My clean custom neighborhood (which has played perfectly until now) has just blown my mind by having an apparently random fit of borkage. My tale of woe:
Last night I played TS2. All's well. Today I loaded up the same hood and the same lot as I played last night. Five sims normally live on this lot, but when I entered, only one of them was present, and only his icon was displayed on the left side panel. Alright, I have had sims vanish off of lots in past (slightly borked) hoods - never four at once, but I was still not panicking at this point - and in those cases I was able to just summon them back to the lot and everything went on as normal. So I go to my trusty teleporter to bring the family back, and there is no one to summon. Or to clarify, the only sims available for summoning were NPCs. Playables and townies had... vanished.
I quit the game without saving, opened up my Character folder and found it empty. Not even one file for the one sim I saw on the lot. Odd. Fortunately, I have a recent backup. I replaced the Character folder with the backup, and all the character files appeared to be intact, with a total of 65 files. I tried loading the game again - same lot. Family was all there on the loading screen (but then they had been the first time, too). But once the lot loaded, it was the same deal as before - only one sim calmly sitting by himself. I opened up the Character folder without leaving the game, but all of the files were still there this time. Just, apparently, not loading.
I tried to summon the family back again. This time, the available sims to summon were NPCs, townies, and most playables. The only playables not on the list were the four who were missing from the lot. I boggled and decided to check my other lots...
...And things got even weirder. On every other lot in my hood, all the residents were present. However, in one lot they were all standing out by the mailbox, with their normally shiny aspiration meters suddenly bottomed out in deep red, and all their want panels showed how much they wanted to get jobs (all slots on every sim showed a different job they wanted to get). On another lot they were all still going about their activities, same as they had been when I last played them, but they too were all in aspiration failure, plus they were all starving and about to pass out from exhaustion. I absolutely did not leave them that way. Also, two of the sims on that lot were in completely different outfits - outfits that they do not even own.
(
Edit to add: it has crossed my mind that the resets/asp failure on the other lots could be due to the fact that I replaced all the character files with copies. If so, I'm not concerned. Can anyone confirm whether this is the case?)
I quit without saving. My first concern was for the missing sims, so I went into SimPE to look at my list of characters, and all four of the vanished sims were still available in there. I really don't know much about SimPE and I only use it for very basic stuff, so I didn't mess around with them at all. I just wanted to know if the files were still present and intact, and it seems they are.
My game is all patched, I have not downloaded anything weird (or anything at all) recently, and this is a totally clean neighborhood with no history of borkage at all. It has been my dream hood until now, and somehow overnight, it's gone banoodles.
I'm unsure of what to do next, and I'd really like some advice, please. BFBVFS? Abandon ship?
Or is there anything to be done/attempted that I don't know about yet?
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