The Sims 3 | no sims in town problem (solved)
Hi! At the beginning, I wanna say that I have no mods in my TS3 game, but I got some of the expansion packs and all of the store towns.
I have a save that I've played in for like a year with some long breaks. The whole problem happened in one day/playing session. After like an hour of playing I’ve decided to save the progress in game and then I’ve started to see some bugs while playing + longer loading. Then I exited the game and loaded it again (hoping that restarting it would help with the lags) and then it happened. My sim is gone, all of the other sims in town are also gone (just like in the photos below). Even when I put new sims there they just disappear.
I thought that opening this previous save may help, but the problem appears here as well and it shows the same, empty town. I’ve also tried to see if it’s the problem with the game and if it’s happening in other towns/saves, but it seems that everything is okay there, so I’m pretty sure this save itself is corrupt.
The user jamieptaylor had the same problem, so I followed the solution that was given here. This user has successfully fixed the game, but for me it didn’t help, although I think I’ve done everything correctly, so I’ve started to worry even more about this whole situation (link = https://answers.ea.com/t5/Technical-Issues-PC/No-sims-ghost-town-sims-3/td-p/7872548). I’m going to reinstall TS3 soon anyway, cause I’m too angered with those bugs, but I wish I could end the story on that save, but right now I can’t even save my sims to the library and start the save again just to end this story. Thanks for any help and sorry for my a bit weak English. I'm open to all of the questions.
@silentwind2 There are a few variations on the same approach, but I think this is the simplest. Load into the household of the sim you can access and let the game clock run for a few sim-minutes. Pick what used to be an empty house or lot in town, click on a wall or the ground, and select NRaas > MC > Add Sim, then X out the list of filters. You'll see a list of all sims in the save, at least those that MC can find. Pick a single sim or a group of them, for example your former active household, and those sims should now be living on the lot you picked.
After the sims are added, let the game clock run for a few more sim-minutes, then run another MC town reset. Use "save as" again, quit, delete the cache files, reload, and see whether you can save the household to the in-game bin. You can also try loading into it, but depending on how much sim data has been recovered, that may not go well. However, given the current state of your save, it sounds like it's time to move your sims elsewhere anyway, so saving them to the library is what matters.
You can repeat the process for any number of sims you want to save. Keep adding them to separate empty houses or lots though, so you don't get any overlap with sims already living there.