Properties that got stuck at 25% when you tried to enter
- Joining a property could hang forever at 25%, on “Property joined successfully. Requesting property data…”. Waiting didn’t help, and neither did retrying – once a property went bad, every new arrival hung on it, while everyone already inside carried on playing normally.
- The property was fine. What had failed was the one-off snapshot of the lot that the server builds and hands to each arriving player. If that snapshot ever failed to build, the server quietly marked itself as still busy building it and never tried again – so nobody could be let in for the rest of that property’s life, and nothing anywhere recorded a problem.
- The server now recovers from a failed snapshot instead of latching, retries on the next tick, and writes the failure to the log so it can be traced. A stuck snapshot is also given a 30 second deadline, after which the server starts a fresh one rather than blocking arrivals.
Two new outfits, and custom clothing that actually renders
- Two women’s outfits from the zen urban skins collection have been added to Create-A-Sim and to daywear clothing racks: a swimsuit and a high-fashion piece, each in light, medium and dark tones.
- While adding them we found that the four custom outfits added previously were never visible in game. Each one pointed at a body mesh that doesn’t exist, so the game loaded the outfit, failed to find anything to put on the Sim, and quietly dropped it. They need rebuilding – that’s a separate job, but the tooling that caused it has been fixed so it can’t happen again.
- Custom clothing no longer risks the city server. A new outfit that happened to collide with an existing one used to crash the server on startup rather than complain, and an outfit the server didn’t recognise threw an error instead of politely refusing the Sim. Both now report the problem and carry on.
- Clothing racks can be extended without touching original game files. NewSO ships its own price list alongside the one the game came with instead of replacing it, so reinstalling or verifying your game files can no longer wipe out custom clothing.
Your resident NPCs were dying at work
- Residents could die. Really die – grim reaper, the lot goes quiet, and your caretaker is a ghost who stops cooking, cleaning and greeting until something revives them.
- Nobody could work out why, because there was nothing to see: no fire, no warning, full motives. The reports that did come in described a Sim who looked like they were burning, on a lot with nothing burning on it.
- The culprit was repair work. Fixing a broken TV, lamp or appliance has always carried a small chance of electrocuting the Sim doing it, and that chance never drops to zero no matter how good they are with Mechanical – some objects don’t even check. That’s fine for a player, who chooses to pick up the toolbox. Repairs are a resident’s job, all day, every day, so for them it was only ever a matter of time.
- Residents are still mortal, and we want them to be – a resident who can’t die isn’t a character on your lot, they’re furniture. What we’ve taken away is the certainty. A resident now usually shrugs off a shock that would have killed them: they drop the repair, pick themselves up and try again. Sometimes they won’t, and that’s the point.
- Repair-capable residents also now have maxed-out Mechanical skill, so shocks are rarer to begin with.
- Moderators can still use the admin electrocute command on a resident when they mean to, and it works every time.
Magic portraits no longer vanish when you place them
- The four animated Makin’ Magic portraits in Decorative – Agnes Elizabeth Steadman, August J. Stuffiman IV, Leslie Giggham Fluttersbeak and Doctor Sebastian Hyde – took your money and then disappeared the moment they were placed.
- The catalog was pointing at the Magic Town gift-shop rack that hands those portraits out, not at the paintings themselves, and that rack deletes itself on a home lot. The listings now sell the real paintings, which hang on the wall and animate as intended.
Property chat channels no longer hijacked by City Chat
- Fixed the first custom text channel you create on a property acting as City Chat — anything you typed into it was broadcast city-wide, and City Chat messages showed up under your channel’s tab.
- Fixed creating a new text channel after deleting one overwriting an existing channel instead of taking the empty slot.
- Fixed the “New” button disappearing after 3 custom channels — all 4 slots are usable again.
Invisible dog-dig leftovers wrecking a lot’s Room score and blocking build mode
If a lot had a pile of leftover “dog dig” test markers stuck on it, they were invisible, unreachable, and impossible to get rid of — you couldn’t click them, the maid couldn’t clean them, and the Servo ignored them. A stack of them would:
- pin the Room need bar at fully red no matter how much decor you added, and
- stop you placing floor tiles, pools, or ponds on the tiles they were sitting on.
These markers are only ever meant to exist for a split second while a pet works out whether a hole will fit, and then delete themselves. Any that got left behind are now cleared automatically when the lot loads, so an affected lot fixes itself after its next restart.
Servo: no more sharing your shower, and no more standing around between jobs
Two things Sierra spotted while watching her Servo work.
You could shower at the same time as Servo. If you clicked “Take a Shower” while Servo was on his way over to clean or repair that same shower, both of you ended up using it at once. Servo’s chores were checking “is anyone using this?” when the job was handed out, but never again once he actually arrived — so anything you claimed during his walk over was ignored. Chores now re-check the object the moment the work starts, and Servo quietly moves on to something else instead of climbing in with you. The same fix covers caretakers and other hired help.
Servo stood motionless for a minute at a time, and the hat kept going on and off. Every repair pops up two confirmation boxes. You never saw them, because they belong to Servo — and Servo has nobody to click OK, so he just stood there until each one gave up on its own, a full minute apiece. That’s why a single light took him well over two minutes, why he looked frozen while “fixing”, and why the hat seemed to cycle every time he finally moved on to the next thing.
Servo (and hired caretakers) now answer their own prompts straight away. A repair that took about two and a half minutes now takes around twenty-five seconds, and he stays animated while he works.
Your resident NPCs will feed the pets now
CatDaddyBoo asked for this: Chad and the other residents should feed the parrots.
They never did, and they never could — nothing in the resident behaviour code had any idea pets existed, except for the rules that keep them out of the cat bed. Meanwhile a parrot is on a quiet death timer. Its food dish holds five servings, the bird works through them on its own, and when the counter runs out it dies. Only someone who lives on the property can refill it, so if you stopped logging in for a while, the bird was gone and there was nobody on the lot allowed to do anything about it.
Residents now check the pets as part of their normal day. When a dish is actually empty — not just “there’s a parrot over there”, the game asks the bird itself whether it needs feeding — the nearest resident walks over and fills it. It sits above housework in their priorities, because a dirty floor can wait and a starving pet can’t, and it’s off the list while they’re asleep.
This covers everything that eats: parrots and cockatoos, the small and large bird cages, fish bowls, koi ponds, iguana tanks, turtles, guinea pigs, the ant farm, and cat and dog food bowls (that last one buys pet food, same as it does when you click it yourself).
The CowPlant and the carnivorous table plant are deliberately not on that list. They also have a “Feed” button. What they are fed is a Sim.
Five more fixes that were finished but never actually shipped. While sorting out the cubicle, we found the same problem had happened to a batch of other repairs: written, tested, then left sitting somewhere the game never picked them up. They’re all in now.
- Texas Hold’em showed your losses with the wrong sign, so a bad hand read like a win.
- The Oblique vending machine behaved incorrectly and, worse, lit up rooms like a lamp. Machines already placed will stop glowing the next time their lot loads.
- The phone’s “hire a gardener” prompt still quoted the old every-three-days schedule. Gardeners have visited daily for a while now; the text finally agrees. (Separate from the NPC Controller prompt, which was reworded earlier.)
- Cancelling a newspaper mid-read made your sim drop it on the floor instead of putting it back on an end table, every single time. It’ll put the paper away properly now.
Nothing here is new work – it’s four to seven days of finished repairs that never reached you. We’ve changed how we track this so it stops happening.