When the game crashes after a long session, or a more serious malfunction that requires restoring the hood from a backup, do you try to have your Sims do the same things again? Or something completely different?

What are some interesting events that you lost out on thanks to a game malfunction?

Honestly, most of the time is crashing when building. I had made an incredible house, decorated and all, fit exactly for the Sim family, and then the lovely pop up of "The application has crashed. The application will now terminate" sneaks up on me. I usually give up and create something new for a house except if it was really nice. I'll try to remember how it was and make a rough recreation of it.
If it crashes and it was in the middle of gameplay, I will try to do the same things, especially if I do have plans for the household. Sometimes I want to do something else if the malfunction has made me rethink what to do with the family and I thought that the previous gameplay was a bit boring.

Public Service Announcement: Remember to save! XD

Seriously! I always forget! Say it crashes once, and I lost a perfect lot, and I realize it's my fault!

I have never had to resort to a back up.
If it crashes and I have lost a day well more fool me for not saving sooner. I load up another house in the rotation if that happens and wait some days before going back to the crashed home. Hopefully I will have forgotten what happened there due to my poor memory lol.

I try to avoid such incidents. :-P

But usually - if I have to - I'll do it back how I did the first time. It's usually build mode when it crashes, and usually because I deleted a wall that had a window/door on it. I don't generally get normal game play crashes though.

I've never had to restore a backup, thankfully, but when my game crashes while I'm playing, I go play a different household or do something else besides the sims, because if I go straight back to the lot, I'll feel sad and frustrated about the progress I lost (mainly story-wise). Then, when I go back into the lot in a day or two, I won't feel so bad, as I'll have probably forgotten where I left off and I'll just continue playing wherever my sims are , and if things turn out the same or completely different, that's okay.

It keeps me sane.

On my old computer I had my game go full-on pink soup immediately after entering, after working fine for several years... so I kind of panicked and used a backup. Still not sure what had happened, but didn't want to risk anything, and didn't have too much time to problemsolve. It was a fairly recent backup, and my story hood, so no big changes.

I've had my game crash plenty of times after a hefty setup while photoshooting. I've learned to set everything up (buy clothes I need, dress the sims, do permanent scene changes, etc.) then save, and then mess about - if the game crashes or pink-flashes or anything like that, it's much easier to reset, because the game is already in a good place to start.

I can't quite remember any instances, but I've had the game crash at points where I hadn't saved. What I do with it depends what I was doing at the time.

How I deal with lost progress depends on what was going on at the time of crash/loss - I've never had a crash that needed a backup, just lost some time after my last save. If nothing major had happened, I just speed play through the household to get what I had already done completed again - weed that garden, or earn a skill point type tasks. If I lose a wedding or birthday party, I rarely repeat the full party unless the sims have a want for it. I try to save after major events but have had play sessions where I failed to do that and lost things like weddings or births. For those I just play as I normally would, so sometimes things follow roughly the same path as the first run and other times they go off in a whole new direction. I've had sims take different jobs or roll slightly different wants so the events in the week change. Then the randomness of the game has a chance to make a new impact, too. Once I lost about half a week for one family - I don't remember what had happened in the first playthrough other than the birth of one baby, but the replacement involved a fire and the birth of quads. The random events made the house much more interesting on the repeat. I normally save at least once per sim day now.

I backup after I finish setting up a new 'hood, when adding new mods (even if I tested them elsewhere), before playing with any external tools, at the end of every full rotation (season), and at least every other real world month. The only times I remember using a backup were after I'd been using lot adjuster or hood replace, and since I'd made the backups immediately before making changes, I didn't lose any play progress.

I also usually get them during building, though have had them during gameplay.

I normally just play from the time I reload without necessarily trying to go for the same outcome.

I had my first crash during gameplay for months today. It came when my Sims were leaving the Veronaville Swim Centre, which is actually my oldest self-made lot in my game; it was made in my first fortnight as a Simmer, but it's seen a lot of changes over the years.

I was playing two teenage boys who are destined to become townies. (Usual excuse -- I just made them in CAS to "roll the pacifier", but when looked at them, I wanted them in my game.) I had just made them in CAS at the start of the session. I wanted them in my game so I exported them in SimPE, and then cloned them in Body Shop. I then used CAS to them giveback the characters, and outfits they'd had the first time, at least as well as I could remember them. (Fortunately I'd made a backup before starting to play.) This time I made an adult female Sim to go with them, to save me the work of changing an adult into a teen, and buying all their outfits again. I then tried to replay their first day again, but of course it was quite different to the first time. They saw fewer walk-byes, and only one neighbour was in the Welcome Wagon both times. And I don't think I'll send them to the Swim Centre this time -- that would be tempting fate!

I'm currently in this position, a full sim day of playing went out the window when it didn't save properly.. and I still got the photos of the efforts bringing the family together. So might redo the Sunday, adding a little bit of one to one between some of the family members (one of the children isn't best friends with one of the mothers and the siblings aren't all friends with eachother. Trying to replicate the day isn't really for me, I prefer to think of it as a day that could have happened

The most sginificant one happened with a three-month previous back-up. In the lost timeline the wife of one of the most prestigious families in my hood died after giving birth to her second child due to a lack of food and the fire that made her pass out only sped that doom up. I can usually handle pregnant sims but that was a tough one! The father mourned, ACR made him woo hoo his ex-mother-in-law in his grief, and then he was finding love again with another woman.

Then I installed a lot that made my game crash and somehow half my sims disappeared so I went to the 3-month previous backup. Timeline gone, wife alive--she survived this time and they went on to have a third, a son and heir to the family who isn't nice or decent and became an antagonist on a story so the course of the hood lore would have been very different if his mother had stayed dead and he didn't exist. Also, the woman the father was going to marry next turned out to be pretty significant in my stories as well and wouldn't have panned out the way they had if she married him.

ACR made him woohoo his ex mother in law? Wtf, ACR!

Back on my PC I could pretty regularly predict my crashes. Usually they'd happen for the following reasons:

1. Snow accumulation, or decumulation. Everytime it started to snow in game my heart rate would pickup and I'd spam the save button every few minutes. Got so bad I haven't played a hood with the winter season for a while and just stuck to desert hoods, which works alright for me. I've fallen in love with the aesthetic.

2. Long build sessions: particularly if I've made a large or detailed lot, and gone a bit without saving-- upon trying to save the completed lot I'd get the dreaded "application has crashed window," and all my hard work would be undone. Worst instance was a palace style movie theater I'd been trying to recreate in my game, and I'd spent something like half an hour spamming those little black lightbulb strips on a frieze to mimic those big cinema signs. It was soul crushing, but I managed to recreate it. Usually if that happens I snap a picture of the game while it's still in crash mode, and try to go from there.

3. Long play sessions. For my PC, I'd discovered the optimal playtime is about 5 sim days, so usually one playthrough of a family for me. Anything after that and I'm liable for crashes, but it always runs smoothly at least for that long.

Since switching to my laptop I've only ever had two crashes, and both times it happened after I'd quit the game. I'm still not certain what exactly caused those crashes, but I assume since it all happened after everything has been saved, nothing has been lost and no bad things have occurred. Back on my PC I'd never had the game crash during quitting, and I've never heard of anyone else's game doing that either. Knock on wood, of course...

It's not really for me either. I suppose it could (nearly) be done by turning Free Will off, but I fear that would kill most of the fun for me, and even more-so for my Sims. And even with Free Will off, random events are almost bound to turn out slightly differently. So I try to repeat things in broad brush-strokes, but a lot of the detail will be different. I have an odd belief that, once a Sim has appeared in my game, they have a right to life. So, if a new CAS Sim has appeared since the last back-up, and is going to be lost in reverting to that back-up, I will re-make them in CAS, using the procedure described above in my last post in tis thread.

What might really upset me would be if a new-born baby was lost, and then a baby of the opposite sex was born when I replayed it. I know I could quit without saving and try again, but the idea of aborting a birth, because the baby was the "wrong" sex is really quite repugnant to me. Fortunately births are quite rare in my game, so there's a good chance that this will never happen. If it does happen, I think I'll just say that they got the baby's sex wrong the first time. This really happened at my mother's birth! The nurse who was present at her birth, a neighbour who was not trained in midwifery, looked at the umbilical cord, and wrongly identified her as a boy. When the real midwife arrived a little later, she correctly identified my mother as a girl! Actually, in my game, when a baby is born, I try to have a Sim in the medical career present, to assist with the birth. I'm pretty sure none of them have been trained in midwifery either!

P.S. I've just read a very helpful post by @Pideli explaining how to change a new baby's sex in SimPE. It's much simpler than I would have imagined. @Charity : Maybe you should add it to your sticky thread on useful tutorials.

Added it to the Mini Tutorials thread.

It depends, if it's something huge like a proposal I'll probably try to recreate it, even if the specifics are different. I don't bother recreating smaller things.

I resonate with a lot of your opinions on this matter. But i feel like i am living in a builder’s paradise! My game never crashes when i am building. Hope i dont jinx it !! I feel lucky about that. But it did just crash a few times today entering and leaving homes.

In the case of a crash i will redo any major events like engagements , marriages, but in the case of relationship points i will either boolprop cheat my way into more relationship points if i have already chatted them up once. Otherwise i will keep the screenshots i took and pretend like it all happened the way the pictures show! One thing i do without fail is save immediately after a baby is born. Pregnancies are hard for me to get my sims thru and i already lost a mother and child once, i dont plan on doing it again. I like the randomness of what gender the couple gets, but like some of you i feel bad if i the couple doesnt keep the original baby. Also, i like to play the same families in different senarios and hoods. The order and genders of the children can change their story entirely and makes for interesting gameplay . Anywhoo, i could go on but i will digress.

Interesting discussion question!! Crashing is troublesome, so it helps to share solutions or commiserate losses . Thanks to the OP. Hope you find some answers.

Hope your day is going well, everyone!

Too late. You have mentioned it and awoken the irony gods. You must now perform the blood sacrifices. XD