You'd have to move the family to the family bin, move the house to the subneighborhood, and move the family in from there. It's the act of putting the occupied lot into the bin that shreds the data.

Yes, we were talking about bins but it helps to be clear.


No - do as Peni says. As soon as you move the occupied lot to the lot bin, the game breaks all relationships with sims outside the lot and, when you place the lot again, will create duplicate sim files of all the sims your sims on the lot ever knew, even slightly and put those in your neighbourhood files - whether it's the same neighbourhood or not. In other words, it's just like deleting sims but with extra sim files (often 50-100 sim files depending on how old and popular your sim was).

In the neighborhood I'm playing (Been doing it on and off for a year and a half), I deleted some of the bin families before starting and I kind of don't want to start it over since I got pretty far. I was wondering, is there a safe way to clean up any of the excess files from some of the deleted sims?

Unfortunately, there is no way to guarantee that an occupied lot is safe. The one exception is the occupied lots which are shipped by EA.

The best option is to clean the lot as well as you can ("the Hard Way" from Game_Help:Moving_Sims^wiki), then install the lot into a test neighborhood, open the test neighborhood in SimPE to see whether you can find any signs of partial sims (such as unassigned SWAFs), run the HoodChecker to see whether it can find any problems, and test play the game until you have reused all of the sim instances that existed in the original neighborhood (the one that contained the occupied lot). If you can't find anything odd in SimPE, the HoodChecker doesn't find anything, and you don't find any signs of corruption during your test game play, then you might have some reason to believe that the lot is safe. (Note that I didn't suggest that the lot is actually safe.)

This is why we discourage people from sharing occupied lots.

No. That will corrupt your neighborhood twice: once when you move the family into the occupied lots bin, and once when you move the family out of the occupied lots bin.

As far as I know, there is no way to be sure that you have cleaned up everything. That said...

I've been told that the Batbox from MATY has an option to clean up incorrectly deleted sims, although I have never tried it and know nothing more about it.

You can also try the HoodChecker "Remove" option, and opening the neighborhood in SimPE and removing anything which is associated with a non-existent Sim Description instance number.

Pescado said for a long time that you couldn't completely clean up the mess once it was created. The reason for him adding the delete sim option to the batbox was so that you could delete sims, leaving stump files tidied up (i.e. with no loose ends to attach elsewhere) and even then you have to complete the job in SimPE. The idea was to keep it contained BEFORE you went about deleting the sim. AFAIK, anyway, there's no way to clean up a deleted sim that wasn't deleted2.

I think even with that delete option, it's better to just use the batbox rather than the trash can. I don't know about the smoker metaphor though... last March, my grandma died from lung cancer, and she never smoked in her life.

I think it's better to never delete a sim-ever.

True - I just live with the sims I create. They make for some nice stories. Even the ones that don't look completely picture perfect can be real sweethearts. Nervous Subject's wife had a baby, and he's very nice and almost completely unlike his daddy - except for his shyness and possibly activity(though I will hafta check him out. I may have Daddy Nervous encourage River to be more serious and active, but I want River to be neat and not fart all over the place and pee in the shower.

You can delete the families in each of the Neighborhoods, but remember: You will not be able to get it back, but you can get them back when you create a new neighborhood.

No, please do not delete the families in each of the neighbourhoods unless you want to mess up your hoods. It doesn't matter if sims have been played or not, deleting them from the bin shreds their files.

Technically true, but it's obvious there are things about how the game works that you don't understand. Did you read what others have said in this thread?

If you're as new to the game as your MTS join date and post count suggest, you might want to do a lot more reading about what's safe and what's not safe to do in the game before making any more declarative statements that directly contradict what the more experienced players have learned the hard way over the years. This would be an excellent place to start: http://simswiki.info/wiki.php?title...Hood_Corruption

Totally. If you want to start out with hoods without the family bin families, download some clean templates from Tarlia's journal - just google 'oh my god it's full of sims'.

Tarlia's clean templates have all of the bin families. I use them, and I still have all of the Ottomas, Newson, Traveller etc families. Her templates are clean not empty. She did get rid of some of the older ancestors and some townies in certain neighborhoods, but she did not completely wipe out the bin families.

;Deleting from the bin does not cause corruption, this is a myth. Their character file is stubbed.

Yes, but this wasn't known 11 years ago.