Hi guys,

So I'm kinda at a loss here. I have one neighbourhood that I worked really hard on for a few months, then one day I opened it up and I'd say about two thirds of the sims in town had vanished. I don't mean that they were still present but invisible, I mean they were literally gone - their houses were for sale, but when I went inside I could see where they had been asleep or in the bath or whatever when they had disappeared. Eerie. The Sims that vanished and the sims that remained seemed to be completely random, there were families half missing etc. Bizarrely, Sims that were visiting their owned businesses still vanished, but supposedly still owned the lot so I wasn't able to save those.

So I figured "it happens", something must have corrupted, and decided to restart the neighbourhood as a brand new town. I copied the lots over that I could and did all of the neighbourhood deco, etc. That took me about two days. Last night I got to work remaking some of the families from my old town, I'd say I got most of them finished when I decided to call it a night. I hadn't moved any of them in, so they were still in the sim bin when I left the game.

I open the game today to find that every. single. sim. has vanished from the sim bin. Why are my sims getting deleted, even in a clean town? I vaguely remember seeing somewhere that if the game goes over memory or something then my mac will do a "purge" of data, is that what's happened? My game was fine for months and all of a sudden it's having problems. I can't imagine there's a piece of CC doing this, surely?

Any help would be appreciated, thank you!

I cannot help you, I know nothing about mac, but maybe edit your title so it is obvious, you aren't using a pc to play. mac expert will see it better.

By copying the lots over, do you mean that you placed the formerly occupied lots in the bin and put them in your new neighborhood? Because that would corrupt the new neighborhood, since there would be sim references left on inhabited lots.

It's strange that it would delete so many sims so fast, so there's probably something to your data purge theory, but unfortunately I don't know anything about Macs either. I did find this though: http://bunsim.tumblr.com/MacFileLimitHelp

The lots weren't occupied when I copied them over. That link was actually really helpful, thank you! I think that had what what I was after - the author says that deleted sims are a side effect of the file load limit on macs. I guess I'll have to delete some CC! Thank you

But they had been occupied before you copied them? Because that's pretty much the same thing. If a lot has been played at any point, you can't move it to another neighborhood, because there are still sim references left that will corrupt the new neighborhood.

Oh really? That might be it as well then. I guess I'll start from scratch!

You didn't move over previously occupied lots did you? Did you clean them in SimPE first? Never use previously occupied lots unless you use SimPE to remove all the sim references. Lots always have some, even blank unplayed with lots, but those are different.

I play The Sims 2 on my iMac.

I know that one can change the Mac File Limit if you really want to have a lot of CC, in case you do ask me to give you the Technical Instructions on how to do it and I will share the information with you.

Me I currently have 8,397 items in my Downloads folder in the game and I have ran the game just fine with more.

If you do start over you should make sure to have the recommended group of MODs that help prevent corruption and help keep your game running better. I think that there is a list in one of the threads here.

Also make a backup of your entire The Sims 2 folder before you change anything and then make a backup every time you get done playing for a while.

I have multiple daily backups, also I use Apple's Time Machine software and an External hard drive.