I am partway through this video and it goes into a lot of detail. Which just makes me ask: just where did the 'deleting Sims will permanently break your neighbourhood' idea come from?

And how did it persist so long?

EDIT: This actually seems covered in the video, section starting about 43 minutes in.

Yes, I think she covers the history in the video. It's all really interesting, just from a cultural sense: how it grew into this huge, ill-defined kind of urban legend. I still see lots of posts (on Reddit mostly) by people who are just so *scared* of corruption that they won't even do simple things in game. I get not wanting to corrupt your neighborhood you worked so hard on, but I don't get the weird fear so many people express. Like they would trash their entire neighborhood if they deleted a grave just because they're so worried about *possible* corruption.

I had a chuckle of that one part in the video where the completely genuine response to what seemed to be a glitching lot imposter was "use Hoodchecker!"

For what it matters, Sprignwater's Great Crash came from running out of disk space while saving, which crashed the game. This did end up with a lot of missing character (and possibly lots, it was hard to tell) files and while it didn't disappear I was only able to get it to load once or twice afterwards and only to neighbourhood view.

I think it came from MATY? I don't know, it's a while since I watched the video.

Hood/game corruption was talked about a LOT on MATY and they had this very "Hahahaha you are too stupid to understand the complex explanation! Be happy with the dire warnings, peasants!" kind of attitude that people were scared to question, I think.

It seemed to be true in earlier versions of the game (harder cap on number of sims?) and I think people just assumed that it continued to be true even though it wasn't as much of an issue in later games. Also remember that back in 2005 or whenever, the sims 2 was a MONSTER game and required a fairly beefy computer to run it well.

Also there are a load of errors in the vanilla game. If you run vanilla with testingcheats on errors pop up all the time, even when you didn't do anything wrong. (I found this in my testing hood). I have so many mods installed that fix bugs like this, so I don't normally see them, but It would be conceivable that people might view a lot of errors as being a sign that a neighbourhood is headed towards corruption, like it's something slow that builds up over time, rather than the reality which is that it happens once when a file gets deleted or amended incorrectly.

I definitely 100% thought that my 15-year-old hood was corrupted and will inevitably die eventually, but I don't think that any more - yeah there are a bunch of bugs/errors/weird things that happen, but that's because I have mashed so many mods in there and changed them willy nilly over the years, many of them badly made ones from the early years of CC creation, so of course it's a little messed up. It's nothing unfixable, and if I really want to isolate a specific error then I can probably do that and deleting the bad CC/conflicting mods causing it usually seem to fix the problem.

If I understood the video right (the auto-subtitle isn't too great), sometime between 2006 and 2009, the "overpopulation is bad", "using deleteallcharacters can fix overpopulation," and "deleteallcharacters may corrupt things if you reset the sim index" somehow got muddled into "deleting characters [via any method] causes corruption."

^ That sounds about right. I've been around the community since about 2006, and the "deleteallcharacters" cheat was always a big no-no, and you were always warned to not delete characters without doing it "safely" - there were tutorials for doing so, although I can't remember when those surfaced (I never tried, I cared too much about my sims, even my "throwaway" sims were rarely killed off permanently ).

I can imagine there were a lot of younger people and first-time gamers who had some of their first experience with problem solving, CC, bugs, cheats, etc., and if you pair these people with a lot of experienced modders who knowingly keep information from them in a "let's dumb this down to one step so they don't do all the stupid stuff" way, you easily get a lot of misunderstanding and chaos happening.

The thing is, people can be quick learners, especially to misinformation when there's a lot of confusion going around. Unfortunately, unlearning something isn't as easy, especially in a large community, because the first information spreads like glitter, and trying to make the community unlearn it is like scrubbing up every little grain of glitter...

When I got the game in 2006 I had zero experience with coding, modding, and CC. Took me a few months just to figure out that after adding CC I had to delete the cache files (instead of reinstalling the entire game) to get it to run... I haven't been through the buggy era of the vanilla game only - I started out with BG + Uni, and very shortly after adding on NL - but there has always been some bugs - but haven't seen many errors the past years. I don't think I've ever had neighborhoods blowing up, though. I thought I did, but that was likely just the buggy cache files (could also have been my extreme playstyle the first year or so, where I did absolutely everything that likely would cause bugs because I didn't know better, but who knows? I reinstalled enough times to delete the evidence, so eh)

April had a thread here which gave some background:
https://modthesims.info/showthread.php?t=663154

So when I just woke up a little while ago, something just occured to me:Oakbrook was always corrupted! My longest-lasting neighbourhood, created in early 2016.

For a long, long time, I was slightly puzzled by Holly Gast, my transgender restaurant host. "Through some glitch or another," she was flagged male and had a male voice, but used female clothing and hair. (I'm not sure about how she remained an NPC - though some of this is coded to the character file itself, so maybe it's stored there.)

So just now, I loaded her up in SimPE - and what I see there is perfectly consistent with April's description of what happens when a Sim Description gets deleted and the game has to regenerate a new one based on a character file. Since Ms. Gast was an NPC and I'd never made her selectable, I just never noticed.

And the best part - it never spread! The game actually worked around the missing data the best it could (and gave me a cool headcanon at it). My neighbourhood is still working in 2023. No Sims have gone missing, no Sims have turned into toddlers, only one Sim has gotten a want to flirt with a spectral cat (I'm going to check that out in SimPE later, but it could also be possibly an out-of-date mod affecting wants).

This is... surprisingly very reassuring.

I don't think I've had the male/female (or sim/pet) issue in my game. Sounds like an interesting bug, but not one I'd like to experiment with... I've had sims acting like the wrong age, but most of those were intentional (and a few buggy ones when playing around with the intentional ones) - for spesific photos.

TS2 can be surprisingly resilient. You can poke and prod at it and really get in there with everything you've got, and the game just works around the problem, and continues to work relatively fine for several months, even years.

But then there's some players who somehow manage to delete something, touch that one thing they really shouldn't touch, or have some or another combination of mods that cause a neverending flood of errors and bugs, or did *something* but they're not sure what, or they don't even know they did *a thing*, and their game completely breaks down in the span of a few days. Often because they tried to fix whatever they borked, and made it all worse.

Deleteallcharacters causes corruption regardless, because it deletes character files. Deleting sims in other ways from within the game does not delete character files.

I used to occasionally use SimPE to turn human Sims into cats to see what happened. They retained their appearance, but tried to do cat animations which was amazing. Interactions also tended to error out.

Messing around with universal NPCs can still break things, according to the Sims wiki. Setting objects.package to read-only should prevent the need for reinstallation at least.

So, regarding the mystery of Herb Oldie's unrequited love:



I checked it out in SimPE. At first, I thought Tracy's Familiar might've overwritten another Sim and taken on their references, but the Sim ID and character file number seems consistent with the ones surrounding it. I also looked in Herb's SWAFs, but when I switched to the History tab, SimPE just threw an exception and closed - I've noticed before that it seems to have issues with the sheer size of Oakbrook. I'll try the older vesion of SimPE but I suspect the mystery will remain a mystery.

Update: I got Herb's SWAF open! This is actually in Chris Hatch's version of SimPE - I made a slight error above when I mentioned trying the older version as I was already in the older version.



There's a history of fulfilling a want for "Sim (Social_NonRomantic / Meet)" with T.F. (and another with Nimbus, another spectral cat) before the flirt want rolled up. Which makes me wonder if somehow wires got crossed for the wants itself - maybe it failed to check that T.F. was a human Sim.

Yes, wants are triggered by fulfilling other wants. The want that gets satisfied by meeting a pet is different than the one that gets satisfied by meeting a sim, and the flirt want is triggered for romance sims on every new sim they meet. I guess for some reason the game just satisfied the wrong want when he met the familiar.

In my last hood, I recall generic 'meet new Sim' would get fulfilled by strays. I'm wondering if there was a mod touching the wants that hadn't been updated for Pets EP - Squinge's Vampire Aging would keep pets from aging, for instance.

I thought I'd read somewhere that you couldn't stop pets from aging, so clearly that was wrong! I do understand though that the Aging off cheat doesn't work on pets, and there's no equivalent cheat for pets.

This has become (a bit) relevant for me since I bought the Pets EP a few weeks ago. Now I may never install it, as, with the combination of mods I have, the game is playing pretty well the way I want it to play (keeping my Sims safe, while giving them -- and me -- lots of fun), but I would quite like my Sims to be able to have pets, since pets have played a important role in my own life, and I rather think my Sims might like to have them too. Now, as many of you know, I play with Aging almost permanently off, so, if I do install Pets, I would like to stop them growing old and dying too. (One of the things wrong with Real Life pets is that they grow old and die far too quickly -- almost as bad as Sims in an unmodded game.)

So, if I ever do install Pets, is my best approach to install Squinge's Vampire Aging mod? Even though I never really play vampires? (As I have Downtown attached to Veronaville, the Maxis Grand Vampires are in my game; but I ban them with the Visitor Controller. But that sometimes fails. And, when it fails, it can fail spectacularly: I once saw a male Grand Vampire dancing naked at a nightclub -- not a pretty sight!!) Surely, if Squinge's Vampire Aging mod can do it, there must be another (better?) way of turning pet aging off!

You should use that hack if you don't want pets to age-I used it briefly to keep the vampires dying of old age-which is what happened-but it did screw up my pets.
You can have one or the other, but not both, it seems.
I don't really play with either now, so the mod's out of my game.

Have you tried the Temporal Adjuster on the Insimenator? I've never actually tried it on pets, admittedly, so it might not work or even be an option.

SimSlice has a 'bush of life' that supposedly stops pet aging but I can't seem to find it on the Booty. (Don't give SimSlice any money, though!)

It's under plants and garden:
http://paysites.mustbedestroyed.org...nts_and_garden/

So, in light of this all, is nounlinkondelete still a recommended mod?

I'd say yes - but for a different reason. The game isn't always the most careful with graves, so it'd be annoying if you intended to resurrect a Sim but found out last minute they'd gotten unlinked at some point.

Yes, I'm pretty sure that was the original purpose of nounlinkondelete.

nocorruptdeath and creaturefixes I'd expect would be both still recommended, as they both prevent other breakage (corrupt death memories and objects.package modification if Crumplebottom gets bitten).

I'm curious if anyone's had Crumplebottom bitten while objects was read-only, though. Would nothing happen, would she actually (temporarily) transform, or would the game just crash?

Aging off has always worked for my pets. Except puppies/kittens, they need boolProp disablePuppyKittenAging [true/false].

Probably she would transform as normal in the game, but the next time you loaded your save she would be back to normal. The game doesn't save automatically as you play, only when you click save, and I don't think it reloads objects.package in the middle of the session either.

After some searching, I actually managed to find some posts:





Since the picture didn't appear in the quote: