Thanks for the suggestions, I'll give them a try and see how I go. Much appreciated.

Does anyone know if there's any way, at all, to delete the foundation of a house and have the rest of the house automatically shift down to ground level? I want to use the basement tool from World Adventures, but stairs from the basement will only go as high as the ground, not the foundation. The house is very large, has three stories above ground level and is built entirely on a foundation, so I'd really like to not have to build it from scratch (took me about four days to build it the first time).

I've tried building two sets of stairs to link the basement to the ground and the ground to the foundation, but the sims don't seem to want to use them. They just run to the other side of the lot for no apparent reason.

Anyone have any ideas?

OfB can also give you new interactions, like "Motivational Speech" and "Rally Forth", that raise the Needs of others, although I find they only work on people you're friendly with.

You can also start a home business, which is much cheaper than buying another lot. If you made a home-salon, for instance, your only outlay would be the salon chair and an Open/Close sign. A home business also takes up sim-time.

Ummm.....getting pets does seem to give you a hell of a lot of pet-related Wants....my Sims seem to be bombarded with "Bonkers gets a job in Security", "Give Sigurd a hug" and so on, but that could just be because I have four pets.

Pets tend to be a lot less needy than toddlers, especially cats. Cats you can pretty much leave to do their own thing, aside from feeding.

If you want to do it without messing around with the cheats, you can give a pet with "Playfulness" trained to full the Command to "Play with....", and get her to play with the other pets.

Meh. When the "buy guitar", "buy drum kit", etc wants come up, I just buy it for them, stick it in a corner of the lot under some trees, then sell it a day later when they've forgotten about it. Then when they get the want again a while later, I can buy it again and get more aspiration points.

My cat never seemed that overjoyed with catnip.....perhaps because she was getting on a bit when we tried it with her.

Yeah, I remember reading that somewhere. The dog is halfway between "Fussy" and "Pigpen", though, and I haven't trained him to be clean (or dirty). The dish is also the most expensive one, anyway.

Well....if it's a dog you can by clicking on the food bowl and calling them to eat, but yeah. You shouldn't have to. My (RL) dogs almost explode with joy anytime someone goes anywhere near their food bowls, so you wouldn't ever have to *tell* them to eat.

I had my idiot (sim) dog almost taken away yesterday (the "your dog is starving" message came up) because I'd locked him outside, and he wanted to eat from the two food dishes in the house. Completely ignoring the fact that there were two perfectly good, full dishes outside. Snobby git.

I read in another thread that pets can't go in certain vehicles, so if a pet and a sim leave at the same time they'll use the pet's car to go to work in. But what happens if a sim gets home at the same time a pet is leaving? My Business sim gets home in a chopper at the same time my Security dog leaves for work, but he can't use her helicopter. He seems to jump into it, but then he disappears and reappears over (not in, over) the pool in the middle of the lot.

There are workarounds, I suppose. I could transfer ownership of the house car to the Business sim and have her use that. Assuming the pet can get into that car, it should work. Seems odd, though. Anyone else have this problem?

No probs.

I wish I could tell my cat in real life to pounce at people.....oh, the fun we could have.

I don't know if it's relevant, but I had all of my sims unable to access their inventory, career rewards and aspiration rewards for a while. Have no idea why, but it fixed itself a while later.

Yeah, I have a genius hyper cat that's always running around crazily, playing with the mouse and bird on a stick thingy and so on. I just encouraged her to be playful whenever she did it initially.

Once they reach maximum playfulness, they gain a crapload of new commands too, like "Play with other pet", "Run around crazily", "Pounce at sim" and so on. Makes getting your pets to be friends easier, because you can just get one to play with the others to get the relationship score up.

And even that's only because cats like burying their crap.

Or teach them to eat people food. Just get a munchiebot, and the pets can eat the pizza it brings. Can pets eat chinese food? Hmm.

The dogs have jobs, too, so they need to be able to get out to catch their lift.

My dogs are trained to pee outside, stay off beds and so forth, but they come inside to bark at and attack the cats. I made them aggressive so they could be "guard dogs". I was sort of hoping they'd only be aggressive to non-family members, but apparently not.

I didn't, no. Is that actually possible? Getting a normal promotion and a chance card promotion during the same day?

Anyone know a way make pets stay outside without just locking all the doors?

I have a couple of dogs I want to be "outside" dogs, and a couple of cats I want to be "inside" cats. Problem is, I can't just hit "disallow pets" on all the doors because then the cats can't get to their jobs. Anyone know of any objects/hacks/hints to help me out?

Thanks, guys.

I have to say, your sim family icons frighten me, LynnMar.

I wonder if things disappearing in floorboards is a new bug, as I had a sim set down some mail on the floor and it just disappeared.

Just had something odd happen. My Security-employed german shepherd managed to skip a level in his job. He was a Guard (I think that's the name of it anyway - it's the second level), and according to the description the next should have been "Contraband Sniffer". Instead he was fast tracked up to Guard Pet instead. Anyone else had this happen?

Sorry for going off-topic a little, but what happens if all the secret society members die? Are more generated, or can you now never join the society?

Just curious, as most of my members were eaten by the cow plant on the society lot. Had my society member sim visit the ss house and mess around for a bit, and when I looked outside I noticed a number of graves on the lawn. Took me a minute to figure out what had happened, as I'd never had any experience with the plant before and didn't know sims automatically tried to get the cake. But yeah, the ss members got eaten. You'd think they'd know better, given it's their damn plant. If you want cake, just cook one, idiots.

Perhaps it depends on their Aspiration, as well? I have a Romance sim that I can make fall in love with anyone, even if she has an 'x' for them, attraction-wise.

Anyone know if there are any hacks around that stop sims getting job promotions? Did a quick search, but couldn't find anything. Thanks, guys.

As I understand it, the reason places like the RSPCA (Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals) charge for pets is so that the creature has value to the person that adopts it. Abandoned pets are a big problem in Australia (and I suspect much of the world), and people tend to value something they have to pay for more than something they got for free, and so be less likely to throw it away. Hence, the cost.

Expansion isn't out here till Friday so I can't test this myself, but can you bring dead pets back to life with the Ressurect-O-Nomitron, and so get zombie pets? How about vampires? Can they bite pets? Can you end up with the all-powerful vampire zombie tabby?