Help please from anyone who knows how to use SimPE

you've been a great help already ! ty
I'm going to have to think on what I want to do with Brandi & her gang.
It was difficult in the beginning, then learning she had another on the way & they all were in school !
Not sure if I want to go through that again.

I don't like playing families with more than 2 children in school.
Things can get kind of hairy to me.
I don't like feeling as though I always have to "catch up"

Only one family I have has 3 sims and 2 dogs. That's the largest.
The couple just had a child.

Just to get an idea, what if I just want to recover or reset or obtain Pleasantville without the corruption,
is there a way I can do that ?
I also have one Sim in Riverblossom Hill I created the day before yesterday.
He's supposed to be for one of the female Sims in Pleasantville. If I can somehow save her, and I don't know move her in
with him in Riverblossom Hill, would she have the corruption attached to her ?

I really don't know what I'm doing here, just winging it because I know nothing about how to handle corruption in Sims 2 :D

Trying to see if I can salvage anything or do I have to start completely over.

"Seera1024;c-16636611" wrote:
We can salvage the Sims and restore most of the information to them (skills, personality, etc). It all boils down to how much do you want to save of each Sim that you want to save. And if you feel comfortable using SimPE. Cinebar is right that you may just want to completely restart even knowing you'll be restarting with the Brokes completely.

Am thinking about doing exactly this, starting over with new towns completely, but I am extremely interested in salvaging my Sims.
I have used SimPE before for other things, I don't know how to do a lot with it, but I self taught myself & am fairly comfortable with
it.

Given that, this is what I'd like to know if you know the answer given your expertise.
If I removed everything from the Sims homes, put it in their inventories, packaged their homes to file,
and put the Sims in the Sim bin, would I be able to place them in a newly generated town, or are they corrupt ?

Here is what I am looking at:
10 Sims I want to save from Pleasantville (already did some work in trying to salvage them, doing what I asked about above, but I'm not sure
it was the right thing to do & before I move on to the other towns, I want to see what you have to say.)

2 /3 I want to save from Belladonna Cove

1 Sim I want to save from Riverblossoms Hills

And 2 Sims I want to save from a custom town I made named Bilnee Shores.

This is leading me down the rabbit hole of corruption, and I've learned there are 2 types.
One is the game corruption.
And the other is the town corruption.
Of course I still have a lot to learn.

I didn't expect to be catapulted down this rabbit hole obviously, or I would never have moved that family
so I'd appreciate it if people didn't try to make me feel worse than I do.

I will take peoples word the towns are corrupted due to me moving family from one town to another, although my game
is not showing signs yet of corruption.
That said, I'm attempting now to take steps, to save my sims.
These are Sims I've created and I enjoy playing them & watching their lives progress.

Thank you for your help

edit: what's interesting is I just created custom town not too long ago.
I just created it, moved a few sims from the Sim bin into it so it won't appear abandoned
and moved one of the Sims I had created to go to Uni to it after she graduated.
Only Sims I've played in this town are her & her room mate.
And the only other Sims in this town is a couple or two moved into it from the Sim bin.
She just got married, but that's beside the point.
What I'm trying to say is, the town was just created, but its corrupted already ?
I ran Hood checker on it and its showing corruption.
Then, I found this interesting discussion. https://www.tapatalk.com/groups/ts2/what-exactly-causes-game-corruption-t1027.html
I am learning as I go, and I may not have to, but I am leaning toward newly recreated towns, but finding
some things very interesting.

"Cinebar;c-16635892" wrote:
Oh boy, you have corrupted memories and relationships and both hoods. Done exactly what others posted here to never do. Never delete a Sim (even in the bin in game) and never move Sims from one main hood to another. With that said, how to reset the hoods (and start all over) is to pull either the neighboorhood file from the EA game folder, restart the game and it will recreate it, fresh copy found in the program files.

Or remove the entire EA game folder if you want to start over in all hoods etc.

If you want to try to salvage this but I highly advise let it go and start over in fresh EA game folder/with fresh regenerated hoods.
Here are the beginner instructions to SimPe. There are more complicated instructions as you learn to use SimPE but these are the basics.

https://simpeforum.ambertation.de/viewtopic.php?t=30

Basics of TS2: The hoods included in the game are Main Hoods, never move Sims in and out of these main hoods to other hoods. The only hoods your Sims can move to are subhoods attached to your main hood. And never delete subhoods if your Sims met and know any subhood Maxis Sims who live in those subhoods.

Thank you Cinebar, for offering up the SimPE instructions on the basics.
I will read in my leisure, but I've worked with it before & am fairly comfortable with it.
I just don't know how to do a lot with it, or its full potential yet.

Re: the bolded part of your message, sorry that's lost on me, because I didn't participate in the forums
then for Sims 2, so I couldn't possibly have known what they said not to do.

I will also say neither the game (Sims) or town is showing signs of corruption. That could change.
But what led me down this path is trying to restore Brandi Broke relationship with her son
after moving her & her son back to Desiderata Valley so one of her sons could go to College.

They are showing up in SimPE in other areas for Desiderata Valley, but trying to follow that tutorial posted above is not
helping because they are not showing up in family ties.
I realized the town population is not being updated in real time, and wondered if that could be done & how, using SimPE.
That's why I made this thread.

You won't be able to save anything but the Sims appearance themselves in the first step after noting down everything you want to keep. We can cheat in game and use SimPE to get other stuff back.

When you package a lot with Sims to the bin it cuts the connections between the Sims in the neighborhood and the Sims in the binned house. Hence why Dustin no longer knew Brandi after he came back from going to Pleasantview first to go to University. However, EA didn't set up the code that cuts the connections the best. It leaves traces in the forms of memories. Like Dustin's memory of kissing Angela. When you moved Dustin to Desiderata, he know longer knew Angela, but his memory of kissing her still referenced "her".

Each Sim is stored in the game by a unique ID #. Angela may be #30. Dustin may be #24. Memories of things happening to Sims that involve other Sims reference the Sim by their unique ID #. However, that number doesn't note what neighborhood they are from. So there's a Sim #30 in Desiderata Valley and a Sim #30 in Pleasantview. When you packaged the the lot, the reference to Angela was not fully removed from Dustin.

This not fully removed reference is what causes 99% of preventable corruption to spread. Dustin starts telling the world about his kiss to "Sim #30". Which spreads that not fully removed reference around in gossip memories. Which is why some people can go 2 weeks and others can go 10+ years. Just the luck of the draw in what memories were talked about in discussions and how often Sims interact with each other.

So you can't package the Sims you want to save into lots and use that.

It is a doozy to get thrown into researching the options when you realize you've corrupted your neighborhood. At least you caught it before you were unable to load the neighborhood (which may not have happened before you were bored with the neighborhood and wanted to rest it or move on). Keep in mind an option is to fix the family tree now and play the neighborhood until it decides to blow up or until it starts showing signs of corruption. I myself was once in your shoes, but with a family that had been going for 10 generations when I learned what you're learning now.

I'll link a good tutorial for the process of saving the Sims. You can stop after you've cloned the Sims you want in Body Shop. The tutorial is for packaging born in game or made in game Sims in order to share them with other people in a way that removes anything that could cause corruption, so they went a step further and packaged the Sims. Here is the tutorial: https://pixel-trade.livejournal.com/16091.html

I still use this feature today. I like to cheat and see what kids will look like when they grow up without waiting for them to do so. I like to use my born in game Sims as bases for new Sims. The above tutorial is the only safe way to save a Sim to the "Sim bin" like you would in Sims 3 when you went to change their appearance.


The tutorial that Cinebar linked to is an outdated SimPE version and the UI and where things are have changed. But the gist of what you can do in SimPE is there.

@Seera1024 thank you for the link, your time and other information.

I just want to say I'm not sure you understand what I did so I'll explain it again.
Last night I put all their furniture & household things in their inventory, then moved them out of their homes by
using the move family tool.
They went to the in game saved families bin.
Then I packaged the empty home they were in to packaged lots.

In the past I had packaged their lots, with them in it and saved them in a folder on my desktop.
But you've made it clear to me I can't use them.
So I tried another method.

But have I lost these Sims for good by doing it this different way ?