Complete Household deleted after moving to new town?!

[Hex: Devour Bussy]

Hey guys!

So I've got one HELL of a problem! After coming back from University, I wanted my sim, now a young adult, to move out to Bridgeport. I chose to move on the phone, saved the game, all that. Then I realized I took my entire family with me, which i didn't want. So I cancelled and as I was loading up again, the game threw me into the University town without my sim. I went back to the main menu and the family screen, while showing their name, is completely empty, not even showing a house/lot.

Sooooo... what the ♥♥♥♥ is going on? I saved, so this really shouldn't have happened?

[marstinson]

I'm going to hope that you have a slightly earlier save that you can revert to because that is going to be the better way to go.

Go to nraas.net and get the Overwatch, ErrorTrap, and Traveler mods. Install them. "How to Install" instructions are linked on each mod's page and instructions on how to set up the mod framework is about halfway down the linked page.

Once those are installed and running (you'll get a popup at the game's main menu telling you that they are), load your save.

The earlier save is going to be the better choice because the hinkiness hasn't happened yet as far as the game is concerned and the Overwatch and Traveler mods will help keep it from happening. Traveler makes you hard save before transitioning neighborhoods just to be doubly safe.

If you don't have an earlier save to use, then the hope is that Overwatch will clean up some of the problems that caused you to appear at Sim U and fix the entire missing sim problem. It might not, but it's a good shot at fixing the corrupted save.

[Hex: Devour Bussy]

Originally posted by marstinson:

I'm going to hope that you have a slightly earlier save that you can revert to because that is going to be the better way to go.

Go to nraas.net and get the Overwatch, ErrorTrap, and Traveler mods. Install them. "How to Install" instructions are linked on each mod's page and instructions on how to set up the mod framework is about halfway down the linked page.

Once those are installed and running (you'll get a popup at the game's main menu telling you that they are), load your save.

The earlier save is going to be the better choice because the hinkiness hasn't happened yet as far as the game is concerned and the Overwatch and Traveler mods will help keep it from happening. Traveler makes you hard save before transitioning neighborhoods just to be doubly safe.

If you don't have an earlier save to use, then the hope is that Overwatch will clean up some of the problems that caused you to appear at Sim U and fix the entire missing sim problem. It might not, but it's a good shot at fixing the corrupted save.

None of it helped, unfortunately. :/

Thanks for the help anyways, though!

[marstinson]

Originally posted by Jared Fogle:

None of it helped, unfortunately. :/

Thanks for the help anyways, though!

Bummer. Having to abandon a household due to save corruption is a royal PITA. While this one may not be fixable, here are a few things that will help avoid it going forward.

Do install those three mods (ErrorTrap, Overwatch, and Traveler). ErrorTrap and Overwatch won't change anything as far your gameplay goes, but they will keep an eye on things where the devs didn't provide for a graceful fail or a periodic cleanup. Other mods or CC are a matter of taste, but those two are pretty much standard kit.

Traveler isn't really necessary unless you have World Adventures, University Life, Into the Future, or Island Paradise. I think IP is the one that lets you move to a new neighborhood; used to be that you had to save the household, start a new game, and then load that household into the new game. Anyway, when you have World Adventures and/or University Life installed Traveler will let you do what you were originally trying to do: send part of the household to another neighborhood and leave the rest behind. Also, its prompting to make a hard save before transitioning can be a game-saver.

If you have Generations installed, watch out for the "free vacation for the adults" opportunity and do not accept it when it pops up. The intent was to let the kids have free reign for a few days, but the adults sometimes don't reappear. I'm not aware of any way to fix the problem other than avoiding the conditions that make it appear.

Avoid the "Save" and "Save and Quit" buttons. When you use the "Save" function, all of the accumulated world state changes are appended to the save file you are using rather than being incorporated into it. It sounds reasonable in theory, but the implementation doesn't work very well. It's better to use the "Save As" function, which writes all of those changes into a new file. It does mean you'll accumulate more save files, but it's fine to just rotate between three or four saves (CurrentGame001, CurrentGame002, CurrentGame003, for example) rather than periodically cleaning up your save folder to get rid of the saves you're never going back to.

There are a few other things that run into the "well that wasn't such a hot idea" dimension, but for vacations and traveling, those will help you avoid the more common problems.

[igazor]

Even if things had worked as intended for the OP in the first place, they may not have realized (it's not clear from their post) that moving to a new world the EA way means that the world left behind and all of its sims become unreachable going forward and all relationships with those left behind are gone because those sims no longer exist. It's really just a shortcut for starting the game over. Of course the game isn't supposed explode into a total mess in the process, but many players are taken by surprise when they learn that EA's implementation of Move to a New World isn't really what they had in mind.

Originally posted by marstinson:

Traveler isn't really necessary unless you have World Adventures, University Life, Into the Future, or Island Paradise. I think IP is the one that lets you move to a new neighborhood; used to be that you had to save the household, start a new game, and then load that household into the new game. Anyway, when you have World Adventures and/or University Life installed Traveler will let you do what you were originally trying to do: send part of the household to another neighborhood and leave the rest behind. Also, its prompting to make a hard save before transitioning can be a game-saver.

None of those EPs are required to use NRaas Traveler to travel to another world either on vacation or by moving there while keeping the original homeworld in play. It used to be that way many years ago, but the current version of Traveler and its immediate predecessor remove the need for WA in particular and moves to a new world can be done the vacation way even if IP is not present. Of course sims cannot travel to France, Egypt, or China and do the tomb exploration thing without WA, but they can vacation/move to any world that the player has installed and still have multi-world games going on.

Whether that makes the mod "necessary" or not depends on what the player is trying to accomplish. :)

[Tiberius]

have you tried edit world and see if your family is in there?