My neighborhoods are Gone

[lil bag2]

Ok so my friend used her Orgin account to install the stuff packs that I don't have on my computer and when that was all done and she started the game, my custom content was still there but my neighborhoods, including the ones that the game came with, are gone. But I looked in the neighborhood folder in my documents and everything is still intact...what happened?

[Darby]

I don't know. It just happens. And it happens often enough that it's a big reason why players are strongly and repeatedly advised to back up their game before doing anything major, like adding an EP/SP.

Someone may know of a way to restore your game, but that's a long-shot.

Please, in the future, take the easy, basic, necessary precaution of making regular backups of your game so as to avoid this sort of hassle and heartache.

[lil bag2]

Luckily I did back my game up recently. I just wanted to know if it'd be safe to but the backup in even though my neighborhood files are all still there

[Darby]

Well, if the current Neighborhoods folder still contains N001, N002, etc., you certainly want to remove them before putting your backed-up neighbohoods in that folder. As long as you don't try to have two files with the same name in there, your backups should work fine.

As for the old files, the ones the game doesn't seem to be reading anymore, I wouldn't delete those yet. Just pull them to your desktop. Reason being that as I said before, someone may know of a way to get the game to read those files again. Unless your backups are recent enough that you don't mind the ultimate loss of the 'hoods as they were just before you installed the new EP.

[lil bag2]

Ok that's weird. I have two backups. I put in one from a few months back and it worked just fine. Then I added the one fro two weeks ago and that's not showing up

[Peni Griffin]

If you look in the dedicated thread in the sticky section devoted to this problem, you'll see that there's different reasons for neighborhoods to disappear, but the most common one for the situation such as you're describing is that the neighborhood file got corrupted, possibly during the saving process. If that's what happened, looks like you're stuck with a two-month-old backup.

That's why I back up more often than that.

[Darby]

Makes sense. The more recent backup that's not working was probably made after corruption hit, and the one from a few months ago is the most recent one that's still okay.

lil bag, somewhere between the older backup and the newer one, something may have happened to corrupt the 'hood(s). Check this article to see if it gives you some insight.
http://simswiki.info/wiki.php?title=Game_Help:Avoiding_Hood_Corruption

If you've done none of those things, you may simply be the victim of the corruption that comes with the game right out of the box. Happens. A lot of people have switched to using cleaned templates, instead of the default 'hoods, in order to have a more stable game. These are excellent. http://meetme2theriver.livejournal.com/63030.html#cutid1

[lil bag2]

Do you think uninstalling and reinstalling the game would fix things?

[Peni Griffin]

No; or at any rate, no, unless (having looked over the resource Darby linked you to) you've done something that will corrupt not just the neighborhood, but the game files themselves.

If the game files are corrupted, than every neighborhood that's been played since the corruption happened will be corrupted.

If the neighborhood file is corrupted, but the game files are not, then uninstalling/reinstalling is just a lot of hassle to get the same result. If the text on the page is nonsense, than getting new glasses won't help you read it.

I am not aware of any sims utility equivalent to those programs and devices that can scan a page with ink spilled on it and see the words obliterated by the ink. Sorry not to have better tidings.

[Darby]

Unless you've messed around with any of the "universal" sims, like Grim, Mrs. Crumplebottom, etc., it's not likely your game is corrupt at the install level. So as Peni says, reinstalling would be a needless waste of time and effort. Corruption that affects only your game/user files, the ones in My Documents, (as opposed to the install files in Program Files) only requires that neighborhoods be reset, not reinstalled.

FYI, here's the list of Universal Sims:
Toddler New Year
Father Time
Santa Klaus
Hula Zombie
Pollination Technian
Grim Reaper
Therapist
Mrs Crumplebottom
Stinky Skunk
Witchdoctor
Bigfoot Bigfoot
Ideal Plantsim
Rod Humble
Genie
Spectral Assistant
Good Witch Cat

If you've ever added any of these sims to a family or otherwise made them playable, or ever selectable, that would be a reason to reinstall. Otherwise, resetting or, in your case, reverting to the most recent working backup is the thing to do.