Lot 51 Releases Targeted Patches for Plum Telephone and Free-Range Mods

Lot 51 shipped three targeted patches across two popular mods between March 20 and 23, addressing a cluster of interaction bugs that had been surfacing since the Plum Telephone Company's early release weeks earlier.

Free-Range 1.8.2 dropped first on March 20, followed by two rapid-fire versions of the landline mod. Plum Telephone Company 1.0.4, the most current release, landed on March 23. Version 1.0.3 also shipped in that same window, making it three updates across four days.

The Plum Telephone patch notes read like a checklist of annoyances anyone who'd spent time with the mod would recognize immediately. The 1.0.4 release fixed an exception during certain interactions, corrected a Sim stepping away from the phone after certain interactions, and disabled speech balloons until a better solution for timing could be found. The stepping-away bug was the more visible of the two: your Sim would finish a call and physically walk off mid-animation, breaking the landline immersion the mod goes to considerable lengths to preserve.

Version 1.0.3 tackled a different set of issues, improving the Hire Service and Hire Delivery pickers, making a sweep through all interactions to shorten call times for appropriate interactions, and fixing an incorrect Sim thumbnail on phone calls inviting Sims out or to their residence. That thumbnail fix is a small but noticeable polish detail: seeing the wrong face on an incoming invitation call is the kind of friction that makes a mod feel unfinished.

Plum Telephone Company is currently at version 1.0.4 and replaces Sims' mobile phones with a physical landline and dial tone. The mod includes nearly all interactions available from the original phone, including those added by other mods, and plays a custom animation in its place. The model was created by SurelySims, with animations by thepancake1.

On the Free-Range side, the 1.8.2 update was narrower in scope. The patch fixed an exception that could occur randomly, the kind of low-grade instability that generates Last Exception files without an obvious cause and tends to make modders' inboxes uncomfortable.

Free-Range has accumulated over 185,000 downloads, making it one of Lot 51's most-used releases, which means even a sporadic random exception affects a meaningful slice of Sims 4 players running livestock on their lots. Getting that fixed quietly in a point release, without fanfare, is exactly how stable mod maintenance is supposed to work.

All three updates are available now from Lot 51's site directly or via CurseForge.