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Dipwad_Omega's avatar
Dipwad_Omega
Rising Novice
9 months ago

Sims are gone & missing from some households

Hey all, I've never posted here before, so please bear with me if I do something incorrectly.

I play on MacOS Sonoma 14.6.1 on a 2020 MacBook Pro with the Apple M1 chip. I do play with mods, so I tried removing all of them and then starting the game, but the problem remained. I have also switched over from Origin to the EA app (Pretty sure it was a forced change, but figured I'd mention it just in case)

After installing the most recent update to TS4, I started noticing a lot of visual bugs and figured that something might've gotten messed up somehow, so I tried Repairing the game. Now, every time I open the game, there are some Sims missing from their households. Not the ENTIRE household, only a few Sims. And some households are completely fine. (My main household that I play the most is a group of 8, but there's only 2 of them that show up when I click on their house in the Newcrest map.)

At first, I thought this might be due to the mods I had installed, as like I said before, I moved all of them to my Downloads folder and had the same issue. Then I thought it might be because I recently cleaned out my Mac and had moved some old Saves to my external storage, so I tried adding those back into my Saves folder, but that didn't change anything, either. The final thing that I tried was restoring an old save (which I'd never done before, but I read online that it might help), and initially, it DID bring back all of the missing Sims. After saving, exiting, and then reloading the game, however, the Sims went missing once again.

I've done a bit of poking around and testing stuff, and so far, it doesn't seem like anything else is broken or incorrect or anything like that. The game seems fine, other than the fact that there's a handful of missing Sims from only a handful of households. I can confirm that it's not just Newcrest, either, Sims have gone missing all over. It's weird, and...honestly kinda creepy. Feels like there's a serial kidnapper sneaking around in my game or something.

If anyone has any ideas what this could be caused by, please let me know! Tysm!

gameplay issue

6 Replies

  • PipMenace's avatar
    PipMenace
    Hero
    9 months ago
    I’m assuming the households were originally created with mods in? Just to test, if you create a few new households with mods out, save and exit, and go back in, do any of the new sims disappear?
  • Dipwad_Omega's avatar
    Dipwad_Omega
    Rising Novice
    9 months ago

    No, they don't. I made three new households and none of them were missing from the world. However, I'm pretty sure that I originally created most (if not all) of the Sims in my main household before I installed any mods at all, and there are a ton of Sims that I'm 100% sure I created using mods but aren't missing, so this is why I personally don't get the feeling that the issue is linked to my mods, but also I could definitely be wrong. Like I said, it's seemingly completely random who went missing and who didn't, and that's part of why it's so frustrating for me.

  • PipMenace's avatar
    PipMenace
    Hero
    9 months ago

    @Dipwad_OmegaHmm... but it wouldn't be all mods, it would be one specific bugged mod... and it might even not make them disappear until it's removed... but it's hard to tell what's going on if there's no pattern to who disappears. Did you look at what each Sim was doing when you saved and exited? Or what relationships they had with each other? Do you use any gameplay mods that might have affected any of the missing Sims' panels at all (custom traits, fears, milestones, aspirations, etc)?

    Edit: Asked around if anyone had heard of something similar. Did you have the Hybrid Occult mod?

  • Dipwad_Omega's avatar
    Dipwad_Omega
    Rising Novice
    9 months ago

    I do have some mods that add things like custom traits (from both chingyu and thepancake1) and more trait slots, but there still doesn't seem to be any pattern that forms even knowing that. I did get an email that thepancake1 released an update for his traits (https://www.patreon.com/posts/mod-status-for-1-108836941?utm_campaign=patron_engagement&utm_source=post_link&post_id=108836941&utm_id=ab68820f-e2ee-4b95-9af4-ae5966b7aa2d&utm_medium=email) a couple days ago, but I already tried straight-up deleting all of my mods and it didn't bring back the missing Sims, so I don't think replacing an outdated mod with a new version would make any difference either.

    I've been actively choosing not to play TS4 until I could get this figured out so I wouldn't make any progress that I could potentially lose while trying to fix the issue. I created a new Sim and worked on a house, both of which I saved to My Gallery so I could access later, but I didn't save my game either time just in case it would somehow leave my Sims missing permanently. 

    I just went back and used Recover Save, and the missing Sims did show up again. However, that was without mods. Once I added my mods back in and started up the same save file, the Sims went missing again. I updated thepancake1's mod, and that didn't seem to help either, so I'm going to have to do things the old fashion way by removing them all and adding them back in small groups at a time so I can figure out which mod is causing the problem. I'll let you know if I'm able to find anything. Thanks

  • Dipwad_Omega's avatar
    Dipwad_Omega
    Rising Novice
    9 months ago

    Apparently I did have a Hybrid Occult mod installed that seems to have been causing the problems. I forgot that I have an Alien Spellcaster and that I couldn't do that in vanilla TS4 😅 I believe it was a hybrid mod by Iced Cream, and in retrospect, there was actually a pattern because all of the Sims I who went missing were also occults of some type. (Don't know how I didn't pick up on that earlier lol, my bad)

    I went to check out if there was an update for that mod, and there...kind of was? I think what they ended up doing was merging their mod with another one called Occult Hybrid Unlocker & Stabilizer by TwelfthDoctor1. (The included screenshot is of the old mod that I deleted.) So I deleted the old hybrid mod and downloaded these instead:


    - https://modthesims.info/d/643617/

    -  https://modthesims.info/d/647863/all-in-one-occult-hybrid-stabilizer.html

    I went poking around to make sure everything worked correctly, and it everything seemed to be fine. I checked to make sure my Alien Spellcaster Sim still had both occults, and sure enough, she did. I haven't noticed any Sims still missing, so it seems that problem has been solved. It did, however, create ANOTHER problem...because of course it did. (Because apparently, we as TS4 fans aren't allowed to have nice things.)

    Now I can't open CAS without it freezing on the loading screen, making me have to Force Quit the game. I even tried going to CAS on a non-occult Sim (one of the 2 that DIDN'T go missing from that same household), but it froze again. So now my Sims are back, but now I can't edit them or create any new ones...excellent. 😮‍💨😭

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