I prefer to err on the side of caution and not do any of the VBT including deleting sims. Even if deleting sims from the bin ultimately doesn't cause corruption gathering many stub characters does not seem to be a good way of housekeeping your game to me.

Given that the OP has posted this as a question, "How EXACTLY does deleting Sims from the family bin cause corruption?"
I will assume they don't know for sure if it does or not. They may not yet be in possession of all the factors so I would not go off and willy nilly start deleting sims only to discover a year later that some detail was missed.
Mootilda (RIP) was also a software developer and she believed it did. Maybe if she were here now she might say differently but she always gave sound advice so until this is proven iron-clad 100% I will continue to follow her advice.

I think the real question should be: If deleting sims from the bin doesn't cause corruption then what does?

I definitely don't suggest to delete all Sims willy nilly, I'm just struggling to understand how exactly is deleting Sims in a family bin supposed to harm your neighborhood. Apparently there are modders who believe that it doesn't (see the second reply to my post), and what they are saying alings with what I was seeing during my experiments. I would be really interested to know what caused the early modders (including Mootilda) to come to conclusion that this is a hood-destroying action. I have been looking for some confirmation or early discussions about this, but I haven't found anything so far - and I have been digging, trust me

What about the other stuff warned about on the wiki, like making certain NPC's playable or resurrecting Sims with incomplete data? Is that still a big fireball of doom? And this is why I kill off the Ottomas https://sims.fandom.com/wiki/Unborn_Ottomas_babies

Not saying you are, but this will be some peoples response.
This is why it's been an area for debate. I hope you do continue to research it and do find out one way or the other if it is indeed 100% safe.
Mootilda was a software programmer more than she was a modder-although she did mod. You can find old posts by her across this site.
https://modthesims.info/m/589252 Her programs continue to be widely used.



The Ottomas and Critter families were both fixed in the Season patch, there is no need to kill any of them off.

I mean, I suspect it's probably because similar things do cause issues, like deleting character files or using the deleteallcharacters cheat like you mentioned earlier. I am curious what you think about moving occupied lots into the lot bin, as well - does this also soft delete the sims and therefore might be safe, or does it leave data behind in an unsafe way? I haven't really looked in-depth at how the mechanisms of these things actually work. If only some of these things are problematic, it might have made sense to just say "don't delete sims" instead of getting into the specifics of what was and wasn't safe. Or like you said earlier, it could have been because of running into the character limit in the early versions of the game.

A lot of misinformation gets spread around and amplified and even winds up on places that people consider official sources of information, like the main sims 2 wiki on wikia. For example, there's a minor issue that happens if you save while a sim is on the phone and the your game resets for some reason like you installed a new EP, or installed a certain type of mod, or whatever, and the off-world loiterer that was spawned by the phone call doesn't get cleaned up. This can cause some minor issues like not being able to call that sim anymore and may cause problems if you move the lot into the lot bin, but it's easily fixed with the lot debugger. But for some reason, this got amplified and now lots of people seem to think that just saving the game while a sim is on the phone causes irreversible corruption and it's even listed that way on the wiki. There's just a ton of superstition and needless panic about this that doesn't go away regardless of what anyone, no matter how respected, says about it.

Hard to comment when:
Your hood vanished into thin air after 5 or so years of vanilla play, when you did not delete any sims or gravestones in it

I think this is a very likely explanation, to be honest. I can also imagine that back when The Sims 2 was at the peak of its popularity, people were getting hundreds of messages asking why is their hood not working, so I can see why it would make sense to tell them "just don't delete Sims, period".

As for moving occupied lots into the bin; it looks like when the Sim is moved out, the same thing happens to their character file as if deleted from the family bin (unlinked, file reduced to a stub). So if removing Sims from the bin is safe, then moving them out of the neighborhood is probably safe too. There are two caveats though:
- Moving Sims between the neighborhoods is incredibly messy, especially if those Sims have big family trees. Players might be importing more characters to their target hood than they realise. From what I've observed, a stub character file is generated for every single Sim that appears in that family tree and that is not a part of the household that you're moving. You know how in Veronaville there are just three occupied houses with only a few Sims living in them, right? I moved those three houses into another hood and observed the Characters folder. Just these three houses generated over a hundred character files. Additionally, if you are moving families that are split into multiple households, they are no longer going to be connected. You will end up with duplicate Sims (the actual imported Sim and their stub file). So whilst it might not be hood-breaking, I would avoid doing this anyway, unless it's like a single Sim or a one-household family
- I am not 100% sure what happens to the memories about Sims that are not part of the family tree (i.e. friends, NPCs and the like). I think they are wiped, but I would have to conduct more experiments to confirm this.

As for the Sims Wiki article... Yes, I agree with you, this is a very good and informative article, but nonetheless, I have noticed that some of the information included in it is questionable. Saving with Sims on the telephone is one example. Another one I've noticed is that the description of why deleteAllCharacters cheat might cause corruption is incorrect. The article suggests that it's the same thing as deleting your Sims from the bin (just on the bigger scale), but that's not true This cheat just wipes your entire Characters folder. It leaves no stubs behind!

Snub files are created for the sim in the memories too. Thats my understanding anyway - before I knew about VBT I had moved a sim from one neighbourhood (strangetown) to a custom hood, He had a memory of meeting Pascal Curious and using the tombstone of L&D I believe i had the option of summoning pascal even though he hadn't been moved to that hood. When I did it, it either didn't work or I got a "this sim died on another lot" pop up. This was about 10 years ago so I might not be remembering correctly. The memory was definitely still there though and I'm 80% sure he showed up as a summon option.

Theoretically, if one was to move a sim from one neighbourhood to another, it would be better to wipe all memories first to avoid unnecessary bloat/snub files. If as you said, many character files is the main cause for corruption, theoretically this would help avoid it. But I'm not an expert.

Not just the memories, but also gossip, as gossip is the same as memories, only hidden.

Huh, this thread might have just answered a question I had been thinking about- namely, what exactly happened to most of the ancestors in the Base Game neighborhoods? Namely, the Sims wiki says that they "have no character data," and I was struggling to think of how that would be functionally different from just deleting them outright, but there had to be something different, as well... you can see them in the family tree and in their descendants' memories. As opposed to say, Viola from Veronaville, who was deleted outright, and now has no evidence of her existence other than the metadata of an unoccupied residential lot. Does this mean the ancestors were deleted through the Family Bin?

I think some of them just had the character file removed from the character folder, which is definitely a bad thing. As the neighbourhood files point to data that is gone.

It’s possible that their graves were deleted too.

This has been a very interesting thread. I was also someone who was extra cautious about things like "saving while Sim is on the phone" and "Samantha Ottomas' pregnancy" but when I did more research on why exactly these things were considered Bad and what problems they could create, I realized they weren't nearly as much of an issue.

I think the fascination with hood corruption (which is an interesting topic) has led to a lot of fears in the sims 2 community and given the game a slightly undeserved reputation for instability. I think some of it even comes from the word "corruption," which sounds so dramatic, and that if we used words like "bugs" and "glitches" more often to talk about some of these things people might be a little less paranoid of them.



Well, when it comes to the basegame neighborhoods, it's important to keep in mind that they were being developed whilst the game itself was being developed, so many of these Sims were probably created within old versions of the game and/or in ways that we as players don't have access to. It seems like many of the ancestors & dead sims were made in older versions of the game and never updated to the release version, due to some of them having unreleased beta hairstyles or borked faces (I've always assumed the glitchy faces is probably due to some during-development change in the way sim facial data was coded, but that's pure speculation??).

One of the former TS2 developers had a thread on Twitter where he told stories of the development process and he mentioned that it was difficult to keep up with updating the neighborhoods during development -- and that at one point, one of his coworkers whipped up a program to take information from a spreadsheet and inject it into the game, so that they could do their hood planning outside of the game and then stick the Sims in later. Hearing that makes me wonder if some of these ancestor Sims didn't have their character data deleted, so much as never created in the first place.

That has been known though, I remember it reading it as "newborn Sims can inherit the want-trees of deleted Sims" years and years ago. And that can't be as it was intended, so we're back to deleting Sims being problematic (not Fireball Visible from Space problematic, but still)

What about blank want slots, though? Can you figure out what causes them?

Although I am still cautious to never delete a Sim.... I had to do it this time. I killed off a bunch of townies by aging them up and moving them into a house. I got tired of seeing the same old Maxis townies, you know? I want to see some new, randomly generated ones. So anyway, they died, I saved, and then when I got to the neighborhood screen, it looked like four of them were still alive. I moved them out and back in, but when I moved them in, there was no live mode option, only buy and build mode. So my only option at this point was to delete them from the bin.

I read and watched a few discussions about corruption. The proof that corruption existed always involved resurrection of dead people and touching the neighborhood with external tools. Raising the dead is a most unrealistic thing to do to characters tied with developed storylines. Much more so than supporting a body that still exists with the elixir of life. Dead ancestors give a sense of time progression and maybe could be the basis for a legend in the story (Tricou). When converted into living characters successfully, they act like anybody else. They don't get any special interactions or new difficulties from their status, such as lack of a valid passport. So there is no gameplay point to doing this.

While I messed around with the technical process, while learning what properties make a person dead for my mod, I pretend that the Nomitron thing doesn't exist.

I did delete some of the prebuilt families from the bin, that I didn't like to see staring at me, or appearing where the code doesn't check for neighbor in stack object house number. The character gets reduced to its name and portrait, and keeps its number. Under what circumstances can the number be freed?

Given how often "relationships" get used for things like beds and cars, it's possible that some erroneous relationships could be added this way, if neighbor gets used in place of object by mistake.

Here's a link to OP's video which very nicely sums up new discoveries about deleting Sims and about Sims 2 neighborhood corruption in general from the past few years. Thanks so much for speaking up and spreading facts!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2cB67DGDXFQ

(And thanks to simmer22 for linking to the video in the Look! Shiny! thread.)

Yes! I love this thread, so interesting and makes a lot of sense. Thanks for the bump and video link.

Andrew, I have had Grow Up sims with adult LTWs when I created them in CAS and aged them down in-game, using the SetAge cheat or a cheat object. But I create sims from scratch in CAS all the time, of all ages, and they all properly have no LTW until they are teenagers. Them having a LTW is not game breaking in that situation, though. I think it's only inheriting a deleted sim's NID that is a symptom of a problem.

WRT resurrection, it's resurrecting base game pre-made sims that seems to be the problem. When the base game was released, there was no way to resurrect dead sims. This only got added in university (with two further methods in Freetime and Apartment Life). IIRC, it was never possible to resurrect sims in Sims 1, only as a zombie which had that sim's appearance. Zombies weren't fully fleshed out like in TS2, they were more like TS2 ghosts.

It's quite possible therefore that the developers assumed it didn't matter about those sims having incomplete data, whether it was deleted, from an incompatible version, never created etc, because if resurrection was added in a later EP it would probably be in the zombie format and not a fully living, breathing, remembering, relation-ing sim. They had appearance (which is also used for the ghost and portraits) and that was enough. When resurrection was added, it's quite possible that nobody even thought about those sims from the base game hoods which were liable to cause problems when resurrected. They probably just tested the function with brand new sims.

I don't believe the server fire stories. It's been refuted by so many Maxis employees over the years, and it seems unlikely that they wouldn't have backups in any case. It's a fun dramatic rumour to speculate about, but I'm certain it's just that; a rumour. It's completely normal for any product to have changes during development and intended pieces, functions, parts which were cut out, re-written, re-worked and so on throughout the development process whether because they didn't work or the direction was changed or it was decided they were superfluous or costly or anything at all. Just look at the deleted scenes of any movie, and those are the scenes that got far enough in the process to be filmed. Often deleted scenes are funny because there is no special effects. If you look deep enough into the creation process of that same movie, you'll find more scenes which were scripted but never made it to camera, or storyboarded but not scripted (I may have that the wrong way around) or storyboarded from a different perspective than finally shot.

Somebody was asking about no unlink on delete - what this mod does is prevent the game from unlinking a character file when a tombstone or urn is destroyed. It's possible for this to happen in many ways in the vanilla game - you can delete them in buy mode, a sim can smash an urn, even autonomously. Graves can be accidentally deleted, they disappear if the last living sim dies in an apartment when the sub-lot is reset, they can go missing when moving between lots, they can be placed in inventory, which is deleted if that sim dies. I think they sometimes just disappear as well due to some random glitch. As this thread demonstrates, unlinking a file isn't bad per se, but what it does mean is that you can no longer resurrect that sim or see their ghost. It's no longer possible to regenerate the tombstone in a vanilla game. Because urns and tombstones can be destroyed accidentally though, the mod is useful in case you want a safety net against tombstones being accidentally deleted. It won't prevent graves from disappearing, but it means that you can regenerate them if you want them back. But I don't think it's an essential corruption-preventing mod, although it is touted as one.

I'm so glad that OP made this video as it came up on my recommended and got me back into playing TS2 again after a few years of barely touching it. It's an insanely interesting video and huge props to April for making it. As someone who also now works in the computer science field and has a solid understanding of software and software development (compared to years ago when I actively played TS2 and worried a lot about corruption) it clears things up in a way that's both technically detailed for folks like me and palatable and easy to understand for those who don't have the same experience in computer programming and software. If anyone is worried about hood corruption and has 2 hours to spare I totally recommend watching April's video and you'll probably feel so much better about your hood afterwards. That being said (and April says this in their video as well) having anti-corruption mods installed, running HoodChecker regularly and making backups are still always going to be a good idea - but it's definitely going to be easier to sleep at night after watching the full video :D