Missing custom lots and Sims

[goderguy]

I have looked around here and in the wiki, and don't see this answered anywhere... I had a custom neighborhood with 20 occupied lots, all customized by me. I used it for several years, adding new lots and families and removing others as I went along. Then yesterday, I decided I was bored with the terrain so I created a new custom neighborhood and put all of my occupied lots from the old neighborhood in the lot bin. I opened the new neighborhood, and started placing my old lots. When I got to lot 9, the game crashed. When I reopened the new neighborhood, the lots I had placed were gone from the neighborhood, gone from the lot bin and were not back in the old neighborhood! The remaining 11 old lots I hadn't placed yet were still in the lot bin.

I lost 9 of my favorite houses and 9 of my favorite families. Where could they have gone? I checked the lot catalog, and there are several in there but I have no idea if they are mine or pre-made ones (due to naming structure), and I'm not sure which have sims in them or not. I didn't delete anything and I didn't add any custom content before I made the transfer to the new neighborhood.

I really would love to recover the lost lots and sims, but would settle for the lost lots at least. I worked very long and hard on each of them. Any questions? Ideas? Thoughts? Advice??? Please help if you can...

Thanks!

[Mootilda]

I don't suppose that you backed up everything before you started? That's the right thing to do whenever you want to make a major change. If you did, then restore from your backup and let us tell you the correct way to do what you want to do, which is to replace the terrain on your existing neighborhood.

Can we assume that all of the lots that you put into the lot bin were occupied? This is the wrong way to move sims to a new neighborhood and may have caused your problems. It will certainly corrupt both your old and new neighborhoods.

Do you have any lot packages in your new neighborhood's Lot folder? If so, you can recover those lots by moving them into the LotCatalog folder and renaming them to match the naming convention of the other files in that folder.

Recovering your sims is much harder. Try opening the new neighborhood package in SimPE and extracting the sims. If you can do this, then you can recreate your sims from scratch.

[goderguy]

Thanks for the advice. I didn't back up my files right before I tried to make the changes, but I did back them up a few months ago. I was able to replace the existing old neighborhood with the previous one and all my favorite lots and families are back! I packaged and saved the lots this time... Thanks again!

[Mootilda]

If you just want a new terrain, there's a very simple way to replace your terrain with another. This way, you won't destroy your neighborhoods by installing occupied lots. Try the HoodReplace program: http://www.modthesims.info/download.php?t=279992

If you want to understand the problem with installing occupied lots, take a look at this: http://www.simswiki.info/wiki.php?title=Game_Help:Moving_Sims

[goderguy]

What about packaging the lots with family included, then installing the package? Now I've put so much time and effort into the new neighborhood with terrain modifcations and adding trees and decorations, I'd hate to ditch it and start over. Since all the families in the new neighborhood are the same as the old neighborhood, would that be a good thing or a bad thing?

[Mootilda]

A very bad thing. As explained in the wiki article that I linked to, packing a lot with the family included and then installing the package will corrupt your neighborhood. You may not notice problems right away, but the corruption will spread over time until your neighborhood is unplayable. In fact, moving sims in this way is one of the easiest ways to destroy your neighborhood.

The only way to do this properly is to clean each and every occupied lot and test them individually to ensure that they have been cleaned adequately. This is a huge amount of work and quite error-prone.

HoodReplace will allow you to keep all of your new terrain modifications, deco, trees, etc. and use them with your existing save game backup. Believe me, it's the better solution.

[goderguy]

Thanks for all the advice. Since I already had moved some of the occupied lots from the old neighborhood and into the new, there was no turning back. With great sadness I deleted all of my families last night - some I've been playing since Sims 2 first came out... :-( But, I get to be creative and create all new families, so it's not a complete loss.

[Mootilda]

I'm concerned that deleting all of the families from your neighborhood is not enough to fix the existing corruption in your new neighborhood. I'm not sure, but I suspect that you are just making things worse.

Perhaps someone else knows for sure whether this is safe.

Here's my suggestion for ensuring that you start with a non-corrupted neighborhood:
1) Create a new neighborhood.
2) Use HoodReplace to copy over the terrain, roads, trees, and deco from your corrupt neighborhood.
3) Delete the corrupt neighborhood.
4) Start creating new families.

[goderguy]

Ugh, that sucks :-( Not your fault of course, and thanks so much for the advice. I have downloaded the HoodReplace program. Will it transfer over lots too, or will that need to be done separately?

[Mootilda]

You'll need to do that separately. Just be sure to remove any families before installing the lots.

[goderguy]

Yes all lots are empty of families. Thanks again for your assistance.