More Awesome Than You!

I was playing a family in a residential lot Downtown.  I was trying to get the teen's vampire boyfriend, Remington, killed so I could resurrect him as a zombie.  I used the mind control mirror and had him run with the scissors to no avail.  So I bought the electric reindeer.  He was electrocuted 2x.  The 2nd shock started a fire, but he survived and promptly left the lot.  So I had my teen invite him back over once the fire was out.  I had boolprop on too so I could get the resurrect-o-nomitron.  Aways, right before Remington arrived there was an error message about some object or something.  I clicked Reset. 

I killed Remington with boolprop (Kill\By Flies) and brought him back as a zombie and got him settled into the family (he was still a vampire by the way).  Somewhere along the way I noticed the plumbob was missing.  The game still plays, I can select sims, I still have thought bubbles, skill meters, friendship +'s and -'s, but there's no plumbob.

I have plumbobs on other lots.  I haven't tried taking them to a community lot to see if they have plumbobs there.  Aside from moving them out and to a different lot (or back to the same lot) I have no idea what to do.  I really don't want to move them, I've customized this house extensively and would like to stay.  I searched for 'missing plumbob' here, MTS2, and the BBS but pretty much came up empty handed.  ShowHeadlines is on, turning it off and on had no effect.  I looked at JMP's Lot debugger, but none of the options seem to deal with this problem.  Relaunching the game didn't do anything.

Anyone have any suggestions?  I suppose I could try deleting them, saving, and reentering.  Or maybe I should have them Leave World?  I fool around with it some more.  Any suggestions would be helpful.

EDIT: nevermind.  I sent the zombie to school and he came back with a plumbob.  Everything seems to be ok now.  (It was either that, or it was spawning the tombstone of L and D to rename him, I noticed after I changed his name.  I suspect it was sending him off lot though.)

For reference in the future, if you're skeptical about moving sims out of a lot because you have everything they need etc and don't wish to refurnish, you could download and use Inge's moveout stayer bush thing. That's probably not the proper name, but it's on her site (simlogical) somewhere.

The next time the plumbob goes missing, look closely at the Sim - I've had two lots now where the plumbob goes missing and I've found it's changed shape - on one, to the Grim Reaper's hourglass, on the other the little stool the kids spawn to stand on - and it's seated inside their chests! I've been able to force an error, delete the Sims, and go back into the lot, which fixes it. I'm not sure why it even happens, but...

If you were playing with boolprop TestingCheats, it's very possible you accidentally shift-clicked on the plumbbob & selected Force Error --> Delete. This is how I remove plumbbobs for storytelling purposes :).

That is a known issue with the pre-Nightlife Inseminator. I had the same problem after installing Nightlife. I had a toddler trapped in an hourglass, and one of my sims had a houseplant sticking out of his neck. It was freaky deaky, but I noticed that the objects were all coincidentally the same objects spawned from the Insem.   


I know, I know...less awesome hack...yadda yadda yadda...

But doesn't it come back once you relaunch the game?  I read about that technique on several posts, but the plumbob wasn't coming back after quitting.  So I was a bit worried.  I hadn't been sending the teens to school, or I would have found out faster that I just needed to send one off lot.

Hmmm. I've only had this happen twice now, and I definitely have a NL version of InSim, unless an older one snuck in somehow... not too likely, but possible, I'll check on that. One of the houses it happened in has been really buggy anyway, ever since I used a hack that called the clothing debug options and then deleted the clothing rack. I'll probably just end up nuking that house and refurnishing it, since it's one of the Maxis prebuilt ones and those have since reappeared in the house bins after NL.

The second one is a little more confusing, but it was a house I stole from my Uni lot and moved to my neighborhood so I wouldn't be surprised if that had something to do with it, too.

OHHHH!!  So that's what causes it?  I've only had this happen once, and it was after NL.  I have the "Ready for Nightlife InSiminator" as well. 

When my plumbob morphed into Sims' chests, it became the teddy bear.  It was really funny, looked like they were impaled or impregnanted by stuffed animals or something.  LOL  I was able to use the "move objects" cheat and delete the plumbob, which caused it to reginerate correctly.

I think, iirc, it shows up that way after the pre-NL inseminator is removed. Don't quote me on that, though.

Yeah, it does. Hmm.

Plumbbobs sometimes wig out if you have TestingCheats on, shift-click on a sim and choose "MAKE SELECTABLE". The GUI "knows" how many sims there should be, and so it doesn't cycle through them all properly, and I usually sit there hitting the space bar & clicking on random sims until I've successfully cycled through all the newly-controllable sims. I think that selectable status gets saved when the lot does, but I'm always careful to turn it off before exiting.

Anyway, it sounds like it must've been a glitch, related to Remington's resurrected status :).