Troubleshooting help something weird in my game

There is not yet a patch for Pets, although Maxis is gathering information for making a patch on the official site.

It's really difficult to do, but it is important that you do check through your custom content. It's amazing how often problems are because of some sort of custom content. Maxis works hard to have things from the community work in the game, but they can't fix the ones which are problematic.

There are two tools which work for checking your custom content. One is pHever's Sims 2 Pack Clean Installer, which you can find here: http://sims2pack.modthesims2.com/ (which requires that you install Microsoft's dotnet framework 1.1 on your computer, but which is a very fast and easy tool to use)

or the official sites "Content Manager": http://thesims2.ea.com/help/index.php?pid=Help (which doesn't require the Microsoft framework but can be tedious to use, especially if you have a lot of custom content as it has the same insane loading times as BodyShop and the actual game.)

I generally use the Clean Installer as I've found it to be faster and easier. (Installing the Microsoft framework is no big deal, but some people aren't allowed to add programs like that to their computers.) It tells you (in pink) if there is duplicated information (which can cause problems) or empty packages (which take up room at the very least), and it shows modified ("hacked") things (in red) which can cause incompatibilties in the game.

Even after "cleaning" up your downloads folder with the Clean Installer or the Content manager, there may still be some custom content conflicts. Ideally you would then test each download item individually, but when you have as much custom content as you have, you need to do it in a more streamlined way. What I do is to start by completely removing my entire downloads folder. Then I go to my "testing" neighborhood (so called because it's an extra one so that I don't have to use my regular familes for testing and possibly mess them up at the same time.) I try to play a family the way I'd played my problem family to see if the problem still exists. (You can use your regular family if you choose, as that is a more accurate way of doing it. But I choose to do it in my "practice" neighborhood.)

If the problem still exists, then you know that it's not due to anything you've put in your downloads folder, so you don't need to test all your downloads.

However, if the problem doesn't reoccur, it means that you then get to test all your downloads. As I said before, doing it package by package is the ideal. However, I tend to do it in batches. If it doesn't happen with one batch, then I know it's not something in there, so I put that "batch" off to the side and test another. Once I find a problem batch, then I either break that into smaller batches (if there is a lot in the batch) or individually.

It's a big pain, because you have to enter, play, then exit the game each time. However, it can be the only way to find a bad package which doesn't show up as bad with the "Content Manager" or "Clean Installer."

One thing I definitely do (as I have an 8.3 gb downloads folder) is to put any new downloads into a subfolder "temporary" file. That way the new stuff which might be conflicting or otherwise problematic doesn't get mixed in with all the other stuff. So if a problem starts, you only have the things in *that* folder to look through, instead of the entire downloads folder. (It can really help. I don't know what I would have done recently if the staircase that was somehow a problem had been in "general population" rather than in the smaller subfolder. 8.3 gb is a *lot* of files, as in nearly 40,000.)

Hopefully you'll find the problem so that you can fix it. My guess would be that you have a mod/hack that is conflicting with your new EP. (At least if it was, you wouldn't have to go through the "testing" phase, but only need to use the Clean Installer/Content Manager, which are considerably easier to do than checking all your downloads.)