More Awesome Than You!

Ugh. Well, I'm just having all sorts of problems lately.

I'm not sure this happened as a result of University or not, because yesterday I snatched up a ton of SPs/EPs from Origin (SPs are on sale for $6, for anyone who hasn't ARR'd them). Therefore, I now have every EP/SP except for Master Suite, Katy Perry, and Diesel.

When I first noticed this problem, I had all of my mods installed, so I removed the Mods folder to test (and cleared caches). I started a vanilla game in Sunset Valley and used testingcheats to give my Sim the Collection Helper. The problem I am having is this:

No gems, seeds, lizards or turtles are spawning.
Fish, insects, birds, snakes, and rodents are spawning, although, besides the fish, there are very few spawned.

I was not focused on collecting when I first installed University, but I seem to remember sending someone off with AM to collect rocks/gems/metals out in the world without issue. Before I removed my mods today to test, I discovered the lack of gems using SC, and got the popup, "No collectables of this type on map!"

As I said, I just recently downloaded new EPs (SN, Gen, SHT) with which I'm not entirely familiar. I have read something that seemed to indicate that the same spawners for rocks/gems are also used to spawn small animals, so that I may have to wait a few Sim weeks (seriously?!) for gems to spawn. This doesn't sound right to me, as I collected a plethora of gems with the Pets EP installed, all the way through Seasons, with no issues.

I downloaded Gen, SN, SHT, and a a number stuff packs simultaneously, so they all installed back to back. I suspect that if there is a problem, this caused it.

Is this normal game behavior with these new packs installed, or is there something wrong with my game?

Are you sure it didn't say a few Sim days? Gems, rocks , seeds and metals will spawn after about 3 days. I've had games where they appeared after merely a day or two. Others where I've had to wait up to 5 days.

I don't know what factors that.