I too went to play a normal night of the sims and all of my households were gone along with anything I had saved in the gallery. it is almost like I never played the game at all. I have tried everything. I deleted what I thought were mods or maybe sim 4 packs then quit and re-open origin and sims 4 so many times. I must have run repair in origin at least 4 times. I still have yet to get my household back. At this point, I just got to give up. Sims 4 has given my computer so many tech problems even before this happened.
@deang68 So sorry for the loss of your played households! I'm not entirely sure what you mean when you say "I deleted what I thought were mods or maybe sim 4 packs"? Perhaps you could clarify?
Did you try going to a previous game save? To do this...
In-Game Method: Go to the Main Menu and choose 'Load Game'...
Select (click on) a saved game (to reveal the small folder icon)...
...then hover over the small folder icon ('Recover Save' will pop up) and click this folder icon...
This will reveal your most recent saves on that 'Game Save'. Select the 'Recover' button on the version (see time stamp) that you prefer:
When you say saved to your Gallery, do you mean your Library? The Gallery is online whereas the Library stores Households/Lots/Rooms locally in the Tray folder in your Sims 4 folder. If you deleted everything Sims related from your computer, your uploads would still be accessible in the Gallery.
It sounds like maybe your computer is setup to store Documents files in the cloud when the internal storage is getting full. This means that the game can't find the contents of the Sims 4 folder to load, such as Saves and the Tray items, so it is like loading a new game every time you launch the game but if you could clarify PC/Mac that would help.
I'm having similar issues where all my households have disappeared; they are no longer in their homes, nor am I able to move them back into their respected homes because they are no longer available in the Manage Households menu.
I also have this bit of possibly related information: my saved file called 'Community #1' is tagged with "do_not_remove_wicked_whims_version" since this issue, but I've tried everything to retrieve my families ☹️ (they all had back stories and everything...ugh so much time lost).
@Kaleigh03 When you create a household a copy should be added in your library. You could check there to see if the missing households are there? The only 'relational/backstory' information that will come with adding that household from the library back into the game will be what it had at the point it was saved to the library, but at least you would have the household/sims back after placing them into a new lot/game save.
Perhaps it's the mod you mentioned that caused the issue/missing sims? Perhaps you could try creating a new game save that is a copy of the save where they were present, (open the save and do a 'Save as' of this previous save, renaming it so you know what it is - name it test or something distinctive), then leave the game and remove your mods and cache file, and reenter the game only opening the test save to see if the sims are there. Then exit the game without saving. (A bit more detail on the testing process🙂
Try moving the Mods folder from your "The Sims 4" folder [Documents > Electronic Arts > The Sims 4] to your desktop (save it for reference) and delete the localthumbcache.package file in your “The Sims 4” folder. Then check in a new game save to see if this issue is still occurring. You can test without saving in order to identify which CC/Mods are causing the issue, then remove or add updated version(s) of the Mod/CC causing the issue.
