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In Sims 3, me and my fiancee have settled with doing the change active household style of playing as discussed here Multiple users and households in Sims 3

Anyway, I have a feeling that some of the NPCs and the other Sim is getting stuck somewhere. Let me explain. Say i have Sim-A, and my fiancee uses Sim-B. I am currently playing my sim (Sim-A) and going about with my busy career etc. I do try to call on Sim-B to invite her over etc and she keeps saying sure, but 5 seconds later she says something came up. That seemed possible(even after 2 days of trying to call...my sim is lazy and busy so going to Sim-B's apartment is not really practical at the moment)

So, when I sometimes try to play for tips in front of the movie theater, I see a bunch of NPCs naturally go there and sometimes chat around, do whatever the want, etc. I do notice though that most(if not all) of them are complaining of lack of sleep etc. I noticed this too when playing Sim-A or Sim-B(when playing Sim-A, Sim-B keeps complaining of lack of sleep, and vice versa)

This also happens to most Sim-A's friends. They all complain and I had a suspicion that they're getting stuck somewhere. So the question is, is this a known bug, or is there a way to "debug" this problem without using tedious methods(like logging into every active household and checking them one by one)?

An added note: Sim-B invited Sim-A to stay the night over since they're both tired(and still complaining of lack of sleep). Sim-B proceeded to sleep on her bed, but Sim-A just stood there, waiting for something to happen(add to the fact that Sim-A was already RELAXING on the bed...he stood up to do nothing!). After an hour of just standing there, I finally got fed up and switched active household over to Sim-A. He certainly wasn't stuck and I had to manually ask him to sleep on the bed(which he did).

I am playing Late night btw and the only other major mod i don't have is fast lane(and i think that's even just a stuff expansion)

I hope someone can shed light into this. I have a feeling Im gonna have to reset all the sims in my town for this to work

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  • Have you recently changed the free will options? Because that made it really buggy for me once. – Zoe Aug 22 '11 at 0:53
  • i have been experimenting with it. i turned free will off completely because i was assuming they were "fighting" my commands. but then i noticed than when i switched from Sim-A to Sim-B, Sim-B would be totally hungry and sleepy and they're just staring at the wall! when i switch back to Sim-A, Sim-A is the one staring at the wall! Ive turned free will to high now. what did you do with yours? – corroded Aug 22 '11 at 1:06
  • I just made sure that they had something to do, but that sometimes doesn't work, they sometimes stand in front of a fridge for an hour (their time). It also helps to use your lifetime rewards on; Steel Bladder, Dirt Defiant, Carefree, Hardly Hungry, Moodlet Manager and Meditative Trance Sleep to keep them happier and in the long run save more time. You can also use Speedy Cleaner so that they take less time to clean anything so they have more time to do what you want them to do. – Zoe Sep 10 '11 at 23:57
  • You may still want to try to play a few other households than Sim-A's and B's, just to see how they're doing. Even just one may shed some light on this mystery. – leokhorn Aug 15 '13 at 8:26
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The Sims 3 is notorious for high CPU and resource usage, especially when you get multiple households and things going. Try opening up the task manage (ctrl+shift+esc) while playing and take a look at the CPU and Memory percentages. If they are pegged at 100% or close to it, that may be the problem.

The game does try to "optimize" by instead of the entire game chugging, only certain processes of it do, like sim behavior and the background world simulation (which is why everyone is tired). Something to try is lower the various settings, or removing households you don't really care about so the background simulation doesn't have to work as hard(backup your save in case this doesn't work!).

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  • I used to have this problem before I got a hyper-threaded quad-core CPU. I can still tell where it would've hung for a bit; now it's a just momentary pause. But, I'd swear it has something to do with the ice cream truck... – Mazura Sep 20 '16 at 6:17
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Have you downloaded any new Custom Content lately? thats a likely culprit of sims frequently getting stuck, have you tried resetting the stuck sim through the console (Ctrl+ Shft+ C) resetsim (first_lastname) If they continue to get stuck after that, there are still many other reasons: outdated mods, misplaced furniture on the lot, something D/L'd from the Exchange your game doesnt like. So many untold factors still remain, like your machine, your OS.

Try resetting the sim first. Thats the easiest step and the one with 0 repercussions if you do it. But imo it sounds like a memory leak being caused by bad CC (custom content)

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  • i've been resetting it every time and it still happens -_- – corroded Dec 21 '12 at 1:14
  • I've seen this type of thing when I was new to Sims and downloaded anything I saw off the Exchange...once I started being more selective in my CC, the problems has stopped...but if you're not too attached to that world, maybe save the characters and try them in a new world, if it still freezing then you know it's something those sims are wearing causing the problem...maybe a new hairstyle or piece of accessory you recently downloaded? – Shrapnel Dec 31 '12 at 19:48
  • Use resetsim * to reset all sims. – Mazura Jul 1 '15 at 22:33
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Make sure you haven't downloaded to much to the game, if you have go to the downloads section on that front screen and take of whatever you dont want!

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