Hi! Before I will start describing how i discovered that error in my game, I would want to say that I'm aware that corruption is not a real thing, other than the real file corruption like crashing while saving (which is probably worth saying that it didn't happened to me in years).

So while I was playing in one of my Pleasantview families I just wanted to check some connection between two sims. So I opened family tree and went through few families to get to the sim I wanted to find. I clicked on the mother of said sim and found that the connection between them is gone, I decided to go by father side and also found that his connection to this sim is gone, just like its gone for his siblings. So I went to check what's going on and just in case didn't save in the family I was then playing.
In the family of the sim with the gone ties - let's just call him by his name so Oliver - everything seemed ok, it wasn't reset (the actions of the sims weren't) or anything. But Oliver has had all his values reset - exactly saying his aspiration was set to literally nothing, level of it obviously the reddest, his relationships and memories gone, his personality all set to 0 and family tree empty. Every other sim in the house didn't had him in theirs rel panel or in family tree. I think in the memories of Oliver's child was $Subject thing but I really don't remember If I saw clearly. Reloading family obviously didn't change anything and the error was still there.


I decided to check in SimPE and things there went really strange... So first I had problem with Sim Descs in resource tree cause it just didn't load, thankfully the Sim Explorer? (the thing in tools->neighborhood-> I don't know how it's called in English) worked so I went to Oliver through that. Every possible value (other than Interests ) has been reseted. In family ties Oliver has no connection, but his family members when clicked throw sweet Null Reference Error (can I say here that I'm myself a programmer? Not too advanced but definitely not a begginer ).
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At first as you have read I did not get that "Sim was found twice error". Since the problem happened (or I just discovered that it exists) I haven't played in Pleasantview or just The Sims 2. Once I only went to take photos of what's going on and didn't save. Then when I went to SimPE and clicked "Sim Explorer" I got the "Sim was found twice" and in details was the instance of Oliver.

Since that, he is showing twice both in "Sim Explorer" and family ties. As for Sim Descs I have no way to check since that thing is not loading.


One of them has all Oliver's data and the other one has all probably default data.

I decided to check something then, cause If there's two version of my sim what do game do with that? Which version does it load? So i opened and closed game 5 times (without saving) and 3 out of 5 Oliver was normal and 2 out of 5 he had reset values. But now even though the reset one load all other sims have still family ties to him (actually to the working one cause the reset Oliver has none to them), memories are all intact and even relationships to him (the reset one has again none).

I thought for a few days about how could that happend or how to repair that. For solving that I had an idea (while I did knew that something have happened but before i turned game on again and got sim was found twice error) that I could extract working Oliver's sim desc from a backup and replace the bad one, but I didn't know what to do with the missing memories cause you can't (or atleast I don't know how) export them and replace them somewhere else.

I have been playing in this Pleasantview for 8 years so I don't want to just stop and forget about all this stories cause of that error. I did said that I do have a kind of recent backup but since I made it I played few very important to me and long in making events and I don't want to play them again.

For technical part, I haven't installed in a half a year time span any mods that could change something this drastically. The only one is "Grow!" mod but I don't believe it could be capable of doing such things and it definitely don't conflict with any other mod in my game. I also am an RCP player for probably 2 years now.
For any weird things that earlier somewhere happened that could have caused this, some very long time ago my sim creation index reseted and Oliver is the last sim that was born before that happened. I never also did any of the "unsafe" things and kind of regularly checked my game with hood checker (but not in the last half a year).

For even more technical part I am a win11 player but i do have onedrive disabled since always and I'm not even logged to MS account so it can't be the reason for my problem. As I said before my game haven't crashed in years and I haven't touched the files myself and I do know how to use SimPE so this also can't be the reason. Any other program also wasn't around my save files.

If it can't be saved for some reason and won't cause problems for other sims I can go with some storyline for what happened.

I'm user of MTS since 2018 and have read through many other forums of technical/gameplay bugs with Sims 2 so I'm kind of familiar with that stuff, it's just that I never needed an account before and made one specifically so I could write about my problem in game and ask for help. (I just wrote this in case someone found it strange that my account is one day old).

I hope what I wrote makes sense and isn't too chaotic

Do you have a recent backup? If so, the easiest solution is to restore that and I would recommend it.

If you don't, the main issue here is obviously that there are now two sims with the same ID. I don't know if it's possible to assign one of them a new ID? Then you could essentially fix one sim and hide the other one in the Default family like the other hidden duplicates. I tried googling that error, but it seems like this is a very rare thing.

edit: It looks like you can change a sim's Sim ID with SimPE, so try that maybe? Definitely make a backup first.

As I said before, yeah I do have a recent backup but I played few important moments so I would prefer to not use it.

And for changing sim ID, yeah I might try it but won't there be a problem with character file? Cause there's two sim descs and only one character file from what I have checked.

Did you try just deleting the SDSC with the null data? Since there only seems to be one character file at the other SDSC seems fine.