So, I probably should have asked this before I deleted/sold a few, but what should one do with gravestones and urns? I searched multiple times using Google and everything I found said selling them was safe, but I'm still scared. :/
If it makes any difference I have all the expansion packs and two stuff packs (Teen Style and Ikea)...

ooo dear - no, not safe, I'm afraid.

Scared of what exactly?

Yes you can sell them, delete them, leave them in your backyard or in your house if you have an urn which will probably get destroyed by someone that's mad.
What I do is make a big community lot and decorate it and move the tombstone to the community lot and I have a cemetery for the dead loved ones and sometimes I get tired the ghosts scarring my sims.

Maxon: How is it not safe? And is there anything I can do to fix it? I actually just used the Lot Debugger to clear gossip and whatnot.

Briana: I've done that before but I'm scared because I've seen one or two comments on here about not selling gravestones, yet everything else I read said it was safe, but that was usually on not-so-big forums..

I've been deleting tombstones for years, and have only in the last month read that deleting them is a no-no. Shame as I'd already deleted some in my Uberhood so I'm just preparing in the back of my mind to say goodbye to the neighbourhood at some point. Sometimes I wish I'd never found out it's a bad thing to do; ignorance is bliss!

Anyway now I move all the gravestones to Gothier Green Lawns in Downtown, apart from graves of the Goth family who still have their own family plot in the back garden.

How about if you just leave them on the lot and move out? Is that bad too? I get sooo sick of those Specter ghosts, so this time I just moved Olive and Ophelia out. But I didn't distroy the house or the ghosts. Is that OK?

Not safe in the way of deleting tombstones corrupts the character data of the Sim whose tombstone you deleted. The corruption then spreads from that character data to other parts of the game and creates other glitches.

As an example of what happened in my game that glitched: I got frustrated with Cordelia Capp's ghost (her ghost is majorly angry and terrorizes the living Capps when she comes out) so I deleted her urn. Big mistake, her picture was deleted from the Capp family tree and from the memories of her children and other glitches started happening at the Capp lot.

I reinstalled the game and went looking for another way to move her urn and the other tombstones off the lot.

I THINK leaving graves on an empty lot is fine, but don't quote me as I'm not 100%.

However, that happened with me - an elder sim living alone died, and her house was left empty with her grave on the lot. I never bulldozed the place simply BECAUSE of the grave. Now I have a new family living there, and all that's happened is that ghost is upset because the new occupants aren't related.
It also happened in another hood, where the Ramaswamis died in a house fire, leaving their bungalow empty. That place still exists as well, again with a new family in it. The back story is it was selling cheap due to being haunted!

Ouch, I mean, I was planning on, when I get it down to a more manageable number of sims that is, possibly packaging all of the sims in my game and re-starting, so I would have to rebuild all the houses and wouldn't have family trees, but it's starting to sound like I might have to do that anyway...
I have too many sims to do it now but maybe after a generation or two of "only one pregnancy per household" it'd be do-able, haha.

I haven't noticed any glitches in my game, even though I'm sure I've done it before too, except for my sims resetting themselves if left without actions but who knows.

I've deleted so many tombstones (graves in a college just seem a little..... frightening.) and nothing has ever happened to me.

But, if you are really that scared, I would suggest creating a cemetery, simply add a community lot, not too big, since graves only take up a 1x1 square, and when someone dies, click on their tombstone and click "Move This Grave". A menu will pop up with all the community lots in town, and just select your cemetery. Later you can edit the cemetery (move the graves around, add bumps in the ground so it looks like someone was buried, add flowers, sculptures, etc, so you can still mourn that Sim, but they won't haunt you at your house, and no character data is deleted).

I've deleted tombstones, and nothing bad has happened. I deleted one grave and she still remains in the family tree and in the memory panel.

I've heard about moving the gravestones to other places, but I don't know how.

Yes, as long as you don't delete the lot with the stone on it.

To OP, as others have said, deleting tombstones rips the sim file. Bad news for neighbourhood corruption.


Clone the sims, don't package. If you package you will import virtually the same problem into the new neighbourhood before you even start playing it. You can rebuild family trees, memories, just about everything with SimPE though for a whole neighbourhood, it's a big job and needs preparation (this is something I have done).

You may not see any problems for years when you delete graves/urns, but that doesn't mean they're not there. The characters become unlinked, other characters gossip about them and spread corrupted data and your hood becomes a time bomb. You can carry on playing, or you can start over by extracting and cloning the characters and resetting the hood. If you're using a premade hood, that's as easy as copying the data from one folder to another. And you might want to install some hacks from MATY such as nocorruptdeath and nounlinkondelete. What I do with graves is send them to a community graveyard. Just click on the grave an an option should be there to move the grave. You could leave them on an empty residential lot too if you want.

I don't understand the difference between deleting and selling.

I used to sell all my tombstones in Buy mode while playing original Pleasantview, sold unimaginable amount of them this way, not only playables, but also all walking by townies/downtownies were "disposed" as I thought back then I'm getting rid of them not knowing the game will automatically generate new ones. That Pleasantview with all EA subhoods attached I played for 3-4 years, until it became so overpopulated I lost interest in trying to keep up with everybody. Despite everything, I never had problems with it :/ I figured if I had an option of selling, I could sell with no complications in future playing?

Amairani, if I understand correctly, when you sell something in Buy Mode, the game deletes the instance of that object and adds whatever cash value it held to the current household. For catalog objects, this is no big deal because you can buy more (i.e. easily create new instances of that object). For craftables and custom paintings, they must be remade. In the case of a tombstone, neither would really be the case. It is still a form of deletion. Does that make sense?

Just awesome... so I was harming my game without even knowing. Good thing I stopped doing it and now keep all tombstones in new 'hoods either on family lots or send to community cemetary.

Thanks!

If you have Nightlife, when you click on the tombstone you will have the option of "move this grave" and a screen will pop up and you can choose where to send the grave. This option has the downside of acting like the Sim died again, so if any of the living Sims have a fear of the family member dying, the fear will be filled.

I've also heard about putting a grave in a Sim's inventory and sending that Sim to a community or residential lot and placing the tombstone on the lot. I'm not sure about the "safety" of that option because I've heard that corruption can take place if the Sim dies with another Sim's grave in their inventory.

so which is safer, the NL EP method or the inventory method?

I wish I knew. I've asked that question before, but never really got an answer.

Can I ask how it was discovered that tombstones shouldn't be deleted, or where in an affected neighborhood I could find evidence of corruption? I can't recall ever having seen this referenced as a bad idea except here. I even went and tested it in a fresh neighborhood and don't see any obvious problems: the character file has been reduced to a stub, as expected, but gossip referencing that sim still looks fine in SimPE, and Mootilda's HoodChecker isn't finding any invalid memories. So, could someone who knows more than I do please clarify?

We had a debate on this a while back and I was giving out the advice that you shouldn't put anything 'owned' in inventory because it risks problems (i.e. stuff can corrupt). However, I think it was either Mootilda or Katya Stevens who pointed to a more recent comment by Pescado saying using the inventory for gravestones is ok.


Deleting tombstones is the same as deleting sims so the problems are the same. The damage is generally to memories, relationships and parts of the sim data (such as SimDNA and SWAFs) which don't get deleted properly. If you've ever seen, for example, a toddler with adult wants, then you've seen this sort of corruption because what that represents is the SWAF data of a deleted sim which has become attached to a new sim. Memories and relationships can be dealt with relatively easily because you can see them in SimPE and can either modify them or delete them. Dangling SWAFs and other sim data is harder to deal with because you can't identify them readily, you need to know the NID (I think, or possibly the GUID) of the original sim and find the link to it in the SWAF data.

Anyway, have a look at your neighbourhood in SimPE and work out how many characters you have in the neighbourhood and the number of SWAFs and SimDNA: the SWAFs and SimDNA should be lower in number by about 20-30 depending on your game set up (I can't remember the exact numbers without looking it up). As for not seeing this information elsewhere, you need to get round the modders boards more (e.g. MATY, Cyjon's site, Simbology and so on) - you will find plenty of information there from people (the modder in question very often) who have actually looked at the game code and neighbourhood data after deletion has taken place. If you look hard enough, somewhere on MATY Pescado explains how the game goes about deleting the data and what it misses out and/or fails to do - probably in the Deleted2 thread.

Exactly. And its generally by chance too. One person could delete tombstones over and over, and never have anything happen, and another person could corrupt their entire Pleasantview and lose a fifth generation legacy from deleting a single tombstone. The case varies, and you may never have any problems or have a BFBVFS (Big Fiery Ball Visible From Space), so better to be safe than sorry. And yes, deleting sims from the Neighborhood Sim Bin will do the EXACT SAME THING. I just move my sims to the "Graveyard". Problem solved.

Believe me, its happened before. There is a post on here talking about what isn't instinctively a bad idea to do in and out of game that you might want to check out.

As of 2008, Pescado said the safest way to move gravestones was via using a sim inventory and transferring to an owned community lot. (I think I linked to it on the non-intuitive things NOT to do in a sims game thread.) There were earlier posts on MATY from 2006 that said putting graves into inventory was bad, but I'm assuming the later posts are more accurate to the game as it currently exists.

The last Pescado post I could find on it, from 2009, says: "The SAFEST way to move a tombstone is to transfer it via the Inventory. This preserves all of its death-related data. It is acceptable to move a tombstone via the "move to community lot" and "move home" features, but doing this results in the loss of the death type. This data can be restored by shift-clicking, but only if you remember what it is. NEVER move a tombstone by giving it with the "Gift" action. This will fuck up your game."

So I think it's okay to do either, as long as you don't mind losing the death type when using the "move to..." feature. In my game, I have a Sim (Reaper Gravekeeper) who owns all 3 cemeteries; I use the teleporter bush to summon Reaper after a death, make him selectable, put the graves in his inventory, teleport him off the lot, and when I've accumulated a bunch of graves I enter his lot, go to the cemeteries, and place them. I made him as my first Sim in the neighborhood so he's easy to find in the teleporter bush menu.

I think the one possible problem with graves in the inventory is if the sim holding them dies unexpectedly!