Orphaned toddlers have no wants in Pets

[Madame Mim]

I've been working on creating a Neighbourhood which I call Pleasant Village. It is all the Pleasant View ancestors. My idea was to have them as toddlers or babies and for them all to grow up in an orphanage, but they don't have any wants.

I am using Numenors basegame to create them, and then removing their parents in SimPE. When I move the now orphaned toddlers via the lots bin (or export and import them via file) to a new basegame neighbourhood they are fine. When I import them into my full game they have little to no wants and rarely (if ever) roll the standard toddler wants to learn to walk, talk and be potty trained. The one baby I moved in the same way also had no wants when he grew to toddlerhood. When they grow up into children they get normal wants, but not as toddlers. The only toddler I have had any success with is one that I had adopted by one of my orphanage workers.

It is a clean new Neighbourhood (in fact I deleted my Neighbourhoods folder, ran the game, and added a new Neighbourhood just to see if it could have those dangling thingies I've been reading about). I've deleted and replaced my objects.package, and I'd just like to know if anybody has any other suggestions, or even an explanation as to why this is happening?

[Theo]

It can be a problem of dangling SWAF's, but you can try re-rolling a sim's wants/fears with the lot debugger.

[Nauthiz]

I've recently tried to run an orphanage too, but I made townie toddlers via NPC&Townie Maker (the tree) and moved them in with Simlogical Teleporter Shrub. None of them had any wants or fears and re-rolling didn't change this. But when a boy was adopted by sim from another household (put to adoption and then brought by Social Worker), he was fine.

[Madame Mim]

Theo: How can these SWAFs dangle in a brand new Neighbourhood? I've tried to roll wants every way I can. When they get some (the same three all the time if anything - be tickled - be read to - be snuggled) they don't get any more. That's the problem. No wants.

And it's not just one or two of them. There are 39 wantless toddlers. All of them with the same symptoms. In fact the only time one of them had any viable wants was when he was in a neighbourhood where these SWAFs might have been dangling.

Nauthiz: Yes. Adoption seems to be the only way. It's almost as if toddlers without parents are broken in some way in Pets, but I don't want to have to adopt out nearly 40 toddlers. I'm trying to avoid having unwanted adults. So far the only way I can see around it is to have each and every one adopted by a sexless Sim (to avoid more babies that I don't want) and that's a lot of useless Sims.

[ThyGuy]

Try to burnate them. I've seen that fix some seemingly unfixable things, but I don't know if it fixes that kind of stuff though.

[Madame Mim]

Seems a little cruel  but I'll give it a go.

[J. M. Pescado]

Toddlers have want trees pertaining to their parents. If they don't have any, then they just become confuzzled and the entire tree shorts out.

[Madame Mim]

Well, at least that's an explanation - which is more than I have been able to find anywhere else.

Is it something that it is worth me asking for a fix for or should I just give orphaned toddlers up as a bad idea?

[gali]

Well, I don't use any orphan-hack, but had observed my toddlers. When their parent are at work, sometimes one or two of their want-queues are blanked.

But when they fulfill some play-want, A "global" want appears: "play with", "be cuddled", "be hugged" - without any mention of a name. When I send the nanny to play or to cuddle them, and the "global" mode is fulfilled, again blank wants appear.

May be you should send the nanny to cuddle and play with them, to awake the "global" orphans' wants; may be, because they are orphans, they don't know that it's possible.

[seelindarun]

I've never had blank want slots, but then I don't push the envelope with 40 toddlers in an orphanage... 

I do notice that the toddlers in my game who get the anonymous tickle, cuddle, talk wants tend to have strong relationships with the live-in nanny or grandparents.  It is not uncommon in my multi-generational houses for the children to become best friends with their grandparents as babies, but not with the parents until almost childhood.  Still, toddlers are completely obsessed with their parents so it may be a lost cause.   

[Andygal]

My toddlers have broken wants even if they *have* parents. Sometimes my older sims have broken wants too.

[miros]

But those can be fixed with a respin from the Lot Debugger.

[Madame Mim]

Just a quick update on what I have discovered.

In the base game it seems to make no difference if the toddlers I import have parents or not (dead or otherwise), but in Pets toddlers installed with no parents (deleted in SimPe or deleted tombstones before exporting) have no wants.

Saving the toddlers on a lot with the tombstone of their parent (in the basegame) and then importing them into a Pets game works except if you then use a teleporting object (or ingame cheat) to add them to the family - if I do that they loose their wants again.

Enterring the lot of the toddler in Pets and putting their parents tombstone in their pocket then moving them out of the lot and into an inhabited lot does work.

I'm not sure whether this is due to game coding differences or the different mods I have running in the two different versions of the game. Which ever it is I should be able to later delete the unwanted parents by unlinking them from their children in SimPe, deleting their tombstones and using Pescado's tutorial on deleting unwanted Sims.

I don't know how much use/relevence this small piece of information is to you all, but I just thought I'd give you an update on this particular problem incase any of you run into something similar.