Hi all!

So, long story short, due to a windows update and some oddities that happened afterwards, my Riverblossom Hills got partially overwritten. Unfortunately, I don't have a backup of it that contains several of the lots I built in the last week.

I've looked at the Lots folder in SimPE and the .package files for the lots I created exist - they just got unliked (I presume) and are not readable by the game.

I've tried moving the lots to the Lot Catalog and giving each lot their respective cx_00000xxx.package name according to available numbers, but the game still didn't see the lots (except one random one I made 2 years ago and left in there for testing purposes).

I've also tried opening the package in simPE, saving it again under a different name, making it a .sims2pack file and installing it but the game still didn't recognize the lots.

I can see most data in SimPE - I'll attach a screenshot of which data I have exactly. As far as I can see, I'm missing lot type and lot description?

Is there a way to 'rebuild' this into a new file in SimPE so I don't have to manually rebuild all these lots?
I haven't really used SimPE for anything similar to this and I wasn't able to find much info online either, so any help would mean a lot to me.

Thanks!

It doesn't seem to be missing any information from what I can see. What happens if you just put it into the Lots folder of another neighborhood?

It just simply doesn't show up

Are you placing it in the LotCatalog folder? I don't think placing it in the Lots folder for a neighborhood (the cx_0000xxxx file) is going to work.

I can't see anything that's spesifically missing from your file. Looks like any other lot file. The "UNK:..." resources are present in files I have that I know are working, so they're supposed to be that way.

"Lot Definition" has the lot name. "Text Lists" has the lot name plus a description if there is one.
(Can't find resources named "Lot type" or "Lot description" so I don't think those are a thing in lot files, unless they only follow spesific types of lots).
Your file doesn't have the "Text lists" resource, but lot files from a neighborhood don't have this - only lots placed into the Lot Catalog via the game (I think? None of the ones I have, includig maxis lots, had them). There are some small differences between the types of lot files (but it shouldn't matter too much).

Have you clicked on those particular resources in SimPE to check if there's any text?

Lots have a tendency to not be recognizable in the catalog, so you likely have to look a bit closer. I've had times where I went through the catalog several times without finding the lot, then clicked anything that sort of looked like it, and it turned out the lot was showing from a different angle or just looked different for other reasons.

You can temporarily move out the lots from the LotCatalog folder (NOT from the neighborhood Lots folders, as at least some of those are in use!!!) to make it easier to search through the catalog.

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Windows updates can on occasion screw up a few things, especially if something goes wrong and OneDrive or any other forms of autobackup systems are left to do their thing. If there's suddenly not enough space left for the backup files (could be a limited space set up for the backup), or it for whatever reason resets to a previous version of folders/files, you could end up losing files. Might want to check out if this could be a potential issue for what happened.
(Also why it's a good idea to backup files elsewhere, too - external harddrive or similar).

Hi!

Yes I was placing it in the Lot Catalog folder

as far as OneDrive goes, I don't have it at all, I've completely purged it years ago. It's a bit complicated to explain, since many things happened at once but basically it started out with crashes and pink flashing which I thought was odd since I never once got pink flashing on the lots I had in RH. Long story short, the game was suddenly using my integrated AMD gpu, the config got screwed up (not sure what exactly, didn't have the opportunity to find out before things went south), the game started throwing directx and d3derr_invalid call errors and once I fixed the graphical issue, the config still pointed to the AMD card and I guess, the game couldn't read the save files and once I loaded RH it reverted to using Maxis templates. That's how I ended up with a partially overwritten folder.

As far as backups go, I do have a back up but it's not much help in this situation since I was working on a RH refresh and all the lots that are important to me I've made in the past 5 days - which I don't have the backup for

I managed to fix it and it turned out to be a numbering sequence issue.

I'm going to leave this here in case anyone in the future encounters anything similar and thanks to kestrellyn and simmer22 for replying

I managed to extract the individual lot data (HOUS, GMND, GMDC, LTTX, LOTG, JPEGS, 3DIR) from my ‘orphan’ lot and replaced the corresponding resources in a working lot that properly appeared in the lot bin and functioned normally in all neighborhoods. However, I must have missed something, because my orphan lot ended up taking the place of the old one in the lot bin but it crashed whenever I tried to load it. I think this method could work but maybe with a bit more tweaking? not sure

What I happened to notice by chance was that the numbering sequence in my LotCatalog folder was broken. I’m not entirely sure how or when it happened, it could have been before my issues started, or maybe I deleted a file by accident while testing my orphan lots. The sequence went up to 317 (the last file being cx_00000317), but I realized that cx_00000307 was missing. I didn't even notice I was missing 10 lots that were supposed to be here, I was just paying attention to getting my 'orphan' lots working

To fix this, I first moved all of the existing lots out of the LotCatalog folder and placed them in a separate folder on my desktop. Then, I added the twelve orphan lots from my damaged save into the empty LotCatalog folder, giving them proper filenames (so from cx_00000001 to cx_00000012, respectively. When I loaded up my game, the lots finally appeared in the lot bin!

Just to be sure, I opened each lot in SimPE to identify what it was and deleted any duplicates I found. I kept a list of the filenames of the lots I deleted (for example, if I deleted cx_00000267, I noted it down so I could reuse that slot later).

After that, I moved all the original lots from my desktop back into the LotCatalog folder. I renamed my orphan lots to fit into the numbering sequence, so one of them replaced cx_00000267, for instance. Once I ran out of the numbers I’d freed up (including filling the missing cx_00000307 that had originally broken the sequence), I simply continued the sequence. Since my last lot had been cx_00000317, I numbered the remaining ones consecutively (cx_00000318, cx_00000319, and so on).

And now they all work and are visible in my lot bin!