'Fixing' the Curious house -- help!

[jsalemi]

Ok, I've been playing Strangetown a bit more recently, and I decided to get rid of those silly towers on top of the Curious brothers' house.  Well, everything deletes fine EXCEPT the stairs!  I can't select them with moveobjects on, and even burniating them doesn't seem to work.  So now I have this house with stairs to nowhere.   Any hints how I can get rid of them?

[MsMaria]

Did you try the bulldozer? I'm sure you probably did but thought I'd mention it. While in the stair section of build mode, I believe you hold down the shift key and the left mouse button to make the bulldozer appear. Then place it at the bottom of the stairs and they should disappear.

[syberspunk]

I've had weird things happen with stairs as well. You can't delete stairways if they are 'in use.' Don't ask me how that might happen. I experienced this in Uni a few times... where I guess that a student had been using, or was going to use it (had going up the stairs in their queue or something or had just gone up the stairs) and I caught this just at the 'right' (or wrong ) moment. It then locks up the stairs and no one else can use it. I don't remember exactly... but I think I used the debug cheat to force an error, and then I could delete them.

Ste

[jsalemi]

Did you try the bulldozer? I'm sure you probably did but thought I'd mention it. While in the stair section of build mode, I believe you hold down the shift key and the left mouse button to make the bulldozer appear. Then place it at the bottom of the stairs and they should disappear.

It's the control key, and yea, I tried that -- nothing changes.  The stairs stay firmly stuck in place.  One thing I didn't do was force an error (it was late -- that's my excuse and I'm sticking to it ).  I'll try that later when I play the game.

[MsMaria]

Hmmm. That is odd. Syberspunk may be onto something there.

[jsalemi]

Finally got rid of the stairs, so I figured I'd share what I did.  They're modular stairs ('Holey Smoke' things), and apparently the game treats each step as a separate object, which is why I couldn't delete the whole staircase, and why just forcing an error and resetting didn't fix it.  I ended up doing a 'force error/delete' on each individual step, which finally cleared them out.  Took some time, but the Curious brothers now have a two-story house which loads a lot faster.

[Mirelly]

LOL That'll be good old Maxian builders' workmanship again ... I just betcha!

[Theo]

Did you try the bulldozer? I'm sure you probably did but thought I'd mention it. While in the stair section of build mode, I believe you hold down the shift key and the left mouse button to make the bulldozer appear. Then place it at the bottom of the stairs and they should disappear.

It's the control key, and yea, I tried that -- nothing changes.  The stairs stay firmly stuck in place.  One thing I didn't do was force an error (it was late -- that's my excuse and I'm sticking to it ).  I'll try that later when I play the game.

What may be happening is that a portion of the stair is covered by an empty floor tile.

It's a bit hard to explain, but you can notice that in build mode, the floor tiles are "outlined", even the ones without floor covering.

These tiles block the deleter tool, even on the stair's top landing. If you hit an area of the stair that isn't covered by these tiles, normally the stair can be deleted.


But that's only in theory - I got similar problems when deleting the very same stairs, but in my case I was able to get rid of them with a bit of persistence .

[MyPrecious]

Humm, I have to admit that the Curious household was the first I played to get game experience on the Sims2, and I always found that the house slowed the game down due to the six levels, even tho my son said that this lot was "cool" (he has since come to his senses and does not play the Sim2 any more?).

I usually go to the house and delete the upper levels before even attempting to play this lot. Never had a problem doing this and it adds major mounts of money to the Curious household. For new peeps maybe doing this will help? Just let the house load and then freeze play; then go up 6 stories and delete all you don't want or need including all the pillars. You will find the Curious brothers are considerably richer (helping out with the maxis 2 alien babies…"holy crap! we need a nanny" thing). Try deleting the stairs before anything else it may help. 

Other hints on the Curious house are, let Lazie look after the kids, less bugs and he hates his job anyway. Oh and get the kids cleaning points cos he is a bugger in the shower.

Oh yeah, if you are really new, get Laz the medical job and the reward, let him come home in his outfit (white coat) and let him ‘practice on that med table…I nearly fell off my chair laughing the first time I saw that….Argghh! "It's a rocket, put it back…heart, liver, lungs? Ahhh chuck them out…)   

[MsMaria]

Good grief, what a chore. I'm glad you figured it out Jsalemi. I just deleted all of those stairs last night. Glad it wasn't as time consuming as yours has been.

[jsalemi]

Yea, I'm not surprised it's easier if you do it right away.  Mine probably got stuck in some nebulous 'in-use' state, probably because Vicund went all the way to the top to use the telescope to get abducted, and never came back down them.  They were never used after that point. Should I ever restart Strangetown, I won't make that mistake again.

[Kokopelli]

Although the Curious house was neat, the load time was not. I had a heck of a time, myself getting rid of the stairs but now it's just a nice one story home.

[Annette]

Nice to see that I'm not the only one who has issues with those stairs. Took me ages to realise they were those modular\outdoor stairs and would delete using the ctrl key. I have got rid if them, and the house is much more usable.
 My problem is that I missed a couple of floor tiles as I deleted everything, and while you can't see them in-game, in the neighborhood view they hover over the house  Still it's the Curious brothers.....people expect weird. I suspect to delete these floor tiles I'll have to build up again.......I might get to that one day.....but as I restart often I may just leave it till the next restart 

[Dark Trepie]

Have you tried attaching a garage to the house on the messy, un-even, flood-prone land yet?



Deleting the stairs was annoying enough.  But this...  Good grief.

Of course, this was all followed by gutting the entire first floor and trying to make it half way functional.

[jsalemi]

No, I only went as far as putting a driveway in for the one car they all wanted.   I did build a new bedroom and bathroom for the two boys on the 'roof', and changed the front room from a 'hothouse' to another bathroom, because I dreaded having to redesign the whole house, but I'm thinking of having Lazlo move out now that both boys are teens and he and Pascal are getting the hots for potential mates -- that would be a good time to do some general renovations.

[Strangel]

Finally got rid of the stairs, so I figured I'd share what I did.  They're modular stairs ('Holey Smoke' things), and apparently the game treats each step as a separate object, which is why I couldn't delete the whole staircase, and why just forcing an error and resetting didn't fix it.  I ended up doing a 'force error/delete' on each individual step, which finally cleared them out.  Took some time, but the Curious brothers now have a two-story house which loads a lot faster.

I get the same thing. What I do is eyedropper one of the stairs, hover the bulldozer over a MIDDLE stair (doesn't seem to work on the top or bottom stair) and then click-doze through ONLY one or two stairs and poof, they're gone.

[jsalemi]

Interesting -- I'll try that next time I run into 'undeletable stairs'.

[Avalikia]

I've been having a weird problem in my Curious house.  In the bedroom closest to the kitchen they can only access most of the bedroom by going to it from outside.  They can go just inside the room from the inside of the house, but no further into the room.  If I try telling them to go further they leave the room, go outside, and walk all the way around the house to get to the room from the door to the outside.  If I try forcing them to use the inside door by moving or deleting doors they act like there's no possible way to get in or out of the room.  It's like they think there's a wall or a fence surrounding the tile in front of the door.  But I don't care about it too much because Vidcund ended up having twins and it made me lose interest in playing that house for some strange reason...

[jsalemi]

I've been having a weird problem in my Curious house.  In the bedroom closest to the kitchen they can only access most of the bedroom by going to it from outside.  They can go just inside the room from the inside of the house, but no further into the room.  If I try telling them to go further they leave the room, go outside, and walk all the way around the house to get to the room from the door to the outside.  If I try forcing them to use the inside door by moving or deleting doors they act like there's no possible way to get in or out of the room. 

It's a diagonal door glitch. I had it happen, and fixed it by either deleting the door and installing a new one, or changing which way the door 'opens' (reversing the green arrow) -- I forget which, but it worked.  Ultimately, redesigning that house to get rid of the diagonal walls and doors is a VGT.

[Avalikia]

Well that's good to know, in case that ever happens again.  But, like I said, I've lost interest in that house.

[jsalemi]

It's not a bad house, and Pascal and Vidcund make decent parents.  Lazilo is kind-of the fifth wheel there, though, and the next time I play the house I'm going to have him move out so he can have his own life.

[croiduire]

I've rebuilt the Curious house repeatedly. For some reason, you have to strictly delete things in the reverse order of how they would logically be built, working from the top down--fence, stairs, floor, etc--finishing one level before moving down. Otherwise you wind up with something floating and undelete-able. It makes me think of PEMDAS!

[J. M. Pescado]

Well, it's definitely the opposite of how one would do things in real demolitions. When you normally demolish things, you typically start at the bottom, and that's all you need since the top collapses in a heap once the bottom has been blown out.

[jsalemi]

I would love it if the game had a mode like that -- 'Demolish house'.  All the sims could stand around and cheer while bulldozers come in and bring the house to the ground, like some stupid reality show.