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Mad Poster
Original Poster
#1 Old 6th Jul 2016 at 8:32 PM Last edited by murfee : 8th Jul 2016 at 2:44 AM.

This user has the following games installed:

Sims 3, World Adventures, Ambitions, Late Night, Showtime, Supernatural
Extracting Lots from a Save File? (.nhd file) [RESOLVED]
Alright, so I was playing in one of my saves, when suddenly I started getting crashes to desktop.
I thought it was due to bad CC I had installed/uninstalled from my mods folder. I tried clearing my caches and everything; no dice.

In the end I deduced that the problem was because of my active household's lot they lived in -- apparently CC in it (or missing from it) was causing a rendering problem; forcing the game to crash if I tried to make my sims leave their house, or go into Edit Mode or Map mode. Even panning the camera around their house makes it crash. The House of Horrors is literally holding my sims hostage. So, the save is pretty much unplayable now. No biggie, I'll just scrap it and use a backup, right? WRONG!

I have a backup from a few days prior that I can use, yes, but my problem is that I recently finished decorating a separate Community Lot in the same world, but I never saved it to the Bin! I REALLY WANT THAT COMMUNITY LOT BACK; I worked on it all week! But if I revert to my older backup save I'll have to make that Community Lot all over again!

So, long story short: I was wondering if the progress I made on the community lot is embedded in my save game file, and if I can somehow extract the lot from it.

I did a little digging, and in the save game folder I saw the 4 typical game files: the TravelDB.package, the Meta.data, another .dat file, and the world's .ndh file, the biggest one.
I assume this is the actual world file, so I made a copy of it and turned the copy into a .package file by renaming it. Then I opened the .ndh/.package file in S3PE.

I got a ton of _IMG files, 2ARTYs, ICONs, LDES, MODLs and OBJNs, REFS, SNAPs, UNKNs; a handful of DETLs; and one META, WDET and WTXT.
I searched through the ICONs to find the community lot I was working on, and it's there, so I selected all of the entries that share the same Instance number the ICON file does; assuming they all have something to do with that community lot in particular.



The idiot in me is tempted to simply delete everything that does NOT share their Instance Number, then save everything as a new package file, and dump it in the Library folder and hope for the best, frankly.
But the cynic in me suspects it's not that easy to rebuild a lot's data, especially because when opening an ACTUAL lot file in S3PE, there are different file types tagged in S3PE that I didn't even see in the .ndh/.package file. (One _XML, LDES, and REFS file; two 2ARY and ICON files, and a bunch of COMPs, TXTCs, TXTFs, and UNKNs.)



So, I guess my actual question (finally ) is whether or not I really can extract a lot from an .ndh save game file in S3PE, or if there's something else I need to do, or whether I should just bite the bullet and make the lot from scratch and stop fiddling with game files when you know I don't know what the heck I'm even doing.

Any help would be greatly appreciated!
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Field Researcher
#3 Old 7th Jul 2016 at 6:26 AM
Your brilliance always amazes me Nitromon
Mad Poster
Original Poster
#5 Old 8th Jul 2016 at 2:43 AM
Quote: Originally posted by nitromon
For example, if you have NRAAS traveler. Simply start a new game in a different world. Save the game. Then copy the borked nhd into your new save. Load the new save, use traveler and travel to your borked homeworld as a vacation spot. It will load the borked nhd.


Interesting trick!
It's way too much world-hopping though; it would be faster to just redecorate the lot.

I was hoping I could just extract the file and plop it down into the Library folder somehow. But this is good to know for future reference; thanks!
Test Subject
#6 Old 22nd Jul 2017 at 6:16 PM
Default Rescued
Quote: Originally posted by nitromon
Why do people always make things more complicated than they should be? There are way easier methods to extract lots via mods and cheats.

For example, if you have NRAAS traveler. Simply start a new game in a different world. Save the game. Then copy the borked nhd into your new save. Load the new save, use traveler and travel to your borked homeworld as a vacation spot. It will load the borked nhd. (Note: Not a guarantee solution, I have no idea why your old game was borked but this is just one method to enter the nhd)

Since I dont actually know what is wrong with your nhd, you can actually use MC to do a hard reset. Or use awesome mod and do "fixall." Etc...

Or upload the nhd to media fire and I'm happy to take a look see if I can extract it.


One year later I lost a lot I spent so much time on. Thank you so much, It saved my lot!
Test Subject
#7 Old 3rd Sep 2020 at 4:38 PM
How would you do this, but with individual sims themselves?
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