While editing Bridgeport and its families, I've come across this dreaded bug again; the bug that makes it so you can't switch the sims you're playing and you're stuck on one sim. This happened when I went to edit the Cook family:



Oddly, when I first selected the family, I get 7 messages in the top corner. First one was telling me Lady Cook just got a portfolio for the Stylist profession and got a promotion. Thing is, Lady Cook by default is unemployed and I never touched her (this is a clean save I started a day ago). She actually got promoted up to level 8 of the profession. I wanted to switch to the other sims, but I was stuck on Jeffrey Cook. I could bypass this by right clicking on a sim to switch them, but the portrait stayed as Jeffrey Cook, even when I dis-selected their household to someone else, I was still stuck on their household. I can edit any of the sims in CAS and give them actions, but I can't switch to anyone fully. Build/Buy mode was disabled even!

In the resulting picture above was my attempt to split up the household and re-merge them together to fix the problem (even deleted the salon to remove Lady Cook's job). This bugged it out even more. Build/Buy mode came back, but the portraits on the left are transparent and all selected, I'm still on Jeffrey's portrait despite controlling Elspeth Cook, I can't switch between the tabs of needs, relationships, etc. and hiding it only made it transparent and half there. Hovering over the family members portraits results in their name being eerily blank (but in CAS the name shows up normally and in the over world hovering the mouse over a sim shows they still have their name).

I've had this bug happen before on a new save game but with an older family that started with graduation suddenly happening for two teen sims, resulting in the bug and loss of the family (I ended up deleting them on accident). But I've never had it trigger with a fresh default sim suddenly gaining a profession and leveling up to level 8.

I'm not sure what to do now as I don't want to go back to my backup save before this happened (I actually saved a separate file with this bug to see if it was possible to fix it) as I have other families edited in it that I don't want to go back and redo all over again, especially the possibility of the bug happening again if I select the Cook family.

Is there any way around this bug at all? Any help would really be appreciated!

I've come across a similar issue before (one sim looking selected but I was playing another one, or not being able to select sims). It was due to a corrupt object in their inventory. It can be anything - in my case, it was a corrupt basegame harvestable, not even CC.

If you don't have it already, Debug Enabler allows you to clear the inventories of sims without having to select them.
(click on sim) NRaas / Debug Enabler / Options: Sim / Delete Inventory (should be towards the end of the menus)

I suggest clearing ALL the objects in their inventories, saving your game (as a copy, in case it gets..well, worse than it already is), and quitting the game. Then clear your cache files and try to reload the save with the cleared inventories.

If it still acts up, use Master Controller's Reset Everything feature, then repeat the "save game as copy, clear cache files, reload" procedure. Hopefully that will have solved it.
(click on City Hall) NRaas / Master Controller / Town / Reset Everything

If you think an object in another sim's inventory might be the problem, but you don't know which sim, MC has a feature which allows you to delete all the sims' inventories:
(click on City Hall) NRaas / Master Controller / Town / Object Stats / Inventory

Didn't know inventory items could become corrupt. Stranger is that there was nothing in anyone's inventories too... just Lady Cook's sudden job gain before I removed the Salon.

I actually went back to the save and found the bug fixed itself on its own as if it never happened (still suspicious that it could happen again though).
Thanks for the info, I'll download one of these just in case it happens again.