about changing lot zoning, my understanding is that it is bad only when sims are currently staying there. one exception to that I take to be changing a graveyard lot (without living sims) into a cemetery; not sure if there are others.

slightly related:
I heard from several sources (I think on Wiki sites) that urns/tombstones should not stay in an apartment. Why is that?
would that apply if the grave was in the area shared by all the apartments?

@MystAngel
The SimBlender lets you change your sims' zodiac signs.

I forget, is there a mod or testingcheats object that tells you what kind of sickness a Sim has? The kids in my orphanage had just returned from school, and two of them are aging up today, so I went to check on one of them to pick an outfit, and I found her vomiting on the floor in her room. There was nobody in the vicinity that might have spun her around, and since she had just dropped her homework on the desk there's no way she played on anything whirl-y either. I haven't noticed a message, but I don't know if there's supposed to be one.

I don't recall her eating fuming food, but can't keep an eye on all Sims in the orphanage at all time, so it's possible she free willed it without me noticing. But it'd be nice to confirm, could be a great story-line

Because the grave will misbehave. I tried to have Rhett keep Vidcund's urn with him in the apartment they moved to after Strangetown, in the GS Uberhood challenge, and the urn kept vanishing in his apartment and turning up at the mailbox when I played the other units.

gummilutt, try the FFS debugger/batbox from MATY. It doesn't display the illnesses in a nice name (i.e. cold, flu, food poisoning) but between the LD and CT values you can probably find out what they have (e.g. food poisoning is LD 120 and CT -1). Info & values at MATY.

Food poisoning always makes sims throw up more then anything else. Well perhaps excepting a very bad pregnant sim.

That's very helpful, thank you Katya. I rarely use the batbox, and I can't seem to find a menu option that seems plausible. Is it one of those things that only appears with sick Sims on the lot, or am I just being stupid? :P

it's under "info...->show plague info" and will only appear if the sick Sim is your active Sim.

Thank you. In that case I guess she's either no longer sick, or she vomited for some other reason, because the option does not appear

But just in case, from gameplay experience, changing the zodiac sign of the sim (not their personality points) will not change their chemistry with other sims.
Thats something that bothers me. Why put zodiac sign and personality as the same thing? Its so boring. All couples end up being the same if you want to go for 3/2 bolts. Or when you're in the third generation, it happened to me all offsprings had 3 bolts because all of their personalities (zodiac signs) were really alike.

You can also change zodiac with the batbox. It's called something like fudge personality. I don't remember if it's the regular menu or the testing cheats menu. And you can make changed personality points genetic. So if you really want a sim with all the personality points or none you can have one and they can pass it on, within the game limits of inheritance.

So does the manipulator and I guess the insiminator.

Hrghhhhh.

Why is my game refusing to load?

It loads to a certain percent of the bar on the main logo, then the game freaks and gives me the "The game will now terminate" error. I deleted my .cache files and it still persists. Could it be the fact that I installed some new CC that it's acting up?

I would remove your new cc and see if it loads. If it does you can put one piece back at a time until you find out the issue. Or make a backup, remove all cc and do a 50/50 test with the new cc. Because your game will have very little cc you will be able to trouble shoot quickly as each load will probably only take a minute.

Actually, chemistry is based on aspiration, not personality, as Cyjon explained on his blog: A Study of Chemistry in The Sims 2
specifically, this page: Aspiration and Chemistry and this one as well: Personality and Chemistry. About zodiac signs and chemistry, there's a pretty good chart on it here:Zodiac Signs and Chemistry.

The whole section is full of neat information about chemistry-and sometimes it even is valid.

Haaaah. Better do this once I have a few hours where I don't have anything better to do, then. I'm not very organized with my CC (bare minimum organizational skills!), and I have almost 9 GBs of CC.

*incoherent groaning*

Thanks for replying, though, Jo.

It's a pain in the butt I know, I've done a 50/50 3 times. I grab coffee and chocolate.

Damn.

I thought I was getting somewhere with my 50/50'ing, but nope. I even took out the whole Downloads folder, and still, I get the same error. What on earth is this?

Well, the problem isn't your CC, obviously.

Time to get over to Help and go through the FAQ systematically. It's possible your system isn't up to it; or your antivirus did an "upgrade" that suddenly started quarantining your game files, or...

It could even be something siilly, like your screen saver kicking in at the wrong moment. I found out that if my screensaver tries to kick in at one point while loading the game, my screen goes black and I get an error about the screensaver failing to load but Sims 2 still loads, but if it tries to kick in at another point I get an error about The Sims 2 and it crashes.

Are you on the UC or disk? if you are on the UC go into origin, right click on your game and see if fix/heal is an option.

Praise the grilled cheese maker, Jo, you've fixed it! <3 I went and repaired the game through Origin and it works perfectly now. Thank you so much!

Praise the grilled cheese! Wish I had thought of that before you took your downloads out though, it's something UC uses should always do first, but being a disk user I am slow to think of it.

Nah, don't worry, it's fine! I was doing it lazily anyways, only lasted about 15 minutes (...extended by 3x that, because I was goofing off on Skype with my friends). Not a huge waste of time, honestly. I'm just happy I can play tomorrow. Thank you again!

Anyone know of a way to disable everyone of certain ages from renting apartments? In this case, it's an elderly home where obviously I don't want adult sims as neighbours. I tried the visitor controller but it doesn't seem to work on sims spawned to be neighbours.

Come to think of it, I could just use the manipulator to age everyone to elder, but if there's an easier way let me know.