More Awesome Than You!

Ok, weird problem.  I was playing Strangetown (my test hood) Saturday night, seeing how the zombie apocalypse would affect it.  After about an hour of playing, I noticed that I hadn't seen a single stray, wolf or anything on any of the lots during that session.  Exited, deleted groups.cache, and reloaded, and still no strays at all. Strays were showing up fine when I played Pleasantview last Wednesday, so I went into a lot there --- no strays at all in 24 hours. 

First thing I did was look at everything I added to the game since that day.  The only pet-related thing was Inge's new 'no-stray' sign, which should only affect the lot it's on (Inge confirmed this), but I took it out anyway.  Still now strays.  Checked the sim descriptions with SimPE, and they're all there, so they weren't accidentally deleted somehow.  So I used the testing cheats on a mailbox to summon the LotP and a wolf, and they showed up a little while later. Same ones with the same name I saw the last time I played Strangetown, so I knew the game didn't generate new ones. I did the same to summon the skunk, and some standard strays.   So now, they show up on lots on their own, but only the ones I summoned -- none of the other 'usual strays' come out of the stray pool to wander around.  It's like the game has forgotten it has wolves and strays to call until I force it to, and then it adds them to the regular pool.  And no, I don't have nostrayrespawn in my game.

Other than Inge's hack, the only other hacks I've added/changed are updates since 12/13 from here: zombieapoc, vampwerefixes, notelepathy, yellowpee, and TJ's latest smartbeds and no BT swarming.  Other than that, two new hairs from XMSims that were created under pets, and a new doghouse from holy simoly.

So does any one see anything obvious?  It doesn't look like any of those things should affect strays, and I don't get any error messages when entering lots.  I just don' t see strays and wolves that often, if at all.  Help?


I'm going to pull them out (or disable them) to see if one of them is causing the problem, but

Sorry, Joe, no help, but sympathey I can offer in abundance :D

Well, it's weird, and maybe was just a temporary glitch.  I pulled all the new stuff out, and the strays came back.  So I started adding the hacks back one by one, and the strays still showed up.  So now they're all back in the game, and I have no problems with missing strays.  Maybe just one of those things, though it's strange that the problem lasted across playing sessions.

If you think about it, it's easy to understand. There's only about 3 or 4 times when strays can show up in an average day, and it's purely random whether they will. You just got lucky, I think.

Was it a clean hood? If you had deleted characters or not put in pets, then the no respawn hack would stop strays from appearing at all.

Nope -- I first noticed the lack of strays in Strangetown, and then went back to Pleasantview and checked there. Both are standard maxis hoods full of the usual suspects, though they've been played for a while (Pview is my main hood, ST is my test hood).


Yea, but one virtual guarantee of getting a wolf at least is to have a baby or a toddler in the house.  Heck, I had two wolves show up at one house where there were twin toddlers.  But there was no sign of a wolf at this house the whole time the kid was a baby, and not for her first day as a toddler. That's what made me notice the lack of strays, as I got used to seeing the wolves hang around a house with a B/T.