More Awesome Than You!

OK, I just did something incredibly fucking dumb to my game. I finally got around to installing Apartment Life a couple of weeks ago and was poking around in Belladonna Cove when I thought to add a vacation destination. After doing so, I realised they weren't clean templates and I had all the default fugly EA NPCs, so I entered "delete all characters"... I had never used it before, had forgotten reading that it was a VBT, and thought that would only affect the sub hood I was in, not the base hood. To my great dismay, I discovered my mistake. I started searching here for advice. Oooops.

So...how badly did I screw things up? Needless to say, I don't have a backup. (When I screw things up, I do a good job.) Can I package some of the houses I built/altered, or would it be safer not to? Should I just delete the whole folder? Most of the references I can find concerning using this command are from 2005 or '06, and I'm not sure the info is still accurate or complete.

Start new 'hood.  This one's toasted.

As to your houses, I think you can rescue them, if you can be sure they are clean.  If they had sims living in them, you will want to use cleaninstaller to make sure there is no residual rubbish in them.

Do you not have clean backups of your houses in the housing bin?  My TS2 game never has a house in play that does not also have a clean copy somewhere safe.

You mean...be organised enough to make package files before moving characters in? Me? Of course not. *sigh*
I moved the few lot files out before deleting the folder. (Not sure where they should go.) Now I just have to find the correct clean templates before I reload my game. C'est la vie simulée.

Always backup your game files! This can be simply copying your downloads and used neighborhoods to your desktop, external hard drive. Or, if you want the extra security of a solid-state drive, do what I do and use a flash-drive to store your backed up sims files.

I want to emphasize that a flash drive is probably the safest way to store valuable data, because disks break easily, while a solid state drive is basically a very durable piece of RAM.

But whatever you do, simply keep a backup somewhere, because you will have BFBVFS eventually, and keeping a backup is the last defense we have against it.

Since you're talking about an EAxis neighborhood, if you want it again you can retrieve it from the Program Files folder.

The directory to copy is Program Files\The Sims 2 Apartment Life\TSData\res\UserData\Neighborhoods\E001. Copy that to your Neighborhoods folder.

Won't it regenerate anyway, even if I do nothing, the next time I load the game? I quite like some of the families, but not enough to put up with all of them, and I realise it's all-or-none.

Also, given my original post, I suppose my ineptitude and general nitwittedness is already obvious, so I may as well ask. I think I have the clean templates process semi-sorted, but I would be very grateful if someone would be willing to walk me through the BV deletion/install step-by-step. After 27 pages in the Empty and Cleaned-up Templates thread alone, and dozens more in other, related ones, I am more confused now than when I started. The other EPs seem much more straightforward.

No, it won't.  Once you do something to a hood in TS2, it's permanent unless you delete the modified hood and replace it with a clean copy of the original.

Who cares?  The OP was deleting all the sims anyway, and clearly wanted a clean 'hood.  A custom hood should be fine.  Build your own.  It's better.  Why suffer the EAxis limitations?

I mainly wanted a clean vacation hood. I screwed up. However, I now have a lovely clean main hood as well and no angst, other than trying to sort out which one of several different and contradictory methods for generating vacation townies outlined on this site is the most viable.

The EAxis neighbourhood folders will regenerate if you remove ALL the neighbourhoods folders from the neighbourhoods folder:

My Documents\EA Games\The Sims 2\Neighbourhoods

But it will only do this if that folder is empty on start up.  An easy way to do it is just take the other neighbourhoods folders out temporarily.  You can put back any custom hoods once you're done.