So first a little background. I unearthed a really old sims 2 save in a really old hard drive I had, like 10 years old, and I was ecstatic to be able to get EA to redeem the game in Origin because my disks just don't work anymore.

Now I knew that custom content could have problems so I was ready to let many of my families go, fortunately everything worked pretty much perfectly, I invested too many hours in these families, so I was very glad they didn't go to total waste.

But then I realized I had a specific family that doesn't have its custom skin color, which is extreme pale, I thought it might have been a glitch in general for custom skins, but I do have families of sims with robot skins and completely dark skins and they work perfectly, even the babies have the correct skins. Also the skintone is available when creating new sims and it also works ok.

So I tried "boolprop enablecheats true" which I read allows you to change skin tone by shift-click and then look for a specific option in a mirror, but shift-click didn't give me any special options, I found that strange because the command didn't give me any error in the command window.

So my question is simple, is SimPE my only option? the program seems to me a little daunting and I would prefer to do the minimum hacking possible, I don't want to do irreversible damage. I have already played several hours of this old save so I would really prefer to not lose them.

Thanks for your time!

Pretty sure SimPE is the only option if you want skintones to be changed permanently and be genetic. There are a few other options but they only work on that sim, not their kids.



In that case, this is news to me. Sure you haven't mixed up a TS3 tutoral or some such?

Also pretty sure you mean "boolprop testingcheatsenabled true/false", but I'm not sure it gives any (genetic) skin options. It's possible the cheat might give you the option of changing the sim's default skin (S1-S4, maybe alien - they're the only genetic skins ingame), because the code used for skintone changers must be somewhere ingame, but again, I'm not sure if this would be a cosmetic or genetic change.

You can use the cheat in CAS (+ enable with N) to enable hidden skins in CAS, though.

Most changes done outside CAS are cosmetic, not genetic. That's true for hairs, eyebrows, face lifts, etc. To make the changes genetic, SimPE is currently the way.

There is a skin-changer by Christoianlov, but its the same as cosmetic surgery-not genetic. It's not hard to change genetics in simpe, I did quite a few after deleting an eye set. It's good as a sims 2 player to get familiar with SimPE for things like this. It isn't making hacks, just tweaking some sim settings. If you use a skin default it's quite easy to change the skins number code over to a maxis one.
If you want to do that I can tell you the steps.

I'd like to hear the steps, too.

Okay so this is the easiest way, I'll post a link http://www.lothere.com/verso/page/16

But basically, find your sim in simpe. neighbourhood> sim browser is what I do. This way the sim and all their tabs are right in front of you.
More>DNA in there you will find the sims eyes and hair and skin. You want to change the code showing for Dominant Gene. Simply delete the one showing and replace with a known maxis code. (or you can open a sim wearing a skin that you like and take the code from them)
maxis ones are easy because they are known.
Skin Tones:
00000001-0000-0000-0000-000000000000 Light
00000002-0000-0000-0000-000000000000 Medium Light
00000003-0000-0000-0000-000000000000 Medium Dark
00000004-0000-0000-0000-000000000000 Dark
Just copy and paste the code you want into that field.

Once you have done that to be sure of your changes go back to that More tab and open the character file. You will see a list on the left
Open age data to find eyes/skin/hair colour and set the code in there as well.

Thanks for all the answers, I decided to use SimPE and after some compatiblity issues with windows 10 I managed to make it work. I went and checked my family and to my surprise they have a custom skin in their SimDNA, which means the skin is probably missing, I did a test family with my other pale skins and none of them had the same GUID code.

Then it hit me, I remembered I actually created this missing skin in The Sims Body Shop all those years ago! I remember doing the editing and everything, I felt dumb to not have remember that.

Obviously this old backup I have of the Downloads folder was not up to date with this skin, or the Sims Body Shop exports custom skins differently and it simply never was in Downloads folder, my question is now, is it possible to create or edit a skin package with it using the exact same GUID number? it would save me a lot of work since the family is kind of big.

I don't know anything about creating skins, although it sounds possible?

I can tell you it doesn't take that long to fix. I probably fixed up about 15 or so sims whose custom eye I had deleted. If you do fix them in SimPE you may have to take each sim to the mirror to change appearance for the changes to show up.

Well I used the Sims Body Shop which is a program that comes with any expansion, if you got the game in origin it would be under the Pets folder, SP9, CSbin, it's a program from maxis themselves, you take any skin already in the game and the application will export it to basic BMP files textures where you can edit them at your hearts content, and then you can import it to the game as a package. But is all very friendly and streamlined, so there is no way to edit such specific details like the GUIDs used.

What you said it's true, that would have taken more time than just altering my simsDNA in SimPE, which I did, and now I have everything working correctly. Again thanks for your time!