How exactly can you switch households, bork or no?

[Roflganger]

Look...I'm serious here...each save - each instance you make...each time you enter Create-A-Sim and make a new family and install them in a neighborhood the WHOLE F'ING neighborhood resets.  All the pre-made sims don't know any of the sims you previously made and installed in that neighborhood and the new family you just put there cannot possibly meet the previously installed families you put there because they are in their own Sim-universe which was started the moment you put them there. Sliders and Groundhog Day. Seriously.

I wish people would stop saying this.  It is absolutely possible to play a family, then decide to create a new family, and have them exist in the same neighborhood as your first family.  Just go into Edit Town and go into CAS from there.  Get out of CAS, place them in a house, and they are in your current, active neighborhood.  You can then decide to switch to them as your active household, or go back to the first family.  Either way, both are now in the same universe.

Multiple saves files are meant only for creating multiple copies of the neighborhood. Don't want parallel universes?  Don't create more than one save.   

[sewinglady]

Okey, dokey...but then you must save that particular way...and it's a way of saving that I wasn't aware existed... sooooooo....now I know. Learn something new every day. In other words - the way I have been entering CAS and saving the game, what I have been getting is what I have been describing. I am now going to try what you are describing and see if there's a way to go between households, BECAUSE...

I have also learned what happens when you split up an 8 member household within what I am calling a 'single save'...the 4 sims you leave behind become unplayable insofar as I see no way to return to make them that the active family again...so there's no going back? Or is there - again something I just don't know about. The sims still exist within the neighborhood. The house is still there. The funds were sucked from it, the relationships still exist with the four sims that I moved to a new lot...but I've go no way except for 'visiting' to return to that lot.

[Roflganger]

It works the same way - Enter "Edit Hood" and on the left there is a button with an icon of 2 houses.  Click that button (hovering over it tells you it is "Switch Active Household") and then select the new house you want to play from the hood.  

Unless you install AwesomeMod (I'll let you find that on your own, since if you can't find it, you should probably avoid trying to install it anyway), you should be aware that doing so results in the family that you are leaving losing all of their inventory and current locked wishes, and they will be free to do whatever the hell the game decides to have them do - you are leaving them to the mercies of Story ReProgression, regardless of whether you have it enabled in the options or not.

[sewinglady]

I haven't installed the mod yet... I haven't played the game for a whole sim week...I've been that unimpressed. I figure that very soon I will either get A) so frustrated with it all that I quit and never play it again or at least not for several months or B) will at least be forced to figure out how to install the mods...migraines and all.

A good bit of the unimpressed and the inability to figure things out (like how to actually force a sim to jog - not on their own but tell them to do it and not on the treadmill) and this whole why do I have to play scavenger hunt to garden thing...well I feel like a five year old and a good bit of it has to do with the migraine thing - and yes, I've seen a doctor - and yes, he's put me on meds - the first one made me a drooling idiot (like I wasn't one without that already) second one might be helping, slowly.

I do appreciate your help...and I would never have been able to stomach the sims2 without awesome-ware and a few TwoJeffs hacks...so I figure sims3 is going to be same way.

[sewinglady]

Reporting back... playing with the awesomemod installed and my original 8 sim household split into two households and switching back and forth... and so far there's been no big fiery ball in space over my neighborhood or computer.

Any locked wants are lost when the active household becomes inactive, and of course, they continue to age... but so far, so good...

Now I'm going to further the experiment (and possibly more headaches) by trying to add another family across the street from the first house I put in Riverview...

In any case, it's a success...my sims shall live to see another day, now to get back to real life important things like work (ebay).