Earlier I was playing the game as usual and encountered a few townies every so often as walkbys, I decided to start having my sim chat with them and selected the option asking about their wants once I could. For some reason there were no wants in their chat box... And it was those dreaded squiggly lines... In colour! I saved and quit and decided to open up SimPE to have a look at their character and it does indeed seem that they have NO wants at all, only fears. Their aspiration is Knowledge which seems normal since they're not a child. This happened with all but one towny I've spoken to thus far out of 6 (One townie had 3 wants and a blank, rest have mostly all blanks) and it does reroll properly with all slots filled when invited one on a date or using cheats to select them and batboxing rerolls. I so far have NEVER seen a playable Sim with a blank want before and the townies are the first time. I've posted the examples.

This neighbourhoods only a week old and uses all of the Meetme2theriver cleaned BDC and subhoods including a lot of other anti-corruption mods, Hoodchecker comes up COMPLETELY clean except for some "met self" things which are gone after each removal leaving only 4 missing character files (I know they're due to mods as they're consistent across all neighbourhoods.)

So I'm unsure why this happened. Is this a potential sign of corruption or just a oneoff bug that rolling each and everyone's wants one can solve?

@Burnziie, regarding the potential sign of corruption, it is possible as seen here: https://sims.fandom.com/wiki/Game_g...ding_corruption

I have not done anything on that list that I know of that would usually cause a BFBVFS usually outside of test hoods (non NPC related ones). The coloured squiggles of the Sim interests doesn't seem to be something I can't find around that much however and especially it being towny limited so far unless it has the potential to spread.
Only corruption signs I would've possibly had up to this point were the uncoloured needs squiggles, although they only happened with stuck sims.

"Squiggly lines" in your case are just icons smashed together. Sometimes wants just don't appear, but they will after a while. Do you maybe have the Adults Go Steady mod?

I would hope you backed up your Sims 2 folder in your ducuments at least a few times and have a recent copy from just before that started because you could switch to the backed up copy and revert to before that mess started.I do backups of my TS2 folder contents requently and can restore if that ever happened to me.I started backing the folder up when I first started playing to have a backup when installing expansions and still make copies of the folder contents in another folder at least monthly.

I did actively use that mod at the moment.


Fortunately after my last neighbourhood corrupted I've made sure to make backups of just the neighbourhood every single day so I have some backups just not of anything else from the Sims 2 folder currently.

Squiggly lines doesn't necessarily mean there is corruption, it just means that the game didn't have an icon to use for the speech or thought bubble. I believe the case where it means corruption is when a sim is thinking about or talking about a corrupted memory. As far as I know, missing wants isn't a sign of corruption, but it might mean that you have a buggy mod that is affecting want check trees.

Adults Go Steady is a mod that can cause missing wants/fears; see if removing it and rerolling wants fixes it.

I would actually back up the entire Sims 2 folder at least once a month in case anything went wrong in the folder as you were playing so you'd only lose up to a month of playing if that ever happened and you wouldn't lose all of the Mods and CC if your folder got glitched out.I had that happen once and had to revert to a recent backup copy which was far better than losing everything.I'd also check out any Mods I'd installed recently and any recently installed CC in case one of the installs was glitchy.

I usually get the colourful squiggly lines when I have a playable sim on a business lot and they're trying to sell something to a customer. As mentioned, it is just icons squashed together. Unless this is accompanied by other strange behaviours, such as toddlers wanting to go on dates and a sim wanting to woohoo the family dog, I think you should be good.

As for the missing want slots, it could be caused by a mod conflict of some description. Have you tried refreshing wants with the Bat Box? Provided you have it downloaded, of course.

I have, things like inviting townies on dates also worked at rerolling everything normally like it would with the batbox. From SimPE looking it does seem to only happen with townies and none of my playable Sims have shown weird signs yet like children with LTWs and wants for a job.

Seems it's happened to my other neighbourhood too, so it must be a mod conflict but I don't recall adding anything adjusting gameplay since Adults Go Steady which I'll have to test out townie wants now it's removed.

I'd suggest making a test hood and see if the issue persists there. If so, remove the Adults Go Steady mod to see if that is the cause. If it still continues, then you may have to do a 50/50 check; this is basically where you remove half of your mods folder to try and find the cause of the issue, if I'm not mistaken.