This one seems like a strange one to me. I went to modify the facial structure of some Sim kids. They're twin brothers; I wanted to make them look a little older, without aging them up just yet. For the first one, no problem. The second one caused the game to quit, unfortunately wiping out a bunch of home improvements that I had also just completed (and stupidly not saved). Second time around, I made sure I took care of the remodeling first, saved the lot, and then went to do the plastic surgery. Same as before; Twin One was successfully edited; Twin Two made the game crash. I went back in, entered the lot, deleted and respawned Twin Two. It didn't help. When I went to do Gussy Up-->Plastic Surgery, he finished reading the paper, put it down, and when the Gussy Up hit the head of the queue, BLINK! back to the desktop. I did not try it with the parents, but I did successfully Gussy Up two townies who walked through the lot, just to see if there would be an issue with that. There wasn't.

So, aside from the re-spawn reset, what might I do to sleuth out and fix whatever is making this happen? I guess I could hold off on the plastic surgery for a while, and see if it still happens later, but do I want to be saving this Sim's info a bunch of times if he's become diseased? Just to be clear: there's no error, it just quits to the desktop. Is there some log that would give a hint? Puzzling.

Does either one of them have a split character file?

What could help is deleting cache (groups.cache, accessory.cache, and caches), they will be automatically regenerated the next time you start the game.

Could be he's wearing clothes with the "apply for job bug". The clothes work fine normally, but in some cases they'll cause the game to crash, like when applying for a job. Possibly also when aging up sims. Wouldn't be surprised if the bug can cause issues under other circumstances, too.

Try changing his outfit temporarily to a maxis outfit or a different outfit (different mesh, or same outfit as his twin since that one works fine), then try again with the plastic surgery. If the game crashes again, at least it could rule out this particular bug.

(The bug in question is usually related to having used the wrong outfit base/skeleton for the recolor files, either the wrong age, gender, or mixing up top/bottom with full outfit).

I don't know what that means.

I wasn't aging them up, though... they're still kids; I just wanted to alter their faces a bit to give them more of a 10-year-old look as opposed to a 6-year-old. I can try changing clothes though, that's easy enough. Any idea WHICH outfits have the bug? or is it more random than that? I've never heard of that one.

Dang, do you know how many outfits I had to scroll through to FIND a Maxis one? That had no effect, he quit just the same. I'll try dressing him just like his twin. I could use the Peronality adjuster to make sure he's the right gender, but that only alters behavior, no?

Aging up, along with applying for jobs, are known times when this issue can cause crashes - but possibly not the only times (could be nobody has tried plastic surgery when a sim wore one of the outfits).

Could be any outfit, and it really isn't possible to tell ingame unless you can pinpoint which outfits are causing the crashes (by testing with other outfits to confirm or rule out if this is the problem). It is possible to check in SimPE if the outfits have the problem once you have found likely problem outfits, but looking through all outfits is a big job. If the sim is wearing a top and bottom, you'll want to check out both.

But don't get too hung up in this - it could be something else that's causing the issue. Change the sim's clothes, then test if the sim can use plastic surgery. Give it a few tries with different clothes. If the game still crashes, something else could be wrong (but it could still be something the sim is wearing, anything CAS related - it is likely, since it only crashes with that one sim).

In reply to simsample, I did a google search, and then went into the Characters folder for that hood. There is one of those ".1" files in there, generated yesterday, probably about the time that I resurrected the hood from a backup file. I should have also trashed the hood manager, right? Would that cause this? And, if I trash that extra character file, would that completely screw up the game? I'll hold off doing anything further for the moment.

Well, he does have some odd spectacles that I would be happy to get rid of. It'd be another "Gussy Up" operation, but not plastic surgery. We'll give it a shot.

Nope, Gussy Up-->change appearance also made the game quit. I guess I'll keep trying different outfits.

So what would happen if I trashed the "extra" character file? I know the cheat code to get the lot package filenames to show up in the hood. Is there something similar for figuring out which character numbers the Sims have? I'm gonna go out on a limb here and say it's probably a SimPE thing.

I have had the shirt get a job crash bug. My sim was wearing a TShirt which turned out it had been separated from a whole CC outfit. I posted about it on here somewhere and in Discord, and someone fixed it for me. I don't know what about it makes it crash, they probably did explain but it went over my head.

The other reason I have had game crash has been corrupt sim inventory. I would run Hood Checker if you haven't. I had a couple of sims that opening them in SimPE and deleting all inventory lines fixed them.

Well, I'm on a Mac, so no Hood Checker or SimPE for me. Could the Bat Box do anything here?
And, like I said, the neighborhood's Characters folder contains both an "N017_User00064.package" AND a "N017_User00064.1.package". I'm not entirely sure what a split character file is, but that sure sounds like it.

As for inventory corruption, I recently started these kids in a home schooling scheme, the Simlogical flexi one. That could have an impact on their inventory, yeah? They haven't even had a class yet, and it's already causing problems. I guess I should try dis-enrolling Twin #2 and starting over.

But I can trash the Neighborhood Manager at any time, right? No fallout possible from that?

If you figure out which clothes, someone else can check for you with SimPE.

If there are two character files (split character file) and those belong to that particular sim, it's possible that's the issue. No idea how to fix it, though - I don't think I've ever seen split character files before in my game...

if "Gussy Up-->change appearance" is causing issues too (only for that sim), then it's relating to the sim - split character file, something the sim is wearing, or something in their inventory - as Jo says.

Check one thing at a time. Wearables and inventory are easy to check. Remove stuff from inventory, change clothes, and change hair + remove accessories and makeup if/when you can get to "change appearance" (backup first, so you don't lose anything).

If you can't get to "change appearance" at all, backup your game(!) then temporarily move out all CAS items, and see if you can access it then. The sim will look different, but if you can access "change appearance" and "plastic surgery", the problem is CAS related. If you still can't access them, the problem is either in their inventory or with the split character file.

Well, so far it's been one of Heget's 18th Century outfits, and then the Maxis gray T-shirt with the skeleton man on it. I'm going to put him in a duplicate of his twin brother's clothing, to try that out. Also going to do "Gussy Up" in a mirror, as opposed to just clicking on him.

If I copy both character files into a separate folder, and upload a zip of it here, maybe someone can check them to see if they belong to the same Sim, right?

Sure

(By the way, edited my post above).

I made dupes of the suspicious characters, stuck 'em in a folder, and zipped it for uploading. I don't have any tools to look at these, but maybe someone can tell if they belong to the same Sim. If so, what should I do about it?

(CTRS stands for ChiTownRiverScum)

Hood manager has nothing to do with this. Split character files are absolutely fine, the game has no problem with them at all. But I noticed that when I'm using the gussy up mod, if the sim I'm using it on has a split character file, the mod can sometimes have trouble dealing with this depending on how the file is split.

For example, I had a butler who had a split character file (probably from me having mods that allow them to generate with the fat body shape and glasses), and if I tried to change his appearance with the gussy up mod it would crash the game. A waiter with a split character file ended up with a missing face when I messed with his appearance. But others with split character files will behave perfectly normally. So it depends upon the file and how the mod deals with it. No idea of the technicalities of that, but I did note that I had to open the bit of the character file that had the stretch data in manually to change the butler's height in SimPE (it wasn't in the bit that SimPE could open through the character viewer).

So I'm guessing that you may be able to change that sim's face through other methods, but that perhaps the gussy up mod is having trouble with that file.

Wackiness. Okay, SO, I definitely shouldn't touch the character files then, right? ...As the User00064.1 package is some sort of extension of User00064.package, rather than an erroneous duplicate of it. Or something like that... not a crash-causing aberration, in other words.

What sort of alternative method would you suggest for facial modification? Opening it in Bodyshop or something? I haven't been able to save anything from Bodyshop in a while.

Okay, well, their inventory is cleared out. They're kids, so they only inventory they have is the "backpack". Seemingly, there's no way to do "change appearance", as the thing with the mirror gave the same crash. There was some sort of "Plastic surgery" ITEM that someone made at some point, wasn't there? An aspiration reward or something...

Temporarily removing my entire Bodyshop subfolder gives me heart palpitations. Theoretically, I can just put it back afterwards, but that won't make the outfits jump back onto all my sims, will it? I'll have to go re-clothe everyone, won't I? Not to mention that it'll take a geologic era for it to re-load all the categories... I've got 3100 items in there, about a gigabyte's worth. Part of me really wants to get to the bottom of this. And the rest of my brain is saying, "Don't be an ejit! Leave the kid alone!"

Wait a second, I forgot... they're NOT kids anymore - as an experiment, I aged them both up to teens, which means they got brand new wardrobes, and yes, the crash still happened. So it has to be the split character file, right? And yet... they still have Heget's 18th Century clothes, albeit different outfits now. I can't say that I've ever had a problem with those before, though. I'm guessing split character file. This is a brand new issue, just started happening today, and the split file (if that's what I was looking at in the Characters folder) does in fact date from yesterday afternoon.

And YET... if I might be permitted to third-guess myself (or is it fourth by now?), he IS still wearing those weird wire-rim specs, which I liked a lot better when I downloaded them than when I put them on him. If I were to find them in my downloads folder, and just yank out that file... maybe that would do the trick. Okay, maybe I AM an ejit. If that's one of the things I wanted to change in the first place... why didn't I just trash those ugly things straight off? Here we go...

Since you can't use Hood Checker you can try the bat box and the lot cleaner, or I assume you can use the lot cleaner. Honestly without hood checker I doubt my hood would be loading, it cleaned so much junk out of my Uber hood yesterday that the other mods could not fix. Years ago before I knew about the inventory fix in SimPE I killed a sim off as his crashing issues were getting worse to the point I only had to click his inventory or memories for my game to crash. So if you can't fix him I would try not to touch him, maybe an age up might help or not, maybe keep his inventory empty. But killing off your sim may at some point be your only solution to specific sim who crashes the game. Mac's to me are kind of play until you can't, toss and start fresh.

If you want to rar up your hood I could have a go with Hood Checker for you.

The plastic surgery item is one of the original career rewards. I think most mods that do "change appearance" and "plastic surgery" access the same action, so if the issue is with the sim, all such mods would crash the game when accessed.



Backup, then temporarily remove CC, figure out if there's an issue, then replace files with backup (Remember - no overwriting folders/files!). Allows you to mess around with testing - and nothing should change in your original game once the backup is safely restored.

I don't recommend trying without a backup, as when you remove CAS CC, it will be replaced with maxis items and usually stay that way.



You can try. If the glasses are the issue, removing them from your Downloads folder should be enough. Delete the cache files after removing (otherwise, removed accessories can cause the "white mesh with writing" issue on sims who wore them, which in this case would just be a cache remnant).



This does make it seem more likely it's the split character file.

If you have a link to the clothes, I can take a look at them (child and teen versions), just in case. Could at least rule out that problem.

That makes sense about the career reward thing being likely to cause the same crash as the mod. And thank you for the offer of looking over the clothing. I'll try to narrow down which one it is and find a link.

If you want to make the second twin have the same face (because they are twins), you can copy the LxNR resource in SimPE. I have experienced an issue where the previous state of the clothing causes the face to completely disappear or be replaced with a basic one. They had something a bit wrong. Some Downtownies are like that. The person has two kinds of models inside, one is the facial structure, and the other includes the face and accessories. After LxNR is replaced, you need to go to a mirror or any makeover dialog (twice) to put it into effect. The modify facial structure creates a second copy of LxNR, and people who had never used that dialog will only have one. It is possible to put the second copy over the first and then the change is permanent.

Thank you for that info @jonasn !
I also found a bit where @Chris Hatch mentions split characters (in regards to SimPE in this case):
https://modthesims.info/showthread....825#post5701825

So possibly the object data for your sim is in one part of the character file, and the LxNR in another, so GussyUp/ change appearance can't handle it? I still don't understand why a non-template sim (an ordinary playable as opposed to an NPC) would be split though, and how an accessory could cause this?

I suspect that it is a part of the outfit (hair, glasses, or another) like the other person suggested that is a problem. Maybe it could be removed first with the mirror. But if the face disappears and doesn't come back even with another mirror interaction, then you have to revert and accept that the person can't be edited. Do a backup before editing the character file.

I doubt an accessory would cause a split file. It's more likely a mod, as suggested by Kestrellyn in the post below Chris Hatch's.

CAS CC can cause crashing problems if improperly made, and if the sim is causing crashes at both child and teen ages, any part of the sim that's used between ages (makeup, skin, accessories, hair, eyes, face, tattoo/thights/etc. box...) could in theory be a problem. But as said, I doubt it has anything to do with the split file.