I know many people have things like playable schools, hospitals, etc. but I also know many people play with strict rotations. How do you combine both?

I've got immersive institutions like these in my game but my rotations are really loose. I want to try stricter rotations for a while, where each household gets played a certain amount of days, but how would I go about doing this?

For example, my hospital is actually a residential lot. When someone gets sick, I switch over to the hospital, teleport in the sick Sim and keep them there until they're healthy. Of course, in a stricter rotation this would cause the hospital household to be out of sync.

I'm curious and would like to hear how you do it!

I mean, I would think for the hospital you just play the hospital lot in sync with everyone else, regardless of whether or not there are any patients there.

I'd play it in the rotation as being whatever lot you have it set up as. For mine, I've numbered each lot by the number in SimPE and put it on the Sync Timer as that with the family name.. (I've done some heavy editing on that, BTW, to the text output.)

I play a lot from 6 am to 6 am every single rotation so nobody gets overlooked. All you would have to do is figure out where the hospital fits in and play it that way.

At least I'd play it that way.

What about something like a school? Do the kids go to regular school most of the time unless you're playing the school household?

It makes sense that short, 24-hour rotations would wirk well for things like the hospital, I hadn't considered that!

24 hour rotations are easiest for keeping everything synced, but it can get annoying to have to switch every day. I usually have weekly rotations. It's only really an issue for college, and I have solved this by having my students move to small boarding houses in a subhood where they can stay a couple days until their age syncs up with the rest of the neighborhood. It's basically a short vacation after college.

You could do a similar thing with the hospital. Here at least, it's common for longer illnesses to finish with a medical retreat, where you can fully recover while still being supervised by doctors who will help you adjust to things that have changed. An apartment building with some nice rooms and a communal wellness area might work for that.

From what I have seen of active school playing, the household of the one in charge of the school (teacher, principal, whatever) is the one you play the active school, using Simlogical's school bell and all that stuff. And any further household, the kids are off to participate in the typical school bus delivered "rabbit hole" school, so to speak. They are in school, just not actively playing it in each household.

Have you watched any of AniBat's Pleasantview series on YouTube? She plays an immersive hood in one-day rotations, with one family being the "owner" of each community lot, and that lot only played during the owner's day. All of the other Sims who work there are teleported in. Then when their households are played, they just go to work using the carpool. This is similar to what CatMuto is describing, but maybe watching a few of her videos will give you a good idea of how it works for her. She goes into a lot of detail about all the mods she uses to make it work.

When I play rotations, I usually play weekly rotations. For Uni, I play two semesters in a row, since each semester is 3 days and so two semesters is close enough to a full week. I don't worry about the extra days lost. Similarly, if my sims need a few more days after graduation to wrap up parties and such, I don't worry about that either, and either take as much time as I need or just send sims home as soon as the semester is over, because, technically, the post graduation period is a part of their rotation and they're even short a day. It all works out in the end and I don't worry about keeping sims' ages exact.

While I do like weekly rotations (and can fit a school round into the rotation quite nicely), I am looking to switch to something shorter like a one day rotation. I am worried about it being too short, but I think simmers that play one day rotations make good use of community lot time. I think the benefits of a one day rotation is that everything is in sync and sims can sort of do events together, or concurrently. So let's say I'm in Pleasantview and Brandi is pregnant. Well, I can throw a baby shower while I'm playing her, but by the time I get to someone else in the rotation, the pregnancy is over. So if I wanted to have Dustin visit his mom and help out around the house during her pregnancy, I'd better remember to do that while I'm playing Brandi's household, you see? Whereas with a daily rotation, when I'm playing Dina, she can take her best friend out on a spa day as a baby shower gift. And then on Dustin's turn, he can go shopping and pick up a gift for his new sibling, so that the next time he's over there, he's got something ready. It just seems a bit more immersive, which is why I'm looking to change things up. But both rotation styles are completely valid--you just have to try out what works for you and what you like best. I will say that if you have a really big hood, or a large population, shorter rotations might be better because it allows you to get to everyone faster, and touch each household sooner.

That said, I've played weekly rotations for a really long time and I have liked it a lot. I think the best way to describe what I like about it is the timing and sense of balance you get. With a weekly rotation, I can get in a groove, and playing a household, I feel I really get a good chuck of time to spend with each sim in the household. I don't really use cheats anymore and my sims don't always use a lot of magic and aspiration rewards, or even career rewards. At this point in my gameplay, I'm making skilling and earning money harder for my sims and so things take longer. Weekly rotations lets me tend to my sims' needs and have them skill, while still leaving me time to focus on relationships and story. I don't feel rushed, in other words. And I also don't feel like I'm leaving a household too soon, that I didn't get a chance to do anything; I've got time to spend with everyone in the household, at a comfortable pace. This is especially true if I have several sims or kids in a household. School and jobs can take up a lot of a sim day. So it's nice to always have weekends in my rotation. I don't worry about a sim getting missed because I usually have plenty of time to spend with everyone. And then I can take my time figuring out what to do with a sim, if I don't have a set story. I can play them for a few days, see what wants they roll, take them out to a few places, and not feel like I have to turn aging off to keep them in sync while I figure out what they want to do. On the other hand, it can be a slog to play a whole week if I don't like a household or don't have much interest in a sim, but to combat that, I try not to have households with just one sim and I break up the week and play other households in between if I really find it boring.

But back to what I like--I like how weekly rotations sync with weather. It can take a few days to really see the changes in a season, and that's also why I play seven day seasons. This makes it easy to tell which households I haven't played yet from the hood view (because households I haven't played are in the last season), but then when I'm playing, I see the cumulative effects of the weather. I get a few good snowstorms and thunderstorms and I see the effects of the season on each household. (Not that you won't get that in a one day rotation.)

At the end of all the main households in the hood, that's when I usually play institutions like my school (I haven't had a hospital yet), and when I play uni. This gives me a variety of gameplay, and again I can take my time playing in a different style, with a different focus. I play these schools long enough to enjoy the unique gameplay, but not so long that I get sick of it, if that makes sense.

It's funny, while I was writing this, I was realizing that one of the reasons why I was looking to shake things up was I wanted to find a way to play holidays and town events, so I was leaning towards a one day rotation. But I don't see a reason why I couldn't do both, and just introduce one-day holiday rotations in between my Rounds. So I guess this thread helped me, too.

I could never do 24h rotational super strict, that takes away the fun for me. I don't run playable schools, if I did I would do as above poster suggested in that from the kids household they disappear off with the schoolbus, and then the school household they are teleported in during the right hours. I do play immersively in that households interact with each other constantly and play roles in storylines being played out in other households. My rules for rotation is that all households must finish the current season, before one is allowed to continue with the next. Right now I'm on spring rotation, all households need to get to 1st day of Summer before any of the households that have reached it can be played again. I don't enforce a strict order of households, I go to the one that I feel like playing. Sometimes I'll play 2 days here, 2 days there, then return back to the first and finish off their season. If something happens in one household that involves people from another, I simply make a note of which day it happened, and then when I play that household I act out the surrounding bits. I take pictures as I play and make a visual story for myself that I can go back to in order to re-live things that have happened, so I just make sure the pictures reflect the full story.

For example recently one of my Sims got arrested while at the house of another Sim. He violated his no-contact order by showing up on the lot when the person he's forbidden from seeing was there, and he made a fuss so they called the police. I made note of what day it was in the season, and on that day on his household I had him go for a walk, then called in the police so they'd show up and I put him in the backseat using OMSPs so that it looked like he got dropped off at his house by the police. Using teleporters and occasionally a temporary holding lot it's easy to make things happen in multiple places

If there is something going on that involves more than one household that would be difficult to recreate later on, I will just play those specific households in sync with each other for that brief period. For example multiple households are about to go on vacation together, so all of them are being played up to the point where they leave for the vacation, even though that's not the end of the rotation that is where I am stopping them.

Thank you for all the answers, I love reading about how other people play and this has given me some ideas

I'm not sure if this is helpful whatsoever as I don't have playable schools or hospitals. My rotations are semi-strict semi-loose I guess? I do keep the days in sync by having rotations on Monday - Thursday and Thursday - Monday. So 1 sim week is 2 rotations. I don't play the households in a strict order though but I do make sure I get to everyone before the next round so as the round goes on the choices dwindle. But it's not "I need to play this household, then this household, then this household" instead it's "Which household, out of the ones that i haven't finished their days for this rotation, do I want to play today?". Sometimes there will be storytelling reasons I choose a household over another but it's often just random. How i'm feeling that day and of course, my favorite sims tend to be used early in the rotation lol.

Anyway for University I just go with 1 rotation = a sim can get through all 4 years of Uni, so as a sim is going through Uni 1 rotation goes on. That does mean I sometimes use sim manipulator to fix the day of the week. And I plan ahead when my teen sims will go to college, giving them as much time as I can as teens without messing things up.

I have said before that I am a rotational player, but a terrible one. I like to get to all my families, and I do get to all of them, but some simply have to wait longer than others.

My playable school is a community lot. It contains some objects for a school - mostly I just send a mom there with kids and other kids will turn up (or I teleport them in) - and let them have a ball together while they may pick up some skills.

And I also only do that when I want to, because it is sometimes a good idea, especially if the family has no births/weddings/deaths/family reunions/vacations/ graduations coming up).

I love the game, and I intend to enjoy every moment I have to play without bothering with or being restricted by rules that I haven't made up myself.