More Awesome Than You!

So there's this Independent Teens feature in Nightlife. I've encountered it twice now - once with the Broke family and now with the Williams family (obviously, one of my own created families).

Is it just me, or does anyone else feel that this is completely pointless?

There is no warning that this is going to happen and there's nothing about in the Nightlife pamphlet ... er, sorry, I mean 'manual'. One day my teenage Sim is happily going to school while the family try to build up enough cooking skill and pretty objects to impress the private school headmaster, and the next day, the teen can't board the school bus or drive to school any more. Now my teen has to stay at home getting bored because she's the only person at home and her social motive is dropping. By the time everyone else gets home, she so tired that she just wants to go to bed, so she still doesn't get the chance to talk to anyone. She can't spend time with her friends because guess what they're doing? Yep! They're all at school. She can't get a full-time job, so she just does housework. OK, so she could clear off to college, but that means that her teenage life drop to eight days!

I have tried using various things to remedy this situation, but the only one that seems to work is the InSIMinator's aging tool. But that sets the teen back to the start of that life stage, and she's suddenly younger that her brothers and sisters.

Does have any one have any information on what this stage of the teenage period is supposed to be about?

And JM ... when you eventually get hold of a copy of Nightlife and set to tinkering about with the mechanics, could you PLEASE make a little something that cancels this out and lets my teen Sims stay at school? Pretty please?

I think "Independent teen" is a feature of the Insiminator, itself, and not the actual game.

edited a billion times for spelling errors.

Do you have the Inteenimator installed?  This is a feature of it, once the teen reaches 18 they don't have to go to school anymore, although they are supposed to be able to work in the adult careers if they want to.

There is a 'patch' you can use to have them behave like normal teens if you prefer - I use it and mine are as they always were.  I don't want them doing adult jobs at 18, they reach the top of their careers soon enough as it is when they've been to Uni.  I prefer them to go to school and not hang around the house all day.  Wouldn't want my own teen doing it!

Yeah this is not something that was included with the game.

If you've already got a teen in this situation and you didn't want them to be, you can use the schoolwork table from my site to keep their grades up.

I might try that some time and have home-schooling!

Any chance of a link to that patch, pretty please? (And thank'ee kindly in advance). I adore everything about inTeen but the sudden staying home from school...

It's one of the Inteenimator flavour packs.

http://www.insimenator.net/viewtopic.php?t=1766 (http://www.insimenator.net/viewtopic.php?t=1766)

It's in the second zip file: flavor packs. There are 5 of them. Read the documentation for them. There is one that keeps your teens as "teens".

Thanks for all the replies folks.

Time for me to install the new version of Clean Pac Installer me thinks.

After reading the posts, I checked my downloads folder and found that I have Inteenimator on my PC. I have InSIMinator, but had passed on Inteenimator. So I guess it came with something else I downloaded. Serves me right for not being more careful. I was wondering why my teen Sims had so many more 'options' available to them. Now I know what it is and how to resolve the problem, I'll keep it in for a while and 'experiment'.

Thanks again peeps!