Custom Built Dorm Only Allows One Household

[benjamin2010]

Hello, I'm having trouble with a dorm I built for University. I have a nice 12 room dormitory, and it works okay when I just move one student in. Other NPCs move into the remaining rooms.

However, if i want to move another student into the dorm, it asks me "Do you want to join the #B household with the #A household?" I say no, and so then party B isn't moved in at all.

I did use the Myne door to separate all the dorm rooms, and they only have one door. The rooms are all 4 squares by 4 squares.

I have checked the list of "required dorm items" and they are all there. The only thing I might not have done right here was adding the sprinklers - I found them while I was playing as my college student (#A who did successfully move in) and put them in the kitchen using moveobjects on. Whoops, probably shouldn't have done that...

But, I moved her out, and put the lot back to residential. I deleted and re-added those sprinklers and double checked my list. I thought maybe since I didn't put furnishings in the rooms that it might not recognize them, so I put one bed in every room. But still, nothing!

This is my first time creating my own custom dormitory. Has anyone else had this experience?

[DJ.]

Khm... a dorm is not an apartment.

The "Would you like to combine the two households?" message is actually "Do you want to move this household in?". So, when you clicked No, nothing happened.

You can only have (up to four) different households in Apartment lots. Not dormitories. When you do combine households, the NPC dormies will move out to make room for the new Sims.

Sprinklers are not required IIRC. I just dumped a fire alarm in my custom dorm and it worked like a charm - the cafeteria guy literally burnt food every two days.

[Peni Griffin]

It would appear to be your first time using a dormitory at all, if you didn't realize that. It's always a good idea to play a little (in a test neighborhood if you don't want to mess up your real one) with a new feature before creating one yourself, so you know how they're intended to work, and what features/bugs were incorporated in the ones the designers built, so you can build a superior one.

[Ghost sdoj]

Note that you probably do want your rooms furnished. If you are moving your own sims in, they are going to want the beds, desks, etc. for themselves, and anything you put in ahead of time is something that they won't need to use their hard earned cash for.

And a sprinkler is just a way to get the cow mascots and other pranksters to make puddles which nobody cleans up, unless you are very creative about how you place it. (Ok, yes, it does also put out fires...) But it's not as urgent to have one if you have a fire alarm.

[benjamin2010]

I have played Uni before, actually. Yes, it has been a while, but I have had many a sim student live in dormitories and not had these issues that I am having with my own created dorm.

The dormitory does not say in parenthesis next to the name "12 rooms available" like the other premade dorms do. This was my first sign that something wasn't right. I can pick up and buy/delete for other dorm rooms besides the one my sim has already claimed. In fact I can buy, move, delete anything in the building without moveobjects on.

I do not want to join the households together as the game suggests I do. I thought in the premade Maxis dormitories that each college student would be its own playable "household" and not a shared one (like if you moved 3 students in a house that they shared - then you would be playing all of them together at once, and in my previous experience the dorms did not work that way; you control one student household at a time even if you have multiple students living in that same dormitory).

[joandsarah77]

As DJ said, it's not an apartment. You only get separate playables in an apartment. When you play a dorm say with three playables moved in, you play all three at the same time. There is no way to separate it so you only play sim 1 this play session, sim 2 next play session and sim 3 next time. My gosh Uni would take forever. If you want to play them separately you will have to move sim two, and sim three to separate dormitories or into houses by themselves.

[benjamin2010]

:faceslap:

Wow, I must be daft beyond repair. I was so wrong about how the dormitories worked! I hate the mechanics of it though, and I wish they did work like how the Apartments worked. Sorry for being so silly about all this, I know you all were trying to point out the flaws in my thought processes lol

[joandsarah77]

Well.... :lol: Eh, we all make blunders along the way. You might actually be able to play uni as an apartment if you have the base hood uni hacks. I think they are over at insim or simbiology, where you can have YA in the base hood. If you use that I don't see why each playable YA couldn't be in an apartment. I've never tried building an apartment in a uni hood, so I can't say if that would work or not.

[Peni Griffin]

There are people on here who've used apartments in University hoods, and apparently problems don't arise (beyond those of paying rent) unless an apartment house built in a University hood is subsequently placed in a regular hood, at which point the inhabitants get semester timers instead of normal lifebars and everything weird as heck. And of course there's University-in-Base-Hood hacks.

I have no idea how you managed to play separate households in the same dorm before, Benjamin, unless you switched universes and a parallel you is now going: "WTF? Since when do dorms work like apartments?" This sort of thing happens to me all the time, though it's usually not as extreme.

[joandsarah77]

unless an apartment house built in a University hood is subsequently placed in a regular hood, at which point the inhabitants get semester timers instead of normal lifebars and everything weird as heck.

Oh interesting, I shall have to try that just to see it one day.

[Ghost sdoj]

If you ignore playables, they still go to class, study, wander into your room to use the computer while you are trying to sleep, invite the drama professor in, etc.

So it can sometimes feel as though you have them in a separate household, I guess?