Complications changing family tree
Hi! So I have a 7 sim family. I recently decided that I wanted to add parents to one of the already adult sims, so I enabled testingcheats and cas.fulleditmode to create the sims and the relationship...
Forum Discussion
That particular adult sim has children of her own, a husband and a sister, so I imagine that if I were to remake her I wouldn't be able to give her those relationships back, just like I can't seem to give her the parent relationship with her father.
I've checked her family tree and since I made the father two empty boxes/pictures have popped up where her parents should be. They weren't there before. So I'd assume if the father still existed he would be in one of the boxes, but he isn't. He's not in the "manage households" tab either.
When I made the father I never exited CAS with him. I made him, saved him to my gallery and exited without saving. It annoys me that all I should've done was remove the relationship before deleting him, haha.
I've really made some huge story-building sims, houses and events already that I'd hate to lose by loading another save. I'm thinking that if I can't somehow fix it she'll just have to be without parents.
@phoenixjklin
Ok, here's what I did...
I created two sisters and placed them in a house. I then modified them, created a father, split him out and deleted him.
The sisters both showed "missing" parents. I checked them and couldn't find where the "father" was set. It's nowhere in any hidden traits, relationships, relationship bits, or commodities. I was unable to change it.
I created a new household member with the intention of making him the father but was unable to set it.
I then copied both sisters to my library, deleted them from the world, and placed them back. I was then able to set the new man as the father. So, moving them to the library and back does in fact clear the missing father.
But, as you saw, it will delete all existing NPC relationships. They kept their jobs but lost their personal inventory. But that's easily kept by moving it to the household inventory.
I was also then able to create a new mother just fine.
@phoenixjklin Wow! What a mess! :-/ It's too bad you had so much trouble with this. It is really frustrating when things go south in this game. Too often things can get really bad with no easy fix.
Wow, thank you both for putting so much time and effort into trying to solve this! I greatly appreciate it.
@JonaO703 I think I did save the whole family (with the father) and then later separated him in a different save to be able to put him back.
I think I deleted that specific family after I separated him from them, because I see no family close to him in my gallery.
@Psychotps I tried saving the family to my gallery, deleting them from the world and then putting them back. I added the father but unfortunately still couldn't create the "father" relationship. The only person I can add it to is the spouse of the sister for some reason, but of course I don't want him to have it, haha.
Maybe there's something else wrong with my saves, I have no clue!
At this point I'm pretty much ready to give up with this, so I don't blame you both if you are too! It's definitely a mystery.
@phoenixjklin Oh man, it's too bad you didn't keep a copy of the whole family with the dad! Like I said before ... what a mess! :-( I really wish I knew something else that might help. The more I think about it, the more this seems like a bug. I wonder if you'd consider starting a new topic on the bug reports board. Maybe give it a specific subject like "Deleted Sims Leave Empty Slots In Genealogy" and just include the part where you deleted the father and the steps you took to add a new one. The only reference I could find to this issue was in an old reddit article from a couple years ago. There are bug reports about sims disappearing from family trees but none about these empty relationships or the effect of not being able to add a relationship because of it. I guess I just assumed that, when a sim is deleted, all traces of their existence goes with them. We don't have empty slots in the relationship panel. The only thing I've noticed leftover from deleted sims is their personal inventory items added to the household inventory. Although, I've only played a couple "legacy" games and I never deleted a sim from those so the genealogy problem hasn't been an issue for me. Anyway, I definitely know that point of frustration when you wonder if it's worth the effort. It's totally up to you of course.
- @phoenixjklin
Go ahead and save the entire family to the library and share it to the gallery and I'll take a look at it. First I owe an apology. I got confused a bit about whose post was whose, sorry @Psychotps ! Still, when I took the steps you mentioned, those missing parent slots still showed up.
Today, I had an epiphany. In my previous testing, I was so focused on adding an outside sim and it dawned on me that I didn't try playing with genetics again. So I saved my sim family and deleted them from the game, then saved and exited to menu. I loaded the game again and clicked create new household. Once in CAS, I played with genetics to create a father AND a mother. Creating them from the youngest did not give me an option to set the parent relationship for the oldest. I had to select the oldest sibling and play with genetics based on her. I got the exclamation point triangle warning related to their relationships so I was worried it wasn't going to work. However, I checked the relationships three or four times to be sure the right father-mother-daughter combo was set. I saved and played the household finding the genealogy now displays properly.
Eureeka! @phoenixjklin I'm hoping this will work in your game as well. If you do decide to try this, remember to play with genetics from the oldest sibling then double check the relationships across the other household members.
Edit: Now that I think about it, I think the reason I couldn't set the parent relationship for the oldest is because they were all young adult. In CAS, you can't set a parental relationship for sims of the same age; i.e. a young adult's parent must be adult or older. Perhaps double check that in your game as well.
- @JonaO703 Yea, that's always been a limitation. They need to be one age group higher (at least?). Not sure if that goes for teens as well. If the kids are teen and YA, and the parent is Adult, can the adult be parent to the teen?
Glad its working for you! It worked fine for me once I moved the sim to library and back. @Psychotps Yes, in my test save, one of the siblings is a teen, which I think was part of the problem for me. When I added the parents for the teen, they generated as YA but I didn't realize that at first. Then it dawned on me that adding parents for the YA sibling created Adult parents both of whom were set as parents for the siblings. I felt rather dumb afterwards but that's why I added my "edit" response to check for the possible age conflict. :-/ I think you mentioned we learn through the process. It's one of the reasons I started trying to help players here. I enjoy helping, even if it's not perfect, but I'm' also learning a lot. I really appreciate you and others for helping too. :-)
