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Test Subject
Original Poster
#1 Old 25th Feb 2015 at 11:43 PM
Default I Need Some Reassurance
So, I'm cleaning out my Mods/CC, deleting all neighborhoods and replacing the EAxis ones with the nice, clean ones I've found. I'm just generally renewing my game. But there's one problem, I'm just scared of corruption. That's what's driven me away from the game for so long. I'm just afraid that I'll mess something up and -POOF- my hard work is gone and corrupted itself.
Sims 2 is the fastest, cleanest, most fun packed game compared to my copies of Sims 4 and 3, because Sims 3 takes like 10 minutes to 1. Load up the menu, 2. Load a neighborhood, and then 3. Save and Turn off. Sims 4 is just plain boring since there aren't any expansions for it yet.
So, to get to the point, I need some reassurance about Sims 2. Can you guys just give me some tips and tricks about corruption so I'll be ready. Thanks!
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Theorist
#2 Old 26th Feb 2015 at 12:07 AM
I don't think I've ever had a corrupt hood, so I give ya any tips on that. All I can do is advice to stay neat and organized.

I have recently just came back to Sims 2, not from Sims 3 or 4 as I don't have those, no just reinstalled my games and started playing again after 'bout 5ish years. The one thing I did recall from playing is that when downloading, start out bein organized. Put downloads in folders with where you got it, who made it, what it is, and a pic of said item if poss. I tried to keep myself to this as I started again, and I kinda fell off the bandwagon there was just so much I wanted.

So, now I have made myself wait, no play, no downloading, until I get my folders organized. I recently saw one of Jessa's videos where she shows how she organizes her downloads and I liked her system so I have taken how she did it and makin it my way. It's a pain to do, but I know in the long run it will be all worth it when I can actually find stuff that I'm lookin for.

When I say downloads folder I do not mean the one in game, though I believe that's where Jessa's is, I am mean from the very start in downloading from a site. When you click on that download button and it goes into your generalized computer downloads folder. Start off right from the first and it's worth it in the end. :D
Link Ninja
#3 Old 26th Feb 2015 at 12:07 AM
There is an article all about sims2 corruption and how to avoid it! Most of the time it's neighborhood corruption people worry about since there's a lot of things one can do to start it going.

Uh oh! My social bar is low - that's why I posted today.

Theorist
#4 Old 26th Feb 2015 at 12:09 AM
Start here: http://simswiki.info/wiki.php?title...Hood_Corruption

Read the article carefully, take notes if you need to, and be sure you install all the recommended corruption-preventing hacks before you boot the game. One that is not on the list (but that should be) is creaturefixes, available from MATY: http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/s...pic,1482.0.html It prevents Mrs. Crumplebottom becoming a vampire, which is death to your entire install. The version I linked to is for AL/MG, since that's where the description is, but you should be able to find the FT version in the Hack Directory: http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/s.../topic,7.0.html

Don't download any occupied lots, or lots that were once occupied. Start a whole new Sims 2 folder (you can do this by just renaming the folders) for testing lots if you're not sure if they've been occupied or not. There's some debate as to whether previously occupied lots are dangerous; personally, I say better safe than sorry. Currently occupied lots are ALWAYS dangerous.

Back up your game frequently and regularly, and ALWAYS back up before you do anything major, like installing new, big hacks, things that create NPCs, or anything else that you might be the least bit unsure about. Personally, I back up after every play session, and I always make sure I have a recent backup before I install any cc. I bought a 1TB external hard drive for the express purpose of backing up. It ran me about $100 (you could probably get it for less now; memory's cheap), and I expect it to last me for 80 backups or so before I get any kind of low on space.

Other than that, take a deep breath and have fun playing!

esmeiolanthe's Live Journal and Tumblr
Most recent story update: Fuchs That! on 2/21/15
Field Researcher
#5 Old 26th Feb 2015 at 12:09 AM
Mootilda's Hood Checker is a very useful tool to keep your game running smoothly.

http://modthesims.info/d/456523

It's a bit like Ccleaner for TS2 -- it quickly identifies any corruption in your neighborhood and deletes it for you.
Top Secret Researcher
#6 Old 26th Feb 2015 at 12:14 AM
Make lots of back ups. You play a few times, make a back up. You add new cc, make a back up. This way if your game or hood somehow gets corrupt, you can go back to a back up before it was corrupt.
Mad Poster
#7 Old 26th Feb 2015 at 12:20 AM
Actually, with a little care, you should not be so worried about game corruption. What used to be true is still true, but players have become aware of what not to do, so when you have an issue, it's not so hard to get the answers for the problems.

Don't do anything sublimely corrupting, and you should be all right. Do get Mootilda's program, and Pescado's fixes for the broken stuff in the game. Add any mods you like to flavor it, and you're good to go.

After all, most of us have been playing this for 15 years, we've learned an awful lot about it in that time. I know I have still a neighborhood from about 9 years ago that still plays-although I'm shocked at how badly I built and decorated houses. I'd die of shame if there was such a thing.
Undead Molten Llama
#9 Old 26th Feb 2015 at 12:49 AM
Honestly, I think people freak out too much about corruption. Really, just read the article esmeiolanthe linked you to and don't do the things it says not to do, get the recommended mods in that article that will minimize damage if something happens in your game beyond your control, and back up your neighborhoods often (I just put a copy of the Neighborhoods folder on my external hard drive or a flash drive every so often) so that if something screwy does happen, you can simply stick in your back-up. Do that, and stop worrying so much. It's a game. It should be a source of fun and relaxation, not stress.

I'm mostly found on (and mostly upload to) Tumblr these days because, alas, there are only 24 hours in a day.
Muh Simblr! | An index of my downloads on Tumblr.
Mad Poster
#10 Old 26th Feb 2015 at 12:51 AM
You want Peni's "you can't play soccer without a dirty ball"-post. You're going to corrupt your hood. Nothing you can do about it, the game is written in ways we can't fix or avoid.

Don't do the very bad things, make back ups, and you'll be fine. And this is coming from someone that's been rebuilding their hood for the past two years after losing it to corruption. If I'm not paranoid, there's no reason for you to be
Test Subject
Original Poster
#11 Old 26th Feb 2015 at 12:56 AM
Thank you all! I've been scanning over everything you guys gave me.
My silly fears always seem to hold me back. I have a really bad fear of getting lost and basically straying from a safepoint. I get stressed a bit when I accidentally leave my cursor in the corner and I'm flying away from the lot in Sims 3.
I used to play Sims 2 daily. But after I learned about corruption and how easy it was to create it, I completely abandoned all of my work in the game.
Theorist
#12 Old 26th Feb 2015 at 1:01 AM
Pssshhtttt... don't stress it :D

Abandoning the game cuz it 'might' become corrupted is like sayin ya shouldn't drive a car cuz ya might get a ticket or in an accident.

Such as with driving a car, just follow the rules and you should be fine.
Mad Poster
#13 Old 26th Feb 2015 at 9:41 AM Last edited by gazania : 26th Feb 2015 at 9:55 AM.
All you can do is follow the standard warnings. Be careful about downloading animated animals, things based on the RC car and other suspected objects. Back up your game first and test the animated item thoroughly. Some of these downloads are really delightful, and I have a couple of them I thoroughly enjoy, but they are a long-term commitment, unless you plan to reset/delete all your hoods at the same time. Testing is particularly important if you want to use custom PTs. Those are very popular, and I know I like the ones I have, but be aware that you can't just delete all the files when you're bored with them. Make sure you like any of these downloads before you resume playing, and test the stuffing out of them. If you don't like them, go to your backup.

The Wiki offers other tips. After a while, you'll remember many of them if you keep reading it like I do!

Also ... and please excuse my repeating this ... if you have custom PTs and have to do a 50/50 to weed out a misbehaving download, do NOT do the 50/50 on your current game and simply get rid of the offending file. If you take out custom PT files for any reason, even if you don't save the game, your alien children will lose their alien parents, and you will have corrupted any hoods with alien children. I have the dubious distinction of corrupting two hoods at the same time because of that. Back up your original game (just in case), and do any testing on a COPY of the game. When you find the offender, fix or delete the offending file in the original (or the backup, if you've mucked the original) and get rid of the copy. The whole point is to use the version in which you have never removed the PT files at any time.

Be aware. If the game decides to do something that you suspect may not be a good idea, don't save! I know I'd rather be safe than sorry. For instance, I've had a tour guide call my Sim and Food Judges stroll on a community lot. I still have no idea whether either was OK or not, but have no desire to chance it. Chancing is for your SIms' careers, NOT if your game decides to raise your blood pressure.

I know I get a little overwrought about corruption, but all I can do is take the steps to avert it to the best of my ability. I should add that I am one of those who had a hood that lasted a few years before I had to nuke it because it became unplayable. Sometimes, you luck out.

Thanks to ALL free-site creators, admins and mods.

RIP Sunni ... truly a ray of light.
Mad Poster
#14 Old 26th Feb 2015 at 10:07 AM
I have played a corrupted hood for more than 4 years before it blew up into space or something. I did all the things I was not supposed to do, since I did not have a proper internet connection and did not know any better. I played around the things that went wrong most of the time and I still regard that particular, custom free, corruptied-as-hell hood the best hood I ever had At least I had more than four years of fun! These days I have a few mods to help to prevent that - but I will, if my current hood blows up - simply start a new one I simply refuse to allow worrying to spoil my fun - and it is, after all, also fun to start over (I don't have the cleaned hoods either. I like the hoods as they are. I like the townies and the AL social groups and the gardening club members and the hobby lot. I like the gypsy and the penguin and I LOVE the damn bin Sims). Because a hood without Kennedy Cox beating up some random Sim and Goopy being the sex magnet will just NOT be the same to me.
Mad Poster
#15 Old 26th Feb 2015 at 11:12 AM
Also, backups can save your (hood's) life.
Mad Poster
#16 Old 26th Feb 2015 at 11:19 AM
The point, indeed, is to have fun - not to be scared stiff
Mad Poster
#17 Old 26th Feb 2015 at 1:46 PM
Quote: Originally posted by CaliBrat
. . . Abandoning the game cuz it 'might' become corrupted is like sayin ya shouldn't drive a car cuz ya might get a ticket or in an accident. . .
I don't drive a car, in part because I might have an accident, but mainly because I've hated the ugly, smelly, dangerous things since I was about 11! I don't let my Sims drive cars either.

On the other hand I absolutely love playing The Sims 2!

On topic, I think corruption is more of an issue for players like me, who want to go on playing the same Sims in the same 'hood for years. If you keep restarting, it's unlikely to appear. I fight corruption by trying to avoid doing VBTs, regular use of mootilda's HoodChecker, and by making (and keeping) regular backups. I keep all my backups on DVDs going right back to the very beginnings of my game. I've got 22 DVDs of Sims backups now. If I ever do lose my 'hood, I'll probably just revert to a recent backup and go on playing. Or I might try to rebuild my 'hood from scratch the way gummilutt is doing. I started doing that about a year ago, and then discovered that my problem wasn't corruption after all -- it was a CC clash! (So remember, if something does go wrong with your game, it might not be corruption at all!)

But, as Justpetro says, the important thing is to enjoy your game, and don't let corruption worries spoil it!

All Sims are beautiful -- even the ugly ones.
My Simblr ~~ My LJ
Sims' lives matter!
The Veronaville kids are alright.
Mad Poster
#18 Old 26th Feb 2015 at 3:58 PM
Case in point: last night I resurrected a very old saved game-from 2008. Yeah, it was the 'badly decorated and built' one I was referring to earlier.
It had not been updated at all-past NL, and it was very bare (I didn't know if it could be restored, either.missing a couple of files). So I spent the better part of the night restoring it. Between Moo's hood checker, the compressorizer and restarting my computer a couple of times (it didn't like the time it took to load..) I finally got it up and running.

Right now I'm putting families back into houses, batboxing everyone, hobbyfying everyone and getting rid of the obvious corruption. All that's left now to do is going through SimPE and deleting bad memories...and that's going to be a long one. Because I didn't know about memories back then, there's tons of them to delete because otherwise it's going to clog the game down.

But: this is a very old save-one of my first hoods, and if that can restored, it's very probable you don't have to worry. Just save a hood diligently and you can usually replay it later. Corruption is a word that causes panic. It shouldn't, if you take obvious steps to keep it from happening in the first place.
Mad Poster
#19 Old 26th Feb 2015 at 8:13 PM
I wish I had backed up my corrupted hood all those years ago
Test Subject
#20 Old 26th Feb 2015 at 11:35 PM
Corruption, eh? You shouldn't worry about that. It doesn't really happen as often as you would think, just read this so you know what to watch out for..
http://simswiki.info/wiki.php?title...Hood_Corruption
and make sure to grab these for ultimate protection...
http://modthesims.info/showthread.php?t=532696
and you should be good to go. The Sims 2 is truly the best game ever, just has some issues every once in a while that Maxis never fixed, so the modding community fixed it instead.
Mad Poster
#21 Old 1st Mar 2015 at 5:42 PM
I'm back to give a "Mea Culpa' in public-and I'm embarrassed to death.

It turns out that little statement about that hood I was resurrecting was totally, obliviously wrong. It was fried. I only learned about it when I went into the game, discovered a sub-hood with some of the exact same families as the main hood. Not good.

So when I deleted that subhood, (and don't ever do this at home, kids-seriously) thinking that the worst that could happen would be the neighborhood would blow up, I was right. Absolutely, positively and literally blew up-the game did a "This application has crashed. This application will now shut down".

That's how corrupted it was.

I threw that hood out the door so fast you would not have seen it fly by. Gone. While I still have it saved on disk, I will never play it again..because the whole thing was a goner from the minute I loaded it up.

So I learned a very valuable lesson: don't shoot off your big fat mouth, thinking it won't backfire on you. The game told me that..
Theorist
#22 Old 1st Mar 2015 at 5:56 PM
I didn't have a corrupted hood, what I had where corrupted files. I just recently reinstalled my game and started playin again after a 5ish hiatus. I found my old cd of saved download files, from stuff I'd downloaded as well as houses I'd made and packaged.

Long story short, 90% of my packaged houses ended up bein corrupted and unusable. I hadn't known 'bout the not movin lived in houses into the bin, as well as it seems that some of the packaged houses I packaged with sims and did it wrong.

Suffice it to say I was given the suggestion that it would be better to start totally over fresh and new, and for the most part that is what I've done. There were a few houses that were not corrupted and I was able to at least get a layout so I could redo them in fresh hood (such as my courthouse, for which I am very, very glad of, but then it had never had a sim on lot). So, while I lost the majority of my saved houses, I did learn a very valuable lesson. Even after 10 (ish?) years of the game bein out, and I'm still learning new stuff 'bout it
Top Secret Researcher
#23 Old 1st Mar 2015 at 8:37 PM
I'm super paranoid about downloading lots and neighborhoods because I never know if they're funky or not. ;n; What can I do to verify if they're messed up / been played through and how do I fix them if that's the case?

On a funnier side of things, I knew one of my hoods was smashed a long time ago when some of my children wanted to go out on dates.

Not-so-daily TS2 downloads @ my simblr.
Theorist
#24 Old 1st Mar 2015 at 10:29 PM
First, load them up in a different hood than the one you play in. If you're really paranoid (like me), you can load them up in a new Sims 2 folder. (Just rename the old one and the game will make you a nice new one. Rename the folders again when you want your real game back.)

Look for things that only happen in owned/occupied lots. This might be: newspapers lying about, chairs pushed in at the table, water running/spouting in a fountain, circles and music notes coming out of the speakers, plants/bushes in less-than-perfect condition (wilted/overgrown), beds turned down, pictures on dorm doors, a hole dug in the yard, mail lying about on tables, etc. (Note: I know that there are buyable newspapers out there, but unless the lot description specifically says that buyable papers were used, assume that any papers come from a sim.)

If you find these things, I don't know how to fix them. In a residential lot, there's probably nothing you can do, unless you want to take screenshots to recreate the place.) A community lot may or may not be safer (there's a difference of opinion in the community about this), so it's up to you whether or not to risk it.

esmeiolanthe's Live Journal and Tumblr
Most recent story update: Fuchs That! on 2/21/15
Top Secret Researcher
#25 Old 2nd Mar 2015 at 8:30 PM
The links in my signature do provide tips with helping to reduce or prevent corruption. But usually, when I do it, people get "freaked out" and miss out on a great game. Really, it has its issues, but it's a fun game at the end of the day. And let's not forget that, at the end of the day, it's a game. It should raise your Fun motive (oops, me turning real life into the Sim world).

There really isn't too much to corruption. Just don't move in any NPC that doesn't have a proper name, don't move in any NPCs that you cannot normally move in or build a relationship with (social worker excepted), don't move occupied lots into the lot bin, and don't use the in-game family bin delete button. Most important of all, be sure to back up your neighborhoods regularly. Not too much about it. The Sims 2 can still be fun even after all of this. The most important thing you must do with your game is to have fun with it! If you don't, why play it?
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