Hiya.

So I don't know why when I start new families I always choose Belladonna Cove because I actually hate it as a neighborhood. I thought that if I turned it into a megahood I'd like it more. But then I made all custom townies and so now the hundreds of premades annoy me....so I wanted to move my current family to a blank world that I can build up myself from absolute scratch.

I really want to keep memories, because I'm on the 3rd generation of my family and while I do know how to add memories through SimPE (done so before) it'd be a pain to write down memories/skills/personality points/etc for 14 sims +7 pets. So I tried to follow the "Hard Way" listed Here. I got to the step about moving the family into an empty lot before things bork'd. I reasoned that in order to maintain memory links they'd all have to be on the same lot. So I used the teleporter cat to move everybody into one lot. And then I cleaned & packaged all 4 houses. And then when I tried to move the family from the sim-bin to an empty lot in order to package them it would not load. The cursor just spun indefinitely. it was fine until I moved them out of the house and to the empty lot. So I'm thinking that it just wasn't able to load that many sims on the empty lot.

I had to force my laptop to restart, and then it got stuck on a please wait screen for 8 minutes and then stuck on the welcome spinny circle for even longer so I'm abandoning the mission. Because that was scary.

I really, really don't want to have to just copy their appearance and do memories and such manually. Especially because there's a dead sim (who I could revive) and two babies & you can't create babies in CAS and I'm particular about the age difference between everybody so I don't want them to be toddlers.

I'm giving up for the night but I'm open to any suggestions you've got to move the entire family (4 families) and keep everything in tact.

Sounds like there could already be borkage going on. The saved game files don't always deal well with sudden shutdowns that happen in the middle of a process (saving, going onto and out of a lot, or similar). You do have a backup from before you started all of this, right? Always do a backup before messing about!

As for the babies and the dead sim, I'm not so sure it's safe to do anything with those in their current state, especially moving them to another neighborhood (may also include Bodyshop cloning). Babies can get borked if you mess around too much with them (to the point where you can't interact with them) since they're not full sims yet, and dead sims are a bit iffy, too. The safest would probably be to age up the babies and resurrect the dead sim before you extract them. You could reset the age of the toddlers so they age the way they're supposed to (don't de-age to infant, as this will most certainly bork them), and the dead sim can always be dealt with in the new neighborhood.

If you cleaned the house with the sims in, it's possible the sim references were removed (because that's kinda the point of the cleaning process). Mayb not be a problem if you moved everyone to an empty lot first, though.

But seriously - do it the easy way by extracting the sims and making clones, or the "hard way" with clones and editing memories and such in SimPE. Any other method is not recommended (personally I skip the memory editing because I can't be bothered, and I also don't want to cause accidental borkage). Skills and relationships can be edited ingame via mod or in SimPE with care. While some memories can influence the sim, most of them don't, so it's not like you absolutely need most of them. Instead of writing down everything, you can get a printscreen program and take ingame pictures of all the settings, so you can fix it later.

The only way to 'move a family' is to extract each one in simPE, open Body Shop and clone each sim. delete the extracted ones and place the clones into the new hood. You will need to write down as many details about each sim as possible and then use mods/simPE to make the clones as close as possible to the original sims. Skill points, zodiac signs, hobbies etc. I always include top and lower interests in that because that determines what they like to talk or argue over.

Do not move the actual sims into a new hood, that corrupts both hoods.

Also make sure you properly clone the sims. It's not enough to extract them, and it's certainly not enough to package them directly from Bodyshop. You have to clone the sim for them to be actual sim templates (you can package this clone if you want them "forever" with all the CC they come with as a handy all-in-one pack), and then delete/remove the extracted file before you load up your game. Those files aren't safe for the game.

Thanks for the replies. I think I should have mentioned I've properly extracted sims before the way you both are saying....I just find all the setup I have to then do to get them back to normal afterwards is exhausting and takes me days to do and if you've seen anything else I've posted here before I'm quite lazy I would greatly prefer a magic wand that would just plop them down in the new neighborhood and go. I was more so just hoping there was an easier way than the easy way, ya know?

Yes I made a backup. I've bork'd this game enough times in 16 years that I know that's an absolute.

I did ressurect the dead sim before I did anything, but I did not age the babies so maybe that's where I went wrong. I had moved them out of the house to the bin before I did the houses. But I'm thinking it might have just been the game didn't know how to handle that many sims in one household when I tried moving them out of the bin.

And then just some extra thoughts but not really relevant - my game is touchy enough as it is so if I were to print screen everything and flip back and forth between those (only one monitor) it'd definitely crash after a few times. As why physically writing them down is my best option. Or taking photos on my phone but then you've got all the weird screen lines and it's tiny letters and
& I look through their memories quite a lot so that's why that's the main thing I had hoped to lazily maintain.

We all wish there was a magic wand -or even better that the ingame buttons to move sims was actually fine to use!

If you were to move one or two Sims, the "hard way" option would have much less room for mistakes. But, as you can see, with large families there is that infinite load issue where things can go wrong, and it's very easy to miss a memory related to a Sim you won't be moving. So, with many Sims, the best idea is to extract them and remake them. If you ever decide to use the "hard way" option, make sure that your Sims have absolutely zero memories of other Sims, move them into a fresh, empty lot and use the Package option to export the lot, so that the Clean Installer can check if there are any stray Sims. If there are no stray Sims, install the lot and you'll find it in the lot bin. If you want to move the house as well, make sure it's unoccupied, with no graves or Sims' personal items, and clean it with the Lot Cleaner. Then it's safe to move it to another hood.