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r/sims2help Wiki: The Sims 2 Corruption Guide

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corruption

# April Black's Deep Dive on Corruption

April Black has an amazing deep dive on corruption - this video debunks most of the common myths you will hear about corruption and explains everything in great depth. We highly recommend watching it if you want to know more about corruption! She has also made a video about squiggly lines explaining exactly what the difference is between the types of squiggly thought bubbles.

# What is this corruption everyone is talking about?

Please read the entirety of these sections on corruption as there is a lot of misinformation and misconceptions around it that are clarified and explained. It may sound scary especially when reading stories from people on the internet but it's really not something you need to stress over and you should play your game normally - certainly do not allow fear of corruption to prevent you playing the game!

Game corruption occurs when you modify the files in your install location, by interacting with object NPCs like the Grim Reaper or Mrs. Crumplebottom in ways that you shouldn't (eg. moving them into your house). Here is a list of NPCs that are safe and unsafe to play with.

Neighbourhood corruption is what occurs when specific data for a sim is missing within a neighbourhood (e.g. what happens when deleting a character file).

If your game is corrupt (highly unlikely, but you can check the date on your objects.package/other install files to be sure - how to do this is covered in the next section), the only thing you can do is uninstall your game and reinstall it, unless you have a clean copy of your objects.package file, or whichever file was modified - feel free to make a post if you need a fresh version of a file and someone will likely send it to you! If uninstalling, be sure to follow this guide on uninstalling correctly or you may face issues when trying to reinstall the game. This type of corruption is rare, and is the only reason you should uninstall and reinstall the game - it's not useful or necessary for fixing other issues.

Hood corruption - which is when a neighbourhood rather than the game is corrupt - is more likely to occur and will not affect your game's installation or other hoods, but it is still rarer than you would think. Hood corruption is largely caused by antivirus software or OneDrive eating the games files these days (or the file limit on MacOS), which is why it is crucial to prevent them from interfering with the game's save and installation files.

If you'd like to learn more about corruption, how to avoid it, and the differences between game and hood corruption please do read this guide - this wikia page has been updated to clear up the previous misconceptions and outdated info, but please bear in mind many other wikia pages are still very outdated and many contain blatantly incorrect information. If you are unsure about anything, always feel free to make a thread and ask - but most importantly remember that corruption is largely not a problem, and the biggest threats to your game are external (antivirus, OneDrive, and playing on MacOS).

# The Objects Package and How to Make It Read Only

If you made an object NPC (those in your objects.package, listed on the page linked above) selectable, or messed with them in any other unintended way, your game may be corrupt. One way to ensure that your game never goes corrupt is to make all of your installation files read-only - this will not help if you have already done something to modify the objects.package (the main file that is likely to be modified - now is a good time to make a backup!), it is a preventative measure. Read only means that the game will not be able to change those files.

Your objects.package is located in the TSData/Res/Objects folder of your latest pack (by their release date, not by when you installed them) - Mansion and Garden Stuff (SP9 in Fun with Pets, the exe being EP9) is the very last pack released, though the Store Edition (EP99 in collection packs such as Double Deluxe, Fun with Pets, etc.) supersedes it so you should be looking there if you have it. Otherwise, look at the dates the packs were released to see your latest one, if you don't have all of them or don't have Mansion and Garden or the Store edition. See here for install locations on Windows (for discs, UC, games4theworld, oldgamesdownload) and here for the install locations on MacOS.

If your objects.package is read-only, it shouldn't be able to be modified so it should be safe, but you can check the "date modified" on the package anyway if you like. For the Origin UC, it should be a date in 2014 or 2015. For the discs, it should be 2008 at the latest. For other versions like MrDJ/oldgamesdownload, it would probably be around the same time as the discs, or at least a few years old anyway and not the current year.

You should make all of the files in your installation location read-only - the objects.package is not the only that can be accidentally modified so it is best to make them all read-only and save yourself some hassle trying to replace any modified files!

# Misconceptions About Corruption / What Won't Corrupt Your Hoods / What Is Not A Sign

Note that many things commonly mentioned as causing corruption by simmers in the community (e.g. On Youtube, Tumblr, Modthesims) are not actually an issue and won't cause corruption. These misconceptions have been common for a while and as result can be pervasive in the community. However, they have been debunked with sources provided and so you do not need to worry about these things!

- You will find it rather commonly stated that deleting sims by deleting them from the sim bin or deleting graves/urns caused hood corruption - there is no evidence that this is the case and this is supported by well known modders such as J.M. Pescado (owner of the site moreawesomethanyou, created many useful mods such as the Batbox), Chris Hatch (who has created expansions for the game) and LazyDuchess (who has done a lot of reverse engineering of the game). All evidence shows that it is not problematic to delete sims from the bin/delete graves or urns (these deletions function in the same way). You can learn more about this here and here as well as from this Reddit comment - many people may still not feel comfortable deleting sims due to the many years of hearing how bad it is (including from well known modders such as Mootilda, who created the HoodChecker) but all indications are that the previous information was incorrect, and based on the evidence it is safe to delete sims/graves/urns.

- Similarly, saving with ghosts active on the lot may sometimes cause the game to delete their tombstones (and thus some will say it causes corruption) but for the same reasons outlined above this won't corrupt your hood.

- Additionally, moving occupied lots (those with sims or urns/graves on them) to the lot bin won't cause corruption. However, when you place the lot down again, the game will create stub files for every sim who had a relationship with the sims in the lot. This can result in a lot of extra character files being added to the hood so it is not recommended to do this, or at least not frequently or without clearing some references up first in SimPe.

- Saving with sims on the phone won't cause corruption. If you save with sims on the phone and a hood reset (which occurs when you install a new pack or install/uninstall particular mods) happens, you will have some offworld loiterers on the lot which can be removed with the Batbox/Lot Debugger.

- Having too many Sims is also a non-issue. The character file limit is 32767 per hood - that's like having about 300 generations of sims with 100 sims in each generation, in one hood! You are highly unlikely to ever hit this limit. You can still use the no respawn mods if you want to keep the number of sims in your hood low but it's not strictly necessary from an anti-corruption perspective. Some users have mentioned they noticed issues when a hood has a large number of files (e.g. 2000+) so you may want to limit your character files if you are concerned about that. If you are on MacOS, you may still want to use these mods to keep the character limit down - please read the "Mac File Limit" section in the MacOS section of the wiki to learn more.

- It's safe to move (occupied or unoccupied) lots around within a hood.

- It's also safe to bulldoze lots and to delete lots (occupied or unoccupied) from the lot bin.

- Uninstalling mods that create tokens (such as ACR) will not cause corruption even if you don't remove the tokens. This is an old misconception - it's even mentioned in the documentation for ACR 1 that you need to uninstall the tokens before removing the mod, but not in ACR 2, and ACR 2 doesn't even have an uninstall tokens option as it's not necessary. It's completely safe to remove mods that create tokens.

- Mods that create memories are another matter, and you should take care to keep the memory file if you are removing a mod that generates memories, or use SimPE to delete the custom memories from all sims who have them. This is explained further in the CC/Mod Information section of the wiki.

- Missing/blank ("blue") want/fear slots are not something to worry about, it can be as a result of mods (such as AdultsGoSteady) or it may just happen sometimes without mods as well. An easy way to get wants to reroll is to go to a community lot, go on a date, or have a sim go to sleep and wake up again.

- Duplicated/cloned sims are also not something to worry about - it's a common bug in apartments where a sim will be duplicated possibly many, many times. The BatBox may be able to fix it (possibly with Fix > Bad Apartment Residencies) and is a very useful object to have in general to fix many issues (such as invisible sims, which is also not a sign of corruption but a bug that occurs at the top of the Natural Science and Law Enforcement careers). If that doesn't fix it, you can move the sim out and back into the lot and the duplicates should be gone.

- The Ottomas and Crittur families will not cause corruption. If you have the Ultimate Collection (from Origin or games4theworld, or the disc repack from MrDJ/Oldgamesdownload), the Super Collection on MacOS, or if you have the discs with the Seasons patch applied, then there is no issue at all with the families. If you have the discs without the Season patch applied, then the pregnant sims in these families will have a father assigned to the pregnancy, which could be another sim, a pet, or an object NPC such as the Grim Reaper (it depends on which sim in the hoods matches the ID of the father that is provided by the game). You should use a mod like the Sim Blender to terminate the pregnancy or correctly set the father in SimPE prior to the birth to avoid this as this is in itself corruption - it can be fixed in SimPE but requires several edits if the birth already took place.

- Sims attempting to introduce you to unsafe, object NPCs (such as the Therapist, Baby New Year, Santa Claus, etc.) is not a sign of corruption but it is a bug - you can get mods such as Reputation New Friend Fix and Networking Friend Fix which will prevent this from happening.

- Mods and Custom Content do not cause corruption - removing very specific mods (eg. those that create NPCs) can cause neighbourhood corruption if you don't keep the character files in either your Downloads or hood folder when removing the mod but the mods and CC themselves do not cause corruption.

- Rolling a want and fear for the same thing is not a sign of corruption, it's an intended feature - people can desire and fear something in real life too, like having a baby, which you will also see in game.

- Testing cheats ("boolProp") will not corrupt or otherwise cause issues in your game - just don't select any cheat option which you do not understand. It's perfectly safe to leave the cheat on 24/7, and will allow you to view error dialogs (note it does not cause them, simply allows them to be seen in game).

# How to avoid corruption

The key things to avoid doing to prevent hood corruption are as follows:

- Deleting character files from the Characters folder - this is quite different to deleting from the sim bin/deleting graves or urns, and definitely should not be done as it will cause hood (not game) corruption, because it leaves null references lying around
- Using the deleteAllCharacters cheat - this is the same as deleting files in the Characters folder but on the scale of the entire neighbourhood.
  - Technically, it is okay if you do cleanup afterwards. From April Black: "It certaintly won't blow up your game, I have used it, the cheat is not as messy as I previously thought (the good thing about it is that it does clear out memories, so no $Subject). You can remove all dangling SWAFs with HoodChecker. However, I still don't recommend it for neighborhoods that you want to play for a long time - it shouldn't cause a BFBVFS, but it's just much better & cleaner to create a neighborhoods with no Sims to begin with. Sims Wiki has a good guide on that."
- Remove a mod that creates an NPC from your Downloads folder when you have loaded a hood with the mod in place (even if you didn't play with the mod, if it was in your Downloads folder when you opened the hood, the NPC is now a character in that hood), this is like deleting a character file. You can read more about this and similar mods that cause issues if not uninstalled correctly in the mods section of our wiki.
- Crashing (or power outages) while saving may cause issues as well. You may not be able to predict when crashes will occur but what you can do is save the game and then quit, rather than allowing the game to save while quitting, as crashes can occur when the game quits which may interrupt saving. The game also saves at other times such as when going to community lots or when you place objects/lots in the hood - ideally, zero crashes is best for your hood but of course we cannot always avoid that. This is why backups are important!
- Using OneDrive: this is a massive issue for hood corruption, as the default setting for OneDrive seems to include syncing the Documents folder (which is where your Sims 2 saves are located). OneDrive comes with Windows 10 by default. It is very important that you stop it syncing the game's files or you risk losing your hoods
- Antivirus software: although less likely to touch save files, antivirus software can be overzealous and will sometimes block files in the Documents folder (notably, several programs have blocked the creation of the config log for some reason). Add exceptions to your antivirus for the game's files to avoid this.

Additionally, never merge neighbourhood files or folders. If you have a neighbourhood folder in your Neighbourhoods folder, and you want to restore a backup of this hood, or install a clean version of hood using Meetme's templates, for example, then you need to delete the folder currently in your hoods folder before pasting in the folder that you want to replace it with. If a box pops up asking if you want to merge/replace the folders, click no and make sure you delete the folder you want to replace first.

To avoid game corruption:

- Don't attempt to interact with certain NPCs outside of their designated ingame purpose. However, if you do, and your objects.package is not read only, the main problem is that you will have potentially inconsistent behaviour, as it's very difficult to know exactly what has been modified in this package due to the sheer number of resources in it. E.g. if you modify the Grim Reaper to a certain extent, he will stop reaping souls so sims won't properly die. Please note: Messing with object NPCs is not a big of a deal as some would like to believe. There is an excellent comment on some experiments with these NPCs here. And also not that the sims wikia page on safe NPCs is very outdated and contains much incorrect information - only the very first list on NPCs in the objects.package is correct.
- Make your objects.package read-only as described in a previous section on this page.

To avoid corruption, you can install two helpful mods which won't alter your gameplay but will merely prevent issues. There are also plenty of quality of life mods listed here that will enhance your gameplay experience.

## Mods that cause corruption if removed

Please read this subsection in our CC/Mods information section for details on mods that can cause corruption if removed and how to avoid this.

# Clean Templates

The premade hoods which ship with the game have some issues with incorrect sim data and messed up relationships. Meetme2theriver's Clean Templates of the Maxis neighbourhoods are clean/fixed versions of the hoods, which fixed some inconsistencies with genetics, etc. However, you do not have to use the clean templates and it is fine to play with the hoods that shipped with the game, as many people have done for years though you may encounter some inconsistencies or borked genetics. It is a good idea to run Hoodchecker with the remove option on the Maxis hoods at least once, as mentioned here). There are also other "clean" versions of the premade hoods available which you can find on Modthesims and Tumblr, that change different things (for example, Meetme's templates remove many of the ancestors, which is a negative for some people. There are other templates which keep those ancestors while still removing junk data).

If you're playing on MacOS, please refer to the MacOS section of our wiki for info on installing clean templates.

# MacOS Specific Corruption

Please read the MacOS section of our wiki for info on Mac-specific corruption relating to the file limit on that OS as well as another bug.

# My game is a corrupt mess! What can I do? (i.e. Signs of Corruption)

That depends on the type of corruption, or if it even is corruption. Note that many things that people think are corruption are simply one off, random glitches - it's not corruption if you have pink flashing or if your sim won't stop giving birth, for example.

The vast, vast majority of issues people have with the game are mod/CC related - and normally it is due to not reading the description of a mod, particularly the section which details conflicts with other mods. You can use the 50-50 Method to find problematic mods and CC, and you should also use the Hack Conflict Detector Utility to find mod conflicts, which is linked in our wiki in the Mods Section.

Here are the known signs of corruption (taken from the Sims wiki article, some notes added):

- Children and toddlers with long-term/lifetime wants other than Grow Up. (Note, this would be normal if you aged a sim down from teen/adult/elder to one of these stages and not a sign of corruption in that case)
- Wants that don't fit the age group (e.g. a toddler who suddenly wants to go on a date. A toddler wanting to buy a plant is normal and not a sign of corruption).
- Memories being lost or totally random/containing $Subject (indicates a deleted character).
- Disappearing Sims.
- Disappearing lots.
- Sims losing family members in their family tree.
- Sims becoming unplayable.
- Lots becoming unplayable. (sometimes lots just get borked, not necessarily a sign if your hood is otherwise fine)
- Buy and Build Mode becoming indefinitely disabled. (sometimes caused by mods/CC, not necessarily a sign if the hood is otherwise okay)

Sims having inappropriate wants (toddlers wanting to woohoo is an example of this, romance sim wanting to get married is not - the latter can happen normally) also indicate corruption as well as toddlers or children having Lifetime Wants (LTW). Note, however, some premade children do have LTWs, and also if you age down an older sim to a toddler/child, they will retain the LTW.

Major signs of corruption are sims, lots, or even entire hoods disappearing (or hoods refusing to load at all/crashing, even in a fresh save folder with all CC removed).

If your hood cannot be read by SimPE or the Hoodchecker at all, that is also not a good sign and is likely corruption but there are exceptions - I (u/Mysterious_Potential) once found out that the reason someone's hood couldn't be read by any Sims 2 program was because they managed to accidentally rename every file in their hood folder to have no underscores, making the hood unreadable to the game. Random stuff like this happens, so don't necessarily write off your hood straight away!

To reiterate from a previous section, make backups, get the anti corruption mods, and just play your game. You don't need to obsess over corruption or attribute every issue to it, and chances are you will grow bored of a hood before anything happens to it. Even if your hood has a bunch of missing sims, it's still playable until it disappears or won't load without crashing!

# Hood Checker

You can use Mootilda's HoodChecker to check on your neighbourhoods for potential issues and fix faulty memories, wants, and fears. However, please be aware that The Sims 2 has a tendency to create temporary "relationships" with inanimate objects such as books, cars and so on. It does this to help the game remember which car the sim used to go to work, for example. They're safe to delete, but it's also okay not to. Most things that show up in Hoodchecker (eg. "Invalid relationship with self") are nothing to worry about. You should run Hoodchecker occasionally with the Remove button to remove any invalid references it detects, and the game will recreate the ones it needs.

If you have a "Missing Character File" line (or lines), it's most likely due to an NPC(s) that you have added to the game. People often don't realise that they have done this because they can be added as objects (eg. the surf mod has an NPC) and not just as sims. Here is an incomplete list of the CC which creates NPCs - it has their GUIDs listed so if you see that in Hoodchecker it's nothing to worry about. Even if it's not listed there, you can simply create a new hood and run the Hoodchecker on it. If the "Missing Character file" error shows with the same number, it's caused by a custom NPC and not a deleted sim. If you want to remove one of these custom NPCs, you need to copy the character file from the mod to the Characters folder of every hood that you've loaded since placing the mod in your game - even if you never used the mod in that hood.

Last revised by Mysterious_Potential 4 months ago
Created May 2, 2020
6 years ago
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- PAGE SECTIONS

- April Black's Deep Dive on Corruption
- What is this corruption everyone is talking about?
- The Objects Package and How to Make It Read Only
- Misconceptions About Corruption / What Won't Corrupt Your Hoods / What Is Not A Sign
- How to avoid corruption
- - Mods that cause corruption if removed
- Clean Templates
- MacOS Specific Corruption
- My game is a corrupt mess! What can I do? (i.e. Signs of Corruption)
- Hood Checker

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