Cleanly and safely remove all sims from a neighborhood and all of it's associated subhoods.

Alternatively, allow user to specify which sims s/he wants to keep.

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I've been looking for a tutorial on how to remove all characters in a neighborhood and all of its attached subhoods, but I haven't been able to find anything until today. I finally found this thread:
http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/s...pic,4090.0.html

Note that the tutorial method in the first post is not correct and will leave a lot of junk in your neighborhood folder. If you read the rest of the thread, you can see that people who follow the tutorial have problems later on.

Posts #77 or #116 in that thread have the best method that I've seen so far, although it seems to ignore the various family records and memories and leaves dangling text lists, so I wouldn't vouch for it. It also uses the deleteallcharacters cheat, which cannot be used more than once per neighborhood without major problems, and which may fail completely if there are attached subhoods.

I assume that properly cleaning a neighborhood involves using SimPE to delete all of the sim-related records from the neighborhood package, including the Sim Descriptions, Sim Relations, Sim Wants and Fears, Sim DNA, Family Information, Family Ties, Family Unknown, etc., including all of the associated text lists. Of course, there are also records like Neighborhood Memories, which probably cannot be deleted* but instead need to be modified to remove the memories array, and we'll need to reset the next sim index.

* Research required

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Another alternative:

To safely remove all sims from an existing TS2 neighborhood, I would recommend using the method that plasticbox documents in post #47 of her Elsewhere neighborhood. This method basically involves creating a new neighborhood, then copying the neighborhood terrain and lots from your original hood to your new hood. It's a great method for ensuring a truly empty neighborhood with no sims.

Although the technique wasn't designed for a neighborhood with attached subhoods, it would probably work as long as you created all required empty subhoods and then used the technique on those subhoods as well.

This technique could also be automated.

There's also Theo's Deleter, which had 2 parts. One was an ingame piece which told you the Sim's instance info (to be written down). Then you fired up SimPE and entered that number into the plugin piece to auto-delete all the dangling crap.

In general, I use the batbox to prep the sim(s) for delete before using Theo's plugin to delete the remaining records and the character file. I'm not convinced that Theo's deleter on its own is safe.

Another thought... deleteallcharacters leaves owned businesses dangling. If a Sim tries to go there, they get stuck in build mode as if they owned it.