Hi there,
Today I installed Supernatural and transferred a family from the base game Sunset Valley to the new Supernatural neighbourhood, the process went like this:

• It was my active family so it was the first household I loaded after installing the new EP.
• When it loaded, the game prompted me about the new install and asked if I wanted to move them to the new town. I said yes and followed through the instructions.
• The family moves into the new town fine and all is well. I play a while, save and close the game.
• When I load the game back up later, the family and new town has been saved over my previous neighbourhood - one that had a lot of stories and buildings that I play regularly and have invested a lot of time in - I can't seem to get it back at all!

Clearly I did something wrong in the process and I'm desperate to undo it

Now, I've tried restoring the previous save file but evidently I saved more than once in the new neighbourhood and I all I seem to be able to recover is a previous version of the Supernatural neighbourhood.

Please, please, is there any way at all of recovering the lots and families as they were in the old Sunset Valley neighbourhood? There is a copy of some of them in the library but it doesn't include any of the children/careers/etc that have come along since they moved in. I care far, far more about this game than the Supernatural family!

Help!

Thank you in advance for any advice you can offer,

Georgie

Hi

When you saved in Moonlit Falls, did you use the same save name as you were using in Sunset Valley? Or did you do an auto-type save and let the game decide what to name it? I've never used the game engine to move my sims to a new town so I'm not sure how the save name would look. It sounds like you have no backups of your old game...and I know this totally sucks.

Don't do anything major, hopefully someone who has experienced this will come along to let you know if you can get your older save back or if it can't be recovered.

If you don't do it already, it's a good idea going forward to use 'Save As' rather than 'Save,' varying the game save name a few times (at least). Something like, SV Jones...SV Jones 2...SV Jones 3 (Sunset Valley, Jones household, save number). These can serve as your regular games and also your backups, should you need to revert to an earlier save.

I've never moved the EA way and without mods either, so my expectation that this is going to help is really low. But do any of the saved games in your Save folder (.sims3 or .backup, doesn't matter) have a file called Sunset Valley(some hexcodes).nhd? Or do you now only have Moonlight Falls nhd files in all of them and nothing else? If you do, you might be able to extract one of those and insert it into another game...but again, I'm really not confident this will work.

I'm afraid the game did do what you told it to by overwriting the original in progress world. Going forward (and I'm sure you don't want to hear this right now, but maybe it will help later), there are three things you can do to prevent this from happening again.

--Always use SaveAs and change the save's name as Lindali365 said (waves hi at Lindali, by the way)
-- If your in progress games are important to you, as they are to me, back them up to another location on your computer. Better yet, to an external hard drive much as you would important personal documents, homework projects, research papers, that book you spent years writing, etc.
-- Never move the EA way, as by design it destroys the world you are moving from. Use the NRaas Traveler mod and both worlds remain playable within the same game save -- in fact, you can even travel between them on vacations, visit the sims left behind, invite them over for visits, move some sims back, etc.
http://nraas.wikispaces.com/Traveler+FAQ

Thank you for your advice guys.

The contents of my save folder is attached.

I did try simply deleting the Moonlight Falls file and loading the game up with the hopes that either the University or Sunset Valley file would load instead but of course that didn't work!

I will DEFINITELY be taking the precautions you suggest in future but for now how would I go about attempting to extract the Sunset Valley_hexcode.nhd files into another game?

Okay, so UPDATE:

I say this tentatively, but I think I may have recovered the game. There doesn't seem to be any issues but we'll see if anything arises with longer gameplay. It was such a simple fix I'm surprised I didn't attempt it in the first place!

Here are the steps I used (for anyone in future that has this problem):

• So I loaded up the game and created a new game from the Main Menu.
• I saved this completely clean, untouched version of Sunset Valley with a unique file name as you suggested (instead of just Sunset Valley 3 hahaha) and to avoid confusion when I went back to the saves folder.
• I exited the game and went back to my saves folder. where the new neighourhood was now listed
• Then I simply copied the original Sunset Valley_hexcode.nhd/ExportDB.package into the new folder, replacing the current files
• When I opened up the game again, after a loooonnnggg load time my old game was back! Voila! The only difference being that my sims had been 'reset' so were gathered at the front of the lot with maxed motives

Everything seems back to normal and in good working condition but I will update if there are any problems in gameplay.

Thank you both sooo much for your advice! :lovestruc

What I had in mind was, startup a new game in Sunset Valley. Play some random sim for a few minutes, save as (under a unique name!), and quit.

Then pull out/delete the newly created Sunset Valley nhd file from the new game save and replace it with a copy of the old one. And then see if that new game starts up.

Again, my expectation that this will work is low. More likely the game will launch but generate another fresh copy of Sunset Valley instead of loading up the old one, if it loads up at all. But it's certainly worth a try at this point.


Edit: LOL - Hey, you figured out what I meant. Your update crossed my explanation. This is great, I've never actually known if that trick would work when traveling without the Traveler mod. There are dozens of places where that might have failed. You could probably have restored Uni in this "new" game as well, if that or the sims over there were important to you.