For the past few days, if I try to start a new world (e.g. Sunset Valley, Apaloosa Plains) it always loads with no premade sims at all. This is the case for all premade, store and custom worlds. This is bad as I want to do a new playthrough with premade sims, but can't. I'm not talking about intentionally empty worlds either; most of the worlds I have in my game come with Sims preloaded into them without the use of a starter save folder.

I've removed all CC and mods, all store content, all cache files, even uninstalled and reinstalled the whole game (1.67, non-Origin) to no avail. I'm at a loss as to what to do.

Basically I'm looking for either solutions or unedited vanilla starter save files for the EA/store worlds. Or both.

Many thanks.

Is it possible that your game is somehow stuck in its Tutorial Mode, so that you are being offered a chance to practice CAS sim creation skills but you aren't really playing the game yet?

I made a sim in CAS and moved in to the a new world and there was the option to exit tutorial so it seems I was stuck in the tutorial. I can now click choose household in new worlds since it's showing up again, but there are no households to choose and when I put a premade sim in the world and activate the Tagger mod there are no sim tags which shows that there are no other sims in the world. I will take out my mods and try again, update after that.

Update: cleared caches, disables all mods except for nointro, and guess what?? Worlds have people in them again! So this seems to be a mod issue after all as I suspected, that was affecting my game even when I took them out.

Now to do the boring task of determining which mod is causing the issue... will probably post here when I do so that others won't have such a hard time.

OK final update: the mod causing the issue is called University Fix Missing Science Professor. I have removed it completely and my game is back to normal. Thank you again for suggesting the tutorial issue, without that I may not have been able to identify that it was a mod issue underneath.

The mod does comes with a warning
https://modthesims.info/d/611709/un...ing-issues.html

Still, that's quite an impact this thing has!

I learned a valuable lesson from this: read the descriptions thoroughly! Sometimes I just blindly go on binge download sprees and stuff like this happens...