NewSO Update 536849 – The New Sims Online

Sims stuck standing on furniture no longer break every social

If a Sim ended up standing on top of a bed or chair, greeting or talking to them popped a “SimAntics Exception” box and reset them, so there was no way to interact your way out of it.
Before any social starts, the game checks whether the pair are standing in a doorway and steps them aside. That check could get caught in a loop it never escaped whenever the game’s record of who is standing where had drifted out of sync.
The position record now corrects itself, and the doorway check can no longer get stuck, so the social just runs.

The Whythern Hall banquet table no longer looks hollow in 3D

In 3D mode the “Whythern Hall Witengemot” Banquet Table showed a gap at every tile join, so the long table read as a row of separate hollow boxes rather than one solid piece.
The table is built as one long slab sliced into twelve tile-sized pieces, and each piece’s 3D shape was stopping just short of its own edge. Those pieces now meet properly, the way the joined counters and fences already do.
The table’s stored 3D shape is rebuilt once on your next launch, so the fix shows up without having to do anything.

Fun House coaster riders now sit on the track instead of beside it

Riding a Fun House coaster put your Sim slightly off the rails, most noticeably on the curves – the cart looked like it was gliding over the grass alongside the track rather than running on it.
Your Sim now rides where the track actually is, all the way round, on left turns, right turns and straight sections alike.

Switch between fullscreen and windowed mode from Graphics Options

Graphics Options now has a button for switching the game between fullscreen and windowed mode without restarting.
The button always shows the mode it will switch to, and the choice is remembered the next time the game starts.

Every garden flower was showing the same tulip picture

Since the last update the catalog cells for Wildflowers, Daffodils, Tulips and Nasturtiums all showed the same pink tulip bed. Only the little picture was wrong – the name, the description, the price and the flowers you actually planted were all the right ones the whole time.
The new pink, red and white tulips brought a spare thumbnail along with them that quietly replaced the picture for every other outdoor flower. That spare has been removed, so each flower bed shows its own bloom again.
The new tulips keep their own thumbnails.
The catalog is also fussier now about pictures shared between objects in the same set, so one stray thumbnail can’t take over a whole shelf again.

Residents stop obsessing over needs their lot cannot possibly meet

A resident whose worst need had nothing on the lot to fix it would pick that need again and again, forever. Because the need stayed at rock bottom it stayed the worst one, so it won every decision – and cleaning, chores, free time and socialising never got a turn. On one lot a resident spent 86% of an entire day, 1,909 decisions in a row at the worst of it, walking nowhere over a need that no object on the property could touch.
Residents now notice after a few tries that nothing on the lot serves a particular need, set it aside for a while, and get on with whatever they can do. They re-check every half hour, so a shower or a fridge bought later is picked up on its own.
This also clears up shorter versions of the same stall on furnished lots, where hunger in particular could hold up a resident’s decision-making for a stretch even though the normal cooking and fridge routines were working fine.
Residents living somewhere genuinely unfurnished are still unhappy – that is the lot, not the bug – but they now behave sensibly instead of pacing, and the server logs say plainly which kind of object the lot is missing.

Roommates can call the repairman again

Only roommates with building permissions could call a repairman from the phone. On a lot where nobody with build rights was online, anything broken simply stayed broken until they logged in – which is exactly when a broken shower or stove is most annoying.
The Call Repairman option on the phone now appears for any roommate, whether or not they have building permissions. Visitors still cannot call one.
Hiring a maid or a gardener still requires building permissions. Those are recurring services that bill the lot every day, so the decision to take one on stays with the builders; a repairman is a one-off call-out to fix something that is already broken.

Chalkboard work pays 20% more

Chalkboards paid less per completed job than other skill objects, which made even a strong newspaper payout percentage feel unrewarding. For example, a solo chalkboard job at 150% paid about §35 while a piñata under the same conditions paid about §48.
Chalkboard payouts have been increased by 20%. That §35 example now pays about §42; newspaper percentages, skill bonuses and the existing dynamic payout adjustment continue to apply as before.

Fun House rides and their track vanished from the lot

Every piece of Fun House track, and the Fun House rides themselves, would disappear moments after a lot loaded. The rest of a carnival stayed put – the Haunted House rides, the carts, the scenery – so what you were left with was a fairground built around loops of track that led nowhere.
These rides came from The Sims 1, where they belong on community lots, and each one quietly asks “am I on a residential lot?” when it starts up. If the answer is yes, it deletes itself on purpose. In NewSO that question never had a real answer, so every lot looked residential to them and the rides removed themselves every single time.
The Haunted House rides had already had this behaviour switched off years ago; the Fun House ones had simply been missed. They now stay where you put them, exactly like their haunted counterparts.

“The Magic of Telephony” phone booth had an empty menu

Clicking the Magic Town pay booth did nothing at all. It selected, showed its name and its price, and offered no options whatsoever – not even the ones every other phone in the game has.
The booth came across from The Sims 1 with only its two Magic Town travel actions, “Go Home” and “Go Home With Autofollow Sim”. Both of those ask “is this sim visiting here from somewhere else?”, which is never true on a NewSO lot, so both quietly hid themselves and the menu came up empty every time.
It now carries the same interactions as the Read n’ Red Overhead Phonebooth it was built from – hiring and firing a Gardener or Maid, hiring a Repairman, calling work, calling a cab, quitting a job, ordering pizza, and leaving the lot. The booth keeps its own carnival artwork, its name and its price; only its behaviour changed.

Crash to desktop when entering a lot on High or Ultra graphics

On Windows, picking the High or Ultra graphics preset made the game close itself the moment a lot finished loading. There was no error message – the client simply disappeared.
Those two presets are the only ones that switch on the image sharpening pass. The Windows (DirectX) copy of the sharpening shader was never rebuilt when that feature was added back in August, so it was missing the very effect the game asked it for. Reaching for something that wasn’t there took the whole client down on the first frame it tried to draw.
The Windows shader has been rebuilt, so sharpening now genuinely works on High and Ultra rather than being a crash trigger.
The renderer also no longer treats a missing effect as fatal. If a shader ever comes up short again, the frame is presented without that finishing pass instead of closing the game.
Anyone who dropped to Medium to stay playable can move back up to High or Ultra.

Residents who sat down stopped doing anything (Chad’s forty minute nap)

A resident who sat, lay or soaked in anything – a bed, a chair, a sofa, a hot tub – quietly went off the rails until they got up again on their own. The clearest symptom was sleep: a resident would reach fully rested within a minute or two and then stay in bed for another half hour or more, because the part of the game that decides “you’re rested, get up” had stopped running for them the moment they climbed in.
The same stall covered everything else the residents do on a timer while seated – wrapping up a long book or a TV session, heading to a scheduled meal, being nudged out of an action that has gone nowhere. If they were in a seat, they were on their own.
This was one day old. It came in with yesterday’s Power Glove fix, which correctly stopped the game yanking a resident out of your hand when you picked one up – but it decided “is being held” by asking whether the sim was inside something, and a bed counts as something.
Now only being held by another sim counts. Picking residents up (and throwing them) still works exactly as it did, and residents in furniture behave normally again.

Skill gameplay and lot category can be changed on a property that never closes

Both settings used to demand that your property be offline before you could touch them. That was fine when every property emptied out overnight, but a property with a resident NPC living on it never goes offline – so owners of those lots were locked out of both settings permanently, with no way to ask for an exception.
The offline requirement is gone for both. It was never doing what it looked like it was doing: the property only reads its skill mode and category when it starts up, so a change made while people are inside could never have taken effect mid-visit anyway. It has always landed at the next restart, and now it says so instead of refusing.
When you change either setting on a property that is currently open, the game now tells you the change applies the next time that property restarts.
Lot category changes are unaffected otherwise – the seven day cooldown between category changes still applies, and the categories reserved for staff are still reserved.
Skill gameplay changes are now written to the property’s Activity Log, the same way category and description changes already were.