I've had zero success with the ninja while on vacation, so I cheated.    Before the Insimenator was updated for BV, I found I was able to summon the ninja at home with twojeffs' Find A Mate Crystal Ball.  He showed up for every Sim I tried it with, so I just kept summoning him and trying to answer his question until I got it right.  I love their reactions to someone teleporting.

Digging for treasure is great.  If you have some useless Sims hanging around, you can make loads of money with the dig for stuff macro, as my sister discovered last night after invading the Bright household at Sim State University.  She sped her Sim through college with the collegeadjuster while the three Eaxis Sims there (with motive decay off) dug for stuff day and night.  It's kind of a nuisance to have to sell off a bazillion rocks and such, but you get a lot of the more valuable items, too.  She got at least a dozen treasure chests.  She ended up with 240,000 Simoleons by graduation. 

I should really make my antisocial mad scientist Sim again and send him off to the beach with the weather machine.  And I had "my" in that post one too many times.  My snow!  My beach!  I never remember to set climates downtown, then I wonder why my dates are ridiculously easy instead of criminally easy.

Well, that's good, I didn't want my snow on my beach.  Even though it might be kinda funny.

Can you set the climates at the destinations the same way you do the neighborhoods/subhoods?  I had heard the Prima guide said you couldn't, but that thing is wrong a lot.

The same thing happened to me, after I reinstalled everything (all eps with patches, no stuff packs).  I solved it the same way you did, thinking I had the wrong version or something, but it was weird because the one I copied from the Director's Cut was the same date and size as the one I already had.  Works fine now, though.

Is it necessary to update this if you're still using the beta and not having any problems?  With my GeForce 6600, the game would freeze completely and not even go to the blue screen, but it only started doing that when I updated my drivers last time.  Everything's been fine with the beta driver, even with all the settings turned up like yours are, so I don't want to mess with it again unless I have to. 

The prefab Sims are getting uglier and uglier.  I shudder to think of what Bon Voyage will bring.

I've probably restarted it a hundred times since the game came out.  It's an uncontrollable compulsion, I swear.  I think I just like "correcting" EAMaxis's work.   

Cyd makes beautiful babies with Dina Caliente, but I hate that stupid dog, so I make Cyd hate the dog as well with the Insimenator, then call animal control.  He's kind of boring, but has good genes. 

I've had Sims who hated each other mutually both get the good breakup memory, but they have to really hate each other, like -100 on both STR and LTR hate.  I was just doing this earlier with the Ramaswamis in my Strangetown.

10 days!  I couldn't look at him that long.  It is distasteful, that's true, so now if I want someone to die of disease for a storyline I just use the Insimenator to dispatch them quickly.  This was in my more experimental days, and I was surprised at how long it took.  He entertained himself by making crank calls, though.  He died just as someone was stomping into the house to shove him.   

I got Loki Beaker to die of disease by locking him in his bedroom with the mini-fridge, a wall speaker constantly playing salsa music and no bed or bathroom access.  Sleep deprivation seems to help it along, but it still took forever.  It must have been five or six Sim days.   /Loki-killing tips

I haven't had a truly accidental death since one of the neighbors passed out in front of the pool ladder way back in Sims 1.  Even then, it wouldn't have happened if I'd actually been paying attention instead of looking at a magazine.  I usually let my Sims lead relatively uncomplicated, tragedy-free lives, but sometimes I want to get rid of someone for story purposes, or pare down a certain age group (way too many fugly teens when you add a Downtown), or because they're a Maxian atrocity with no redeeming qualities.  I don't give them a lingering gory death, I just click on various deaths with the Insimenator and get colorful ghosts for my cemetery.  I don't even sit there cackling over it.  Not always.  

I've only had one snow day, and only after the heavy snow, so it seems reasonable. 

I just tried breeding two redheads fresh from CAS in a custom neighborhood and their twins ended up with red eyebrows and black hair.   My NPCs' hair has changed, too.  Derek Viblahblah the paperboy showed up with black hair.  This is the only patch I've had any problems with, oddly enough. 

This has happened to me when there were certain kinds of lights on the table, like the "Anytime Candles" on the patio tables at Crypt O'Night Club.  When I replaced them with the "Romantic Romance" candle/flower thing that's on the indoor tables, the food would appear as normal.  Maybe the size of the light or decoration on the table is the problem, since I haven't had any trouble with restaurant-specific ones like the napkin dispenser (which many of my sims have received as gifts after dates, gee thanks!).  This is with the one-/two-square tables, I don't know about the really big ones. 

I'm a compulsive resetter too, but generally, I focus on the Brokes and the Dreamers because the others tend to make hideous offspring.  I have ridiculous standards of Sim beauty that are nothing like my real-life attitudes, and I tend to decide everything in Pleasantview according to who should breed and who shouldn't. Even so, the Burbs are genetically good but they bore the crap out of me for some reason, so I never seem to stick with them.   Brandi Broke and Castor Nova make beautiful children, after I've dealt with Brandi's ready-made kids, who look nothing like her and make horrifying babies.  I try to keep the neighborhood story going, but breeding some of the prefab couples, like Dustin and Angela Pleasant or Dirk Dreamer and Lilith, is just a recipe for horror.  I get Beau Broke taken away by the social worker and have Dustin marry Ricky Cormier.  I like those two, but not their genes.  They make a great couple if you change their aspirations, so I give them a long, happy life of ventrilo-farting each other and adopting orphans from the pool I've created.  Cassandra and Darren get married and have two or three kids (I find they're prone to twins), and I get Dirk together with the Downtownie girl with the dark skin and Princess Leia hairdo.  Sometimes I use Don as a serial inseminator or alien host, but I prefer to just let him go on with his consequence-free manwhoring forever, with aging off.  He adores that Downtownie Slob woman in the dirty pajamas.   

This has only happened to me when I added kids to the adoption pool by killing off the original parent.  If I get the kid taken away through neglect and the original parent is around to get the memory of having the kid taken away, the original family ties are severed when the kid is adopted by someone else.  I haven't tried it lately, but this was the case for me up through Nightlife.

Amazon almost always overestimates shipping dates and such, so I usually get things several days before they said I would.  I wasn't very excited about OFB at first, but I really missed Servo and can't wait for my first death by elevator.  I don't suppose the new workbenches include a gnome workbench, like in Sims 1.  I used to have my Sims stay home and make gnomes all day to sell for $150 each, unless some jackass like Mortimer Goth decided to come by and kick one of the gnomes, causing them all to explode.  I killed him so many times.  Man, the death by starvation in a square of fence used to take forever!  I wonder if they're going to bring back the fireworks.

I'm never happy with what I've done to Pleasantview, so I keep a backup of it in pristine condition and start fresh whenever I like.  Last time, I turned Nina and Dina into zombies, bought them much worse clothing and made them over with the most garish makeup possible.  What Pleasantview really needed was a couple of zombie hookers, lurching down the street in low-cut leopard print dresses and big curly hairdos.  Usually I just kill Nina and have Dina bear Mortimer's love child, but the results are so unpredictable.  It's either beautiful or a Nose Creature.  I never know what to do with the Pleasants, either.  Maybe I'll make Lilith a Mad Scientist on a mission to weed out the local riffraff with use of the darwincowplant hack.  

I've had the "you're dumping me for someone else" message, too, but from repeatedly asking the gypsy for blind dates without ending the date the Sim was already on.  It's the easiest way to get the flaming bag of poo, for anyone who wants to see it.  I managed to get Cassandra Goth about five of them in one night.  Mortimer was a bit upset.  It was pretty entertaining, but I did exit the lot without saving, because I didn't want quite that many enemies.

If you have a sim move a grave and it doesn't show up at the cemetery when you enter in build mode, all you have to do is quit the game and restart it.  The tombstones will be there on the curb, ready to arrange.

I put four Sims through college yesterday, using the clock very liberally, and they all graduated without any problems.  I turned off their free will, used the new maxmotives cheat and got it all done in less than two hours without them even having to go to class.  They just did their term papers and umpteen assignments until the meter was full, then took finals.  An odd thing happened when I moved Bridget and Jake into a house and put up their diplomas (now in inventory instead of rewards):  both diplomas belonged to Bridget, with her History major on them and everything.  I don't know if this has anything to do with the clock or with the diplomas being buggy, which I wouldn't doubt, since I've read elsewhere about them disappearing and such with Nightlife.  I had another Sim graduate before I installed NL, and he emerged from the neighborhood bin without one.  I'll have to move the other couple in and see what happens there.