Author's Note: This is your captain speaking. We are experiencing some minor turbulence

Not the Bread but the Wine has become corrupted and aging no longer works. It's not TS3; it's just this saved game. Well, possibly it affects Zayne's game too, but I don't age that one anyway, so it's only this one that's the problem. The backup is corrupted in the same way. I tried all kinds of restarts and restores and recreating the options.ini file. I tried starting a new neighborhood with the existing households, which I selected from the library. I even reinstalled the game. Aging works fine for a brand new game with new sims from the bin, but not for the existing households from Avi's neighborhood.

That pretty much ruins it as regards the story. It's pointless if Avi lives forever and has unlimited time to achieve all her goals. She already had it way too easy, having maxed out painting and cooking in her early young adulthood, with no goals left but to make money and build stuff and crank out the paintings. But I can't just throw it away after investing this much time. It would be cheating the few people who actually read it.

The only solution I've been able to find after a long day is to start a brand new game using a fresh copy of the sims from the bin. I saved all of the key players to the bin individually, and have moved Avi and Demarco into a new Sunset Valley. Demarco's family is no more, but I don't think he'll miss them. Story progression had already moved him out. I screwed up the spelling of his last name along the way, so I'll be checking my own story frequently to remember what his name is supposed to be! Hah! I had saved the Goth, Bacheler and Bunch households, but moving them in as households won't work; they won't age. Therefore, I kept the premade versions of those families in my new town, and just aged up Mortimer, Michael and Lisa individually with cheats (though maybe I shouldn't have bothered to keep Lisa, ha!). I didn't bother to age up the siblings, and some of them may never be born this time around, but they never made it into the story, anyway.

Since I aged up the household kids with  cheats, I couldn't select traits or lifetime wishes, so some of them will have different jobs in the future. I'll let them get jobs on their own, if they will. I got Demarco his old job and rank back. There are only 4 friends that have been central to the story thus far, so it's no big deal to build their relationships back. In fact, when I switched to the Bachelor household, I found Michael already visiting the Goths on his own, and already good friends with Mortimer.


The real problem is the skills. They are lost now, and it will take a bit of time to get them back becuase that can't be cheated. I think I've lost all of Avi's paintings, too. I had all the ones that would fit hung on the walls of her house, so they saved with the house. There were still there when I started my new game, but after switching active households a bunch of times to get everybody aged up, the textures are now missing. All the paintings show a question mark. They're probably not even worth selling. She'll have to start over in every way. I know how much money she had minus the unsold paintings, and I know how much Demarco had, so I'll use the money cheat to get them their money back.

In short, it will be a while longer before I have a new chapter, and we may find that the story has taken a bit of a turn. I'm going to have to take a bit more of an active hand, too, I think.