Restore "culled" sims
After all the patches it seems we are able to control culling. Still, many players have their game was ruined by culling and carefully built genealogy trees are filled with question marks. Of course...
Forum Discussion
@rostsit It may be possible to get a bit creative by saving a backup of your current save ("The Sims 4" folder) to your desktop and trying to roll back (if you kept backups) to your old "The Sims 4" folder....
Please note: only family relationships are saved within the household(s) that you save to the gallery. Also, remember that if you bring in any sim this way and replace a current sim with them the progress and recent experiences of the more recent sim will be lost. You may be able to extract the culled sims from an older save, if you have one. However, it's not possible to recover the relationships between your active sims and the culled ones, unless you use cheats...
...Add the desired sims into household groups with those you want to preserve relationships with (this would keep them from having those particular relationships severed - relationships stay intact within the household they are saved with into the library &/or community gallery), then drop your current save back in (overwrite that old "The Sims 4" folder) and download those other households from the gallery. This may get you at least a few things back that you wanted. You can also create relationships that may be missing via cheating, as mentioned. An imperfect and spotty solution, but it is something to try if you want to.
Dealing with save games & backups: https://sims4.crinrict.com/eng/2014/09/save-games/
Merging, splitting, creating and uploading households: https://www.ea.com/games/the-sims/the-sims-4/news/splitting-and-merging
Relationship cheat (toward bottom of article): https://simsvip.com/sims-4-cheats-codes/
@SheriGRThanks for your input and effort. This solution will actually work in some cases, no doubt. They still have some major flaws:
1. Saving household will preserve major relationships within said household, but, as you've mentioned, it will destroy all progress of current sims. In most cases, the sims that need to be restored are/were a part of some bigger major player's family - that's the main reason WHY players want to restore them. Sacrificing other family members progress is not an option..
2. Creating relationships through cheats or mods is the same workaround I've described in my OP. It works, but again, it has its flaws. In most cases, it will not restore family tree properly, leaving all the question marks in it.
So, just as you've said, an imperfect and spotty solution. But the sole existence of said solutions proves it's doable, even if third party mods should be involved (like SimPE in Sims 2). As mod developers explained to me, at the moment it is beyond their capabilities to create something that would fully restore a culled sim. Only the game developers can expand on this.
