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?

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!

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.

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?

Does a newly placed lot sync to the season the last played lot was in, or does it always start at the same season?

It should always start at the default season as far as I know (summer, in my neighbourhood). I think the only time it's different is if you've played a lot, then saved it to the lot catalogue while it was in a different season.