First off, I know not to delete any families from the sim bin who have been played.

If I install the base game, pets, seasons & AL all together on my new laptop, then move e.g. the Ottomans family into riverblossom hills - am I okay to then delete the oottomas family that will still be in the sim bin in other neighbourhoods?

I only want to play with one version of each family, and kind of like them to go where they are intended (even though that's up to the player).

Thanks x

Uh.
No.

Once they're in the family bin, they're in the neighborhood, and deleting them will cause corruption.

If you don't want family bin sims in more than one neighborhood, you'll need to download empty versions of the stealth neighborhoods with which they are associated - Pets for Cyd Roseland, Seasons for the Ottomai, etc. Then before you load a neighborhood for the first time (which is when all the family bin sims are loaded) you'll need to decide which family bin sims you want to associate with it, and follow the directions for (temporarily) replacing the others.

I'd give you links, but all my links are on the desktop machine that won't boot right now.

The Ottomas and the Indian couple from Seasons and the 2 dogs and guy with pets from Pets still show up in the bin even with empty templates, but from the posts in the threads on MATY about them it's then safe to delete them.

Really? That's odd. Can you link to the thread so the OP can read it for herself?

Incidentally, Clareel, just as one player to another - I find I really like playing different families differently in different hoods. I played the Ottomases and Newsons the first time without much experience, in the context of my custom hood, and have had a lot of fun with them, but felt I understood them better and wanted to try out different things with them, so I put them both into Strangetown. Now the Ottomases are a military family and Peter has a Family secondary, while Dora and Samantha have Romance secondaries. Sharla has a Pleasure aspiration instead of Family, David is gay and dating Tank Grunt, my twins have different personalities, and it's an entirely different experience. (Dora, the vixen, wants to vamp PT9; in the original run-through I never got to do much with her except chase after toddlers. She died while potty-training one.) Ditto the Newsons, who are now squatting in an abandoned barracks and interacting differently with the different cast. In yet a third neighborhood, I'm going with a more upper-middle-class Dora and have a mind to match her with an existing elderly virgin hermit, and moved the Newsons in with the Goodies, who I've never played before. So I recommend leaving them in and finding new and different things to do with them. But you know your own mind better than I do.

You can also convert them into townies, if Mr. Shizzle's right and the MATY thread doesn't satisfy you that it's safe to delete them under the conditions described, decide you don't want to do empty templates, or whatever.

Of course you can also move them onto an empty lot and kill them, too. Not the pets or younger than children of course, but they'll then get taken by the Social Worker/Animal Control and be adoptable. I don't remember exactly but it's wherever the thread for the empty template for Seasons is. I think it said something like with the empty template the character data is gone.

MattShizzle "The Ottomas and the Indian couple from Seasons and the 2 dogs and guy with pets from Pets still show up in the bin even with empty templates"

This is wrong. I have Empty Templates from both Season and Pets and neither of the families appears in my Bin.

So do I, but when I create a new neighborhood they're still there.

As to deleting the bin families as soon as you start the hood, I would recommend against it. It's risky since you only need one piece of gossip to escape to start the cycle of corruption. With that strategy, you are taking a risk which may or may not work out. With the empty template strategy and with the AGS strategy (see below), there is no risk. "An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure."

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Matt, you're obviously doing something wrong. If you install empty templates, then the bin families from the original template can't be added to a brand new neighborhood. Perhaps you're using "clean" templates, not empty ones? Or, perhaps you're missing some of the empty templates? Or, perhaps you're installing them incorrectly? In any case, this is a user error, not a problem with the strategy. The strategy works. You aren't really helping people by insisting otherwise. Instead, you should solve the problem on your computer.

I have another suggestion for you. The AnyGameStarter uses a different approach, which you may want to try. Instead of replacing the existing templates with empty versions, you can just remove the templates completely (after backing up, of course). A template which doesn't exist can't possibly add bin families to your newly generated neighborhoods, either. That's the strategy which I use and it works every single time.

If you still can't get it to work, then I would suggest that you run the AnyGameStarter and create an empty game using that. The AnyGameStarter isn't likely to make mistakes. If you'd like, you can look at the generated AGS BAT files to determine how it works, then implement that strategy permanently.

If that still doesn't work, then you'll want to open a help thread so that we can work on your problem, rather than trying to help you in other people's threads every time that this issue comes up. Tell us which templates you downloaded (yes, all of them). Don't give us a link to the thread, but a link to the exact download that you used, so that there will be no confusion. Explain exactly what you did with each of the templates, including what you did with any backups. Try to give us enough information that we can spot what you're doing wrong.

I'm quite sure that your problem can be solved, if you are willing.

Already had one and added to it now here:

http://www.modthesims.info/showthread.php?t=495077

Thanks for all the replies guys, sorry if my question was stupid

That's a good idea to play them out in each neighbourhood differently, I didn't really think of all the options I would have doing that.

I'll have a look at the other things mentioned as well.

Thanks again x

Not a stupid question at all. It's one that we all ask at some point, and that's when we learn about empty templates.

Thanks so much, I've looked into the empty templates and think I will go down that route

Before playing a custom NH I go into the file folder for the NH and delete all of the characters. This removes all Sims that may be in the Sim Bin and generates new townies and NPCs. I do not know if this is considered a correct method, however, over the years this has caused no problems that I have noticed.

Also, have I been doing something wrong when setting up an never played, fresh, brand new Maxis NH by deleting the extra Sims in the Bin - meaning those that have been given no connection to any Sim in the NH?

It is not. Sometimes it takes a long time for corruption to show and many people have played neighborhoods for some time before corruption reached a level that bothered them. So if you want to do this, go ahead.

But please do not go around recommending it to other people. You're like the smoker who lives till 80 - the fluke who lulls people into false confidence.

Every time you delete a sim using the trash bin or with delete all characters or from the folder you are doing something wrong. If you know and want to risk your own hood, fine, but please don't advice others to do it.

It is not. Deleting the sim files is not enough to clear the information about those sims from the neighbourhood files. Some information about the sims is stored elsewhere and the problem is when you delete the sim file, those bits of information then are free to attach themselves to new sims in your neighbourhood. This is what is meant by corruption in this context. You may not notice problems for some time but there are problems with your neighbourhood. If you wanted to play it for a long period, there is a high chance that your neighbourhood will simply stop working at some point.


Yes, you are doing the same as above. There are some exceptions which Moo can tell you about but otherwise you are causing corruption. Broken connections to other sims is the LEAST of the problems when deleting sims and the easiest dealt with (meaning that you actually can do something about it). You shouldn't be using that as a yardstick to measure the safety of what you are doing.

The only exception that I know of is deleting them properly using the batbox from MATY and Theo's Delete-Sim SimPE plugin.

I've misremembered something then - I thought you'd said something about deleting bin families - which bin, I'm not sure.

Perhaps it was the lot bin? It's completely safe to delete occupied lots from the lot bin.

This seems counter-intuitive, because it's completely unsafe to add (improperly cleaned) occupied lots to the lot bin, or to install (improperly cleaned) occupied lots from the lot bin. However, once you have an (improperly cleaned) occupied lot in your lot bin, the only safe thing is to delete it.

Ah yes, that's it. So it's safe to delete occupied EAxis lots on first load of the neighbourhood?

That does sound very counter-intuitive, Mootilda, and I guess that the safest bet for most people is make sure every single lot in the bin is empty, and clean, lest you risk the game.

Because the kind of question that was just posed is going to be ripping through here from now on:
"Oh, so it's ok to put occupied lots in the lot bin?"

"Improperly cleaned" or "properly cleaned" are very vague phrases, and must be defined clearly-how would you check if the lot is either?

It's safe to delete occupied EA lots from the bin - but not occupied EA lots from the 'hood.

I have never done this, but say you have this family.
-The family lives in the main hood
-Their home is a business
Say you want to move them to the subhood without losing all the furniture and the status of a home business.
Can you move the family into the Occupied Lots bin and put it in the subhood? It's not a different town, just another part.

Well, for starters, that will break all friend and family relationships to everyone in the neighborhood, even if it is the same hood.