More Awesome Than You!

This is just a tombstone related question regarding this little process on getting them back.

I wish to bring my missing tombstones back, but I'm a little confused over the particular sentence highlighted in red. I am aware that the "death" will play out in the same way as an old age death, but does this also mean that when I respawn the tombstones, that all those sims will have the old-age ghost? I ask this because I rather like Olive Specter's graveyard having many different types of ghosts.

You can set the death-type of a tombstone by shift-clicking on it. All tombstones moved to a community lot via "move to community lot" become "Starvation" ghosts anyway.

Just while we're on the subject of dead sims, what's the currently approved way of moving tombstones?

Okay, that's really handy to know.

Although I have another problem which I'll deal with here. For some reason, in Desiderata Valley the Picaso's toddler, Katie, has mysteriously de-aged into a baby for some reason. She still looks like a toddler, but I can't select her (without exploitation), and is definitely set to the baby age for some reason. I'm getting no error logs with that, but every time someone tries to interact with her I get an error. I'm not sure how I'm going to restore her to toddler stage.

All of the ways of moving a tombstone WORK, but the absolute SAFEST is to move it by a sim's inventory to an owned community lot. You can't move it this way to an unowned lot because it won't save the results, so the game will respawn the tombstone and lose the death type.

You'll probably have to correct that by Frobnicating, in SimPE, or use the agesimscheat.

AHA!!  So that's the deal.  Better to own your cemetery then, rather than leave it as an unowned comm. lot.  I think I have found Snowbawl a new home.

By any chance, did you clone and delete her with MoveObjects on around the time she toddlered up?

I read about some trick some people were using to create mentally-retarded sims: when a toddler ages up, pause the game before you get the message about successful age-up, turn MoveObjects on, select the aged-up sim, shift-move to make a copy, then delete the original. The result is an child-sized sim that behaves like a toddler. I haven't tried this, because I bet it hoses things pretty badly, but if you did something similar, maybe by accident, you could have wound up with a toddler that only has baby code.

Hm. I don't think I've done anything like that. When I load the lot, the family portrait still has her in a toddler pose. I may have accidently tinkered with something, although some strange crap has gone on in this hood before. One time, John Mole proposed to and moved in Sharon Wirth, and this borked up the entire hood. It removed everyone's wants and fears, and all kinds of crazy crap. Luckily I had a backup, but there's something that's not quite right with this hood (unsurprisingly). I'll try using agesims, otherwise I'll use SimPE.

Looks like my goth sims are going to have to buy the cemetary then...

This has happened to me once or twice. Generally, setting the child to toddler stage in SimPE will fix it. Aging cheat did not work for me, as any attempt to do a birthday or aging animation ended in errors.

What happens if my sim gives the gift of a tombstone to the owner of the cemetary? When I go to play the owner of the cemetary, will the tombstone be safe?

I was wondering that too. If you visit someone else's cemetery, then when you leave, the tombstone isn't saved. You could have one cemetery that each sim buys as needed to place their tombstone, that seems a little long-winded. Giving gifts sounds the most practical, if it works.

I was thinking, if there's a tombstone on the lot, I could have the sim invite the owner of the cemetery over, make her selectable, and have her put the tombstone in her inventory.  Make her unselectable again and she would walk off with the tombstone in her inventory.  Then when I played the cemetery owner again, she could just plunk the stone down in the cemetery.  Giving the stone as a gift might do the same thing though without all those extra steps and sounds more lulzy.  "I got something for you.  It's grandma."

"That's.... just... what I.. wanted?"

Of course, don't forget to pay for their burial. Grandma deserves to be buried with pride, not in a coffee tin.

Make-Selectable works. However, DON'T give the tombstone as a gift. This WILL fuck up your game.

You do realize that now I have to make a Cemetary Man sim for my game.

"Yeah?"

*Jelenedra pontificates who would make a good caretaker for her MATY hood

Maybe Hook, he did mention that he likes the dead girls.

Ways back in Urban Paradise, I had the all-knowing mime, avatar of the Oversoul, deal with all death matters.

Out of curisoity, is there a way to view the death type or variable for it in SimPE or something? I'm very funny about having the ghosts exactly as they were, and it would save the trouble of having to wait for the ghosts to come out to play so I can check their colour.

Plus it's virtually impossible to tell starvation and old age ghosts apart, ugh.

Ah, well.  So much for the gift idea.

Oh crap, my game is headed for meltdown. It seems to be randomly deleting files completely.

I moved my current Pleasantview and Strangetown folders out to some safe remote location and copied some fresh new ones in so I could toy with it. I added a downtown, but several lots are missing (appearing as empty lots, still with the right names but with nothing on them) and lots from my actual used PV downtown. Looking in the D001 template folder, several lot files are missing! I assume these lots obviously couldn't be copied into test PV, as they no longer exist.

Anyway, later on I moved my neighborhoods back, and they wouldn't load. I was forced to restart my computer with Strangetown. I spliced in some fully up to date SimPE backups and they loaded fine. But it appears that some of the sims are missing. Kristen Singles, Chloe Singles and Ajay Loner in particular. Their files are completely missing, and not a trace of them appears to exist within the game. I looked at some other files, and it appears one of the lot files has been deleted (I have yet to see which one). The neighborhood took longer than usual to load, as though it was deleting files. What on earth is going on? I've backed up Plesantview, which has all the files there, and I'm going to try it and see what happens.

EDIT: PV and Sim State University are fine. But all of the buildings and sims in Downtown and Bluewater Village are completely gone save for two buildings downtown, one of which appeared to be graphically corrupted. The vacation destinations seem ok, except that the seemingly deleted sims no longer own their vacation homes. I despair... I'm afraid to touch any of my other hoods now.

(http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/bfbvfs.jpg)

Indeed.  :'(

Luckily I have a pre-FreeTime backup of those hoods on a DVD.  :D

What would cause the template to start eating itself though?

/Jelenedra is a sad panda that no one got her Cemetary Man reference.

Come on, people! Rupert Everret being creepy! It's like watching Evil Dead with taller version of Bruce Campbell!

I noticed after moving a household (whose gravestones I had packed in inventory) all of the old-age ghosts are now starvation ghosts. Is this the same type of phenomenon or something I should be worried about?

Exactly how does this bork the game--fireball bad or may cause minor annoyances bad?

Your post only made me think of two things:

(1) The Tall Man (in which case, you should have said "Boy!" instead of "Yeah!"
(2) "I love to dance with cemetery girls/The moon comes out, the earth unfurls..."
(in which case, "Yeah!" is entirely appropriate.)

Of the two, the Tall Man would probably be a more interesting thing to sim, but only if you modded the security bot to look like a silver ball.

Bah! If people had gotten the Cemetary Man reference, they would've gotten the, "yeah."

Rupert Everett's character has a Egor like sidekick that only says, "Yeah?" It's creepy after awhile.

actually, i was going to ask you to offer him up if you made one. but i got here late today.  :P i saw cemetary man with an ex and loved it.

Damn, I was looking forward to that. What about taking a sim to an owned community lot that is not owned by his family and placing gravestones there? Will their ghosts still be wrong?

Community lots do not save when visited by someone other than the owner, but you can summon/make-selectable to collect tombstones.

D'oh! Of course you can.  ::) I'm glad I thought of it.

Risking necromancy-related punishment (though regarding the subject it seems approriate  :D ) to ask - is this indeed the safest method of moving tombstones? I've used the search function regarding moving tombstones and have noted many confusing if at times paradoxical posts on whether moving tombstones or how to do so can be a VBT. Has the FOJ's opinion changed any?

The SAFEST way to move a tombstone is to transfer it via the Inventory. This preserves all of its death-related data. It is acceptable to move a tombstone via the "move to community lot" and "move home" features, but doing this results in the loss of the death type. This data can be restored by shift-clicking, but only if you remember what it is. NEVER move a tombstone by giving it with the "Gift" action. This will fuck up your game.