You may need those objects if you are building a hood to share though.

One can hardly build a shopping hood (Traderville) or a vacation hood (Clarens) without those objects - and any main hood (like Paternoster) needs at least some shops and community lots as well. (I forgot to mention the barista that spawned too).

And - I DID get it right in the end. Traderville has no NPC's and I am very happy that I got there.

Disabling the 3 BG hoods is HOW I finally got to place all the lots on the backup map and none spawned. It was not the first thing I did, only after my second and third attempts also had NPC's - it was a last resort. As I said, why it worked, I don't know. Yet when I get mental enough to build another hood in the future, that is going to be one of the first steps I take.

Maybe it was just a one time glitch or oddity that it didn't happen that time, but templates don't have anything to do with generated sims, especially if they are already empty.

I should have remembered this, but I rediscovered that when a pixel dies on a lot always remember:
to send the urn to the graveyard of your choice, making sure to save the home lot before checking where it went,
Going to the grave yard and place it in the grave yard, save that lot after doing so,
Then when playing another home lot, you can use the batbox to delete the "global urnstone tokens'.

Because if you don't do that in the exact order, you lose the urn, and have to go through hoops to get it to respawn at the cemetery.

I did that and I don't recommend it as a fun hobby.

And yes, I do have "Nounlinkondelete" in my files.

I just had a momentary brain fart.

Yes, I did respawn the grave.

I don't think you normally need to delete urnstone tokens, I believe they delete themselves once you've loaded the lot that the grave was sent to. Most batbox options generally only need to be done if you're having some specific problem.

Yes, after moving the urns to another lot, whether by inventory method or by interacting with them, always save both the current lot and the destination lot immediately afterwards. If not, then the next time the destination lot is visited by a playable family, the moved urns will disappear and the dead will be unlinked.

Lost a few Sims back then because I didn't understand the mechanism clearly.


On another note, I have found out how Lucky Shrine's "You will have success in your chosen career." blessing works - the token given forces Sim blessed to have a 90% chance to get their career chance card, and any choice chosen is a guaranteed success.

The token is never spent, and lasts for 3 days. I have not known if the its timer runs while on vacation or not.

I do the batbox check on most lots because I'm funny that way.

I don't have any problems to do it for, but I just check it for the hell of it.

It's a matter of taste, I suppose.

Re: the Lucky Shrine messages-nice to know that one of them is good for the career. Most of the time the pixels get disappointed when nothing special happens or it tells them to 'don't do this again!".

I deleted an object from my oldest lot, and the object was quite old too. Suddenly, all the household sims gathered around where it once was. Turns out they had a "Where'd it go?" interaction and they were frustrated I had deleted the item. (They did the stress animation.)

Be careful folks, don't just delete!

Also.. my mods sent me on a wild goose chase for the last 2 hours. So, as part of hatch's T&A it has a 'religion' system which you can use to set various rules around relationships, foot stomping, etc.

One of my sims seems to insist on lecturing his sister and her boyfriend whenever they kiss, hug, woohoo. Etc. I thought it was jealousy at first, so I checked all relationships - nope, no one else loves them. I also disabled jealousy using hatch's options.

Still getting lectured, so I then targeted the jealousy emitter directly, I altered:
100B - Should scold Sim A: Always returns false now.
100E - Should scold Sim B: Always returns false now.

This didn't work, still lecturing. So, I moved onto:
1001 - Main - Fire trigger: Loop and idle, do not trigger - simply idle.

I also intentionally got it to throw an error just to be sure my overrides were taking effect, plenty of errors.

Still lectures.... so I'm thinking "What the hell?!" and pulling what remains of my hair out as if I wasn't bald enough already.

The reason this was happening? The brother had switched faiths from Faith 2 (Which allows out of marriage woohoo) to Faith 1, which does not. So he was actually lecturing because these things were taking place outside of marriage, not because of jealousy.....

The fix? Switch him back to religion 2... no more lecturing... and I felt stupid for going the long way around when it was really quite simple.

The reason for the switch? If a sims faith drops too low and they interact with a sim of another faith there is a chance of them 'converting' to the new faith.....

So overall I discovered: Think simple, don't dig too far.

I discovered that past me had made a backup copy of an unplayed Pleasantview + Downtown with all my made-over community lots and houses that I hadn't played with in a while. So I'm pretty happy with past me, especially for the Downtown lots. I remade them all a while back when I was regularly playing Strangetown and apparently I saved copies in this Pleasantview that I then completely forgot about.

What I learned today is that backups are invaluable! And not just game backups. Backup everything!

I was ready to totally panic when SimPE suddenly refused to open and then the game itself told me it wasn't installed when I tried to open it and kept trying to generate a new Sims 2 folder.

Turned out to be an overzealous cleaning program that had deleted my registry paths. A backup saved me. I would have had absolutely no idea what to do to fix it if I couldn't restore from the backup!

So my PSA for today is 'backup'!

And that's why I never let any program "clean" my devices. Why would it know better than I do what I should and shouldn't keep?

I dropped all 'registry cleaners' when I switched over to the new computer. Windows does its' own cleanup and besides, having a SSD does not require one-can even damage it.

"In short, the lifetime of an SSD is based on the read/write amount of processes. Defraging an SSD drive reduces its life expectancy. Also, SSD drives are not defragmented since data is stored and accessed instantaneously instead of with a needle head over a spinning head."
https://forums.tomshardware.com/thr...-a-ssd.3806903/

Registry cleaners don't have anything to do with defragging, as far as I'm aware.

If a sim clogs toilet and somebody notices, the witness will go and lecture the clogger.
(Cherry Keller was taking a shower while her husband... well, you know).

Well it can find stuff that I can't. Like old update stuff that was never cleared out.



I don't even know if I have an SSD lol.

The computer internal description will tell you if you have one or not under "properties" on the drive itself or you can use Task Manager in Win 10/11 to find it.

I have one:
NVMe Micron 1024GB

"NVMe SSDs: These use the PCIe interface but with an optimized protocol for even faster speeds. NVMe SSDs are becoming increasingly common in high-end laptops and desktops. They offer significantly higher read/write speeds compared to SATA SSDs."

Here's what they are from HP and what they do:

https://www.hp.com/us-en/shop/tech-takes/what-is-an-ssd

Turns out I have both a SSD and a HDD.