I remember reading some thread a long time ago that said that the two dogs that come with Pets, the Crittur family, are borked. I want to add them to my sim's household but I don't want something awful to happen. Does anyone know if they are safe to play?

Because you have UC I will say yes. UC is fully patched and Critturs are repaired.

The Critturs are not broken.

The Critturs are one of two Maxis-made victims of a glitch that didn't update the father's ID properly when a pregnancy created in a subhood (the Seasons stealth hood) was added to a main hood. This was fixed in the Seasons patch. As long as your game is properly patched you have nothing to fear from the Critturs or from their fellow victims, the Ottomas family.

The ID numbers of sims created in independent subhoods - the Bluewater Village, university, and stealth hood sims, plus sims in any player-made subhoods you download - are changed when added to a main neighborhood, so as to prevent duplicate IDs. Since the patch, this is only a problem when the father is a pollination technician, as finding that the father's ID belongs to someone who existed in the hood before the subhood was added confuses the program. So when adding a subhood version of Strangetown, Sedona, or Meadow Creek (all of which have ongoing alien pregnancies) you would do well to manually check the pregnancy controller with SimPE, SimBlender, or some other editing tool, and make sure it points to the correct parent.

That clears it up! I'd play the Ottomas family too, if I could locate them in my game... They seem to have gone missing as they aren't in the bin. Thanks for the help!

That sounds like you've disabled, or replaced, the Seasons stealth hood template, which is where the Ottomai are born.

Hmm. The only neighborhood they, as well as a few other bin sims, are available in is Pleasantview. I'm thinking that something is majorly wrong with my game because now neighborhood stories are broken as well. Belladonna cove has no bin sims whatsoever.

Bin sims are loaded the first time you load a hood, so it sounds like you did something to your stealth hoods after you loaded Pleasantview and before you loaded any of the others. Time to go looking in your program files, find out what's going on in there.

The neighborhood stories should be an unrelated problem. I use the story albums a lot, and some problems I've figured out and some I haven't. How are they broken, exactly?

I actually just loaded Pleasantview actually, specifically to check for issues. What exactly would I look for in the program files?

Belladonna cove's story won't advance past the first page, and in Pleasantview Belladonna's story shows sans pictures. I put up a help forum thread about it, if that would be a better place to discuss it .

In the program files, you should have different folders for each EP, inside which are four different subfolders. Inside the TSData folder are a number of other subfolders, including one called Res. And inside that, along with a bunch of other stuff, will be a NeighborhoodTemplate folder. The paths may be slightly different if you have a compilation disk or the UC.

University should have one for each college (U001, U002, U003). Nightlife should have one for downtown (D001). OFB has one for Bluewater, Pets for strays and the bin families (P001), Seasons for the bin families (G002), BV for the bin families and each vacation neighborhood (A001, M001, T001, and V001), Freetime for the hobby lots and bin families (F001), and Apartment Life for the bin families, witches, and social group townies (E002). These are all separate from the neighborhoods added with EPs, which are located in the UserData folder under "Neighborhoods." They should all have those names and have folders for Characters and Lots.

Empty templates are used to replace those folders and should have no characters in them. Renaming folders in the wrong format (ie DISABLEDNeighborhood Templates) should render them invisible, or at least unusable, by the program. And you really should remember installing or disabling!

If folders are missing, renamed, or disabled, and you didn't do it, you may have an overzealous antivirus program messing you up. If you're using the UC, it's possible your game has been damaged, so you should back up anything you want to keep (like your downloads folder) and see if you can repair it. If you're not using the UC, you may have to reinstall the affected EP, but try to track down the problem that screwed you up in the first place before you do that, or it'll just happen again. You may have to whitelist the EA Games folder with one or more computer maintenance programs.

I'll go look in your help thread in a bit and see if I know how to fix your story album problem.

Alright, I checked those files. I did notice that under freetime the file was F002, but that seemed to be the only difference I could find. I did change the target location of the "My Documents" folder to a flash drive recently, which I did following a guide here. Seemingly, other people have done this with no problem. The game runs fine, so I assumed that I had correctly moved everything. The neighborhood folder there seems to check out fine as well.

These are the neighborhoods I have in the neighborhoods folder
E001
F001
G001
N001
N002
N327 (Phaenoh's West Weasels)

G002 Seasons stealth hood is the Ottomas and Ramaswami's.

I'll have to check on that file, because I haven't even seen the Ranaswami's! Would regenerating the Sims 2 folder in the documents folder help at all? Honestly I could try a full reinstallation if all else fails; I'm not one to get very attached to neighborhoods.

EDIT- I checked that file, it's there and seems to be unedited.