$Subject: Teenager Missing

[IridescentKerry]

I clicked on a house I hadn't played for a while, the family in it are a mom, dad and 2 daughters(1 teen, 1 child). The eldest daughter is on the famliy picture on the info pop-up, but when I click for more info her thumbnail is missing. I entered the house, and she's missing. She's no longer in the family tree, all the photo's her mom took of her are still on the wall, but that's it.

I looked in the memories of her mom and dad and all the memories they have of her are 'Had $Subject' or 'Taught $Subject to study', etc and the picture of her is blank in these memories. I promptly left the house, without saving.

I've had this bug before with babies, but a baby is just a baby. She was my favourite teenager sim  I had a whole story around her, ( I know it's sad!).

I don't know whether this is relevant, but on the day I realised she'd gone missing as I started my computer, the computer said it needed to check the system (I've got XP) and it sorted out some files it said were corrupted.

I would like her back, but if not could someone please explain why this happens. It's so weird!

[Brynne]

Have you looked at her character file in simpe?

[IridescentKerry]

I haven't got SimPe. I download hacks, etc, but I'm a bit intimidated by SimPe. And I won't touch Boolprop cheatsenabeld with a barge pole, that thing seems to be the only solution over at the BBS!

[Motoki]

Testingcheatsenabled isn't so bad. I feel like half the BBS demonizes it and the other half lives off of it. :p

SimPE isn't too bad either. Thing is, sometimes things get really messed up in this game, even without any custom content whatsoever in the mix, and you need to take drastic measures to fix things.

[Brynne]

I got over my fear of simpe long ago by making frequent backups (copying the neighborhood folder, not the simpe backup feature), so if something does go even more horribly wrong than it was originally, I can always restore it back to the original problem . Lesser of two evils. Simpe has helped me rescue many of my sims from oblivion, though, so it's worth trying out.

[Motoki]

Yep backups are important too. Even if you don't use SimPE, you can just copy your neighborhood directory. I'd say it's probably a good idea to make one at least once a week if you play a lot otherwise if something goes wrong you could lose months of playing time.

[Brynne]

Gawd, the way I play, if I lose a day, I've lost a generation of sims.

[FinkTheFuzzy]

For what it's worth, I've had the same thing happen to one of my sims. She's been missing since about March.
She isn't in the family tree and she's $Subject in all memories relating to her.

I've checked her with two versions of SimPE. The most recent one shows she's unlinked, while the previous
shows her as a teen (as I created her) and as an adult, but not as an elder (the age at which she disappeared.)
Her husband is still married to her, but their grandkids aren't related to him. However, they are related to
all of their aunts, uncles, and cousins, half-relation and full.

[Motoki]

How were their relationships to the rest of the family? I wonder if this bug is something to do with running away.

[Brynne]

I had this happen to the wife of one of my most-played characters. She was also listed as "$Subject" in all her families memories. She was an adult, named Jennie. I had been playing another lot for a while. I decided to teleport her over with the shrub, but she was not listed in her family. I found her in the "default" family, but when I teleported her in, she just laid (lay? lied?) on the ground like a baby and no one could interact with her. I tried replacing her character file with an older one, to no avail. I finally gave up on trying to fix her because I was new to simpe (this was last year when I first started playing Sims 2), and recreated her. Luckily I had recently cloned her and her clone was still a character in the neighborhood, with a different name, outfit, hairstyle, family ties, etc. So I took that character and renamed her, put her in the Bayfield family tree, and she's now just like the original. Mind you, the clone family had just been created and had not met anyone in the neighborhood, so that wasn't a concern, but I had to break her ties with her clone hubby and child (who were her only family ties) , then disable those character files. Then I had to edit all her memories, which was not a big deal. The family had not been played so there were no memories other than the standard ones you get when creating a family. What was a pain was recreating all her memories, then replacing all the family and friends' "$subject" memories with the new character. Took forever! Not the best way to go about it, I know that now that I'm a little more familiar with simpe, but at the time I was very new to the program.  I still have no idea what caused her character to disappear completely. Since then  I've had a few weird instances of sims somehow going to the default family since, but they were always playable. They just had no memories or relationship panel (although they did retain their family trees), like a brand new townie, or something, and I wasn't able to move them back in the correct household in-game. Those kinds of issues I've been able to fix in simpe. It was a matter of setting the family instance to the correct family and not 0x0000 (which is default), and making sure everything matched up in the extended browser. But Jennie still has me mystified.

Interesting you should mention "running away", Motoki. Don't know if it's related, but a few of the sims that went "default" on me were teens that had  "snuck out" and never came back. Found them in the default family, again. I've had that happen a few times, and since then I avoid the "sneak out" and even "go out" wants like the plague. I think the "go out with..." wants should be done away with once you install NL, anyway, since you can actually have your sims go out on real dates, and not just disappear off the lot.

[dizzy]

The family 0 bug is most likely caused by accidently deleting that sim's character file. SimPe could have done this without you even being aware (which is why I always do my own backups outside of SimPe).

[Brynne]

Me too. I often have to replace character files from my own backups. Why would simpe do that? That's not very nice.

[IridescentKerry]

She's best friends with all her family, so never ran away. But when I was playing her boyfriends house I did get him to sneak out with her. I think that could have been the last time I saw her. If I go download SimPe can someone help me get her back with it??

[ZephyrZodiac]

It sounds like she didn't come back properly from the sneakOut!