The sims 2 pets is acting funny.. I just bought the pets expansion pack two days ago. I have all other expansion packs except for that family one. And I have Mortimer and Dina and Alexander in a house and I combined the Critturs family with them. (the two dogs) Both of the dogs won't eat, they've already starved themselves once. The only reason they aren't dead or taken away from me yet is because I have it saved at when I first combined them. But anyway, I can't click on the food dish and then select the option "call to meal" like I can in other households. There is food in it. The only option I get is to clean up the bowl. Is it because these two are bad, or is there a glitch or something? I informed EA games of this and they said they can't help, which is going to make me really anrgy if this is like a bug in the game or something, cause that's bull. I hope its not though. I've also noticed that in that same family I cant click on there career rewards or the regualr rewards, it's just not clickable. And the inventory has that RENU thing in it and I can't click on that either, it's just highlighted in red instead of green. And before I loaded on pets everything was fine. I have more than enough requirements for the game and its expansions, and I have never downloaded anything for the game. Please help me.... I am getting really upset and just want to play the game without any problems. Thanks to anyone with some advice!! Could you please also let me know if anyone is having the same problem, even if you don't have a solution. Thanks again!!
i did the same thing, i put the critturs with a family and they almost starved. what i figured out is that if you put your food on the floor that they'll eat that. i just serve the food and stop the action before they can get to the table so that the sim will put it on the floor. i assumed it was because their story was that they had been homeless dogs and had been trained to eat people food. it's very annoying and i don't know how to make them eat the dog food. but that'll keep them from starving.
I'm having that same issue. Thought there was something wrong with the house; so, I moved the family into a new home, same things happened. My other family hasn't had that problem. I'll have to serve food and put it on the floor! We'll see what happens. Thanks for the suggestion.
Go into the pet's simology panel and look at the "learned behaviors" panel. The pets you mention come with the game and will have some "trained" behaviors to make them more challenging/interesting. Chances are they are "trained" to eat Sim food. (There are 8 trainable behaviors: calm vs distructive, clean vs filthy, eats pet food vs eats Sim food, housebroken vs yardbroken, playful vs hostile, respectful vs destructive, stays off furniture vs goes on furniture and stays off sim beds vs goes on sim beds.) As to the career items or aspiration items being greyed/red, it means that they haven't been earned (in terms of career items) or don't have enough aspiration points (for the aspiration items.) They won't be clickable if that is the case (which it would be for a family which hasn't been played much.) I suspect that the problems you are having are not glitches but are "game play" things, which is why EA Games customer service can't help. They can only help with things that are related to known problems which are not gameplay issues. (They expect that if you have a game play issue that you talk to other users such as on the official site BBS/forum or on some other user to user gorum such as this one.)
If they are trained to eat Sim food/garbage, then you must untrain them by scolding them when they do eat Sim food/garbage. Have the Pet food available and if they happen to eat some, then quickly (before they go on to another trainable thing) praise them for eating pet food. One hint: scolding them doesn't work well if you don't know the pet well. The Sim takes a hit in the "friend" scale for scolding, so make sure to do a "give love" or "play" positive interaction after any scolding to get the friend scale back in the right direction so that they don't get hostile to you. Training works for any of the eight reinforceable behaviors. Scold for behaviors you don't like, praise for ones you do like. You can tell if a pet has done some sort of "reinforceable" by looking at their icon for the circular arrow icon. You need to click to see what praise/scold they have for specifics. (Such as "scold for running around crazily" for training them not to be disruptive.)
I also realized that if you train them to "Come Here", you'll be able to call them to eat at the pet dish. I think if they don't know how to answer "come here", they wouldn't be able to answer a call to the food dish. I had that same problem with them, and they actually got taken away before I realized that might fix it. I just adopted them back and called the animal trainer.
