Has anyone had a sim just 'Poof!' disappear? My computer once decided to do that to me, and in a family I liked. The family in question had a cat, two adults, a pair of twin children, two toddlers, and twin babies. After the birth of the babies, I saved, quit, came back on, and discovered that the children and toddlers were gone. The babies and adults were fine, but their memories and relationships with the gone children were, well, gone.

This is not a 'Help Me!' topic, but a 'Has it Happened to You?' topic.

I have had sims disappear, quite often. However they were still in the other sims memories. I was able to teleport the sim in question, back into the household using the sim blender, then have to make them selectable again.

What I've discovered is that the Sims never just "disappear" unless they really do die. At least, that's been the case for me.

I thought one of my kids was missing once, but I came back and he was crawling by the mailbox. (NOTE: It's harder for babies, tots, and children to die, I think I read that they're invincible and will only leave with the social workers.)

And then sometimes they glitch up and float, but that's a different story.

Half of my sims in riverblossom hills vanished. They never came back and any memories to do with them say something like $subject where there should be a name.

Well, it was a minor annoyance, because the family was going to be in a kind've legacy. The days wasted just wasn't too cool. But, as the female had a ton of aspiration, she has now something like 40-50 more days of adulthood.

Just had this happen, actually. After I got a new video card, my game decided to go "vanilla". My game has had problems constantly after extensive hardware or software updates, such as a new video card or a Firefox update (has to be a really big one, though). It goes vanilla or partially vanilla. I've learned to back up my game before I do any extensive updates. Actually, I back up every month, anyway.

Right before I had the card put in, I backed up my game, as usual. When the game went vanilla, as I guessed it would, I used my recent backup, which I KNEW was a clean backup ... no content problems or glitched households. I used my backup, fired up the game, tried a bunch of families, and everything was hunky-dory ... or so I thought. I was just so pleased that I remembered to back up. The last time I installed a new video card, I lost Riverblossom.

Last month, I went into a household I didn't play as much and found that a family member was missing. I was annoyed at myself because I thought that I was playing around with the select/deselect feature of the Insimenator, and perhaps deselected the girl permanently. I've done that before, but have always caught my error before I saved the game. It concerned me, but I just chalked it up to my stupidity and went on.

Two days ago, I went into a few other households I play even MORE rarely, and found five Sims missing among three different families. One family lost three out of four Sims. No rhyme, no reason, no pattern. It's not like I used a particular hack with these five Sims. Just ... poof. My clean copy I made before the installation had them, but the backup copy I did last month did not, apparently, so I would guess that this happened when I got the new video card. I rarely played the game for a month or so after I got the card because my personal life left little time to play games. Like Ginger, I too get the "subject" marker. They're not in Sim PE, not in any other household, and I can't summon them. They're ... gone.

If I knew that people were missing, I could have just reinstalled the backup again a few months ago. I know now. Chalk that one up to experience.

Someone on another board suggested that perhaps my neighborhoods were too full. This is a really good suggestion, but it puzzles me. I have exactly two dorms of Sims in my University, five houses of Sims in my shopping district, five houses of Sims in one Downtown area, and two houses in another. Most of my missing Sims lived in the one downtown area with five houses, NOT in the more populated Pleasantview itself. The original missing girl lived in Pleasantview, but that town is not overly full. There are plenty of open lots and spaces. I had about 750 Sims together between ALL the neighborhoods, and that includes ALL "living" Sims, "dead" Sims, deleted Sims, townies, NPCs, pets ... everyone, whether I made them or the game did. I now see that the total number dropped almost a hundred. It looks like generated NPCs and townies are affected as well, since if I lost a hundred Sims, my Pleasantview would look like a ghost town! I don't think I HAVE a hundred user-created "living" Sims in that town! Or if I do, maybe it's 110 or so!

The official Sims site recommends reinstalling the game, but then again, I read that they recommend reinstalling the game a lot, so it's hard to figure out if you really need a reinstall in this case. And unfortunately, a "helpful" family member might have inadvertently messed up my Seasons disk, so while I THINK everything should be fine if I do a reinstall, I don't know if it will be.

But yes, this IS annoying. I'm sorry it happened to you people here. And I see that I'm not the only one ...

Last edited by gazania : 21st Sep 2009 at 12:05 AM.

The sims I lost were ones I hadn't played in ages too.

Hmmm ... that's interesting. So far, this seems to be the only pattern I can see.

How long have you been playing this game as it is now (not reinstalled)? Maybe this is just "old age" with the game?

It wouldn't be old age with me, as I played the household constantly. Probably a week at most between them being there and then not.

Eh, I got over it. The annoyance previously mentioned wasn't at the waste of days, but the kids disappearing. I liked those kids.

I haven't played the household in around a month or two, so I'll check them out later today.

Oh, well. That was almost a good pattern.

What I meant, though ... and I'm sorry I wasn't very clear ... is how long were you playing this particular game without reinstalling? A year? Two years? A month? The reason I'm asking is that someone ... a non-Sims player, admittedly ... told me that with some games with a file you've been playing a long time, things "happen" with the file. Data drops out, you get little errors, that sort of thing.

Another player told me that some older games do not play 100% nicely with certain newer cards, systems, etc. They were designed for a particular range of configurations, and there was no way the developers could forecast back in 2004 what hardware or software we have in 2009, particularly with CPU-intensive games like The Sims series. The Sims 3 might very well be causing the same problems in five years ... or sooner. It's the nature of the game beast.

Unfortunately, both gamers told me that eventually, I might have to do a clean reinstall. I could keep my content ... though they did advise me to prune any stuff I don't use much, particularly mods ... but I'd lose my characters. To use an anime cliche, "it can't be helped", I suppose.

Or is this just an occasional burp that many here have dealt with? Is this somewhat normal with Sims players? How long ago did you lose these characters?

I HOPE that this is just an occasional game burp! And again, sorry you lost some of your favorites. That happened to me the last time I got a new card, when I lost Riverblossom. My daughter and I lost quite a few favorites. You invest a lot of time in these pixel dollies!

I don't know how long I've been playing, maybe 18 months? A good few months before December 2008 anyway. I started playing sims 2 in December 2006 (when I finally got a computer good enough to run it, having had the disk for over a year) but sometime between then and now, I started a new game on a different user account and have been playing that one since. But I've never reinstalled, just used a different account.

I lost the sims since then but again long before last december.

And I notice you lost Riverblossom. All the sims I lost were living in Riverblossom. I might have lost some in Pleasantview, but I never checked. I never lost any in Veronaville or Strangetown, but I didn't have many sims in either of those. I had loads in Pleasantview, but I never checked there. I was playing Desiderata by then.

Well, the only things I read pertaining to this problem hint that perhaps I had too many Sims in my neighborhood. Back in 2005, when Uni became popular, people cited 800 as the limit.

Problem is, I never reached 800. Before I replaced the card, I checked on Sim PE. My number was 751.

And here is where I get REALLY confused. The entries about the excess Sims were posted back from Uni days, around 2005. Nightlife added a downtown. OFB added a shopping district. Pets added ... well ... pets. Is the amount still 800? And yes, that's 800 for ALL Sims ... deleted, living, dead, game-created, user-created, pets, etc. It seems a little strange that an expansion wouldn't open up more slots, considering that if you opened a University neighborhood, you can easily accumulate 150 more Sims or via EA's characters.

We very rarely used Veronaville on our other game, so it stayed at the base level for a long time. Tell you the truth, I forgot how many we had simply in the base game ... not more than 300, I know for sure. I think it was around 250. Almost all of those are EA's pixel dollies, not ours. Now that we have the University, we're at 466. That is EVERYONE'S .... EA's and ours. No more than 100 of those are ours in both Veronaville and the university combined ... and that includes living Sims, dead Sims, deleted Sims and pets. EA is the one who sticks in loads of NPCs and Townies when you open up a downtown or a shopping district!

It seems absurd that if you can start a new downtown, university and shopping district, plus get pets, you STILL have to keep to a 800 Sim limit ... including EA's contributions! Geez, what does that mean .... you're allowed to create only 50 Sims and pets per neighborhood? No wonder people use mods to wipe out townies and NPC's! And that's only up to Seasons!

Before I got the video card, I Googled and Googled to see if ANYONE knows of a limit of Sims if you have up to this expansion or that expansion, beyond Uni. I never, never found one. Not on the officials, not here, not on TSR (sorry), not in Insimenator ... nowhere. The only limit I found was that one that dated only to Uni.

If you have 800 Sims with no pets combined between Pleasantview and Uni, then yes, I would say you're getting a bit frisky with Sim reproduction, and may want to put your Sims on birth control. But you would think that number would increase by at least a couple of hundred per expansion if you got the Nightlife, OFB, and Pets expansions. After all, did EA really think we'd want an all-NPC/townie neighborhood?

Wait. Maybe they did!

Anyway, I realize that if things get really wonky, perhaps I should just wipe out Pleasantview and start again. If I recall, there was a way to do that ... maybe load the game vanilla, take out your old Pleasantview, and put the vanilla one in there? I have to Google that ... I DID see that somewhere.

Maybe it's because we play a lot of a neighborhood that this happens? Good question. But at the time Riverblossom disappeared, I had just started playing it a few months ago, and had perhaps 100 custom Sims and pets between all of the neighborhoods. And my daughter and I both played the game. So I'm about 98% sure it wasn't overpopulation with Riverblossom.

Someone else suggested that sometimes, stuff happens. It's not your fault. It's not EA's. Sometimes, your computer just doesn't save something correctly, and it corrupts or deletes data. Or it still can be related to major hardware and software changes, or admin changes, as in your case. Maybe if you make a major change to the machine, strange things happen.

Who knows? Maybe Jupiter didn't align with Mars, or someone sneezed on the machine on a day of the week that didn't have an "r" in it. I think I should simply back up my game more often (at least twice a month ... many say more), and always check the population numbers to make sure that I didn't lose anyone during a major hardware or software change.


EDIT ... I found this bit about re-installing a neighborhood:
http://www.sims2wiki.info/wiki.php?...t_Neighborhoods

I suppose that I'd better keep it bookmarked just in case.

Last edited by gazania : 21st Sep 2009 at 03:11 AM.

Yeah My Anne Johnson is Gone too... I'm still sad about it... her husband's memorie's show her Name is $subject and he is not related to her just his sister and Waiata doe's not remember her either! man... i miss her.



oh and i am imarock's kid and i am talking about castaway storie's there is no castaway storie's thread so i'm posting it here.

If you are comfortable with SimPe:

Quaxi mentioned that it is possible to take the intact character file from a backup of the neighborhood and place it into the corrupted save if you know the character number of the missing sim.

DO NOT ATTEMPT THIS if you are not familiar with using SimPE. Especially if you do not routinely back up your neighborhoods!

That's really cool Ghost! I'll keep that in mind for the future. I haven't got back ups from that long ago. Is there more information about that anywhere?

I recently lost a robot, but it wasn't a big deal, it was just a robot.

It had no real personallity, it was just kind of there, then it wasn't. I made a new one which is alot more fun, so yeah.

I'm pretty sure if you search around at the SimPE site you can find the thread where it was mentioned, but there is hardly anybody there to answer questions anymore so you would be pretty much on your own in your search. I'm taking another break while I wait for some more boxes (We're moving tomorrow) or I would try to track the thread down for you myself. I know both Quaxi and I posted in the thread, and I believe the thread may have been started by Trif when he noticed that some of his sims had been vanishing. But that is about the best clue I can give at the moment.

I had this one lot that would bork all the time, and the craziest time was once when I had quit and my game wasn't done saving before Windows Automatic Update decided it should restart my pc. Oops. Next time I played my game, I found that the two children that had grown from toddler to child or teen during my last session were now stretch skeletons of toddlers. And the game called them their new age, but all they got was toddler clothes. Funny. They stayed that way until they hit the next age change.

I thought that perhaps I could replace the missing Sims using Sim PE, but now I fear that using the Sim PE to put the old characters back in might make things a whole lot worse. At least in my case, it might. Others might probably do just fine.

A few days ago, I pored through both my current file, my last known good save file (the one I made before I replaced the card), and a backup I made a month ago. What I saw was really odd.

I made 16 new Sims between May and now. The last ten caused no problems. They increased the population just as they should. It was my first six new ones since May that did something bizarre.

I currently have 736 characters in my game, according to Sim PE. (Yes, I have found out that my old population count was not 751. Sorry.) I tried to find out the missing character numbers, and five of my missing six were the following: 444, 451, 452, 463 and 465. They weren't even sequential, or at the end of the character list! (I messed up a character number with number 6, and don't have time to find it.)

I checked the missing numbers against my current file, and found that I DID have a number 444, 451, 452, 463 and 465, only ... they weren't the same characters. The first five new characters I made since I got the video card in June replaced them! So even if I tried to put in my old 444, it might now clash with the new 444.

My August backup was even stranger. At the time, I made 5 new Sims since May. The first five replaced the numbers, but since I hadn't made a new sixth Sim, a number was missing. It was the only number missing. When I made that Sim, she replaced the last of my six missing Sims.

So even if I COULD stick the old Sims in, I would be afraid to now.

Last edited by gazania : 25th Sep 2009 at 01:01 PM.

Yes, you have reached the limit of the number of sims available in the neighborhood and the game is randomly replacing sims.

I would suggest getting Theo's deleter plugin here http://theos.chewbakkas.net/tools/sim-deleter-tool.html and deleting some sims you don't want before the game gets rid of any more sims that you do want.

(This is also why the extra character files from transferring a sim between neighborhoods is a VERY BAD THING. If you happen to have any of those, they would be the first things to dispose of.)

The heck with it. I just backed up my Pleasantview, just in case I changed my mind, and reset the neighborhood. Resetting a neighborhood is so easy! That Sim deleter sounds great, but with 945 Sims, I would have to delete an awful lot, and a lot of them had created memories with my Sims. And besides, I had made so many mistakes with Pleasantview. There is something nice about being able to wipe out mistakes ...

I packaged about seven houses and lots (after moving out the families first, just in case), and the game CLAIMED it saved the lots, but one seems to be gone (oh, well), and one, for some reason, I just can't load! The game CLAIMS it loaded OK. I have the Sims2Pack. I've tried twice. Nothing.

I thought I read how to look into that. I'm going to check next, so no need for anyone to leave a link, thanks! But it was my daughter's lot, and she really doesn't care it didn't load. She never played Pleasantview ... just built two houses there.

Anyway, I thought I'd be upset. I thought I'd be sad. Strangely, I'm not. With 945 characters, the game went just about as far as it could go with Pleasantview. I'd be too nervous generating new Sims in the old Pleasantview, knowing how packed that neighborhood was. What's the point of keeping it? I was going to package some Sims, but so many have been changed in SimPE/Christianlov's paintings/Insim, etc. that I have NO idea what I'd wind up with. As I wrote, I made a LOT of mistakes with Pleasantview when I first played it. Those mistakes are gone now. I can look at it that way.

So I'm starting Pleasantview all over again, and I HOPE I don't make the same mistakes. I've already downloaded Pescado's anti-redundancy mod for NPCs, so I should get fewer of those. I might get rid of the EA Downtown and put in my custom one. (I haven't created any Sims yet.) I find if you delete even ONE EA hood or sub-hood, you get far fewer character files. And I played all of three EA Downtown community lots most of the time, and used only two pre-made houses, so it's not as if I used the pre-made Downtown a whole lot. And hey, if I miss Downtown, I can always reset the game again before I get too comfy!

The game now has 675 Sims, instead of 945. NONE of them are mine yet. Tells ya something, doesn't it? Anyway, off to rebuild.

The game DOES load just a little more easily now overall. Must have been all those character files and memories. Thanks for your help, Ghost.

P.S. I made MANY mistakes with Pleasantview, such as liberally deleting from the Sim Bin, but moving Sims between neighborhoods was one mistake I did NOT make.

Last edited by gazania : 1st Oct 2009 at 09:15 PM. Reason: Discovered a lot of interesting things. Not "good" interesting, unfortunately.