NewSO Update 536879

Residents feed your pets, and actually keep up with the mess

• Resident NPCs now feed pets. They never did – not once, on any lot. If you kept a parrot, a fish bowl, an iguana, birds, a guinea pig or a food bowl and you were offline, nothing on the lot would fill the dish and the animal eventually died. Your resident now checks the pets’ food and fills it, ranked above cleaning (a hungry animal beats a dirty floor) but below greeting a guest at the door.

• Only the real refill counts. A parrot’s “Feed Cracker” is just a chat with the bird and puts no food in the dish, so it doesn’t count as feeding – and nothing that isn’t actually a pet can be “fed” by a resident, whatever it says on its menu.

• Residents clean much faster. They used to pick up exactly one piece of mess per minute and stop entirely overnight, so on a busy lot the trash piled up faster than they could ever clear it. They now work through a few things per round, and will tidy overnight when nothing else needs them – though sleeping, greeting guests and anything a visitor needs still come first.

• They also no longer lose interest in cleaning. Doing the same chore repeatedly used to count against it until the resident wandered off to do something more fun with the lot still filthy.

• If you want a resident to leave the pets alone, pet care can be turned off per resident the same way cooking and cleaning already can.

Egg trays can no longer be sold in buy mode for nothing

• A tray of eggs can no longer be sold from buy mode. Picking a tray up in buy mode and selling it destroyed it and paid you $0, because a tray has no catalog price – so a tray worth up to $3,500 could vanish for nothing with no warning. Selling one that way is now refused outright, and the tooltip tells you to use Move to Inventory instead.

• Move to Inventory still works normally, so you can still pick a tray up off the lot and put it away. To turn a tray into money, use the “Sell Eggs” option on the tray itself.

• For the record, since it came up: the price a tray sells for is set by your sim’s Creativity skill, not Cooking – $850 at 0-5, $1,450 at 6-10, $2,150 at 11-15, $2,875 at 16-19 and $3,500 at 20.

The Green Man lamp and door work properly

• The Green Man Lamp is a lamp again. Clicking it only offered “View” and “Salvage” even though it lit the room. It now has the full set of lamp options – Turn On, Turn Off, Repair, and the Manage menu with Enable Auto, Disable Auto and Set Colour – the same as every other lamp.

• The Green Man Door opens and closes. Salvage was the only thing you could do with it. It now has Set Permissions, View Permissions and Building Tips like any other door, plus the owner-only Force Open and Force Closed.

• Both had shipped with an empty stub menu of their own, which quietly hid the real one the game would otherwise have given them.

Pets can play, snuggle and sniff each other

• Pets now interact with each other. Two dogs will play-wrestle, snuggle up and greet each other nose-to-tail, and cats will play-wrestle too – the full animated routines from the base game, which had been sitting in the game’s files unused since pets were added. Until now the only things a pet could do to another pet were pounce, hiss and fight.

• If you are playing as a pet yourself, Play, Snuggle and Sniff appear on the pie menu when you click another cat or dog, so you can start them yourself rather than waiting for your pet to feel like it.

• Snuggling and sniffing are between dogs; cats only have the play-wrestle. That is how the base game’s animations were made – there is no cat-to-cat snuggle to give them.

• A pet only starts a social when it actually wants company, so a pet whose needs are all full will keep to itself.

Mirrored sweeping staircases animate again

• **”12 Opposite Steps in Stone” and the mirrored “Downstairs UpStairs” now play the stair-climb animation.** Both mirrored staircases asked for a set of animations that had never shipped, so Sims glided up and down them without ever taking a step. They now use the sweeping-stair animation, the same one their un-mirrored twins already used.

“Missing String!!!” on the bong, hookah and bubble blower is fixed

• Using the Big Ass Bong, the Hookah or the Fiery Red Bubble Blower and picking an emote from the group menu showed “Missing String!!!” instead of the emote’s name. The Hookah and Bubble Blower now name all sixteen emotes correctly, in every language, and the Big Ass Bong just says “Blaze”. The three objects had been shipped with their emote name list missing since import.

Missing interaction names now say where they came from

• When an object’s action-queue entry shows “Missing String!!!”, it now names the object, the text it was looking for, and your game language, so a screenshot is enough for us to track it down. The long-running report of this on the Big Ass Bong’s “Blaze It” should now identify itself the next time it happens.

Bills and Achievement Bonus swapped buttons

• The money button now opens Bills. Clicking the round $ button at the bottom of the control panel – or your simoleon total right next to it – opens your bills ledger, which is what most people expected it to do. It works from the city map as well as on a lot.

• Achievement Bonus moved to the house panel. It is now the fourth button along the top row of the house panel, where Bills used to be.