Sims Are Disappearing Without A Trace

If things have resulted in the deceased having no remains in the world being played, I'm afraid there are no longer any sims to reconstruct. There will be small amounts of data left behind to fill in family trees and surviving sims may retain memories of the deceased, but that's I'm afraid not nearly enough data out of which to reconstruct a sim who is no longer in the game.

As another example, not related to death and remains, I have caused some sims to emigrate from the world I am currently playing as it was getting overpopulated with households I knew I would never really engage with. For those who knew these sims in passing, they still occupy a foreign world slot on the relationship panel, I can get to see the departed sims' family trees and some small bits of information about them like traits and former careers, but that's about it. They are really no longer in the game and they cannot be summoned back to it.

Or at least these have been my experiences.

@igazor - Thanks for answering. There seems to be a bit of visual confusion going on with the surviving Sims which is most likely data residue. The deceased is showing up as alive (non-ghost form) in their family trees; but the relationship panel has them as 'not remembered', meaning they show up as neither dead nor alive, but they are not erased from the minds of the survivor. Another strange thing is the newspaper didn't report their demise. It's as if the game swallowed them, there is no cause of death to be found and no remains to show they ever existed.

I have not experienced a death which didn't make its way into the newspaper. Nor, have I ever had main characters who are hardwired into every game just disappear without becoming a mourn-able tombstone or ghost. Randomly generated Sims will disappear in this manner once they die, but never, until now, a main character with story ties (Landgraab & Langerak Sims have died).

I didn't wish to resurrect theses Sims, just give them a proper final resting place.

Yes, I'm afraid it can. EA's SP mechanism can falsely decide that a town is over-populated or out of balance demographically, go into emergency sim culling mode, get stuck there, and keep getting rid of sims when there is no need for it to. Possibly there was an over-abundance of resort workers (even if you have no resorts at all) behind the scenes or one of the service pools like that one became overrun due to a programming glitch.

This kind of thing is one of the huge reasons that modded forms of story progression exist. They do not let these things happen for no real reason.

I understand what you are doing here and why you are not using NRaas SP (or AwesomeMod's), but by relying on EA's version of progression the sad thing is these things do just happen. Not saying it's with 100% certainty, but the evidence of the sims having disappeared, some of their data remaining behind but not their bodies/remains, and there being no death notices posted does point in that direction. The witnessing death status I admit seems to contradict that, but I'm not really sure what form sim culling takes from the purview of an inactive resident. So yes, it could have been something else entirely up to and including actual deaths from known causes. But otherwise this isn't too different from players returning to a household they had been playing in rotations to find that their toddlers are suddenly gone or that the entire family just isn't in their game anymore.

I admittedly have limited experience with these things happening in my own game because I stopped using EA's version of progression pretty early on. Am instead relying on the many players we have helped or tried to help with theirs over the years when describing what we believe can happen here.

@igazor - Thanks again, something has definitely gone out-of-whack in this world. In all my years of playing, I have never had Sims culled from my worlds. I'm thinking I'd better move my Sim out of this world and into a new game before anymore madness happens.

I think I noticed something similar in my game that ran a long time with EA's story progression. There are some sims listed in the demographics panel that are nowhere to be found. I tried resetting one of them (not a ghost), but the game didn't take that well.

"Karritz;c-17203511" wrote:
I had a sim removed right before my eyes the other day. It was one of the toddlers from my boarding school. I found him hovering in the sky out to sea. His portrait was still on the left of the screen but I suspect if I'd have left him hovering for too long he would have been gone. I reset him and he came back.

Assuming the toddler didn't have undocumented magical powers or an ITF hoverboard, that usually means the game has sent the sim to an undefined location/ set of map coordinates. Guess that doesn't really help because it doesn't explain why that happened or what was going to happen next if not tended to. One known cause is a total break in the world map, although broken and malformed lot design can also trigger this. Another is a misbehaving mod (NRaas GoHere used to do this to sims using boats while boat routing was disallowed but thankfully that was fixed long ago). We've also seen sims gather together for a rebellious protest demonstration of some kind that should probably have taken place in front of City Hall, but the sims appeared to be under the ocean instead.

But if this is not a regular occurrence, it's not usually all that concerning as long as we catch it and reset the sim in time.

"Turjan;c-17203907" wrote:

'LadyGreenEyes' wrote:
The Bayless teen just "poofed" from the game. No mourning, however, no tombstone, no nothing. Just gone. Happened very early in, too, so no idea why.

I assume the game knew what would become of him when he grows up and just had mercy. Assuming you speak of Tay for a moment.

What happens to Tay when he grows up is that he marries one of my sims who has absolutely no problems with the way he looks and lives happily ever after. One of their kids did admittedly need some slight adjustments in CAS, but the other three turned out just fine. Leave the poor guy alone, he can't help having been born with distinctive genetics. ;)

"mw1525;c-17208827" wrote:
Could there be adverse effects to changing mod settings while the Sims are active during their day. I'm sure if it is it probably depends on the mod being altered.

I cannot think of any examples of mod settings that are unwise to change while sims are awake and active. In the case of some mods like Retuner, the changes probably won't take effect until the next startup of the game and some settings will take a while within the same session to take hold, but no real danger in either case.

I might be wrong but if it's resident Sims your aren't actively playing when they die aren't the urns available at the mausoleum through the manage the dead option?

Are you certain that these sims actually died (I presume of old age, but for any reason) and it was not EA's story progression culling/emigrating them from their homeworld as the tame will do when it "thinks" a world is overpopulated?