Well this is a first for me. I was trying to get a male sim to move out of an apartment lot (he and his girlfriend had had twin toddler boys and they decided to split up, he was going to take one of the twins). After he moved out, the twin supposed to me moving out with him completely disappeared from the hood. He couldn't be summoned via any teleporters. So I exited the game and checked the Sims profiles in SimPE, and the child has been completely removed (whereas it was definitely there before).

Anyone else had anything weird like that happen... a sim disappearing without trace?

I can only assume the apartment was cursed! Could be a good storyline I guess.

It means your neighborhood is corrupted; sorry.

You can restore from a backup; start a new hood; or play it as it lies, knowing that the day of unplayability looms. Mirjampennig's Csonka Canon neighborhood had this happen, and she was in the middle of a bunch of storylines, so she made a serial killer storyline to run in parallel and kept on going.

No way am I starting a new hood. I'm going to play this one into oblivion. It's been working for 4 years just fine otherwise. :P

I've always thought if my hood got to this point, I'd save copies of each lot layout somewhere (so i could recreate them) and extract each currently playable sim with SimPE and then just make a new clean hood, and put in all the playables again in CAS, then use insim family tree to re-create complex biological ties.

The only real bad thing here, would be if you had a cemetary, all the graves would no longer exist, so even if you played the story like nothing happened, there'd be no reason for the sudden disappearance of all ghosts!
But if there are ghosts you need for a story, you could extract them too and just re-kill them...

I mean, it's a lot of work but it sounds worth it for 4 years worth of neighbourhood!

People do all that for a hood rebuild, including the ghosts. I've known a few legacy and other story writers to have done that more than once. I've only done it once but didn't have any ghosts and probably would not have done them. I extracted over 100 sims over two hoods.

There may be a way to get the toddler back if you want to zip up the hood and upload it to say mediafire and pm me the link and I can see if I can get it back for you.

With my experience with fixing all the deleted Sims that Maxis did with the 3 base game hoods have shown me that it is possible just don't play the hood if you can help it and if I can restore the toddler it is best to do it as early as possible.

The disappearance of about six unrelated sims just like this was the reason I eventually gave up on my Patience Island. By restoring from a backup, extracting the "missing" sim in Sim PE, cloning her in bodyshop, and then restoring back to the version of the game she was missing in, recreating her in CAS, and then fixing all her relationships in game, I managed to get the first missing sim "back", but she had no memories (but that didn't bother me so much, because she was CAS'd as an adult, and I could've recreated the important ones in Sim PE if I wanted to). But then when I was resetting her relationships, I discovered that her recently-adopted niece had disappeared. And at least four or five others, when I did a full hood survey.

So I ran away and played Widespot, until I had the energy to create a new custom hood. I had been playing Patience Island for two and a half years, it had four generations, nearly 300 sims, and far too much history to rebuild it. But if yours is newer/smaller, then that might be the way to go.

But it's a definite sign of corruption.

The way I can do it will get all memories back if the sim still has a stub file.

Thanks for the offer marka, but I'm not too bothered by the disappearance of the toddler, I'd hardly had a chance to get familiar with it and I have plenty of other playable kids in the hood (about 100!). I just thought it was unusual because it's never happened before. All I can think of was the apartment lot was borked somehow (I thought it was weird that the adult sim wouldn't even leave the lot when I got it to "Find own place", despite the taxi being there.

I use the batbox to get rid of boring memories and trash and wipe any corrupt ones to keep the files from getting bloated, notownieregen, and recently Mootilda's hoodchecker, and all seems to go fine. I often crash, but that's because the hood is quite full and perhaps my graphics card or computer memory can't cope. My hood is no doubt borked a bit in some way but I will just play it until it explodes, which hopefully won't be anytime soon.

PS - I'd be too embarrassed to zip a file of my hood to ANYONE, it's a little. ahem... crazy, and probably not for the faint-hearted.

Here is the tutorial on how to add the info back if you want to give it a try.

http://sims.wikia.com/wiki/Game_guide:Resurrecting_tips


I was gona use the other twin to get the needed files from.

If you want to try it then I would use a copy of the hood and keep one safe copy as back up.

Thanks for the that, I shall bear it in mind for any future sims I lose who I care more about.

Does corruption like this somehow also bork backups? Why is everyone starting from the beginning again?

Its fun to start at the beginning again and no it does not bork backups. This is just 1 of a few problems that I have read about so I do not use apartments in my hoods.

Hmm. I don't know that recreating everything you worked for years on (as some people's neighbourhoods lasted for) would be all that fun.

I started fresh as I knew I had done a number of VBT right in the early days of those two hoods as this was before I knew about hood corruption. Back-ups if I had made any would have been corrupted also.

Charity, I think it depends on personality and approach to things, and what actually happened. I don't know exactly when my problems started, and what is actual hood-problem and what is pc-problem. I do have backups, but which one do I revert to? There's no clear cut line where the issue started, and starting over half way in what I know might already be doomed is a lot more frustrating than starting over. Starting over I at least "know" it's as clean as it can be, whereas I can't know that with backups.

Now, if I accidentally corrupted a lot, or did something that is more session-specific, backups would be helpful. But for slowly progressing corruption that you don't know the cause of, it's not as useful, for me.

I just don't have the patience to start my hood from new, replicating sims and relationships - it would be too time consuming and then I'd probably not feel like playing them afterwards. I'm just going to carry on with my current hood until things seriously go wrong, like lots not loading at all, or other characters disappearing with no apparent reason why. So far (apart from the above weird occurrence) it's been all good and I don't do stupid things like mess with NPC's, put occupied houses into lots or deleting characters and/or tombstones.

Either to your own doing ( I removed files and those happened to be character files of sims) or that it just happened without you having done anything to cause it; the outcome is still a corrupted hood, yes. Have to unfortunately agree with Peni on that.

In my case it was also that it seemed the disappeared sims had never existed before. Family members have no recollection of them. Not one memory. Nothing at all.

However, my hood is still going. I don't know why. Maybe because I use the bat box and the hood detector of Mootilda regularly, to keep things going as long as I can for as good as I can. I have not encountered things after that doom is around the corner. The game runs actually rather smoothly. No toddlers with adult wishes and none of that kind of weird stuff has happened yet. It might be good news to you that you perhaps still can play this hood for quite some time as well.

Like Peni said. I just used it in the story and I will see where it ends from here.

If I have a hood that got corrupted and I know it I normally just get rid of it and start a new hood with new Sims and just go for it.

1 hood lasted for 6 years before it got corrupted, yep went into the trashcan. (It was still playable but I am that type that refuse to go forward if I known the ends is near.)

I don't want to start over, until I really have to. Can fully understand Jodemilo for not wanting it either.

And I don't know when the end will be. It's still going well and I'm attached to my sims. I see no reason for myself to throw it in the trash just because at some unknown point in the future it will become unplayable. As long as it is playing, I am not going to rob myself from all the action that can happen between the sims in this hood. If I had thrown it in the trash as soon as I knew it was corrupted, approximately 1,5 years ago, then I would have missed out on a lot of things that I could watch because I went on with it.

Is there any way to tell if a backup is corrupted, like in SimPE or something, or do you just have to revert to it and hope the signs don't show up again?