I do apologize, first of all, if this question seems like one with an obvious answer, but after it came to light how the Sims Fandom wiki's "avoiding corruption" guide is over-exaggerated at best and outright wrong at worst, my attention turned to all those premade dead ancestors who will supposedly ruin your game if you resurrect them, such as Olive Specter's "victims" in Strangetown, or the saber-toothed old ladies buried in the Capp family manor's backyard in Veronaville.

In April Black's video that I linked, she does go over how the reason most of the premade dead ancestors are "un-resurrectable" is because they were also soft deleted, and how, funny enough, the wiki itself inadvertently provides a guide on how to restore soft deleted Sims, because the process for resurrecting say, the duplicates of Darleen and Skip in Pleasantview or the second Nervous in Strangetown, is exactly the same process for restoring a soft deleted Sim, so to be perfectly clear, I don't want to focus on those types of premade dead ancestors, as it seems they're perfectly safe anyway, provided you know what you're doing with SimPE.

Instead, my focus is shifted to, again, Olive's victims, or the Capp and Goth ancestors who are buried in their respective families' backyards. The ones who actually seem to have truly broken data, such as Melissa and Vicki Sims both being flagged as adult men by the game, despite the former being a teenage girl and the latter being an adult woman. Ophelia's parents and Lyla Grunt, who all have totally borked faces. Cleopatra Capp and Calpurnia Caesar, who have an elongated tooth that clips through their bodies, who produce offspring with mouths on their foreheads. Apparently Agnes Crumplebottom also has a borked face, but strangely this is only mentioned on Lyla's page and not her own. Knut Futa, who is, well, Knut Futa. Need I say more?

As I mentioned in another thread, I've been playing around on a test hood of sorts, called Corruption Valley, which has all of these sims in it, I know this, because I went through the horrible effort of moving them to the lots and houses bin, and then into the neighborhood, just to be extra unsafe. However, what I've found so far is that, while yes, some sims have horrifying broken faces, even after being resurrected, and some do indeed have messed up data, such as Melissa and Vicki's male coding, or Knut's baby coding (not to mention the fact he's not even actually dead!), and they do indeed pass on their horrible broken faces to their children, none of this seems to actually be breaking the game, or really putting my hood at risk, the way the wiki pages insist they should be. Even Knut Futa, who supposedly can't be aged up, was aged up into an adult for me without throwing errors, and now functions perfectly fine. Willow, Creon, Lyla, Calpurnia, and Cleopatra do have messed up faces, but they still function just fine. Melissa and Vicki sound and animate like adult men, but they, too, still function just fine otherwise.

Now, don't get me wrong, I'm not saying there's nothing wrong with these Sims. They obviously have broken data and are incredibly bugged, I won't even say they're not corrupted, because they clearly are. But, I am calling into question now if this is another case of the wiki heavily exaggerating the "damage" these sims are supposed to do to your hood and to your game, because to me, from what I've observed, their issues seem to be entirely self-contained. But of course, I'm no actual programmer the way April Black, and others on this website, are, my knowledge on programming is mostly second-hand and is very limited, so I'd love to hear others' thoughts. Is this another case of the Fandom wiki exaggerating?

And, on a side note, are there even any similarly corrupted dead premades in the EP neighborhoods? I can't find any evidence that there are, but I'd love to know for further experimenting!

This is what April Black said about the Sims in Olive's graveyard:
"You might see some glitches when you resurrect them, but I disagree that they cause corruption. Many of them just have broken genetics or incomplete data in their character file/Sim Description, but I don’t see any way it could possibly harm your save file."
https://www.reddit.com/r/sims2/comm...vwt9/?context=3

I'd hypothesize the worst effect you might get is a game crash whenever the game tries to load the Sim, but I've only ever seen this when using a very screwed-up custom hair. You're more likely to get jump bugs.

Just watching April Black's video, I could tell what's wrong with Vicki and Melissa Sims, as well as the two other seeming ex-townies in the graveyard, Luc Smith and Patrick Jones- their Sim Description was deleted. All the symptoms match up, with the max fitness, blank personality, no aspiration, and being adult males. And yes, there are some sims in the EP hoods that also had their Sim Descriptions deleted. In Bluewater Village, Elle Rodiek, Jeannie Chen, and all of the ancestors of the Giekes, Jacquets, and Delarosas, and Lucy Mole in Desiderata Valley are similarly bugged. And in Belladonna Cove, Chastity Gere's paternal grandmother got full on deleted, reduced to $Subject, for god knows what reason.

The weird thing is that some of the cautious sources advised against resurrected ANY dead premades in the base game neighborhoods, even the more innocuous, non-bugged sims like Claudio and Olivia Monty, and Contessa Capp, because they apparently are "missing data," even though they seem to be in a similar state to their living counterparts. Maybe they were just victims of the weird game of telephone involving corruption.

I'm curious whether the SDSCs went missing by accident, or were deliberately deleted for whatever reason during development.

In Oakbrook, I had a transgender restaurant host (flagged as male, but female body and hair) due to this glitch, I suspect the game crashed when my Sims were at the restaurant so the Neighbourhood package didn't save but the NPC's character file still existed. it wasn't until April Black's video that I figured out what happened :D

Hey, all! Thanks for the replies, I'd been at work for most of the time not long after I started this thread, so I could only really read your replies without leaving any of my own; MTS doesn't format very well on mobile.

Well, I suppose this is what I get for not using Reddit. If only I'd known the very person whose video I linked at the beginning of the thread had actually already answered this question, and even came to the same conclusion that I did, which is that, while corrupted and buggy, they don't pose any harm towards the actual game, nor to any 'hoods they're in.

Oh yeah, that's what I figured was going on with those four, myself, and yeah, that still seems to not be very harmful towards the game or neighborhood, just those specific Sims being glitchy. Also, I can't believe I forgot Elle Rodiek and Jeannie Chen! I've watched Izzzyzzz's Sims 2 video so many times, knowing for a fact that they actually bring those two up, and I somehow still forgot them!

Honestly, I'm amazed that the post-Nightlife EP neighborhoods have corrupted dead ancestors at all, considering Nightlife itself did well to remember with Downtown to give Rainelle and the Tricous character data so they could be resurrected normally with the Resurrect-O-Nomitron, you'd think the EPs that followed would've done the same!

Wait a minute, I think you just inadvertently answered a question I didn't even ask yet! Is this why my game crashes when I try to move the Green household to the lots & houses bin? Because the game's trying to create a stub file for a Sim who doesn't even exist? That's so nutty! I think Chastity's unknown grandma may very well be the one instance where a dead ancestor being corrupted does cause actual problems with the game. Thanks for this insight!

Yep! This here is exactly why I'm calling into question the wiki's insistence these Sims are somehow "unsafe" to resurrect. Olivia is missing a pregnancy token, but this isn't "unsafe" by any means, it just means that even though she looks pregnant, she won't actually give birth. Similarly, I question the wiki's claim that Danielle Greaves and Jessica Ebadi are the "only" safe sims to resurrect out of Olive's victims, because her dead husbands all also resurrect just fine for me, though I also admit I'm not using the Resurrect-O-Nomitron for this, so maybe that has something to do with it, but regardless, Earl E., Hugh, Ichabod, and Rigger all came back at their proper ages and with their proper faces, same for Tim Lee, I should note. Apparently Ichabod's age is supposed to be corrupt and show that he's lived for days that are in the negatives, but I wasn't able to replicate this? Yeah, I definitely think this is another case of "corruption" claims being a game of telephone.

And finally, I'm seconding this. The only time my game has crashed at all during these experiments was when I tried to move the Green household to the lots & houses bin, and, like I said before, I now know why. Still, the only real "risk" resurrecting these Sims causes is potentially making the game crash, but as long as people make backups, this should barely be a problem.

So, I think I'm going to go through and start editing some of these Fandom wiki pages, I think they're long overdue for the same type of cleanup the "avoiding corruption" guide got. Knut Futa's trivia section in particular is... unnecessary, and I'm not gonna say what it says, because we gotta keep things PG-13 on MTS, but eesh, do people really not know that "Futa" is like, legitimately an actual surname real life people have? With no connections to anything erm, inappropriate?

If you resurrect a sim with missing/broken/odd data, you'll probably have some issues with that sim. That's probably the extent of it.

You may also get some really horrifying faces with some of them: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jL3...QVlJMX&index=11

Knut Futa is currently living his best life as a zombie in Strangetown!

Very interesting thread, good to hear these snippets of information.

Yeah, that's what I was thinking! Issues with the sim and not with the actual game.

By the way, I'll probably start doing more "legit" research on this soon, I should've clarified from the start that, for resurrecting these sims, I've been using a combination of MidgeTheTree's playable ghosts and supernatural transformer, clicking on the tombstones and selecting the option to turn them into playable ghosts, then using the transformer to "cure" their ghostliness. I've only used the Resurrect-O-Nomitron in very few cases, because the dead sims it can be used to resurrect are actually very limited. I've also realized I'll need to do more of this research in, specifically, the standalone neighborhoods, and not Corruption Valley, if I really want access to all of the dead premades.

It also just occurred to me that perhaps the reason I haven't been able to replicate Ichabod's backwards aging is because I have an alternate aging mod, and another mod that corrects the ages of all sims in the neighborhood to match. Oops! I'll have to see what happens with that mod removed from my downloads.

By the way, my friends and I made an interesting observation regarding Olive's victims who have broken faces, that I noticed the wiki doesn't seem to mention at all, which is that they don't just get randomized faces, they steal faces. I'm so sad I didn't get a screencap of this, but as I was streaming these tests to my friends over Discord, we saw as Lyla Grunt, Luc Smith, and Willow Nigmos all had the same exact face, and that face was specifically Titania Summerdream's, as she had passed by the lot just as the ghosts popped out of their graves. They had her pointy ears and all of her makeup. This led to us having a short conversation about how unintentionally creepy glitches were in older games, how it would probably be horrifying for a little kid playing this game and seeing ghosts stealing the faces of living Sims.

WAIT WAIT WAIT
I'VE SEEN THIS BEFORE
I decided to go messing around in the base version of Strangetown to fiddle around with the brokenness, and I was playing the Curious family before I messed around with Olive's victims. I was wondering why the everyone was resurrected with alien faces, but now it makes sense! THEY STOLE TYCHO'S FACE. So creepy!

Even with clean templates, a lot of the Strangetown premades also have character file oddities that cause weirdnesses when InTeeen is installed. Vidcund randomly transforming into a teenager a day or two after giving birth was pretty much the breaking point to me giving up on it

I mean, the game is about sims, so issues with sims are in fact issues with the game. Having issues with the game doesn't mean you have to delete your save, but that was always the case. I believe even the wiki says that if you're still having fun with your neighborhood you can continue playing it in spite of whatever problems it might have. It's entirely up to you how many problems are too many problems.

YES!!! Thank you for providing screenshots of your own, proving this phenomenon exists and that this isn't even isolated to my game! It is indeed very creepy, thinking of it. From a technical standpoint, I think the game is having them "steal" any face they can so that they can load in properly without making the game crash, as I believe would be what happened if they loaded in "faceless," seeing as they have missing 3D data. But from an in-universe standpoint, it's like these dead sims are so desperate to exist again, that they cling to faces that aren't their own...


Oh, that is weird, especially for being on Tarlia's clean hoods. I don't use InTeen, as it conflicts with several other mods I love using, so I can't speak too much on this, but that is indeed very... weird.


Ah, yeah, allow me to clarify then, that I mean that while the sims are broken, and yes in a way this means it does break gameplay to some extent since, well, the sims are the center of the gameplay just like you said, this does not mean that they "cause [hood/game] corruption" the way those sims' wiki pages once said (I say "once" because I've been editing them even as I type this). I don't deny that they are broken, but I think their brokenness has been greatly over-exaggerated over the course of the nearly 20 years (holy cow!!!) this game has been around.

In any case, you're totally right about how many problems are too many problems varying by the person. Right now I have a proper gaming PC that can run this game without catching on fire, but back when I first started playing this game on my crappy eMachines desktop in like, 2009? I believe it was? These borked sims may have been too much for my PC to handle, and that may also be why people still say resurrecting those sims is "unsafe," because maybe it was, a decade ago! Or over a decade ago, I mean, eesh, I feel old.

I think this fandom has a very warped idea of what "corruption" means. Corruption just means that data was modified in an unintentional way, or in a way that puts things into an inconsistent state. These sims are undeniably corrupted (aside from the ones that were just soft deleted, but attempting to resurrect a soft deleted sim without restoring their data may well put them into a corrupt state). That doesn't mean that your computer or your game or your neighborhood needs to be exorcised or deleted or that the corrupt data is going to mutate and consume other data like some kind of digital cancer, it just means that some data is wrong or missing.

Well, partly for the "corruption" as a term being spread like cancer, I'd blame the language used mostly on MATY, namely by Pescado. And of course, the sheer panic of people that didn't know any better; it is a PG-13 game after all.

For the Ottomas twins potentially having the wrong parents, April Black put it this way: "it doesn't cause corruption, it is corruption." But it's mostly just limited to the twins possibly having screwed-up DNA (especially if the father ID of the pregnancy token pointed to a stray dog or something )

I'd also count the false engagement/marriage bug as another example of corruption, but that's easily fixed.

Hmm, I honestly wouldn't blame Pescado too much here, having watched April Black's video in full multiple times (I love background noise, even if I've already watched a video, haha), I didn't get the impression that Pescado himself said such things, just that people misunderstood him and then that became a crazy game of telephone, as April herself puts it. At most, maybe his more exaggerated way of speaking didn't read as sarcasm to a lot of people, and this lead to the misunderstanding.

It's pretty obvious nowadays that a huge bulk of Sims players just, aren't very tech-literate, and that's how so many people misunderstood how data corruption actually works. This includes myself! Not to mention it's a pretty big meme on the internet at large to make fun of games for being broken, especially if they're produced by big-name studios such as EA and aren't cheap, so should not be cheaply made; look at how often people make fun of recent Pokemon games, for example. I think this need to joke about a game being broken, and then people's tech-illiteracy, combined into the game of telephone that is much of the 2010s discussion around "corruption" in The Sims 2.

I will also say that this game being from the early 2000s just added more fuel to the fire, I mean, come on, "If you save the game while your sim is talking on the telephone, it'll corrupt your neighborhood!" sounds like something someone would've told me on the playground, akin to, for another Pokemon comparison, "There's a Mew under the truck!" If anything, I think The Sims 2 could be a fascinating case study about how these "video game playground superstitions," as I call them, were still mostly on the internet, even the official Maxis forums. But that might be getting off-topic, I can save it for another thread! But yeah, you just don't get superstitions about games like that anymore, since basically everyone uses the internet now.

FWIW, when I experimented, setting the father ID to a dog resulted in the baby just being an opposite-sex clone of the mother. Pregnant pets getting the father ID set to a human had slightly more interesting effects.

I only had Sarah Ottomas giving birth to a stray dog's children once and it's been a while, but they definitely looked messed up. Giant noses, tiny eyes. Definitely not opposite sex clones of her.

HE'S WHAT?? How did you manage that?

Hmm, now let's see... I think I resurrected him, set his age to baby in SimPE, aged him up to adult, gave him some personality and aspiration, marked him as dead again, then had Olive resurrect him as a zombie. I did this a while ago, so can't remember exactly! You just need to look at his character (there isn't much of it!) in SimPE and fill in any missing bits.

I never had a single problem with the Ottomas twins in my vanilla game. Those boys grew up well and became quite important sims in my hood.

Not having bought my expansion packs in the order they were published - and I did buy Seasons and Pets later, because they sold out before I could get to our shop in my former town - I think an update may well have taken care of that.

Current hood (started empty) one of the twins is a girl.

Poor guy.

Cool. Sounds wild!