community lot, and when you send them home, the home lot does the "time catch-up" with no playables on it.) So, if there are no tourist families, you won't have the problem. If you don't want empty vacation hoods, you can do other things. For instance, if I want to play a vacation before I have a chance to modify the hoods with "rental houses," I'll often take along an extra Sim on the vacation, one I don't really intend to play. I check them into a separate hotel room and leave them on the hotel lot all the time. This means there's always a playable on the hotel lot. It also means the vacation is a little more expensive, but I've no qualms about cheating the family the extra money for this.