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Test Subject
Original Poster
#1 Old 26th Dec 2018 at 6:47 PM

This user has the following games installed:

Sims 2, University, Nightlife, Open for Business, Pets, Seasons, Bon Voyage
Default (Corruption) I moved an occupied lot to bin, but was a new family, PLEAAAAASE HELP!!! I MAY HAVE RUINED MY GAME FOREVER!!!!
First of all... thank you to read this.
Second... it was an honest mistake.
Third...
I know move lots with people inside is a big deal for the corruption in the game, but the bright side (I hope) is that it was a new family.
For some reason familyfunds cheat wasn't working with my brand new family (maybe because they had 2 last names), so i put them in an empty lot to use the classic motherlode. After that I save and return to the hood (they only talked among themselves, so they didn't interact with the rest of the hood). Then i accidentaly move the hole lotto thw bin, not just the household. I don't know what to do now. I delete the family? I put them back?? I ruin my game forever?

Just to add some details, I'm playing the ultimate collection in windows 7.

PLEAAAASEEE HELP MEEEE!!!!
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Scholar
#2 Old 26th Dec 2018 at 6:55 PM Last edited by Fyren5 : 26th Dec 2018 at 7:24 PM.
Read how to avoid Corruption here

Never move occupied houses/lots to the bin.

Copied and Pasted from the site I linked above:

The game transfers character data from the neighborhood to the lot bin, but does not completely erase all traces of the Sims from the neighborhood. Sims in the neighborhood may gossip about the missing Sims, spreading the corruption around the hood. Also, moving the lot back into the neighborhood will create new character files, instead of overwriting the existing ones. Moving the lot into another neighborhood will introduce the corruption to the hood it is moved into. You can move Sims from one hood to another by extracting their appearances and then recreating them in Create a Sim in the new neighborhood. This is the only known method that is 100% safe. Occupied lots that are already in the bin are safe to delete, as the damage has already been done.

Edit: Hopefully I understood you correctly. If not, please do say so.

Edit 2: Sorry that I wasn't helpful. I tried...
Test Subject
Original Poster
#3 Old 26th Dec 2018 at 7:00 PM
Quote: Originally posted by Fyren5
Read how to avoid Corruption here

Never move occupied houses/lots to the bin.

Copied and Pasted from the site I linked above:

The game transfers character data from the neighborhood to the lot bin, but does not completely erase all traces of the Sims from the neighborhood. Sims in the neighborhood may gossip about the missing Sims, spreading the corruption around the hood. Also, moving the lot back into the neighborhood will create new character files, instead of overwriting the existing ones. Moving the lot into another neighborhood will introduce the corruption to the hood it is moved into. You can move Sims from one hood to another by extracting their appearances and then recreating them in Create a Sim in the new neighborhood. This is the only known method that is 100% safe. Occupied lots that are already in the bin are safe to delete, as the damage has already been done.

Edit: Hopefully I understood you correctly. If not, please do say so.


I read that a million times, the thing is that my sims didn't met anyone of the town, so they don't have relationships outside their household. In that case, is safe to put them back??? I already damage my game forever?? That's what I'm asking
Mad Poster
#4 Old 26th Dec 2018 at 7:07 PM
The neighborhood is broken, the game is not. All your other neighborhoods will be fine.
There is no way to unbreak a neighborhood once sims have been deleted from it, which is what moving them to the bin does.
If you have a recent back up, you can delete the current copy and replace it with the back up and it should be fine.
If you don't have a recent back up, well, that's rough, but it's not the end of the world. Some people's broken neighborhoods become unplayable almost immediately, but lots of us have played neighborhoods for a good long time after they were corrupted. I have only recently retired my first neighborhood after 8 years, when it started crashing too much for me to play it. I don't know when it got corrupted, but I got a lot of fun and satisfaction out of it before it went belly-up, and I have no regrets. Back up regularly, run the hoodchecker every time you back up, and periodically clean up memories with the batbox, and you may still have lots of time to spend with these sims.
Remember, the base game neighborhoods all shipped broken, and plenty of people out there still play them. And the fact is, you can't play soccer with a clean ball - the moment you start to use something, anything, it begins to deteriorate. You didn't let that stop you from playing with Barbies as a kid, you don't let it stop you from reusing your dishes, you don't replace your carpet as soon as it shows wear, so why would you let it stop you from enjoying Sims 2?

Ugly is in the heart of the beholder.
(My simblr isSim Media Res . Widespot,Widespot RFD: The Subhood, and Land Grant University are all available here. In case you care.)
Test Subject
Original Poster
#5 Old 26th Dec 2018 at 7:18 PM
Quote: Originally posted by Peni Griffin
The neighborhood is broken, the game is not. All your other neighborhoods will be fine.
There is no way to unbreak a neighborhood once sims have been deleted from it, which is what moving them to the bin does.
If you have a recent back up, you can delete the current copy and replace it with the back up and it should be fine.
If you don't have a recent back up, well, that's rough, but it's not the end of the world. Some people's broken neighborhoods become unplayable almost immediately, but lots of us have played neighborhoods for a good long time after they were corrupted. I have only recently retired my first neighborhood after 8 years, when it started crashing too much for me to play it. I don't know when it got corrupted, but I got a lot of fun and satisfaction out of it before it went belly-up, and I have no regrets. Back up regularly, run the hoodchecker every time you back up, and periodically clean up memories with the batbox, and you may still have lots of time to spend with these sims.
Remember, the base game neighborhoods all shipped broken, and plenty of people out there still play them. And the fact is, you can't play soccer with a clean ball - the moment you start to use something, anything, it begins to deteriorate. You didn't let that stop you from playing with Barbies as a kid, you don't let it stop you from reusing your dishes, you don't replace your carpet as soon as it shows wear, so why would you let it stop you from enjoying Sims 2?


Thank you!! I just tried so hard to have my hood "clean" that i messed up. I can ask you how to do that things you suggest?? like how can I make a back up or clean the memories?? Also... I read this from moving sims thread in the wiki. I quote:

"If the family was completely brand new and knew nobody outside of their family (nobody that lived outside of the lot) then you might be safe. But if they knew other sims, any other sims, you've created duplicates of those sim files in the neighborhood you've moved them into. How serious this is depends on how many sims they know - if it's just a handful you may able to continue playing without too much issue. But if you've moved a family that knows a lot of sims, or an old Legacy family, you've likely corrupted the neighborhood you've moved them into, creating tons of extra sim files. This is Very Bad for your game.

The only thing you can do at that point is delete the neighborhood you moved them into and start it over."

This is referred about "moving the sims the bad way", like put them in the bin with the lot. So... maybe I didn't broke anything yet??? Plase tell me I could safe my hood :lovestruc
Mad Poster
#6 Old 26th Dec 2018 at 8:17 PM
The wiki needs to be edited to reflect the present state of knowledge. Connections to other sims begin immediately, and the problem isn't just connections, but ID numbers. When you delete a sim from the hood, its ID number is available for reuse. When you replace a household that's been in the lot bin, its members get brand new ID numbers, which may or may not match up to the old one. But these ID numbers are not perfectly reassigned, and may lurk in a number of places, some of which we can't get at using existing tools, so it's entirely possible for a cat whose ID number used to belong to a human to start trying to behave like a human; or for a human whose ID number used to belong to a cat to start acting like a cat. Memories are also more prone to becoming corrupt than usual in these cases - rampant memory corruption was at least one of the things that eventually did for my hood. You can clean up corrupt memories easily, but in my case they started corrupting faster than I could clean them up.

The only way to be sure there's no connections to other sims is to make and move a household in a 100% empty neighborhood - suppress all the templates, move the family in without a cinematic so the taxi driver doesn't generate, save before the newspaper comes, and move the house to the bin. The late great Mootilda thought that this was probably the way that the Kim and Kat households were created for the Pets EP, and a few people have experimented with making lot bin families in this way for their personal use, and even for uploading with suitable warnings attached. Since it's difficult to test for the sneakier forms of corruption, this is still a use-at-your-own risk situation, but it's the safest way we know to do this at the moment, and it would not apply to your situation. I'm sorry.

But as I said above, you don't have to delete the whole neighborhood just because it's a little corrupted. Some people prefer to do that, but most of us have played with more or less corrupted neighborhoods for long periods and are happy they did. It's 100% a personal call on your part. Only you know how much corruption renders your neighborhood "unplayable." Some people play till they can't open the hood any more, other people throw it out and start over the first time they see a toddler with adult wants.

If you know how to copy a file, you already know how to back up your hoods. Each neighborhood has its own subfolder in the EAGames/TheSims2/Neighborhoods folder in your game data in your My Documents folder. Locate the right one, copy the subfolder to a safe location - preferably an external drive - and you're fine. Mootilda used to recommend backing up the whole The Sims 2 folder in this way, in fact - that way, when your computer's hard drive inevitably fries, you aren't left scrambling to recreate all the changes you may have made to other subfolders (such as Downloads or Cameras).

The Hoodchecker is a program, created by Mootilda, to clean up certain types of corruption. As a professional programmer, Mootilda was very careful not to claim too much for this program, as she was well aware that, without the source code, we can never be sure all sources and types of corruption have been identified, much less the best way to clean it up determined. Also, any time you run a utility like this it has the potential for unexpected side effects, so it's important to run it immediately after backing up your neighborhood. For the kinds of corruption she could identify and delete through a program, though, it works very well, and it has extended the lives of many neighborhoods. Look up Mootilda's mods here at MTS, and you'll find it and a number of other useful utilities. All you have to do is run the program, select the neighborhood, and tell it to "remove." Once it's run, you'll get a text report of what was removed, and what oddities it noted and could not remove.

You'll be shocked at how long your report is! All of us get lots of "met self" memories removed every time we run it, the Universal NPCs (Mrs. Crumplebottom, the Grim Reaper, Rod Humble) will be flagged as "Unknown," and the oddities that get flagged without removing may or may not be a problem, they just fall outside the category of things she felt she could trust the program to identify as problems and delete safely. But don't panic - you just cleaned a lot of grit out of the works of your game and can now play it in the assurance that it's as clean as you can get it.

And then you just relax and play your game and have fun. It's good to practice game hygiene; but it's bad to stress so much about corruption that you don't enjoy your game anymore.

Ugly is in the heart of the beholder.
(My simblr isSim Media Res . Widespot,Widespot RFD: The Subhood, and Land Grant University are all available here. In case you care.)
Needs Coffee
retired moderator
#7 Old 26th Dec 2018 at 10:19 PM
Your hood is corrupted not your game and yes it happened as soon as you broke the connections. The Wikki is wrong, it's never safe and the corruption is always immediate.

The best you can do is run hood checker and see how much it can mop up. Then I would play on for however long it gives you, which may be a good long time, but use Hood Checker often.

I know losing hoods and sims can be heartbreaking, but think of it as an opportunity for new stories and a fresh start. Your game is fine, it's just the hoods, the one you moved them out of and into. If you wish to keep those sims you can by extracting them with SimPE and cloning them in Body Shop. Then you have them to place in whatever hood you wish.

Never ever delete sims, that is like pouring gasoline onto an already burning fire.

"I dream of a better tomorrow, where chickens can cross the road and not be questioned about their motives." - Unknown
~Call me Jo~
Field Researcher
#8 Old 27th Dec 2018 at 12:00 AM
This always confuses me. When moving my sims into a new house, I have to move them out of the existing house. Moving them to the new house puts them temporarily into the bin. As far as I know I'm not experiencing corruption.
Needs Coffee
retired moderator
#9 Old 27th Dec 2018 at 12:07 AM
Moving sims into the sim bin is fine, what isn't fine is moving sims inside a house into the house bin. The OP did the second. The game does put up a warning as you try and do that though, saying you will break ties, so they must have also ignored that to actually accomplish the move.

"I dream of a better tomorrow, where chickens can cross the road and not be questioned about their motives." - Unknown
~Call me Jo~
Test Subject
Original Poster
#10 Old 27th Dec 2018 at 12:11 AM
Quote: Originally posted by Peni Griffin
You'll be shocked at how long your report is! All of us get lots of "met self" memories removed every time we run it, the Universal NPCs (Mrs. Crumplebottom, the Grim Reaper, Rod Humble) will be flagged as "Unknown," and the oddities that get flagged without removing may or may not be a problem, they just fall outside the category of things she felt she could trust the program to identify as problems and delete safely. But don't panic - you just cleaned a lot of grit out of the works of your game and can now play it in the assurance that it's as clean as you can get it.

And then you just relax and play your game and have fun. It's good to practice game hygiene; but it's bad to stress so much about corruption that you don't enjoy your game anymore.


Thank you!! two more questions.... can I backup the hood now (even if already has cancer)? or save the sims 2 entire folder with a corrupted hood inside can be a bad idea?
the second and more important. Can I replace the lot if the harm is already done?? is too bad?? even if was a new family?? Or there is a way to take the genetics without placing the family??
Field Researcher
#11 Old 27th Dec 2018 at 12:12 AM
Quote: Originally posted by joandsarah77
Moving sims into the sim bin is fine, what isn't fine is moving sims inside a house into the house bin. The OP did the second. The game does put up a warning as you try and do that though, saying you will break ties, so they must have also ignored that to actually accomplish the move.
Thank you!
Mad Poster
#12 Old 27th Dec 2018 at 1:16 AM
Quote: Originally posted by meco
Thank you!! two more questions.... can I backup the hood now (even if already has cancer)? or save the sims 2 entire folder with a corrupted hood inside can be a bad idea?
the second and more important. Can I replace the lot if the harm is already done?? is too bad?? even if was a new family?? Or there is a way to take the genetics without placing the family??

I have lots and lots of backups of my corrupted neighborhoods! At least it's working now, after all, and you may well want to restore from a back up sometime down the line for some other reason. I always make back ups before I do anything anything drastic like add a subhood or a major mod, as well as my regularly scheduled ones, as then if I don't like the change I can always go right back to how things were before, regardless of what affects might have led me to regret the decision.

Since it's already broken, and putting the family back into the neighborhood won't fix it, and will only break it a little bit more, it's up to you whether you want to do that, or want to extract your family's appearances and remake them. You'll need to use a program called SimPE to make the clones. Do you have it?

Ugly is in the heart of the beholder.
(My simblr isSim Media Res . Widespot,Widespot RFD: The Subhood, and Land Grant University are all available here. In case you care.)
Test Subject
Original Poster
#13 Old 27th Dec 2018 at 1:28 AM
Quote: Originally posted by Peni Griffin
I have lots and lots of backups of my corrupted neighborhoods! At least it's working now, after all, and you may well want to restore from a back up sometime down the line for some other reason. I always make back ups before I do anything anything drastic like add a subhood or a major mod, as well as my regularly scheduled ones, as then if I don't like the change I can always go right back to how things were before, regardless of what affects might have led me to regret the decision.

Since it's already broken, and putting the family back into the neighborhood won't fix it, and will only break it a little bit more, it's up to you whether you want to do that, or want to extract your family's appearances and remake them. You'll need to use a program called SimPE to make the clones. Do you have it?


I don't have it! WHere I can find it?? And I have to put them back in the game again to clone them??
Needs Coffee
retired moderator
#14 Old 27th Dec 2018 at 2:34 AM
Did you see my post above?

Make a back up of your affected hoods and run Hood Checker over them. You can't get rid of all corruption but you can lessen it and keep playing for as long as it allows.
Then extract the sims you want to keep with SimPE and clone in Body Shop.

It isn't just the lot that's corrupt but the entire hood that you took them from and the one you moved them to.

"I dream of a better tomorrow, where chickens can cross the road and not be questioned about their motives." - Unknown
~Call me Jo~
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