Hi there guys. I loaded up my game yesterday and found random sims gone without a trace. I first noticed it in my family of 4, two adults, a child and a toddler. The toddler and one of the adults seem to have completely disappeared. They are gone from the left side menu(to select the sim you want to control in live mode), and do not appear in the neighborhood view of the family, or in any sims' relationships or family tree. It's like they never existed. The only trace is that they still show up in the family portrait on the load screen. All memories with those sims show up now for example as "Taught $Subject to Walk" or "Had Very First Kiss with $Subject".

I went through my neighborhood and it looks like the same thing happened randomly to a few different families, for example a child disappeared from a family, 2 sims disappeared from a college campus, etc.

I haven't downloaded anything new recently so it couldn't have been related to CC...All I can think of is last time I played, I was messing with boolprop a little bit, only in a totally different family: long time ago I had 2 moms with a son, and I wanted to age him up just to skip the toddler phase because i honestly get SO bored with the toddler phase, I hate it. So I used boolprop to age him to a child. Only, I'm not sure how but something went wrong and he ended up growing into a child, but with the animations and voice of a newborn. He would just lie on the ground by the mailbox and no one could do anything to interact with him. I tried deleting, leaving the lot then coming back. I also tried just leaving boolprop on, then when the message comes up showing there is an error, clicking delete and reloading the family. I also tried setting it to his birthday so that he would age up and maybe fix it, however no one could interact with him so they couldn't "help with birthday".

I kind of gave up for a while but then the other night I decided to fix it, I went back into that family and just waited until his needs were too low hoping the social worker would come and just get rid of him and the glitch. What ended up happening was that the social worker came, but couldn't interact with the kid to take him away...... She kind of stood there for a while, then left and came back over and over. I tried turning boolprop on again, so i could press delete on any error messages, and eventually the social worker was able to take the kid away and I turned boolprop off for good. That was the last time I played before I turned the game back on and found a bunch of sims disappeared. IDK if it is related or not though.

I have tried saving and exiting the family, then loading it again but it doesn't affect anything. I tried to look in the game files under Neighborhood > Characters but I wouldn't know what the files to look for are in the first place :/ I just don't understand how this could have happened, or what to do next. I will try to play tonight and see if I lose any more sims

update: I tried to load my game but I can't get past the neighborhood loading screen. it loads but then my mouse turns into the spinny rainbow wheel and freezes, I have to force quit.... It's just this one neighborhood. all the others load fine.

Sounds like your hood is at the far end of being corrupted. You could try Hood Checker but it might be too late to save.

Since you are Playing on a Mac it is very likely that both of your problems are due to too many files in your Downloads folder and that your Mac is not able to load all of the files that The Sims 2 is trying to load.

Good news is that your Neighborhood is not failing due to Corruption.
Good News is that you can use the Bat Box from MATY and remove corruption from your remaining Sims and that will fix most of the corruption issues that you have.
Bad news is your missing Sims are gone for good.

Note: Some symptoms of trying to load too many files are missing Sims and Neighborhood fails to load.

For a detailed explanation of the issue read my post Mac Misbehaviour with Crashes and the Maximum Open Files Limit


This will help with more information in determining if the Issue is in Fact trying to load too many files.

If the problem is too many files like I am thinking, then you have two choices.

Choice #1 You can reduce the number of files in your Downloads folder.


Note: If you have any added files in your Music folder or Paintings folder, you can take them out as well as I think they add to the count. If you have not added .mp3 files to the Music folder, like me, then don't touch it. The Paintings folder is for Custom Paintings in the game, I don't think it is necessary, not really sure though as I changed the contents, but I didn't empty the folder.


Choice #2 You can raise the Limit.

I think that the Best Solution to the problem is raise the Maximum Open File Limit, this is what I did since I had the same problem.


For information on changing the Mac Open File Limit click the link and read my post.

The solution is a bit techinical, but I tried to give a step by step approach to it.

If you need more help on this let me know.

Once you get the issue resolved, I hope with Raising the Limit as I think it the best, then your problem Neighborhood should load with no problem. Once you have it loaded go to the families and use the bat box The black box with the bat symbol found in Miscelaneous/Miscelaneous and then go to Memory and fix corruption on each sim that has it.

Adding to what lordtyger9 says above, the open file limit includes all files open on your computer at the time, not just the ones opened by Sims 2 when it loads. So you can also keep the numbers down by closing down any other apps you're running before starting to play. Even if they're only running in background, they'll still have open file handles and reduce the number of files your Sims game can cope with before it breaks.

I have about 1000 files in my Downloads folder, and only one hood at present. From a clean boot to lloading a lot opens 6000+ files, so it's pretty easy to hit the limit (12288 files in total, 10240 for a single app) if you don't keep an eye on things or increase the limit.

Hmm OK, thank you both so much. After I posted last night I educated myself about corruption. Can't believe there is so much stuff I never realized could cause it, and I've been playing the sims a looong time... To be safe I am deleting my neighborhood and I'll be starting from scratch just to make sure all corruption is gone. I'm scared that if I use the bat box I could just confuse myself and make things worse, and it sounds kind of relieving to just start fresh, although I hate losing all the lots I built.

muridae thank you for the link about increasing the maximum file limit! I think I will try it, maybe not yet because I don't fully understand all of it so I don't want to go messing up my mac that I just bought a few months ago... But I do have like 7k files in my downloads folder, and I'm usually running Spotify while I play so I'm sure that all is not helping. I deleted the premade neighborhoods too, I never use em! So hopefully that will work for now and I'll try to figure out how to do the maximum file limit later.

I'll let you know if my game is running fine again once I get all this done setting up a new neighborhood, thank you guys so much again!

Good luck! And if you end up using the instructions in my link to increase the file limit, try the attached PDF file which has all the screenshots. Alas, they're currently missing from the original post as they were on modyourpanties. When I get a chance I shall upload them again, but at the moment I can't access the computer I took them on so it might be a few more weeks before I get the chance.

(Incidentally, if you're planning to delete and reset your game anyway, it might be worth trying to restore the files for the old one from Time Machine if you're using it. It may not have captured all the files at the right times, and you'll need to go back to a point where you know everything was intact and possibly lose some progress to be on the safe side. But I've managed to restore a hood to a previous date and time from a Time Machine backup successfully in the past, and if it doesn't work you haven't lost anything other than the time taken to try it.)

I have restored from a backup more than once, I recommend doing that too.

Increasing the Maximum Open File Limit is not really all that hard, just be brave and figure that you are going to have to use Terminal.

However you just copy and paste as all of the information that you need to put in the files is right there in the instructions.

Just take a deep breath, relax and take your time, your Mac is really not likely to break.

Note: I went back and increased the Maximum Open File Limit again on my iMac as I have an Ãœberhood and 10369 files and I did not want to give up very much.


Take a look at the information we provided, you will be glad that you changed the limit once you have and if you look at my post about the things that happen when you have exceeded the limit you will be able to recognize it if and when it happens again.

Besides I will help if need be and I am sure that muridae will too, also he is quite good at explaining too.