NewSO Update 536880

Teleport: a puff of smoke where you land

• Teleporting now leaves a puff of smoke on arrival. “Teleport Here” used to just blink your Sim onto the new tile with nothing to show for it. A cloud of pale smoke now boils up from the floor where the Sim appears and thins out over about a second, so everyone on the lot can see where the magic put you. Purely visual – the teleport itself is unchanged.

Launcher: installing the game no longer gives up after 15 minutes

• Slow connections can finish the download. The game files are about 1.2 GB, and the launcher used to abandon the download at exactly 15 minutes no matter how far it had got, so anyone on a connection slower than about 11 Mbit/s saw “Download timed out after 15 minutes” every time. That cut-off is gone. The download now only fails if nothing at all arrives for two minutes, and if the connection drops it picks up where it left off instead of starting the whole file again.

Fashion Runway: Model Clothing no longer cancels itself

• The runway act finds a scene partner again. Since the Superstar runway was ported, “Model Clothing” quietly skipped its search for a second Sim, tried to hand the “Support” role to nobody, and the game threw an error that cancelled the whole act (a red X on the queue icon and the model just standing there). The search now runs: if another Sim is within reach they get pushed “Support” and join the show, and if nobody is around the model walks the runway alone instead of stopping.
• Behind the scenes, the runway and the shared “fame” logic it uses were calling several Sims 1 routines by number that mean something else entirely in TSO (a relationship balloon, a “sit down” social, “turn around”). Those calls are now answered the way Superstar intended, and the engine no longer crashes an interaction that tries to push onto a Sim that is not there.

Volleyball: no more standing there holding the ball

• A serve no longer gets stuck. If your opponent was still walking back to their spot when the next point started, the game could quietly decide they would never be ready, and the server stood in the serve pose with the ball in hand until someone cancelled. The player walking back now counts as ready the moment they arrive, and if a serve still cannot go out after about a minute the court resets to “waiting for players” and the game restarts by itself instead of freezing.
• Players who leave mid-game no longer haunt the court. Someone who logged out, got disconnected, or was on the court when the server restarted used to keep their spot on the team forever, so the next game either never started or froze on the serve. The court now drops anyone who is no longer actually playing within a second.
• Until this update reaches you: if a Sim is frozen serving, have that Sim cancel Play (click the volleyball icon in their queue) and both players click Play again.

Egg trays (and every other farm crop) pay what your skill earns again

• Selling a tray of eggs pays by your Creativity, all the way up the ladder. Since May every tray sold for §1,450 no matter how skilled your Sim was, because the game was quietly reading “Creativity 10 or less” as “Creativity 20.99 or less”. A Sim with Creativity 20 now gets the full §3,500, exactly as the chicken-coop guide has always said (§850 / §1,450 / §2,150 / §2,875 / §3,500 at 0-5 / 5-10 / 10-15 / 15-19 / 19+).
• The same fix applies to every Garden Time crop and craft item that prices by skill: beans, carrots, lettuce, tomatoes and their Super versions, grapes, elderberries, butter, beeswax, honey, golden thread, the butter churn, the nectar press and the wine tokens all had their top tiers capped the same way.
• Craft tables that ask for “skill 10” can actually be used at skill 10. The candle workbench, the crystal craft table and the flower crafting table were demanding a fully maxed skill instead. If you were told you lacked the skill while sitting on 19 or 20, this was why.
• Resident caretakers stop filling pet bowls on lots with no pets. They were topping up the bowl, watching the food spoil, and topping it up again all day. If you thought something invisible was eating on your lot, it was this.

Launcher: install no longer crashes on a leftover download, or sits at “99%”

• No more “99% forever”. The download bar counted bytes as they arrived from the internet, not as they reached your disk. On a fast connection the last stretch of the 1 GB client sat in memory and the bar froze on 99% while it was written out, even though nothing was wrong. The bar now tracks what is actually on disk, says “Download complete, checking file…” when the transfer is done, and the extraction step counts files as it unpacks instead of showing one fixed number until it finishes.
• A genuinely dead download now retries instead of hanging. If no data arrives for two minutes the launcher gives up on that attempt and tries again.

• **The launcher no longer dies with “A JavaScript error occurred in the main process” when it cannot write its download file.** If an earlier install was interrupted, the half-finished `client.zip` in the launcher’s temp folder could be left read-only or still held by another program (antivirus, a second launcher window). Starting the install again would then crash the launcher outright at “0 MB out of 0 MB”. The launcher now clears that leftover first, and if it still cannot use the file it downloads to a fresh temporary location instead.
• If the download file really cannot be written, you get a readable message telling you to close other launcher windows and check antivirus / Controlled Folder Access, instead of a raw error box.

Launcher news titles show dashes and quotes properly

• News headlines in the launcher no longer show codes like `–` in place of punctuation. Post titles with an en dash, curly quotes or an ampersand were reaching the launcher’s news panel with the punctuation still encoded, so the headline read “NewSO Update – NewTool” instead of “NewSO Update – NewTool”. Headlines (and the “Open in a browser” tooltip) now decode those characters the same way the article excerpts always did. Ships in the next launcher update.

Residents put things down before doing anything else

• Resident Sims no longer go about their day with an object glued to their hand. A resident who picked up a laptop (or anything else Sims carry) kept right on going – hitting the bong, eating, even climbing into bed – with the laptop still stuck in their hand, because nothing ever made them let go of it first. Residents now notice a full hand the moment they are free, put the object down before choosing what to do next, and if the normal put-down does not work they simply set it on the floor beside them. Your own Sim was always refused most actions while carrying something; residents now follow the same rule.

Staff commands stay out of City Chat

• Staff commands are no longer broadcast to the whole city. If a staff member typed a command such as `/makefast` while the City Chat tab was selected, the text was sent out as an ordinary message for every player to read. Commands typed there now run on the property exactly as they would from the lot chat tab, and the city server refuses to relay anything that starts with a slash, so a stray command can never appear in City Chat again.

Residents sleep the right way round

• Resident Sims no longer sleep with their head at the foot of the bed. When a resident went to bed from the foot end of a double bed, they lay down back to front – pillows at their feet, head hanging off the end (spotted on Magic Skills University). A player clicking that same spot was always steered to the proper side of the bed; residents were not. They are now, so they climb in and sleep exactly as your own Sim does. The same correction applies to anything else a resident uses that is made of several tiles, and to Sims driven by staff tools.

Your Sim stands on the mini golf green now, not in it

• Grown-up Sims no longer sink into the mini golf greens. Every adult putting animation was planted about a shin’s depth below the ground, so from the moment your Sim stepped up to the ball until they walked away, their feet and lower legs were swallowed by the green. All eleven of those animations have been lifted back onto the floor. Children were never affected – their version of the animation was correct all along, which is how we finally tracked this one down.

A new lot category: Magic

• Magic is now its own property category, with its own icon. Magic Town venues no longer have to masquerade as community lots or as a 24/7 welcome lot – the lot page shows a wizard hat instead of the town hall, so you can tell at a glance what kind of place you are looking at.

• Magic lots are always open. They stay up around the clock whether or not the owner or a roommate is logged in, exactly like the other 24/7 venues, so you can turn up whenever you like.

• Anything can be built there. Objects are not restricted to a single category on a magic lot, the object budget is raised to match the other public venues, and roommates count as donators the way they do on a community lot.

• They still show up when you filter for Community lots on the city map, so nothing you already know how to find has moved – magic lots simply sit in that list alongside the community properties.

• Only staff can set a lot to Magic, and a lot that is already Magic can only be changed back by staff.

Themed lots can now be stuck at night, and can lose their roads

• Some lots will look different from the rest of the city from now on. Admins can set a property to render at permanent night, so it stays dark and lamplit no matter what time it is everywhere else. Nothing about the lot actually changes – your Sims keep the normal day, so sleeping, working, bills and everyone’s routines all run on the usual clock. It only looks like night.

• A lot can also have its road and pavement removed, inside and outside the property line, so a themed build is not interrupted by tarmac running past it. Any floors you laid yourself in that strip are left exactly where they are.

• Both are set per lot by staff, and only a handful of lots will ever use them – expect to see them on event and themed properties rather than on residences.

New in Build mode: ‘Cottingley’ Fairy Lights (Hidden Post)

• The same string lights, with the posts taken away. A second version of the ‘Cottingley’ Fairy Lights that draws only the strung lights – the wooden post and its base are gone, so the lights appear to float between whatever you have hung them from. Everything else works exactly like the original: place two of them a short distance apart and the lights string themselves between the pair, and they light up at night.

• Handy for running lights along a pergola, a fence line or a row of columns, where the stock post looked like clutter you did not ask for.

• Two things to know before you buy. A hidden post that has no partner nearby draws nothing at all, which means it is invisible and cannot be clicked – so place them in pairs, and if you are unsure, drop the normal posted version first and swap it out once you like the run. Hidden posts only string to other hidden posts; they will not connect to the original posted lights.

• Find it in Build mode beside the original, for 340 simoleons.

New in Build mode: the Gaily Gilded Gypsy Gate, a door that only goes one way

• A gilded gypsy door that Sims can only walk through in one direction. It looks exactly like the Gaily Gilded Gypsy Door you already know, but it only lets Sims through the way it faces when you place it. Try to come back the other way and it will not let you past. Rotate it in Build mode to choose which way is “through”.

• Handy for charging admission to a room and still letting people leave, for building a maze nobody can backtrack out of, or for keeping a queue moving in one direction. Its pie menu has a Building Tips option that explains the idea.

• Find it in Build mode with the rest of the doors, for 1,000 simoleons. The one-way behaviour is the same as the “End Passant” one-way door – this one just wears the gypsy woodwork.

Sims no longer sink into the ground next to a Magic Growth crystal

• Standing by a crystal buried your Sim’s feet. All seven Magic Growth crystals – Spook, Levitate, Trick, Hot Foot, Shock, Teleport and Extinguish – were drawn slightly too close to the camera, so they painted over the legs of anyone standing beside them. Your Sim looked like they were sunk into the ground. The crystals now sit at the correct depth at every growth stage, from freshly planted to full size, and from all four rotations and all three zoom levels.

• Newly planted crystals were the worst of the three stages, which is why gardens full of young crystals looked the most broken.

Chemistry Sets no longer stick to one potion color

• **Potion tables used to set their potion color once and keep making that same color forever; now they roll a random color every time.**

Servo no longer freezes lots while replanting flowers

• **Servo tending TS1-style flowers (Tulips, Wildflowers, and similar) could freeze the whole lot and crash connected clients.** Replanting a flower queued an action that Servo could never actually finish, so he kept trying the same flower forever until the game’s runaway-loop guard stepped in and reset him. Servo now replants correctly and moves on. This is the same family of bug already fixed for watering; replanting was the one path that had slipped through.