I'd rather not find out!

HCDU didn't come up with anything particularly alarming re the housekeeper's interactions.

But I am noticing something odd. The fact that the housekeeper always freezes on this lot on the second day (once I got rid of several routing issues that initially froze her) intrigues me. Why the second day? And it's usually right before checkout. Even when I locked her out, she froze.

I'm going to check her out on my Boxy Beach Bungalow lot again. Initial tests have been successful, and the hotel area on this lot is flat as a board. I will put this in a beach vacation hood (and still in a test hood), and see what happens.

The game has a few different ways of telling you your custom hotel lot isn't laid out correctly. I've seen a few already after doing six hotels (and yes, I'm including the infamous Box Hotel!).

1. "The shuttle has been dispatched" as soon as you arrive.
2. You get one day of vacation before you get the notice that the shuttle is arriving.
3. The housekeeper freezes right away.

Could a fourth be that she freezes right before checkout?

If that is not the case, and she's freezing on the Boxy Beach Bungalow lots after two days, though I shudder at the thought, I probably should check my CC. It could also be that. So sorry, Margot. You'll have to leave your pretty house and venture forward again.

I ran Hoodchecker today and fixed the few memories errors I had.

How do I fix those? I added the sim as subject, hit commit and saved the file. It seems the changes didn't stick.

A clue! A clue!

I tried the game with only the two fixes. The housekeeper froze like mad anyway on the cabin lot in Three Lakes (no surprise there ... it didn't have the usual anti-freezing safeguards I've kind of accepted, such as ample doors in the lobby). But the NPC worked fine in the Blau Lodge.

So far, so good. Unfortunately, 50/50 with vacation lots isn't the most effective, since the game likes to save when you leave one.

But I did notice one thing. The housekeeper loves watering flowers. A lot. It's what the housekeeper does a good chunk of the time.

Remember my Boxy Beach Bungalow hotel? The underwhelming lot I just did? Well, I thought it wasn't without appeal and added some trees and Sunni flowers. When I re-entered the lot, though, I got the freezing again. My other lots are fairly sparsely-decorated, and mostly with trees and other plants the housekeeper doesn't touch, including the flowers on Parsimonious that you can place everywhere because I believe the game treats them as decor.

When I moved my Sim on the lot again, I got the freezing housekeeper. This lot worked really well before. The only difference was the plants.

Plants are not the only thing that will freeze a housekeeper. I know that from at least three dozen attempts. But if the housekeeper is trying to do his or her usual thing with the plants and is blocked from doing so, even it's because of a mod, plant or other obstacle. Is THAT causing the freezing? Stalking the little pest, I notice he or she follows a certain pattern. There is an order of things in the housekeeper universe.

I went back to the scene of one of my last successes ... my yurt camp. I noticed that the things the housekeeper likes are there.

1. Wiiiide open spaces.
2. Double doors on both sides of the lobby. (Strange that the Maxis area where the housekeeper froze was one of those that DIDN'T have that.)
3. Lots of space around the lobby in general
4. No-care plants, including a couple of Sunni plants (so that's not it ... )
5. Boxy, boxy rooms

The housekeeper loved it. Did very well. So it's not a bad mod, since he or she would have frozen on that lot as well. There is something in the layout.

I plan to build a wider saltbox and not overdo the plant decorations, even if the Garden Club DID like my scheme. For now, keep any plant that needs tending off it. Stick with pine trees, plastic shrubs, no-care flowers, and put the Perfect Plants mod back in. Make a double staircase with at least two tiles of space around the sides using Maxis stairs (recolors are OK, and so much for historical authenticity with the wide hallway). Currently, I have one of Inge's, and the way I have the house laid out, really can't put a double staircase in there. Take the fence down around the property. Keep the NPC cook off it. He or she can go to a community lot next door, away from the housekeeper, if I want him or her that badly.

It's not going to be nearly as pretty as the original. My boxy beach bungalows certainly weren't! But it may work this time.

I want to add some facial hair to the game but the files have .package and also .bak. What is .bak and do I need them?

They're backups of the files. You can delete them.

Keeping an eye on your progress, Gazania

Gazania, that's why I mentioned people swapping out to plastic hedge on my resort- or I think I did. I know from my own testing that the housekeeper does indeed have a thing for plants and my resort is chokers with them. Gardening mods will also help or take care of it. If you swap to perfect plants she would have no need to trim or water so there is that solution.

the skin of any character can be changed, but I take only in SimPE; not aware of any other ways to change skin of characters.
for characters not part of a neighborhood, it would be through their respective Property Set resource; skintone line.
for characters part of a neighborhood, it can be either that way or through SimPE's Sim Surgery; unless they have no character data.

What if it's an occupied lot? I want to package an occupied lot, but I don't want to move out my sim in the current hood. I just want a copy of the lot.

If I package the lot (with the sim), move it to a new hood, and move out the sim, will it affect the lot?
(Yes it's a dumb question, but this is definitely what the forum is for. lol)

Yes, I read that on your resort notes. That might have lit the light bulb in my brain, and thank you for that!. I thought I'd be safe with the Perfect Plants mod, but I do have the one that excludes orchards, and combined with the narrow house layout, that might not be helping. So it's no-care and plastic shrubs for me right now. And a wider house. Much.

You'd still corrupt it. Actually, both lots. (EDIT ... and hoods too, of course!)

@AliaD85 Adding to the above ^ Both lots and both hoods. Never use the ingame tools to move an occupied house between hoods and never install one either. http://sims.wikia.com/wiki/Game_gui...ding_corruption

Lots are best saved to file and the lot bin after making them. With no sims, not even sims in to test. What you can do is move your sims out, package the lot and use SimPE to remove all sim references before using the lot elsewhere.

And both neighborhoods. Never, ever, ever put an occupied house in the lot bin.

When you package the lot, the original will not be corrupted, and its hood is safe. But if you unpack it into another hood while it's still occupied, you WILL still corrupt the new hood.

If you only want the building, it is safe to package the occupied lot to a file. But before you install this file back into the game, you must clean it up. Open the package in the Sims2Pack Clean Installer, and choose the "Lot Only" selection. Safe the result as a new file and install that new file in the game. Now you'll have a furnished lot without sims in the bin that you can place into your new hood.

All this time I thought that packing an occupied lot would make my game shit itself so back in the days where I moved in a sim before I built their house, I just let it be for them or manually remade it so thanks for this tip.

If done properly, you can package up occupied lots and move your sims from one hood to another. I've been doing it for years without blowing up any of my hoods.

-------------
Instructions for safely saving sims on Lots, for use in other hoods:

1, Package them on their lot.
2, install them into the throw away hood using Clean Installer (making sure you only install the family and the lot - no one that isn't living on the lot)
3, use SimPE or Pescado's Lot debugger (ffsdebugger) to clean up their memories (or use both (No Sim Loaded also helps with this)).
4, re-package them on their lot.
5, install in your new hood.
----------------

@SleepycatDSL I'd also remove the sim references before packing the lot.

@Jawusa is right: At least the references to sims that do/did not live in the house, should be removed from within the Sims2pack Clean Installer before repackaging.

I have a question before using an option on the batbox. I asked a long time ago about this but didn't get a clear enough idea what to do. All households have the option to fix 'stucked diners'. I know, in my case, this is not a reference to diners at home or community lots. This hood has no food lots just yet. All households are fine. The only time I've seen this option is when there are ghosts, and not ghosts on those lots. The hood is Sedona and there are 4 ghosts on a community lot that didn't die of hunger. I'd like to know exactly what it means and if it's safe to fix with that option, what does it fix?

My sims can't use the phone in one of my uni houses. One sim did, and I was about to click "invite sim over" but then the pop-up disappeared and she was just stuck there. So I force error'd her and then the phone. but now whenever someone goes to use the phone, they pick it up and put it down straight away.

I'm thinking the game thinks that a sim is already on the phone, so would using the batbox to get rid of off-world loiterers solve the problem?

Option to clean off-world loiterers is appearing only if they are present. So you can use it if you see option. Be careful it will end talking on phone too.

I've had the issue before - managed to fix it by having one of my sims use a cell phone. It might've just been a fluke but perhaps it's worth a try.

Looking for advice and opinion of these two mods from experienced players. Trying to figure out which one is better to use ? advantages? disadvantages? Conflict reasons.
Stay Thing shrubs
http://www.drealm.info/simlogical/s...2_MiscHacks.htm

FInd own place mod
http://www.insimenator.org/showthread.php?t=48193

I've never heard of the second mod, I've always used the shrub. Of course their are also opinions to the fact that it's cleaner for your game to wipe all things from a lot. I only ever leave things like kitchen and bathroom fittings, I have the sims pack up their belongings as you do. Beds you should always buy new, they tend to be buggy. I would not move a lot that has used the stay things shrub into another hood since it carries sim references.

Sorry, but both links go to the same mod: the move out mod. And actually, from what I read, I think I might try that one