Sims 3 Ambitions: Firefighter Sim Won't Use Preferred Vehicle

[lijoyner07]

My Sim reached level 10 of the Firefighter career and received a fire alarm and fire truck to work from home. Now he won't use his preferred vehicle to go shopping or visit other lots, he ONLY uses the fire truck. i've tried moving the truck into the family inventory as well as to another lot my Sim owns; he still only uses the fire truck. short of deleting the truck (it makes it easier to reach emergencies - also, cool to own), how do i fix this?

i have not modded my game in any way.

[puzzlezaddict]

@lijoyner07  Can you put it in someone else's inventory?  (I don't remember; it's been a while since I played the career.)  Or can you set the firetruck as his preferred vehicla and then reset the other car as preferred?

Also, try deleting the five cache files in your game folder in Documents while you're at it.  There's always a chance that some of the stale data in there is interfering with his decision making.  The files should be deleted regularly even in the absence of game issues.  For reference, they are:

• CASPartCache.package
• compositorCache.package
• scriptCache.package
• simCompositorCache.package
• socialCache.package

[lijoyner07]

deleted them and he's still trucking it up on the upside, the game DID load faster after deleting them.

[puzzlezaddict]

@lijoyner07  I'm sorry, I can't think of any other good way to fix the issue.  You could try selling it and buying it back in buydebug—bring up the cheats consol (crtl-shift-c) and enter "testingcheatsenabled true" without quotes, then enter "buydebug on" without quotes.  In buy mode, you'll see a question mark icon with most of the items you can't normally buy in the game.  But I'm not sure whether the firetruck would still function as a work vehicle, or if you can even buy it; be sure to use "save as" and rename the save before you try, so you have a backup save should you need to revert to it.

Another option is a bit more extreme, and I'm not sure it would work either.  You could evict the family in Edit Town, save the house to the bin, bulldoze the lot, replace the house, and move the family back in.  If you did this all in one Edit Town session, the sims would keep their jobs and relationships but lost their promised wishes and opportunities.  (Like I said, it's more extreme.)  Again, if you want to try this, make a backup save beforehand.

You might be able to get a better answer on the official Sims forums.  There are plenty of active TS3 players still posting there, and someone may have run into the same issue.

https://forums.thesims.com/en_US/categories/general-discussion-en