90% of Sunset Valley lots gone after returning from vacation.

[Tever]

Anything that reloads the lot will do it, not just going on vacation. I first started with playing with an Awesomized neighborhood, and I don't think I added any of my CC. I was playing with the Supercomputer and screwed something up, so I went back to the main menu and restarted, and blue lots. I started a completely new game, and I'm taking care to use save as into a new file every time I save. Been playing for a few RL days now and no trouble, but I haven't tried placing any CC yet, either. What I have is mostly cloned clutter; I really need to sift through it.

[Inge]

To save me hours of work, can someone confirm whether the content that produces blue lots is all made *after* the 1.7.9 patch, or whether there is stuff made ages ago that also does it?

[Barbara Walters]

I cleared all the caches and removed the mods and the framework. The blue lots still remain.

[Slymenstra]

Inge - items made and used before WA were giving blue/cut out lots.  For instance some of the plants were dated August.  I do not know if any newly created items cause blue lots.  Some items might have been in the working stage and just released after WA.

barbara_walters - As far as I know, once your neighborhood has blue/cut out lots it can never be recovered.  Always BACK UP and use a throw away town to test CC.

[Inge]

Thanks Slymenstra

[Barbara Walters]

So then, has it been confirmed that the blue lots only appear after going to one of the vacation towns? If that's the case I think I can manage staying home until someone compiles a thorough list of the bad cc to be removed.

[Lion]

So then, has it been confirmed that the blue lots only appear after going to one of the vacation towns? If that's the case I think I can manage staying home until someone compiles a thorough list of the bad cc to be removed.

It's simpler than that.   Start a new hood. Get one item of the bad cc, and place it in one lot - any lot.   Take any sim, from any lot, on vacation and back again.  Most of your lots will be cut out.
 

How come I don't need to go to vacation to have blue lots? Just place the cc, save, exit to main menu, and re-load the hood, and you get blue lots.

[Slymenstra]

So then, has it been confirmed that the blue lots only appear after going to one of the vacation towns? If that's the case I think I can manage staying home until someone compiles a thorough list of the bad cc to be removed.

Having the CC on a lot somewhere in the neighborhood causes the corrupt lots.  Even in a house you built 3 months ago and just took it out of your library and plopped it in your neighborhood.  The act of saving causes the glitch to appear.  So going or not going on vacation does not matter.  If you have bad CC on a lot and save, it kills your town forever.

Added:
Here is the link to a list of known bad CC. http://www.customsims3.com/forum1/YaBB.pl?num=1258836562 Since things get buried and no one reads the whole thread.

[shadow]

I don't have WA and got blue lots. It happened in an old neighborhood (third/fourth generation) with old CC, as soon as I installed the 1.7 patch.

[Grimma]

Just to confirm, I also suffer from the blue lot insanity.

1.) I don't have WA yet, it started happening right after I patched to 1.7.
2.) It happened both with an old save and a new game
3.) I only have CC dating from before the patch and WA release.
4.) Interesting titbit but possibly a red herring, since I could be very wrong: I seem to remember that at first it was only the Museum of Art that was affected. I zoomed in, went huh?, and after I saved my game most of the lots in my hood were affected. Now I could be remembering it wrong (although I don't think so), but could this maybe have something to do with the "riddler fix" that the patch was supposed to do? When I get back home I'll test that and report back.

EDITED TO ADD:
I also have a problem where every single thing that used to be in my sims' inventories, bookcases and fridges just AWOL-ed the first time I started up after patching (so yes, old game). Dunno if it's connected to this or just to my own stupidity, but investigations are continuing.

[Inge]

One theory I have about the missing lots is that there is no direct connection between which lots are missing and which ones have a problem.  It may be that the lots load one by one, and as soon as the problem is encountered, lot loading is hallted.   Assuming the order lots are loaded in is not just random, then ones nearer the end of the loading sequence will be far more likely to be missing in any error situation.

I know people have tried getting rid of their cc and it has not made those lots come back, but has anyone tried making a note of the lot containing the bad cc and somehow deleting or bulldozing that, and see if the other lots come back?   They may have been sitting there safely on disk and simply unable to load.

[Tingeling]

When I first encountered the problem I had patched all the way up to WA thus making my game version 2.2. I had just reinstalled both The Sims 3 and WA and because of difficulties in making the launcher work, I had taken out my DCBackup folder from before reinstalling and reinserted it in the newly installed game by taking out the contents in the DCBackup folder and putting it into the mods/packages folder. I started the game up, loading a new game and got blue lots everywhere. By doing the binary search I found the culprit and deleted the bad cc, as I think I have told before. When I started the new game that originally had blue lots, the issue was gone. I am wondering if it can have something to do with the fact that I did not save my game upon finding out there was blue lots in it? Therefor, by not saving, you can avoid blowing up the new save game. I haven't tried loading any of my old saves yet, since I want to make sure the game is stable enough for them not to break.

[nanacake]

I know people have tried getting rid of their cc and it has not made those lots come back, but has anyone tried making a note of the lot containing the bad cc and somehow deleting or bulldozing that, and see if the other lots come back?   They may have been sitting there safely on disk and simply unable to load.

I thought of bulldozing the blue lot, but it did not allow that option any longer. It did not have ANY options actually :/ It is like you said too though, once the corrupted lot loads, the rest halt and become blue as well. None of my community lots were ever blue lots, only the residential.

Therefor, by not saving, you can avoid blowing up the new save game. I haven't tried loading any of my old saves yet, since I want to make sure the game is stable enpugh for them not to break.

If you had an old save pre-patch it will load up fine again with the removed downloaded content. The exception is if the hood was using AM at all, I found that any of my old saved games that used AM prior to the 1.7 patch was FUBAR. After a little while of playing with the new AM (never had loaded the save without some version of AM running) with only EA store content, the hood turned blue lots and some irreversible other borked things happened (sims floating by their house, error messages). So if you have an AM save that is still loading for you at this point, I recommend saving any sims to bin that you care for using editsim just incase things get bad soon. YMMV

[Slymenstra]

Just a FYI lemoncandy over at MTS fixed her plants.  So go redownload them!!

[Barbara Walters]

By doing the binary search I found the culprit and deleted the bad cc, as I think I have told before.

What do you mean by a binary search?

[brownlustgirl]

By doing the binary search I found the culprit and deleted the bad cc, as I think I have told before.

What do you mean by a binary search?

Take out all mods/CC and put them back in small, controllable quanitities til you find the problem file.

[VacantBlue]

By doing the binary search I found the culprit and deleted the bad cc, as I think I have told before.

What do you mean by a binary search?

A binary search is performed by removing half of your downloads at a time to narrow down your search.

Keep repeating the process until you have found the bad CC.

[Lion]

Be very careful with Sims Lulamai! Their objects (not just decos) blue-lot your neighborhoods. I tested Set Baño (medieval bath set) and Set Cocina (medieval kitchen). Even functioning mirror, sinks, toilet, and bathtub are faulty! I specifically tested them one by one. Set Cocina is posted today!

The only good ones from these two sets:
D&M_Lampara_de_Pie, D&M_Lampara_Sobremesa (two lamps)
D&M_Baul_M (trunk)
D&M_Tapiz_M_1 (wall hanging)
D&M_Cocina_M1 (stove) *The fridge and table from Set Cocina might be ok, but I don't like to have them, so deleted them early on and did not test them.

[EDIT] It turns out the foods and utensils from Set Cocina are good. The faulty one is the SINK!
[EDIT2] The foods and utensils from Set Cocina may not be all good. I first put two cups and a pie, and they were ok. I then put all the rest on lot, it turned blue. Sigh....I give up. But the sink is bad by itself for sure.

The decos from are cloned mostly from:
sculptureKitchenUtensilsCountry
sculpturePlantIvyBallTopiarySmall
At least one deco is from CoffeeCup, one from ClutterTablePerfumes

Non-decos are cloned from:
Bath from BathtubModern
Sinks from SinkPedestalTraditional
Toilet from ToiletModern
wall mirror (sorry, I can't find the file on my computer any more)

[Grimma]

What do you mean by a binary search?

Take out all mods/CC and put them back in small, controllable quanitities til you find the problem file.

As explained here.

In related news, I spent the afternoon testing stuff. For ease of reading, numbered list to follow.

1.) I uninstalled and re-installed the base game and updates, deleting all my old saved games (after backing them up) and custom content (I backed up Packages for purposes of comparison, and I have a backup of all unrared CC in any case).
2.) I then re-installed the framework and copied all CC using the sims3pack format into the My Documents Downloads folder, and used the launcher to install them all once-off.
3.) Next I deleted everything in DCBackup and made sure that I had taken out all of the packages in my Mods/Packages folder.
4.) I then went to the folder where I backup my unrared CC files. I copied all the package files from there and placed them back into the Packages folder, and installed AM and amconfig.
5.) The only other thing I did was to install 3booter and the FPS-limiter, which I hadn't done before after patching.
6.) In-game, I placed ALL the furnished custom houses I downloaded.
7.) Finally created a new family and continued to play, played a while, saved, exited and went back in to load 'er up again.

I have not had a recurrence of the Blue Lot of Neighbourhood Death problem yet.

I noticed when I compared the backed up Packages file from the borked game with the new Packages folder as copied from the unrared packages that there used to be a LOT of packages with names like 0x4dd8d638cf3c45e987c1f7688ed340c7.package (like 100 or more) in the old folder.

[Inge]

So, Grimma, you put the stuff back that was bluelotting before, and it has stopped bluelotting?

[Grimma]

So, Grimma, you put the stuff back that was bluelotting before, and it has stopped bluelotting?

I put back all the CC I had before, though it's possible that my custom houses in the new neighbourhood didn't actually contain any bluelotting CC. I'm in the process of adding bluelotting stuff, especially unupdated lemoncandy, will report back soon.

EDITED TO ADD: As soon as I added the unupdated lemoncandy stuffs, saved and re-loaded, the entire neighbourhood was borked, so I guess I'm not much help after all.

On that note, is there anything we can do to help you, other than what we're currently doing i.e. testing CC to see which are faulty?

[brownlustgirl]

By doing the binary search I found the culprit and deleted the bad cc, as I think I have told before.

What do you mean by a binary search?

A binary search is performed by removing half of your downloads at a time to narrow down your search.

Keep repeating the process until you have found the bad CC.

Yeah, that works too. I found my method works better, at least for me.

[Grimma]

I've found the following:
1.) It seems that once the game encounters the faulty CC, the rest of the lots are dumped and thus become blue. I had a clean neighbourhood again, and I placed one item of (known) faulty CC on an empty lot, saved and re-loaded town. The lot with the faulty CC loaded perfectly, but most of the rest of SV was blue. I did this 5 times, and every time the lot with the corrupt CC loaded fine, but most of the rest of the hood loaded blue.
2.) I bulldozed said empty lot, picked another lot to play in and while it said "loading", it's clear that it didn't re-load the entire neighbourhood from scratch since the blue lots were still exactly the same.
3.) Since the only way to make the change (bulldozed lot) "stick" is to save and then exit to menu to re-load, and saving the blue-lotted game saves the blue lots as well, bulldozing the lot with the CC doesn't seem to work to solve the problem (unless there's some other way to try to do this?).

Other than one bad nursery set from VitaSims (the Bee nursery crib and change table both cause borkedness) and a few decorative items, I don't have much object CC in my game, and what I have were all been cleared or damned over at custom sims already.

[Inge]

I've narrowed the problem down to the mesh resources.  If I delete the MLOD/MODLs before renumbering, the foosball table causes no bluelotting.

[Kkate]

I don´t have ANY CC or mods. Just the base egame and WA. Both patched. But the blue lots remain after returning from holidays.