There are several mods that make apartments work in uni hoods, but they don't work in the game as shipped.

If you put your YAs in a dorm, their lot will be zoned as a dorm. If you put them in a lot that's not a dorm, their lot won't be zoned as a dorm.

Ok, I've never actually tried the apartments in university thing myself but I thought that I'd read about it working. I must be misremembering, or maybe I saw gameplay from someone who had a mod to make it work and got mixed up, sorry about that.

Speaking of apartments. What determines whether an apartment is considered high class and is there a way to check? I'm using the NPCs and townies as apartment residents mod by midgethetree and it works fine except that it seems to REALLY favor service NPCs so my only apartment residents are maids, repairmen, etc even though I feel like they shouldn't be living in the high-end fancy apartments. But midge seems to say that the mod should favor townies for middle and high class apartments and put the service NPCs in the lower class ones, which I'm fine with, I just don't like the repairman living in the fancy condos. But how do I tell if my apartment is low class?? It's Tech Center Flats from the lot bin with only some minor remodeling -- surely that should be high class?

Enter the cheat mode and type in "Printlotclass", this will tell you what class the building is. Maxis coded it to be influenced by more than the expensive objects and furniture included. It's also affected by the buildings around it. Stick your fancy building next to a low class slum and it's class should go down. The prima guide explains more about this. But if I can remember rightly the whole thing is bugged and doesn't work the way it should. There are several mods that reassess the value of property and bills because of this.

EA/Maxis wanted Tech Center Flats to be middle class.
I have fixed a lot of the "classes" in my LotCatalog Refresh Project (part 2) ~ a complete overhaul of the Specialty Lot Bin.
Tech Center Flats is found both in the bin, and already placed in BellaDonna Cove. (I fixed the bin version.)

Here is a chart/notes from the 'Project' I did which shows the Bin Apartment's class values: (right-click and open in new window to see a larger/easier to read version)

Yes to everything Diovanlestat said above - AND - the easiest way to change the lot class value is with the Lot-Adjuster.

@aelflaed IDK about recent, but maybe Have Dessert (Single) with Make/Make Many Option for Bakeries by Morague. It's just for dessert, though. IDK if there's another mod that allows single plates for everything, but that's the only mod I remember & could find.


And @pianogrinder, I'm curious why you do this with SimPE? There's mods that help you do this in game. For example in Squinge's Mega College Pack, Teen To Young Adult No College EP8 will automatically age every teen to YA and YA Birthday Cake is a hacked cake that allows teens to age to YA and YAs to age to adult and graduate. How do you normally age up sims to adults anyway?

@pianogrinder



You can do that in game, no need to open simPE. You can age teens to young adult with the simblender or Squinge college cake.
The difference is the blender will not have them gain a 'went to college memory' which is good if you want to play YA as an age range not as a uni student.
The cake gives a 'went to uni memory' good for playing uni students in the main hood.

Their housing can also be whatever you want. You can make a functional dorm in the main hood with Lions Gold record, perhaps that is what you are using. But you don't have to, they can also live in regular housing or apartments. I did a post on my MTS Journal about how I play Young Adults. I meant to make another and never got to it.

Yes, I have that one.
Perhaps I imagined the mod I thought I saw made recently. I haven't been able to find it again. But thanks!

Some of my lots are getting flooded. They are no beach lots. I had never had this issue before, and now it's happening on several lots (of the same hood).
Is this a sign of corruption?

No, it's a sign of a high water table in the neighborhood. There's a fix for it, but never having had the problem myself I can't remember what it is.

I see, I'll try to google it and see if I can find any solution. It's getting quite annoying - constant puddles to clean and weeds to garden out!
Do you know whether it is related to the map used?

And thanks <3

Nope. No corruption. Like Peni said - the water table is too high.
The fix is to raise the hood terrain with the "modifyNeighborhoodTerrain on/off" cheat. Some hoods are worse than others - and basements are extremely finicky with it!
...but I've never had excessive puddles and weeds from it?
Here's some quick instructions (from an upload of mine):

Puddles and weeds sounds more like a leak or a drowned ghost than the standard lot flooding we're talking about. Exploding plumbing inside that is close to an exterior wall can spread puddles outside - but you'd presumably notice if you had broken plumbing.

That's interesting. I never thought the sims 2 would account for high water tables on "marshy" land or land that may be below sea level. They took topography seriously when creating the sims world.

Possibly. Or possibly they were working with limits set by SC4, which had to set parameters for when water would appear when terrain was lowered, how high mountains could be, etc. Unintended consequences often look like sophisticated planning.

It's puddles (and therefore weeds) on a corner of the lot.
If started happening when I was playing one apartment (but not on the rest of apartments on the same building). Outside the apartment itself, where there is no plumbing. And I have zero drowned ghosts in this whole hood.

It bothered me so I moved the family to a house - and they are having the same issue again.
What's worse, another family is also having the same issue in their house now.

Ewww! Yeah, that is NOT the kind of flooding I thought you were talking about. That has nothing to do with the water table.
There is definitely something broken somewhere...
Did you try moving the family out and placing a fresh copy of the lot from your lot bin?
Or, if the problem is following your family - maybe it's the family? Some sort of haunting?

I'm having an issue where I can't get rid of my nanny. The game seems to always think a nanny is scheduled and shows up when one of the parents goes to work, and if I end services/fire the nanny, one of the other neighborhood nannies shows up the next day instead. It happens with the nanny in multiple households; I was however able to fire my maid though. It even happened in a house where they had a child but had never hired a nanny before because one parent works nights and their schedules didn't overlap, in that house the nanny seemed to just hire herself and show up... Has anyone ever had a similar glitch, and/or have any immediate ideas on what could be causing it? (Since it's currently at the "annoyance" rather than "game-breaking issue" level of glitch, I thought I'd ask in case someone knows lol)

Do you have a functional laundry mod or some such? Just thinking of the drying rack, could be it's "leaking" water while drying the clothes. Puddles spread, so once they get going, you've got yourself an outdoor pool unless someone mops them up.

Also, tip on removing them fast - Moveobjects and delete them. When you remove them you can see if they return, and from which corner / where they return from, if they return at all. Much easier to see what's causing them. Could potentially be from a second-floor broken item, although it's a bit of a stretch (never seen that happen).

@baticeer, Sounds like a mod conflict to me. I'm afraid it's time for the old 50/50, if nobody comes along soon who had the same issue and can tell you what it was for them.

@Amura's flooding issue probably isn't a mod conflict, since it seems to be attached to a family. It also doesn't look like corruption in the "this neighborhood or game is hopelessly borked" though, either. I have heard of sims getting the break inducer (a testingcheat originally used by the developers for playtesting breakage and repair and occasionally still useful to storytellers) stuck on them, or stuck open in the family, or some such, though I would think that would also break all electrical things and produce visibly exploding plumbing, and I don't think it very likely to happen to a player who hasn't deliberately enabled the break inducer. So that might be worth taking over to tech help and asking for troubleshooting ideas.

If it were me, I'd start by cleaning the family every way I could - with HoodChecker, with the batbox, with SimPE, anything that cleans up anything without actually wiping out gameplay. Given the complexity of the game, it needn't be anything that looks logical coming at it from the player end. It isn't obvious how a, for example, corrupt memory or invalid relationship might cause such an effect, but that doesn't mean that it isn't true, or wouldn't make perfect sense to a programmer who looked in the right place and found where the problem originated, and it never hurts to clear out the corrupt memories and invalid relationships. I'm not very hopeful about it working, but it's at least something active to do while waiting for the techies to give you better troubleshooting advice.

Yeah, I do have Sun & Moon's laundry mod, but only in one of the cases the puddles appeared near the drying rack.
In the other case it was outside an apartment building - and they had a dryer in the apartment. I moved that family out of the apartment and into a house, and the puddles also appeared in the new house after a few rotations (by the telescope, not by the drying rack either).
Those are the only two families affected so far, but I'm not sure I see any pattern.

Thank you everybody for all your advice and help <3
I'll try removing the puddles as they appear and see which corner they come from. If I get more clues I'll post again.

Do Sims *really* find out about cheating through gossip?

I can't remember ever having seen this happen--does it really happen, and is it obvious when it does? Or does this explain why sometimes one Sim is furious with another and I can't figure out why? Is it possible that someone's child can find out one of their parents cheated on the other this way and be mad at them about it?

Just wondering what people's experiences are with this particular aspect of gossip--which I've seen referenced but never confirmed. I have so much cheating going on in my hood right now and I definitely see gossip going on about it, but I can't tell if that gossip ever gets back to the spouse.

No, at least not to the point that they will actually acknowledge it/react to it as far as gameplay is concerned. That was just in that one promo video for Sims 2. Apparently it was considered as a feature at one point but scrapped because they felt there was no easy way to communicate to the player that one of their Sims has just learned about cheating through gossip.

Iirc gossip *is* saved in the memories as you can see in SimPE but again, it won't actually influence their relationship or their behaviour.

This reminds me of something that happened in my own game a very long time ago. I was playing the Test of Time challenge (corrupted, because child ghosts. We didn't know they were a vbt back then.) Mass pee puddles kept appearing around the pedestrian portals. I knew what they were, because I use the Yellowpee mod from MATY. I staked out the portals on the slowest game speed and eventually caught the Penguin flash through the portal, deposit a puddle on the nearest free square and disappear again. It was so quick, if I has a higher game speed I would have missed it. I called it the Pesky Penguin Pedestrian Portal Pee Problem.

If you are having a similar issue, the Yellowpee mod should show you, and banning the culprit with Visitor Controller should solve it.

"A sim like me".. :/ He's a family oriented sim, he's supposed to love monogamy!

What do you think is going on here? Do family sims react badly to same sex-relationships because of the lack of biological children?
Or is there some kind of hidden romance aspiration that I've missed?

Nah, Melancolie, that's just a normal bug.

There's a couple of fixes for it--apparently you should use FT Mini Fixes (From Pescado's Hack Directory choose your highest EP, post FT of course) or, if you are using Midgethetree's suite of romantic standards mods, use "commitmentissues-hopelessromantic_steadyengagementmarriagememories." Twojeffs had a mod but it didn't affect table top engagements.