Moving Sims between 'hoods - without the implosion

[BeastOfTraal]

Hi all,

My Strangetown is becoming rather bloated and unwieldy, due to my lack of knowledge concerning VBTs to do in the early days of the game, and I've decided to clear out the rubbish and liven things up a bit. I'm planning on rounding up all my playable characters, placing them in one household, deleting all their memories and relationships with the unfortunate Sims who'll be left behind, doing the dreaded move-occupied-lot-into-the-lots-and-houses-bin, and plonking them down into a new neighbourhood.

I'm not too sure about the process I should go through to create this though, and I was wondering if anyone could look over my plan and nudge me in the right direction, should I be heading towards a BFBVFS.

My proposal:

• Create the new neighbourhood as per Jordi and SaraMK's tutorials on clean custom 'hoods.
• Shove all my playable Sims into one lot, including any townies that have committed relationships with my Sims.
• Use the Lot Debugger to delete gossip and nuke the Met Sim/Pet memories.
• Clear out any remaining crap in SimPE - memories and relationships.
• Move the lot to the Lots and Houses Bin, and then place them in New Strangetown.

I don't know how well this plan would work though - I've never tried anything like this before in SimPE. (But that's what backups are for, right?) What do you Awesome Ones think? Good or bad idea?

Also, some perhaps silly questions that I haven't found an answer to:

• I've couple of romance Sims in this neighbourhood who have, between them, wined, dined and slept with at least twenty Sims, and clearing out all their relationships with woohooed townies, without invalidating any memories or what-have-you, seems a tad scary to me. Could I instead just wipe all their memories, including memories of kids and marriage, and blame it on travel-induced amnesia? Or would mess up the character's data in some way?
• Deleting memories doesn't sound too bad, but how do I actually go about the whole process of deleting relationships?
• Would I have to delete anything else, like SWAFs?

Thank you for helping an overly ambitious n00bie out. 

[jolrei]

Sounds risky to me.  I know the situation you're in - need new neighbourhood but like my current Sims (some of them at least).  I think a better method would be as follows:

Clone the sims you want to keep using SimPE's simsurgery feature.  This will copy the physical aspects of your sims into a blank sim template.  Save your cloned sims (will automatically save in your savedsims folder).

Once you have cloned the sims you want to keep, make note of their skill levels, personality traits (i.e. neatness, outgoing, nice, etc.) so you can re-enter them in the new neighbourhood.

Go into Bodyshop.  Your saved sims should show up on the clone a sim menu.  Re-clone these sims in bodyshop to get a clean version (SimPE leaves some garbage attached which makes them pretty strange in game).  Edit as you wish in bodyshop and save your new clone.
Delete SimPE version of clone (keep bodyshop clone).  There are other threads that talk about cloning sims in SimPE and bodyshop.

At this point, you have nice blank sims.  Enter the game as normal and go to CAS.  Pull up your cloned sims and give them names, personalities, etc.  You may have to do each one individually if they are not going to be related.

For additional fine tuning of the sims personalities and skills you can either do that in SimPE, editing your new sims in your new neighbourhood, or in game using debug mode (click on the personality points and skills points sliders to adjust as necessary).  If you want them to have relationships (i.e. friendships, etc.) with other sims in the neighbourhood, you can edit those in SimPE.  Provided you noted the personality and skills points reasonably accurately, your sims should behave the same way they did in your old neighbourhood.

I think this might be easier overall than deleting memories, relationships, etc. by hand in SimPE using your old neighbourhood's sims directly.  It does take some time, but is less risky in the sense of missing baggage attached to sims that could lead to a meltdown of your new neighbourhood.

Addition:  Info on cloning sims can be found at: http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/smf/index.php/topic,8407.0.html

[BeastOfTraal]

I've tried that method on the occasional Sim for story purposes; its a very useful way of going about things, but then trying to add - manually - their old memories into the new Sims sounds painfully time-consuming. (Of course, deleting memories and relationships for a whole neighbourhood and getting it right first time sounds painfully time-consuming as well - but I'd only have to do it the once.)

I don't think there's a magic tool out there that means I can copy memories from one Sim to the next, so I'll browse some tutorials, backup, and then stagger around in SimPE. If I screw up, I'll use your method to clone the Sims. Thanks for your help Jolrei.

Edited for clarification.

[Sleepycat]

the last time I moved sims to a different hood,

1, I packaged the lot with all the sims to a file
2, made a list of every sim that was on the lot
3, installed the lot with clean installer, unchecking all the sims that weren't on the lot
4, entered the game and placed the lot in the hood I wanted it in
5, exited the game
6, opened simpe and cleaned up their memories - got rid of all 'unknowns' and stuff

there was a plugin that made it easier and faster but I think it got integrated into simpe, it's been a while since I've bothered to move sims like this so I've lost track.

[Gwill]

I've moved an occupied lot pretty much the way Sleepycat describes, but it's a lot of work.
Traces of other sims can be hiding in the weirdest places among memories.  It's not enough to just delete "met $subject" and best friend memories, you also have to watch out for things like "learned to study" which contains a link to the person who helped them, the lighning memory of being shocked by an amoc servo links you to them, and there are other little things I can't remember.

[gethane]

Against all advice, I just had to have my favorite sim in the neighborhood I was playing. And a clone just wasn't good enough. I typed it up for self reference at the time, should I ever want to do it again. I've been playing them in the new hood for several sim weeks over the last 6 real life months and nothing has sploded yet. (I play it in time sync and there's about 15 houses I have to get around)

[BeastOfTraal]

Sleepycat - that sounds like a lot less work, even if I will end up with a lot size roughly equivalent to Kilimanjaro. I'll give that a go and clean up using Gwill's advice. Thanks for telling me that; I wouldn't have considered the little cracks memories can hide in. I doubt anyone will have memories of studying from townies, but I will check.

That was very useful gethane - I didn't know about townie additions when you install a lot. I'll remember that.

My worries are the two whores romance Sims, whose conquests will probably make up the bulk of the surplus townies, but I'll just pretend they lost their memories in the trauma of moving. My popularity Servo, Marvin, with two zillion best friends won't mind losing them all - it was very uncharacteristic of him to be buddies with everyone anyway, and he'll be glad to forget them. He's too depressed.

[Marhis]

My popularity Servo, Marvin, with two zillion best friends won't mind losing them all - it was very uncharacteristic of him to be buddies with everyone anyway, and he'll be glad to forget them. He's too depressed.

That's pretty good: I keep my Marvin servo always in red mood 

[Gwill]

Hey, hey, hey!  Marvin should obviously be a knowlege sim!