My game suddenly started refusing to load/crashing to desktop, so I started the Great Folder Shuffle, like I always do. I troubleshoot a tiny bit differently than the Game Guide suggests, in that I will test after pulling each folder one at a time (most of the time the culprit is lurking in my New Content folder). OK. This time the problem persisted even after removing my Downloads, so I used Moo's Hood Checker and got this message:

Unable to read beyond the end of the stream. The neighborhood check was aborted! An error occurred during the examination of your neighborhood. The current version of the HoodChecker is unable to continue. Please report this error in the download thread and attach a copy of your neighborhood to the posting.

I pulled the suspect neighbourhood, and my game loaded without a hiccough. I even entered a previously unplayed 'hood without the least difficulty, so I'm going to say N004 is the problem. Is there any way I can clean/salvage it? Naturally, Murphy being Murphy, it's one of my all-time favourites.

If that is the game's Pleasantview (which comes already corrupted)then it has probably run its course. The only thing I can think of is to restore to a backup and run Hood Checker on that. Have you been using Hood Checker on it? With corrupted hoods that's the best way to get the longest life from them.

if the neighborhood was saved with the Ultimate Collection or with any post-M&G collection, the Hood Checker program would not work.
if that is the case and if you have access to disc version of game, might copy the neighborhood/neighborhoods to the disc version. afterward run Hood Checker there.

That particular message, the "ExplainAbort" message is a catch message which will only occur on an otherwise unhandled error. Hoodchecker contains a range of error messages for faults like wrong EP that it would handle and explain.
Clearly that neighbourhood is ruined and obviously if you have a backup then restoring from it is the easiest and safest fix but I doubt you'd post this if that were the case. I believe most neighbourhood faults can be fixed albeit minus some sim's memories and/or wants and fears, perhaps in a worst case minus a few sims and/or lots.
How big is the file size of your N004 zipped up? (not interested in .7z or .rar formats)

The Hoodchecker works just fine with hoods made and saved in the Ultimate Collection.

@Justpetro that's what I thought, but wasn't sure since I am on disks. Thanks for your input.

A lot of people are using UC and since it has arrived. I would have been surprised to hear that all of them players, never once created a new 'Hood, because HC cannot work with them.
Of course Hood Checker works.

179 MB

It is/was a custom tester hood that I became attached to (sigh!). The terrain is crap (I was pushing the limits of Mootilda's hood replacer, just to figure out what I could, and could not, do before I grew attached to my little guinea sims), but the sims themselves have been exceptional. It's not just that my foundational sims make pretty pretty babies, it's the relationships (although I'd be grateful if I could even extract clones and character data so I can recreate them in a fresh hood). I don't care at all about the lots.

Thank you, everyone, for your input on this.

Extracting them is easy, and for them to be the same, taking notes of all their personalities is also, easy. It takes a bit of time, but I did this already.

Doesn't that come under the coulda-shoulda-woulda category, right there alongside regular backups?

179mb is quite modest (mine are all >1gb). if you want to upload it somewhere I'll take a look. Can't promise anything but I'm confident I'll be able get it to open again.

I have no idea what this means, but yes, it is totally possible to get your sims back with their personalities and all. But Chris might be able to tell you what's wrong..and maybe you won't have to extract them after all.

Sorry. I didn't mean to be too slangy to be comprehensible. Coulda-shoulda-woulda is basically a portmanteau word intended to be used humorously--"I coulda been a contender"; "I shoulda said something"; "I woulda done it if I'd only known..."--implying that it's too late to follow the ideal course of action revealed by 20/20 hindsight.



Would you? That would be marvellous! Thank you so much! I'll figure out how to upload the file and add a link asap.

@Chris Hatch Link added, and thank you again. Sorry it took so long; I'm not a regular uploader, so I had to figure out where I could upload a file that size.

TakeaLook-Hood.zip (530kb)
You'll find a repaired N004_Neighborhood.package in that zip, just replace the one in your N004 neighbourhood with it.
It was corrupt utterly, with SimPE unable to read half of the families, none of the text lists, relationships or family ties. However you made it easy to recover, the files in your neighbourhood with the .bkp extension are backups so I just replaced the unreadable data with data from them.
I couldn't enter one family in game, the Tester family. I had to move them out, bulldoze their home and give them another one. You may have more luck with them since I do not have any of the cc they depend on.

One small note, the backups have four more sims than the neighbourhood. That means four sims have been deleted at some time, looking at their GUIDs I assume they were custom content NPCs. Whilst I don't subscribe to a lot of the myths concerning neighbourhood corruption deleting sims definitely can/will cause corruption.

Could you expand on what you believe are myths, please?

That is bizarre. I don't delete sims, ever. (If I have to get rid of NPCs--it's happened, although not in this hood--my preferred MO is to summon them and then kill them off, leaving behind nice, intact ghosts, a method I always thought was safe.) However, I was checking out the human statue and Ray Nuss' jester and mime at one time. My understanding was their podiums were perfectly safe to delete, but could they account for the discrepancy?

Anyway, off to check my poor battered hood and extract sims. Thank you so very much!

Custom content NPCs are things like Rebecah's animated animals. All you need to do to break them is to remove the download after you've had it in. Never remove any of these hacks, even if you aren't using them anymore.

AFAIK the only things confirmed to cause corruption are deleting sims (in the various ways that can be done - deleting from the sim bin, putting a lived in lot into the lot bin, deleting/destroying a gravestone) and interfering with the universals in such a way the game tries to update their character files. Deleting sims without the proper preparation means the sim's SWAFs are left dangling in the neighbourhood files, can't be identified (and so are unfixable) and can get attached to sim files of newly created sims - that's what is meant by 'corruption' in the strict sense of the word. The latter thing (interfering with universals) is more serious as it will bugger the game, the former (deleting sims) is less so since it will just toast a neighbourhood. You can prevent the universals becoming corrupted by making your objects.package read only. If you bugger a neighbourhood, it's generally not fixable so it's use a back up or abandon and delete it - doesn't harm the game itself though. Removing an NPC using mod (another form of sim-deleting) will cause permanent changes (can activate the Super Duper Hug bug) to the game but is not game-breaking and is dealt with by using the appropriate hacks. Only really an issue if you upload lots for sharing (and then Jo - and Chris - have methods for resolving that). Mind you, it's best to avoid that if you can.

The myths are everything else people say causes corruption - like memories with the wrong subject or relationships with self which might be 'corruption' in the sense the game has made a booboo in setting the relationships between things but all these are all fixable and therefore not the type of corruption that actually causes problems.