Hi there! You are currently browsing as a guest. Why not create an account? Then you get less ads, can thank creators, post feedback, keep a list of your favourites, and more!
Test Subject
Original Poster
#1 Old 10th Jun 2022 at 9:06 PM

This user has the following games installed:

Sims 2, University, Nightlife, Open for Business, Pets, Seasons, Bon Voyage, Free Time, Apartment Life
Default My game has randomly generated 259 useless want trees. Possible cause of want-related corruption?
Hello,

I wasn't 100% sure whether to post in this section, because I don't really need help with fixing my save file - I just made some really interesting discovery and I could use some help with trying to figure out how the hell this happened Could this be a bug that causes want-related corruption in some people's games?

So... A few days ago, I was scanning my custom neighborhood with HoodChecker because I needed a screenshot for something. Then, to my horror, I saw this:

The list of these SWAFs was *very* long. I was like... okay, this is not good. Anyone who knows how the want trees work in this game would probably agree with me that this normally means a missing character file, but there were so many errors! How and when did this many character files go missing?! Who did I lose?! I needed to investigate further.

I opened that neighborhood in SimPE and I immediately noticed something strange. 666 SWAF entries? I never had this many Sims in this neighborhood!


So NIDs in Sim Wants and Fears went up to 707, which is a ridiculous number, as this hood has only 420 character files. All SWAFs after the newest Sim were "unclaimed".


I had a look at the Sim Creation Index. 0x01c7 = 455, so that matches the actual number of Sims.


I looked at the previous backups and I have one which seems to be from right before this oddity happened. Below is some nice backup comparison, before & after (there have been only a few days worth of gameplay between those, since I had a break from playing this hood). Note the number of SWAFs & Sims on both sides. Coleen is a baby and has a lifetime want.


I pieced it all together and here's my theory: for some reason my game decided to generate 259 generic want trees, but didn't actually generate any Sims to back them. Because of that, the Sim Creation Index did not progress, as that seems to be incrementing only when a new Sim/pet is created or born. If I carried on playing, every single one of the next 259 new Sims would inherit those "dangling" want trees meant for someone else. Talk about chaos! Luckily, I caught it early on, but 11 Sims still managed to generate in the meantime. As you can expect, a few of my toddlers (and one kitten!) had a lifetime want. One of the toddlers had age transition triggers up to adulthood, which I assume could cause her to roll adult wants sometimes.


I had a look at those generated want trees and they are very varied. Some of them were clearly meant for pets (empty want tree, with only "is born" trigger), some were typical townie want trees (childless adult born in CAS), some were clearly for NPCs judging from who they considered their roomies. So it looks like my game went mental and tried to generate a bunch of NPCs, but... didn't? It ended up only creating a bunch of want trees connected to nothing, waiting to be acquired by all of those newborn babies.

So... what the hell?! Anyone got any ideas on what happened? I had a lot of mods and CC, including stuff like notownieregen, so maybe some crazy bug in this department? I checked the logs and there's absolutely nothing. I'd really like to get to the bottom of this, since if this happened to me, it could have happened to someone else. What if there's a simple bug in the game that causes the "toddlers with lifetime wants" phenomenon?

I will appreciate any input/thoughts
Advertisement
Needs Coffee
retired moderator
#2 Old 10th Jun 2022 at 10:55 PM
Have you installed many NPC creating mods?
Multi Pollination Technician mods, multi pollination plant sims mods, stand alone NPC mods like Bek's animals, tricycle, Echo's clown, roller coaster, the surfing mod. Basically any CC that moves around the lot in some way. if it moves its guided by an NPC sim and if you pull it from your downloads you are deleting a sim.
This does included Sun& moon items.

"I dream of a better tomorrow, where chickens can cross the road and not be questioned about their motives." - Unknown
~Call me Jo~
Test Subject
Original Poster
#3 Old 10th Jun 2022 at 10:56 PM
I haven't installed any of those! I have no custom NPCs in my game.
Needs Coffee
retired moderator
#4 Old 10th Jun 2022 at 10:59 PM
You didn't do anything to the character file folder? Didn't use the cheat 'delete all characters'?

"I dream of a better tomorrow, where chickens can cross the road and not be questioned about their motives." - Unknown
~Call me Jo~
Test Subject
Original Poster
#5 Old 11th Jun 2022 at 12:08 AM
No Sims have been deleted in this hood This is a custom hood started from a clean state (i.e. empty after I created it, I followed the Sims Wiki tutorial for creating hoods with no Sims at all), so not even stealth hood premades were included.

The weirdest part to me is that it looks like none of the character files were deleted at all. None of the actual Sims are missing I am keeping track of all of my Sims, including townies and NPCs. Even if potentially one of them did go missing, there's no way I wouldn't notice the disappearance of 259 Sims! The Sim creation index did not progress, the state of character files from the backups matches up.

It genuinely looks like the game just randomly generated want trees with no Sims "attached" to them!
Needs Coffee
retired moderator
#6 Old 11th Jun 2022 at 1:22 AM
Quote: Originally posted by April Black
No Sims have been deleted in this hood This is a custom hood started from a clean state (i.e. empty after I created it, I followed the Sims Wiki tutorial for creating hoods with no Sims at all), so not even stealth hood premades were included.

The weirdest part to me is that it looks like none of the character files were deleted at all. None of the actual Sims are missing I am keeping track of all of my Sims, including townies and NPCs. Even if potentially one of them did go missing, there's no way I wouldn't notice the disappearance of 259 Sims! The Sim creation index did not progress, the state of character files from the backups matches up.

It genuinely looks like the game just randomly generated want trees with no Sims "attached" to them!


I don't know that guide, its possible its out of date and said something wrong, because something happened.

I would try again and use Cindy's guide.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-FghcJ2WYw4

"I dream of a better tomorrow, where chickens can cross the road and not be questioned about their motives." - Unknown
~Call me Jo~
Test Subject
Original Poster
#7 Old 11th Jun 2022 at 2:01 AM
I've seen Cindy's guide as well, the steps I've followed are the same. I've had this neighborhood for over two years and nothing out of the ordinary ever happened, I also understand the game well enough not to cause any accidental mayhem, so I doubt there's any correlation between this and how the hood was created. I suspect some bug or possibly a mod going haywire, but I'm at a loss as to what exactly happened There's no way extra pet/townie/NPC want trees would just appear on their own for no reason, something specific must have caused this. But what could have triggered the creation of this many SWAFs at once? This is super strange.

That made me wonder, maybe this bug (whatever it is) has happened to other players as well, and that could be one of the reasons some people are seeing toddlers with lifetime wants and other want-related oddities? I only discovered this by chance, and I was able to investigate what happened only because I'm comfortable with using SimPE and I know what's what in the neighborhood files. I imagine most players don't mess around in SimPE as often as I do and they might realize only after they see the first symptoms in the game.

I was wondering for the longest time how is it possible that other Sims acquire those orphaned want trees, mainly due to the Sim Creation index. Basically this index prevents stuff like this from happening, because it remembers the ID of the last generated Sim, so even if you nuke your entire neighborhood with deleteallcharacters, the index goes on as if nothing happened, it does not reset to 1. I've tested many, many scenarios in my isolated save, and concluded that it's basically impossible to reset SCID in-game, the only way is to reset it manually in SimPe. But clearly there's lots of evidence of "toddlers with LTWs" happening in people's games! Maybe it's not the SCID resetting, but the game just having a brain fart and generating unnecessary SWAFs? That would be a final piece in my corruption "reaserch" puzzle. This is why I'm so determined to find an answer, haha!

Perhaps some modders would know if there's any function that triggers SWAF creation and what could have possibly set it off?
Back to top