Sims not appearing when travelling to other countries.

[Alexandria_]

The other day, I had my sims in Egypt. They were attaining a level 3 Visa, and then bought a vacation home. However, on the last few days of the vacation, three of the sims disappeared.
I went back to an earlier save and everything was fine, and I got to level 3 again and built my vacation home again.

However, now when I try to go to any of the countries, none of the sims appear at all (physcially or in the side panel). I cannot view friends, build, buy, change floor levels or anything. In fact, the only thing I can do it view the map and pause time.

I've tried resetting the sims and the game with no fix. I was wondering if anyone knows what to do in this situation to get it working again?

[TallStar]

As far as I know, it's just a glitch. 
The best thing I can say is to save before traveling, and then reload the game if you have to. I know reloading can fix a lot.

[Alexandria_]

Reloading doesn't seem to be helping this time around, which is a shame because it's my dynasty game, and I'd really like to travel.
But thank you for the suggestion.

[Audren]

Do you have an earlier save? That's the only thing I could do when the bug happened to me. It seems fairly common.

[Serena Darrin]

I don't know if you're still looking for a solution, but I found this on the official forums.  It worked for me when I had this problem.

The first thing you can try is go to your savegame folder..

My Documents\Electronic Arts\The Sims 3\Saves\<savegame>

Find the .nhd files for both Egypt and China and delete them. This will reset those countries but since your sim hasn't traveled to them successfully it won't be a problem.

I did this when my traveler sim didn't appear in Egypt, and it worked.  There are two files, an .nhd file and a .package file for each country. I deleted them both.

I don't know if this resets anything -- that was my first trip to Egypt.  I did notice that I lost all my Ancient Coins, however, so this might reset all your quests in that country. 

Hope that helps!

[Tfaircloth]

This happened to me yesterday! I thought I did something wrong. But I deleted my save file, and changed my backup file to my main file. I really want to send my sims to china, but I'm afraid if I go back it will happen again.

[shibamistress]

I'm bumping this old thread because I am having the same problem.  Just got WA and the first couple of times I sent a Sim somewhere (China, two different sims and different game files) I had no problem.

Tried today in a third save file and my sims don't appear at all. Not in France of Egypt. 

I'm up to date on all the game patches.  I kind of figured this problem would be fixed by now given how old WA is, but I guess not.  I do run some nrass mods including story progression and master controller. 

Any thoughts?  Is this a known issue?

[Vinyl]

From what I understand some of the original WA bugs seem to have come back with the University expansion and corresponding patch.  I hope it's fixed quickly - my game used to suffer from them terribly.  I've seen anecdotes of the same missing sim/other issues happening when sims go to University, so I'd caution everyone who sends a sim out of town to be extra careful!

What I used to do was always save before calling for a vacation. Most of the time the sims showed up in the destination, but if they didn't I'd quit without saving, re-launch Sims 3, re-load the save, and try sending them again. I never had an issue with the missing sims twice in a row.

However, if you start getting missing sims at home after travelling, that's a different bug altogether.  My families used to bug out after another household member was added (mainly babies), and the worst part is it could happen days or weeks after the trip.  Sims pictures would start vanishing from the side panel, they couldn't be controlled, they'd disappear from the lot, and eventually the file would be too corrupted to save, load, or play.  I had a workaround if it was caught early enough (move the family to an empty lot, save the house to the library, save the family to the library, delete the current house and family, replace them both from the bin in their original lot).  If I tried that too late, though, it didn't work.

My best advice is to have rotating saves (save1, save2, save3, etc), save both before travelling and before coming home, make sure you don't save over your departure or return save until you're sure everything is working fine, and until another patch is introduced to bear in mind that sims who travel might pick up some bugs along the way.

[Ricalynn]

If you use twallan's mods, he has one that will help fix this issue.  It might be Error Trap or Traveler.  But it can prevent the issue from ever happening.

[shibamistress]

I guess I'll go with the saves which I do anyway, but still, need to be more mindful of it.   Mine, so far, is Sims not appearing at the destination.

I do actually Traveler, and wanted to have it, and still do, but the problem is, once I added that mod, my game has been really buggy.  I had the Save 16 error for first time ever, and last night, after spending hours creating a family, the game just froze (oh, how I wish there was a way to save while in CAS!) so I lost the whole family.

It may not be the Traveler mod.  I also added one other master controller mod at the same time, but I do suspect I'm having some problem with one of the mods I added, given everything was fine before I added them (except for WA not working I mean).  Tonight I'll experiment with running without the newly added mods to see what is going on.

eta:  I did figure out what was causing some of the problems (freezing/crashing/save errors).  I had installed the wrong version of the traveler mod because I was confused by the patch levels.  Still don't know if having the correct traveler mod will fix the problem, but I'll try that next!

[Ladyfish]

I am experiencing this problem, as well - my sims do not appear when travelling to other countries.  I don't use mods, and I can't since I'm participating in challenges.  The bug affects all save files, whether new or existing, whether my sims have traveled to a country successfully in the past or not.   The only thing I haven't tried is reloading the entire app, as that takes so much time and I'm not convinced it will resolve the problem.  That is next on my list, though, as I am out of ideas!  I keep hoping that EA will put out a patch to fix WA soon!   

[hippiechickwithcat]

Not only did I have the SIms not appear after the country loaded, when I went back home they won't travel at ALL now. I clock on the cell phone or computer to get them to go- and nothing happens. They either just close the computer laptop lid, or put the phone away. I tried to move them  and then try again, not working. I guess I'll try to clear the saved cache idea next. SIGH
 

[enchantedwolf]

I had these problems, too, and they actually kept me from playing with WA for over a year. Then it started happening with UNI. I began using Twallan's Traveler mod and have successfully traveled many, many times now and UNI works too! I highly recommend it. It's the perfect fix for these problems.