We have been shipping fixes faster than we have been writing them up, and the notes for the last week never made it onto the site. Rather than post them piecemeal after the fact, here is everything from 31 August through 3 September in one place, grouped by what it touches.
Macs. Two separate crashes, one after the other – one that stopped the game starting at all, and one that hit the moment you joined a property.
Mac: the game no longer quits the moment it starts
- Macs could not get into the game at all. Clicking Play loaded the game for a split second, then macOS said the app had quit unexpectedly. Reinstalling the game or the launcher made no difference, because nothing was actually wrong with your installation.
- The 31 August update moved the Mac game onto a new, faster, native engine. The old Mac version was always started by a small script that quietly told the game which sound system to use. The new version starts directly, without that script – so it had no sound system to talk to, and the game shut itself down the instant the loading screen tried to play its first sound.
- The game now sets that up itself, so it no longer depends on how it was launched.
- Apple Silicon Macs (M1 and newer) were also being given the Intel version of the game by mistake. They now get the native Apple Silicon build they should have had.
- If the game still will not start, reinstall from the launcher once – a client that crashes this early cannot download its own update.
- Thanks to jparent for the report and for patiently trying everything we asked.
Mac: the game no longer quits when you enter a lot
- Fixed the crash that killed the Mac client seconds after you joined a property. Loading a lot rebuilds the lighting maps, and on macOS that was being done from a background thread with no graphics context, which the system answers by terminating the game outright – no error, no dialog, just gone about twenty seconds after launch. That work now happens on the render thread where it belongs. Windows was never affected: its graphics drivers quietly ignore the same mistake instead of crashing.
- Added a guard so this class of bug can’t come back silently. Anything that tries to allocate graphics memory from the wrong thread is now recorded, by name, in a log next to the game rather than taking the whole client down without a trace.
Fullscreen, settings and sound. If your Options never seemed to stick, this is the group to read.
Fullscreen no longer draws the game into the corner of the screen
- **Playing in fullscreen showed the game in a small box in the top left, with the rest of the screen grey.** The window went fullscreen, but the game carried on drawing at its windowed size inside it.
- Fullscreen now renders at your display’s full resolution. Your windowed size is remembered separately, so switching back out of fullscreen still gives you the window you had.
Fullscreen, refresh rate and language stay where you put them
- Some Options settings quietly reverted every time you launched. If you set the game to fullscreen, picked a refresh rate, or changed the language in game, those choices could be overwritten the next time you started up – not by anything you did, but by the launcher.
- The launcher passes its own copy of windowed mode, refresh rate and language to the game on every single launch. The game was treating those as if you had just chosen them, so the next time anything saved your settings, the launcher’s values got written over yours. Fullscreen in particular could never stick.
- Launcher settings now apply to that session only. What you choose in the game’s own Options stays on disk, and the launcher can no longer overwrite it behind your back.
- Note the launcher still starts the game windowed, so if you want fullscreen every time, set it in the launcher too – we will be looking at that side of it separately.
Your settings and saves moved somewhere safer
- Your personal files no longer live inside the game’s install folder. Settings, saved houses, blueprints, your message inbox and read hints now live in your own user folder, where Windows always allows them to be written.
- Previously these sat inside Program Files. That works on most setups, but on any machine where Windows locks down that folder the game could not save a thing – and it failed silently, without telling you.
- You will not lose anything. The first time you launch, the game finds your existing files and brings them across automatically.
- If a save ever does fail in future, it now gets written to the log instead of being quietly discarded.
- This is a hardening change. If you have been seeing settings reset between sessions, we are still chasing that one separately – thanks to Ashh, squeezannah and Rachel for the reports, and for the details that helped rule things out.
Sound follows your headphones instead of dying
- Switching audio output silenced the game until you restarted it. Putting bluetooth earbuds back in their case, unplugging a headset, or changing your default speakers in Windows/macOS left NewSO playing into the device that had gone away, so you heard nothing when you came back.
- The game now notices when your default output changes or disappears and moves its sound over to the new one within a couple of seconds. Music, voices and effects keep playing – no relaunch needed.
- The “failed to initialize audio” message now tells you something. If the game cannot start sound, it used to show a wall of technical detail that did not say what went wrong. It now says plainly that the game will run without sound, names the audio output it tried to use, and gives the actual reason – which is the difference between “no headphones or speakers are plugged in” and something we need to fix.
- Thanks to TheTurtle for the report, and to Ashh, Hella_ and Riekoche for chasing it down.
Sims getting stuck, and things that would not get repaired.
Sims no longer get stuck standing inside the toilet
- Fixed Sims left standing on top of a toilet, bed or chair. If anything went wrong while your Sim was using an object – a hiccup in the object’s script, or the lot reloading at the wrong moment – your Sim stayed welded into it and stood up on the spot. From there they could not walk anywhere: every route started on the object’s own square and failed instantly, so nothing you clicked did anything. “I’m standing in the toilet” is now fixed at the source.
- A Sim who has to be reset while using something now steps out and stands next to it, the way they would if the interaction had simply ended.
- Sim residents can be rescued from this too. The nudge that frees a resident stuck on an occupied square refused to touch anyone caught inside an object, which is exactly who needed it. Two residents spent a whole day pinned on one square with their bladder at rock bottom while the rescue fired and did nothing, roughly 475 times each. They get moved now.
- Sims actually sitting or lying on something are left alone – only a Sim standing inside an object is moved out.
No more error popup when a sim’s target disappears
- “A SimAntics Exception has occurred” while watching the maid clean. If an object was thrown away, sold or picked up while a sim was still walking over to use it, the error popup could appear and that sim would be reset on the spot – most often the maid, mid-way through a doorway.
- Sims now simply give up on whatever they were heading to and choose something else to do, the same way they already do when they cannot reach something.
- The popup only ever appeared for the person watching; nothing was wrong on the lot itself.
The repairman will now fix your custom sinks, toilets and dishwashers
- “Repairman refuses to fix it.” On a whole family of imported objects – most custom sinks, toilets and toilet stalls, dishwashers, the Spa Steamer, the Robot Dock and more – a broken object was completely invisible to the repairman. He would come out, look around, find nothing to do and leave, no matter how obviously broken the thing in front of him was.
- These objects were converted from The Sims 1 and kept that game’s way of recording “this is broken”, which NewSO’s repairman never reads. All 66 of them now use the same broken state as every other object, so the repairman finds them, fixes them, and the pie menu hides the interactions you should not be able to use on a broken object.
- Anything already sitting broken on your lot gets picked up the next time the lot loads – you do not need to replace it.
- Heads up: these objects never used to wear out on their own. Now they do, like every other object in the game, so expect the occasional repair bill on them from here on.
- Thanks to Sierra Raine for the report.
Broken hot tubs can be repaired again
- Repairing a broken hot tub never finished. Your sim walked over, played the old wrench animation, then wandered off with the tub still broken – and you were never asked to confirm the repair cost.
- Affected the “Sparnacle” and white outdoor hot tubs, the wooden jacuzzi and the k8t jacuzzi. These were older conversions still running The Sims 1’s repair routine, which The Sims Online retired.
- They now use the same Repair every other hot tub uses: it quotes you a price first, plays the proper repair animation, and the tub actually works again afterwards.
- Thanks to Ashh for the report and to CatDaddyBoo for spotting the wrong animation and the missing price confirmation.
Smoke from broken objects no longer drifts off into the water
- A broken object’s smoke now stays on the object. Puffs of smoke were turning up out on the water, or off in the corner of the lot, with nothing there to produce them.
- The smoke was real – it belonged to something genuinely broken elsewhere on the lot. The emitter only picked up its position while the object itself was being drawn, so anything broken while off the edge of your screen, or hidden behind a cut-away wall, never got a position at all and its smoke fell back to the very corner of the lot at sea level.
- Smoke also now respects which floor the broken object is on, instead of showing up on every floor.
- Thanks to Tim for the report and the screenshot.
Building and buying.
Tabletop objects can go on counters
- **Computers, stereos and other tabletop items could only go on tables, never on kitchen or bathroom counters** – even though a counter is exactly the same height as a table, so the object would have sat at the same level either way.
- Anything you can put on a table can now be put on a counter, and anything you could put on a counter can now go on a table. Nothing else about placement changed: objects still need an empty surface, and heavy things still cannot go on flimsy furniture.
- End tables are unchanged – a computer still will not fit on one.
- Thanks to Ashh and Hella_ for the suggestion.
Free floor tiles in build mode
- The first nine floor tiles in build mode are no longer free. Nine custom “Bath Wall Tile Matching Floor” patterns shipped with a price of nothing, and because the build catalog puts the cheapest patterns first, they sat at the very front of the first page – so anyone could tile a whole lot without spending a simoleon. They now cost §1 each, the same as the other budget patterns, and they keep their artwork and their place in the catalog. Any pattern added in future that arrives without a price will also be charged §1 rather than nothing.
- Thanks to Tim for the report.
Clothing racks. Stocking one used to mean picking outfits out of postage stamps.
Stocking a clothing rack is no longer guesswork
- You could not see what you were stocking. The “add clothes” strip inside the rack’s Manage panel drew each outfit into 18×38 pixels – about the size of a postage stamp – which made picking the dress you actually wanted a coin flip.
- The Stock button now opens a proper full-size browser. Outfits are drawn nearly four times larger, with the price of the one you have picked and a “7 of 20 rack slots used” counter. It stays open while you shop, so you can stock several outfits without reopening it each time.
- Outfits already on the rack are now highlighted in yellow, both in the new browser and in the small strip in the Manage panel. Racks still allow duplicates on purpose – you just get told before you pay for a second copy of something.
- The browser has its own male / female switch (hidden on the hat, wing, shoe and tail racks, which are not gendered).
- Thanks to Tim for the request.
Clothing rack pages line up again
- **The rack’s big “add clothes” browser now shows 28 outfits a page, the same as the small browser in the Manage panel.** They were 27 and 28, so past the first page the two views – and the outfit lists players shop from on tsomania.net – stopped agreeing about which page an outfit was on. Same number, same order, same page in all three now. The outfit pictures are a little shorter to make room for the fourth row, still around four times the size of the ones in the panel.
Magic Town. The carts finished their move onto Simoleons, and the magic kit stopped printing them.
Magic Town carts take Simoleons
- **The Wagon O’ Wares, Faerie Mara’s Odds and Ends and All Things Draconic now sell in Simoleons.** The carts had already been switched over to your Simoleon account behind the scenes, but they still said MagiCoins on the pie menu and, worse, they printed the old coin number while charging you five times it – “Redeem MagiCoins…/Toad Sweat (21)” for a §105 purchase. Every row now reads “Buy One…/Toad Sweat (§105)” and shows exactly what you will be charged. Five-packs and the vendors’ shop blurb were updated to match.
- Removed the carts’ leftover developer “Get MagiCoins” button. It handed out 25 coins a click, which after the currency change was §125 of real money for anyone living on the lot.
Magic Town grocery prices raised
- Butter, Sugar, Baking Mix and Honey were still priced for The Sims 1. The Magic Town food displays sold them at §20, §8, §10 and §20 – pocket change next to what the Baker’s Oven turns them into. They now cost §800 (Butter), §700 (Sugar), §1,000 (Baking Mix) and §1,000 (Honey). The pie menu shows the new price and charges it.
Magic kit no longer prints money
- Taking the coins out of a magic kit paid out over and over instead of once. Anything that paid you in magic coins – the magic kit, duel winnings at the Magic Arena, tips at the magic trick table, side show and spook show stages and the snake charmer, and selling ingredients at the Magic Town carts – repeated the payout every single game tick instead of paying once, so your simoleons climbed without stopping until you left the lot. The same fault could run the other way at the carts, charging you repeatedly for one purchase. Payouts and purchases now happen exactly once.
- This also fixes a mismatch between your game and the server on every magic coin transaction, which could leave the two out of step.
- Thanks to Twyla for reporting it straight away, and to CatDaddyBoo for confirming it.
Money, work and your wardrobe.
Egg sales are back to their full price
- Selling a tray of eggs pays the original cooking-skill prices again. A rebalance had cut egg tray sales to a tenth of what they were. That was too heavy a hand for a set that takes real work to run, so it is reverted: a tray sells for §850, §1,450, §2,150, §2,875 or §3,500 depending on your Sim’s Cooking skill, exactly as the chicken coop guide describes. Thanks to Ashh for flagging that the payout no longer matched the documented prices.
Bills now shows every transaction for the day
- The Details tab stopped at 200 transactions. If you had a busy day – a workbench cranking out gnomes, a shop taking sales – the list ran out partway down and just said “Showing first 200 of 591 transactions”, with no way to reach the rest. Bills now loads the whole day and you can scroll through all of it.
- The rest of the day fills in a moment after the window opens, and the list keeps your place while it does instead of snapping back to the top.
- Very heavy days are still capped, but at 2,000 transactions rather than 200.
- Income, Expenses and Net at the top of the window were always counted from the full day, so those totals have not changed – only what you can actually see in the list.
Sim jobs are reachable again
- Fixed the job lots. For a spell, taking a cab or car to your sim job dumped you back out to the city map instead – the job lot never finished starting up, so the game sat on “Reconnecting to Lot Server” and then gave up. Robot Factory, Restaurant and Nightclub shifts are all working again.
- Your job, level and experience were never touched by this – nothing was lost, the shift just couldn’t be started.
Create a Sim clothes now show up in the dresser
- Your new Create a Sim outfits are selectable from a dresser again. After using the complimentary makeover, the everyday, sleepwear and swimwear you picked were worn by your Sim but never added to your wardrobe, so a dresser only ever offered the clothes you had before. Changing into anything else meant you could not change back without using a trunk’s “change to normal”.
- The three outfits you chose are now added to your wardrobe when the makeover is saved. Nothing is removed – anything you bought from a clothing rack is still there.
- Sims that had already used their makeover before this update have had the missing outfits added to their wardrobe by hand, so they are there waiting at the next dresser.
Being a dog or a cat no longer stops you using anything
- Players turned into an animal can use objects again. If you were turned into a dog or a cat, every object on the lot stopped responding – clicking the guitar, a chair or the fridge did nothing, and anything you were holding was dropped.
- You can now click objects and do interactions as an animal, exactly as you could before the change. Being an animal is meant to be silly, not a time-out.
- Animals still won’t wander off and do things on their own – an animal only does what you tell it to – and real pets are unchanged, they still can’t raid the fridge.
- Fair warning: interactions were animated for people, so an animal playing the guitar looks extremely wrong. That part is on purpose.
The website and the launcher.
Account verification emails are arriving again
- Fixed a problem that stopped all emails from leaving the server for about two hours one evening. If you tried to make an account and never got your verification email, that was why – the website said “Check Your Email” even though the message was never actually sent.
- Password reset emails were affected by the same problem and are working again too.
- If you requested a verification link during the outage, it has been re-sent to you. If it still hasn’t turned up, just request a new one from the Register page – your link is good for 2 hours.
Launcher’s Volcanic button works again
- The launcher could not start Volcanic after the .NET 10 update. Clicking Volcanic did nothing, or failed with a “could not recover” error, because the update moved the editor into the game’s `Windows\Net10` folder and the launcher was still looking for it in the install folder itself. The launcher now finds the editor wherever your install keeps it – the new location first, the old ones after – and starts it with the game’s folder as its working directory, so it loads content exactly like the game does.
- Reported by CatDaddyBoo.
Launcher 3.0.16: the Volcanic fix actually ships
- Volcanic still would not start from the launcher, even on the “latest” version. The fix for this went into the launcher’s code a few hours after 3.0.15 was published, so every player who updated was still running a launcher that looked for the editor in the wrong place – it showed “Launching NewSO” and then nothing happened. Launcher 3.0.16 contains the fix. Update the launcher (it will offer the update on start) and Volcanic launches again.
- If you would rather not wait, you can always start the editor directly from `<your NewSO folder>\Windows\Net10\NSO.IDE.exe`.
- Reported by squeezannah.
Launcher About page says “New Simulator Online”
- **The launcher’s About/FAQ still expanded NewSO as “Free Simulator Online”, a leftover from FreeSO.** It now reads “New Simulator Online” everywhere it appears – the “What is NewSO?” and “Is NewSO legal?” answers and the install description – in all eight launcher languages.
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Thank you to everyone who reported these, tested guesses and sat through “can you try one more thing” – most of the list above exists because someone took the time to tell us. Notes are back on their normal schedule from here.