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Mootilda
13th Feb 2012, 6:44 PM
Here is the safest and easiest way to delete all characters from a neighborhood:

1) Create a new empty neighborhood with the terrain type that you want to use.

2) Use HoodReplace to copy the neighborhood terrain, roads, trees, deco, etc. from your old neighborhood to your new neighborhood:
http://www.modthesims.info/download.php?t=279992

3) In your old neighborhood, make sure that all of your lots are unowned and unoccupied. Otherwise, your Lot Descriptions will reference families which are not available. It is probably safest to allow the game to delete all objects from your occupied lots when your sims move out. Use of the Stay-Things Shrub or similar mods may leave references to sims on your lots.

4) Download and install the latest version of SimPE:
http://sims.ambertation.de/

5) In SimPE, extract all Text List (STR#) with instance numbers of 0x8000 or larger from your old neighborhood.

6) Extract all Lot Descriptions (LTXT) from your old neighborhood.

7) Add the extracted Text List (STR#) to your new neighborhood. Save your neighborhood, so that the Text Lists are available for the next step.

8) Add the extracted Lot Descriptions to your new neighborhood.

9) Copy all lot packages from the Lots subfolder of your old neighborhood to the Lots subfolder of your new neighborhood.

10) Rename all of those lot packages from <old>_Lot#.package to <new>_Lot#.package (i.e. change the neighborhood prefix, but nothing else).

11) (optional) Copy the png from your old neighborhood to your new neighborhood and rename it to have the new neighborhood prefix. This is the preview picture for the neighborhoods menu.

simsample
14th Feb 2012, 2:03 AM
Thank you so much, Mootilda- I tried this and it worked perfectly!

I had one or two lots that didn't copy over for some reason, but apart from that no glitches. I managed to clone a neighbourhood and its downtown and Uni, so this tutorial was very useful! I had over 300 characters so it would have taken a while to delete them manually.

Mootilda
29th Jun 2012, 8:58 PM
HugeLunatic is having a problem with Black Mesa (http://www.modthesims.info/download.php?t=478837) which may be related. It looks like lots may disappear if the Test List (STR#) associated with the lot doesn't match the information in the Lot Description (LTXT) record.

Therefore, I'm going to recommend that people also copy all Text List (STR#) records for their lots. I've updated the original tutorial.

The instance of the Text List is 0x8000 + the instance of the Lot Description. For example, if the instance number for a Lot Description is 0x00000001, then the Text List instance for that lot is 0x00008001.