My Sim lived with her parents, a cat and a dog. She then moved out to university accommodation, whilst she was away her parents died. The pets seem to have vanished. Is there anyway I can get them back? What happened to them?
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If you're playing a one Sim household and your only Sim dies, your pet goes to some kind of "animal protection service," only I think in practice it's just gone. I suspect the same thing happened with your Sim's pets. I don't think they show up in pet adoptions or unplayed households (but would be happy to be corrected on this point!).
If you have MC Command Center, you can click on a mailbox and summon the pets to a current lot and hopefully that'll work? and then you could shift-click to add them to your Sim's household. (At least, I think it requires MCCC; you could try it with just testing cheats on. If that doesn't work, you would need to use MCCC to turn on debug cheats.)
Pets like Toddlers and children can not live by themselves so the game culls them when the last Teenager or adult in a household dies. There is no way to get them back as they no longer exists. You only option would be to load a savegame prior to this happening.
Sadly, I think @jpkarlsen is right.
If you have an old save where the pets still exist, you could save them to your library and get them back that way. You would load the old save, edit in CAS, save the household to your library, then close and open the new save. Then edit your university household in CAS (fulleditmode?) and choose add a household from your library and import the pets that way. They'll lose their relationship, unfortunately, and will have the friendly default new pet relationship.
