Threee Lakes Hotel ate my sims?

[empires]

Four days ago I sent a family of 3 sims to the most expensive hotel at Three Lakes for a well needed vacation with 2 friends who happend to be my self sim and his wife. Everything was fine but then I had to go somewere so I saved and quit. Today I wen't back to play the family and I get build and buy mode as if no ones there.  The neighberhood thinks there there and there house directed me there also. But the game thinks the hotel is empty once its loded.  Is there anyway I can save this family and there guests? I have all expansions except AL and All SP except Ikea. The only hack I have is to make ponds reflective.

[gali]

Yes, you can, but you will lose all the redecorations you made in this island.

Enter the game, and from the main hood view - click on the Vacation sign at the upper line. You will get the pictures of the three islands.

Highlight the certain island (in this case -  Three Lakes). In the right side of it you will see a trashcan symbol. Click on it, and this island will be deleted.

You will find your sims in their house (and the guests - in their lot).

Now you can create again the vacation island, but you will get the original one.

[witch]

@empires: Please do not take Gali's advice and delete your vacation neighbourhood. You will most likely break something beyond repair. Please wait till someone who knows what they are talking about comes along.

[gali]

*wait till someone who knows what they are talking about*

Thanks for the "compliment" - I presume that you know what are you talking about.

It was tested successfully by other players. But...may be I really don't know what I am talking about, as the big know-it-all witch says - do it on your own risk.

[witch]

Well Gali, if the sims are somewhere in the vacation hood, what do you think might happen if it were deleted? I don't know, I've never been stupid enough to try such a stunt.

I am not claiming I know the answer, but I'm 99% sure the answer does not lie in deletion.

[gali]

[witch]

You're quoting the BBS on MATY!?!

[gali]

So what? Is it forbidden? - Trenues (Trenues2)  from the Sporum advice almost non-stop in the BBS. She gives great advices, and I would be proud to quote her here.

[witch]

It was tested successfully by other players. But...may be I really don't know what I am talking about, as the big know-it-all witch says - do it on your own risk.

ONE person - on the BBS - said it worked. Not "other players". Who knows what else they did. Have you tried it yourself? Seriously, do it at your own risk. Make sure you backup first.

So what? Is it forbidden? - Trenues (Trenues2)  from the Sporum advice almost non-stop in the BBS. She gives great advices, and I would be proud to quote her here.

This person is your "experts"? Why not try leaving it for the MATY experts who have been doing this for years now, instead of bringing second-hand unverified information here?

[empires]

Would there be a way to save them in simPE? That program seems to do almost anything you might need it to do.

[witch]

Dunno. I don't tend to have problems like this. You could look at the lot debugger, there are lots of options on that. Or you could search to see if someone before has had a similar problem or you could make a backup first and then try Gali's suggestion. Up to you.

[TrueLou]

I had the same thing but luckily I had a toddler back at the house so it let me re-enter and my sims came home a few seconds later. If this happened to me in the scenario you've detailed, I know what I would try, it's up to you whether you would want to give it a go, it would mean losing the vacation lot that they were at and also losing their home, but I don't think there's a way around that. I use Insimenator, but you can use any summoning method, if you prefer to play without hacks you can use boolprop and spawn the Tombstone of L and D and it would work the same way, but just take longer.

If you don't have 'testing cheats' auto-on then before you enter a household at your neighboorhood screen open the cheat console and type 'boolprop testingcheatsenabled true' and enter. Enter another residential lot in the same hood (it needs to have at least one more slot for a new household member). Once in, shift and click on any household member and look for the pie menu entry 'spawn', click on that and then from the next menu choose 'Tombstone of L & D'. It will appear next to the sim and be in the guise of a gravestone. Click on the gravestone and choose 'Add neighbor to family...' this will then bring up a menu of ALL sims in the corresponding hood, NPC's, townies and playables. Click MORE and keep clicking MORE until you see the name of an adult member of the lost house. Beware, that it only lists by first name so hopefully the names of your sims are not a common name used by other NPC's and townies. When you see one of their names click on it and that member will be added to the household. Once you've done that you can just move them out, set them up on their own lot and then repeat the process for the rest of the lost household in the new lot.

I use the Insimenator, which would make it easier as the Summoner that is part of that hack splits the family into family name so you can go direct to the missing person/s without having to flick through 10 billion pages of pie menu, I'm not sure if Inge's telporter shrub would do the same as I've never used it, maybe someone else would know the answer to that.

This is only my take on this, if anyone else has a quicker, easier, better way of retriving lost sims I would love to know in case it ever happens to me again. Whatever you decide to do I hope you get your family back, it's most annoying when you lose sims through stupid glitches like this. Good luck !

[Kyna]

I vaguely recall reading similar problems when BV was new, so you could try using the search option and see what the advice was 12 months ago.

You could also try using the magic wand, found in the hacks directory.  From its RTFM:

FEATURES:
It's magic, you wave it around and either it unbreaks your unplayable lot because your sims have all gone missing, or it depreciates everything to minimum normal value, so you don't need a meditation dummy. It's a magic wand.

[Zazazu]

As an alternative to TrueLou's advice, you can get the teleporter cat from Simlogical. It's dead useful. Go to a playable family, buy and click on the cat. Choose the last name of the family and summon each member who is missing. After you have everyone there, click on the cat and choose to add them to the family. You can then move them out on their own.

As for the vacation lot, I'm honestly not sure. You could try getting the magicwand from the hack directory here (www.moreawesomethanyou.com/ffs/YOUR LATEST EP INITIALS/hacks). Enter the lot in build mode, choose the "wand box" from misc/misc, place it and delete it. Then retry. I'd just bulldoze it. Ugly-ass lots, the lot of 'em.

[spaceface]

You could also try moving the family back into the Sim Bin, in Neighborhood view. I had to do that recently, after I installed AL while a family were on vacation. I could play them at their vacation home, but when the vacation ended their home lot simply would not load. I moved them into the Sim Bin and then straight back into their house. I had to refurnish the house but that's not so bad in the long run.

[empires]

I had the same thing but luckily I had a toddler back at the house so it let me re-enter and my sims came home a few seconds later. If this happened to me in the scenario you've detailed, I know what I would try, it's up to you whether you would want to give it a go, it would mean losing the vacation lot that they were at and also losing their home, but I don't think there's a way around that. I use Insimenator, but you can use any summoning method, if you prefer to play without hacks you can use boolprop and spawn the Tombstone of L and D and it would work the same way, but just take longer.

If you don't have 'testing cheats' auto-on then before you enter a household at your neighboorhood screen open the cheat console and type 'boolprop testingcheatsenabled true' and enter. Enter another residential lot in the same hood (it needs to have at least one more slot for a new household member). Once in, shift and click on any household member and look for the pie menu entry 'spawn', click on that and then from the next menu choose 'Tombstone of L & D'. It will appear next to the sim and be in the guise of a gravestone. Click on the gravestone and choose 'Add neighbor to family...' this will then bring up a menu of ALL sims in the corresponding hood, NPC's, townies and playables. Click MORE and keep clicking MORE until you see the name of an adult member of the lost house. Beware, that it only lists by first name so hopefully the names of your sims are not a common name used by other NPC's and townies. When you see one of their names click on it and that member will be added to the household. Once you've done that you can just move them out, set them up on their own lot and then repeat the process for the rest of the lost household in the new lot.

I use the Insimenator, which would make it easier as the Summoner that is part of that hack splits the family into family name so you can go direct to the missing person/s without having to flick through 10 billion pages of pie menu, I'm not sure if Inge's telporter shrub would do the same as I've never used it, maybe someone else would know the answer to that.

This is only my take on this, if anyone else has a quicker, easier, better way of retriving lost sims I would love to know in case it ever happens to me again. Whatever you decide to do I hope you get your family back, it's most annoying when you lose sims through stupid glitches like this. Good luck !

Do you think that if I went to my self sims house it would force every one back. I only sent me and my wife as guests and I have 2 kids at the house. But Im not sure that it would save the host family.

[trlaavh]

I had this happen to me, only it was when a teen snuck (Is it snuck? What IS the past tense of Sneak? Sneaked sounds stupid...) out with another teen. It was funny, because the teen she snuck out with was Zach Addy from the TV Show Bones. If anybody watches that show, they'll get why that's funny. Caniblistic Gormagon Snuck out with a girl and she never came back. The whole "Three lakes hotel ATE my sims" thing is what brought me here in the first place. So I used the lot debugger to debug all off-lot sims. It worked, she showed up burried in my basement, and once I MoveObjectson-ed her out, all worked great! However, I don't know if this will work for you.

BTW, Witch REALLY seems to hate Gali. Why? The advice seemed to make sense to me. Then again, I've blown up my game like, 4 times, forcing reinstall. Heh heh. 

[empires]

Ill try the lot debugger later tonight and report back.

[Zazazu]

BTW, Witch REALLY seems to hate Gali. Why? The advice seemed to make sense to me. Then again, I've blown up my game like, 4 times, forcing reinstall. Heh heh. 

1. There's history.
2. The advice would potentially cause problems due to the fact that it could damage the character files in question.

[witch]

BTW, Witch REALLY seems to hate Gali. Why? The advice seemed to make sense to me. Then again, I've blown up my game like, 4 times, forcing reinstall. Heh heh. 

Why didn't you address this comment to me?

And; what Zazazu said.

Plus, there's a professional pride here. MATY is known for good and accurate gameplay information. Posters like Gali and Zephyr Zodiac have very little, if any, understanding of how the game works under the hood and tend to recommend things that will stuff up files that are out of sight. I don't offer advice or information about another poster's problem unless I'm more than 90% sure I have solved the same problem or have seen a tested  answer before. I'm certainly not advocating myself as one of the experts. Enthusiastic amateur is more like.

I have just enough understanding of programming to make fairly accurate guesses as to what not to do, so I rarely get weird problems other than the normal EAxis glitches. I'm also a cautious player and don't download really experimental hacks until they've been thoroughly tested. Gali is right about one thing, kudos to all the players that do do testing, though the smart ones do it in testing hoods of course - which is what I tend to do also if unsure. Additionally I don't use hacks that change core game files, I think the risk of borkage increases quite dramatically with those hacks.

[empires]

So should I try the lot debugger or wait for someone else to answer? and thank you Witch for helping by pointing out what not to do. I can only imagine what would happen if I had this on the official site... Or even worse call tech suport and get some Indian lady saying "You need reinstall! If not work REINSTALL! If still not work buy new game then REINSTALL!"

[BastDawn]

It's a good idea to back up your neighborhoods periodically, so why not do that first?  Find your neighborhood files in My Documents and copy it to a disk or another location on your computer as a backup. 

To retrieve your sims, try the Magic Wand, which is accessed in the game only through the collections files.  I don't think the lot debugger will do anything for you as it only works in Live mode, so your next option would be Inge's teleporter cat or visiting the home lot.  Experimentation is fine if you've backed up the 'hood, as you can just replace the whole thing if you have additional problems.

[empires]

Ok so Im goign to try the magic wand now. Ill report the resaults.

[J. M. Pescado]

I don't think the magic wand covers this particular case, but I will look into it. Never had this actually happen post-OFB, though.

[trlaavh]

BTW, Witch REALLY seems to hate Gali. Why? The advice seemed to make sense to me. Then again, I've blown up my game like, 4 times, forcing reinstall. Heh heh. 

Why didn't you address this comment to me?

And; what Zazazu said.

Plus, there's a professional pride here. MATY is known for good and accurate gameplay information. Posters like Gali and Zephyr Zodiac have very little, if any, understanding of how the game works under the hood and tend to recommend things that will stuff up files that are out of sight. I don't offer advice or information about another poster's problem unless I'm more than 90% sure I have solved the same problem or have seen a tested  answer before. I'm certainly not advocating myself as one of the experts. Enthusiastic amateur is more like.

I have just enough understanding of programming to make fairly accurate guesses as to what not to do, so I rarely get weird problems other than the normal EAxis glitches. I'm also a cautious player and don't download really experimental hacks until they've been thoroughly tested. Gali is right about one thing, kudos to all the players that do do testing, though the smart ones do it in testing hoods of course - which is what I tend to do also if unsure. Additionally I don't use hacks that change core game files, I think the risk of borkage increases quite dramatically with those hacks.

I didn't address it to you so that it was left open for anyone to answer, including you. I will shut up now, as I don't really want to get into this. I know I'm non-awesome. I love hacks, and like I said before, I have BFBVFS-ed my game about 4 times.