Neighborhood Action Plans: Sims obsessed with doing specific interactions over and over

Update

It’s no longer necessary to clean up your saves. That happens automatically now. Please see How to prevent further issue if you want to turn off NAPs

Problem

I installed the expansion pack Eco Lifestyle  and now everything seems to go wrong. Among others I have the following issues:

• Sims cook and cook and never eat up (especially white cake)
• All my furniture is disappearing. My own house as well as community lots. This leads to my restaurant being incomplete and non-functional.
• My Sims are obsessed with playing with the future cube and the lump of clay and constantly interrupt whatever they are doing to play. If I change to another family, I find tons of these objects in the Sims inventory
• NPCs can’t stop playing instruments and gather tons of them in their inventory
• Sims interrupt their interactions to do push-ups
• My Sims are flirting with everyone they see in the streets
• NPCs constantly start brawls with the neighbors.
• Sims constantly read books and mystery books are created in their inventory.

Cause

The cause isn’t clear in every case but the main cause for this are the neighborhood action plans (NAP). Apart from a few bugs, the plans seem to be very much overpowered and the pushes that make Sims do stuff are way too high.

The NAPs all have different properties that makes the NPCs do stuff and that with no limit.

The action plan Sharing is Caring for example make NPCs take your furniture on the active lot and so that soon there’s nothing left. Free Love allows it that each Sim can flirt with others without consequences and other plans make Sims cook, make music or play with the future cube and the lump of clay

Active Sims aren’t supposed to be pushed but playing rotationally can also make them engage in activities you don’t want them to, free will on or not.

• Not only the action plans for your current neighborhood are active (as it’s supposed to be) but all active action plans from every single neighborhood in all worlds. If you have all packs and with up to 4 active action plans in the same hood, it’s all of them very soon. This issue has been fixed
• NPCs Sims get applied commodities as soon as they visit a lot that has certain action plans in place. If you now switch lots without all Sims leaving, these commodities get stuck on the Sim, pushing them to do things even if the Sims are active.
• Commodities not properly removed for rotational players and possibly other scenarios like travelling
• Instruments/Future Cubes/Mystery Books and Clay being created inside the inventory. There was a bug with this before. They should only be there temporarily so Sims can use them to fulfill the need but not be made permanent in the inventory. Sims have always had an obsession with clay if there was one around so the creation might lead to use of them even if no NAP is in place.
• Excessiveness. There should probably be a longer cool down. This seems to vary depending on the NAP.
• Sharing is caring is a whole other bug cause the limitation of what’s getting stolen isn’t working correctly. As active Sims I think you can only take certain low-priced items but NPCs can take whatever they like. It’s also overly excessive
• Possible other issue with Fake news. Don’t know if that all can be accounted for by the NAP or if there’s a similar issue as the disgust one
• Herbalism has a bug that lets Sims start on a grill and then finish on a stove which leads NPCs to enter your house uninvited.

Solutions

To solve the current issues with Action Plans on existing saves, there’s a few things you can do. All of them are only temporary and involve a lot of work to clean up existing saves.

Make your own decisions which route is the best for you.

How to prevent further issues

If you’re starting a new save, it’s best to turn off NPC voting in the options. This way you can control which action plans are active or have non at all. Action plan auto-voting is in place for all neighborhoods that have households in your households (so if you favorited families in the household manager or played with them, the neighborhood they live in becomes eligible for auto-voting). Be aware that there’s another bug where you will still get messages for NAPs being put in place but it’s just a faulty message, they aren’t really in place.

If you already have existing NAPs you want to repeal you can do so by either choosing Repeal Neighborhood action plan or via cheat (testingcheats true -> Shift-Click on the mail box or the board). You do need to switch to a family that’s lives in the neighborhood to do so.