EDIT: Futher FUBAR. Damn, EA. You really fail this time.

[Jackathyn]

I'm only using Awesomemod, but my game appears to have filled its' bloomers already.
Everyone's contacts have been replaced by... this. I don't even know if anyone in my game have even met these people. Especially the red square thing there...



EDIT: It's pretty FUBAR'd now. Any household I switch to, it doesn't matter... the only characters in the side panel or accessible are that fatass Ursine chick and her kid. Further up-stuffage in this are that the panels belong to DIFFERENT sims: The relationship panel has the kids' FATHER'S relationships ( either that, or the baby is in love with his own mother ), the first panel is his own, but the inventory is his mothers'... ugh. What the hell is with this? I've done nothing peculiar to this picky little game beyond Awesomemod.

[rufio]

Do they have names and traits and things?  (Does the big red square have name and traits?...)

[jolrei]

Perhaps it's a H2G2 reference - they are all friends with a hyperintelligent shade of red.  Does it refract itself into a prism on formal occasions?

[FrickinIdjit]

No, there's no info attached to the thumbnail.  I saw the same thing in a relationship panel after splitting a family and deleting the unwanted half.  As far as I could tell, it's just a harmless artifact.  Rebooting the game removed it.

The "acquaintance" relationships might be the result of gossip.

[Jackathyn]

Do they have names and traits and things?  (Does the big red square have name and traits?...)

Nope, and if it means anything, that first guy was one I accidentally added to a different household.

[Jackathyn]

Updated, now with new unplayable fail!

[Zazazu]

When you switch households, don't have the relationship panel or be in the midst of conversation. That causes this problem. I discovered it a long time ago. You'r best off making sure the last sim you look like is in a neutral state, with the first panel up.

[Jackathyn]

When you switch households, don't have the relationship panel or be in the midst of conversation. That causes this problem. I discovered it a long time ago. You'r best off making sure the last sim you look like is in a neutral state, with the first panel up.

Great, I'll try that if it borks again. For now I shitcanned that neighbourhood because it was full of elders along with its' bits of wierdness, but if it crops up again that'll be the first fix I try.

[DentedLemons]

I have encountered a Red Square Of Doom co-worker acquaintance today. I guess I'm vaguely comforted that I'm not the only one :p though I wish there was some solution. I was able to click on the Red Square and invite him/her/it over . Someone named Shelby said they would be over soon, but no one came over. And now my sim cannot use her phone! Every time I queue a phone action (anything at all), it resets my sim and wipes out the rest of the queue after it.

I might set the lifespan thing to short and hope Red Square dies soon. 

[Aquilegia]

DentedLemons, you might have success with the Awesomemod destroy commands, as I described here. I played for quite a few hours today and other than some little oddnesses, my family and neighborhood chugged right along successfully after I deleted the townie pool. Townies aren't so important or widely known it hurts much to zorch the lot of them.

[eevilcat]

I was going to tag this post onto the end of my borked phones thread as I've had the exact same thing happen again today with my newly restarted legacy and it looks to be the same problem.

As before I dealt with all the homeless families using 'runstoryaction Move In Household', but this time at the start and the game seemed to play fine for several hours. I then checked for and rehomed 3 more homeless families that had materialised (presumably one family for each career in the legacy household). Shortly thereafter the legacy spouse got promoted to the top of the athletic career and coincidentally the whole UI/contacts interface was FUBARed with the game unable to resolve his contacts (all/work) and left clicking on a sim in the UI to select them also stopped working. Selecting a sim by right clicking them in the game still worked and the UI could resolve the show family filter on the spouse contacts so household members were ok. Trying to have the spouse phone a sim to chat/invite over resulted in an error similar to yesterday but other sims could use their phones okay. I'm running the latest awesomemod and the only other mods I have are: HP's detailed male/female skins, no mosaic and the peen meshes for adult/elder males.

This has been the second showstopper/probable BFBVFS in 2 days so I'd like to get to the bottom of it. Deleting townies might solve the resulting problem but that's like taking a sledgehammer to crack a tiny nut; I'd rather it was fixed at source. (Pescado - I can upload the whole save game if that helps.)

[Doc Doofus]

I've had this happen twice now, and both times after runstoryaction, which may be a total coincidence because the sims borked weren't the just-moved-in ones.

My take: It's best to just quit and NOT SAVE as soon as you see this happen.  It seems to get bad really after you get the red square problem.  Don't risk contaminating a save.

[crunk]

I had the same thing happen, after using the runstoryaction Move In Household cheat, in my legacy hood. Solved it by binning the legacy family and house and moving them to a new hood. Of course, this probably borked it as well, but I haven't had any problems.

[Zazazu]

I've used that cheat many, many, many times and have not had any instance of the issue in this neighborhood. I did have it in another well before I discovered the cheat. I think it's a much more wide-spread problem, or caused by something unrelated.

[TrueLou]

I have never used the run story action cheat and have still witnessed the red square in my game. In my instance I knew that the red square was a baby of a townie who merged along with his fiancee into the Crumplebottom house, as his baby had disappeared from the left thumbnails. I could play the household by using the select cheat but could not load the house from the hood, as long as I didn't click on the red square I could play the house fine, but I could not merge or split the household, I came to the conclusion that I could either leave all househeld members there and let them grow old and die there then bulldoze the house or start all over again. I believe the red square issue arose from files corrupting when the household merged. I am almost sure I did not have awesomemod installed when this family merged so I don't believe it is at fault, I think there will always be a chance of it happening whenever a households members alter in number. 

This is a game breaker and I really don't know where to begin in finding the cause, I'm hoping someone comes up with an explanation/resolution or it will always eventually make the game unplayable. 

[Doc Doofus]

I'm convinced it's runstoryaction.  There may be other ways to do it, but it certainly looks like it's problematic.

I got the problem again last night, immediately after running runstoryaction.  There was a homeless family of one that consisted of the sister of a non-homeless townie.  Immediately after runstoryaction, I could locate her new home, but I couldn't inspect her new household by using Select in-game.  Selecting her brother, in his household, though, brought up the red-square problem right away.  Next, I used edittown to evict her to the clipboard and let her just go away to never-neverland by resuming game without relocating her.   That deleted her from the game quite well, but her brother was still borked.

So, my recommendation, don't use runstoryaction, or just be extra-super-cautious when doing so.

[chaos]

Doc, that makes sense. I had recently used the runstoryaction command when I got the red square in my game. I destroyed the 'hood, and started over, this time using destroyalltownies instead of placing the homeless in houses, and have had no problems with red squares.

[Marhis]

I bet on runstoryaction too; same thing for me. Somehow it screws a random (?) sim or household.
I deleted townies households one by one and the 5th was the borked one: red square gone at once.

[tedw]

I'm having a variant of this, without having used "runstoryaction".  Red squares appear in some sim's relationship panels, and all eight of the sims in the house show one of the sim's picture in the UI.  I can't properly see what their queued actions are, and they all show as selected (with a white square around them), but they can still perform actions I set for them.  A reboot appeared to solve the problem, but it returned within five minutes of play when I started up again.

[DentedLemons]

So if runstoryaction is the culprit (I had used it before my red square friend showed up too)... will townies eventually find a house if I don't use that any more? Or will they stay homeless forever?