I took a break from playing Sims 4, but I'm back again! Before I post my Legacy family updates, I have a bit of a discovery I made when I returned to my game.
Disappearing Sims! When I loaded up my Legacy family, the first thing I noticed was my 2 elders, Braylen and Jacoby were missing from the household. I knew when I last played they were still active in the family. Considering Braylen is an Alien and has the long life attribute from his fitness career and Jacoby was nearing the end but I hadn't yet gotten the warning message, there was no reason for them to be gone.
I exited out of my game and headed to Mod the Sims and double checked my mods and CC to ensure that I had everything up to date for the latest patch. That all checked out. I discovered that MC Command Center was no longer hosted at Mod the Sims and had located to a new site (
MCCC Link). Updated all necessary files there. Reloaded my game, hovered over the household and all members appeared, loaded the lot and both elders disappeared again!
I then doubled checked my MCC settings to ensure that elders weren't being shipped out to retirements homes but everything looked to be set up properly.
I then took out my mods folder from my game completely, reloaded and both elders remained in the household. This indicated that the issue was indeed a mod/CC problem. I know the majority of the time when sims start disappearing, the blame is placed on culling, but in an active/played household culling shouldn't happen, especially when mods are in place to prevent culling from happening, which is why I didn't even consider it in the first place. I just had my suspicions that something in my mods folder was the culprit and when I loaded up my game mod free and my elders remained in place I knew I was on the right track.
|
Mods folder Organization |
I organize my mods folder pretty rigidly to help with situations like this. So I started out with adding back in the items I didn't think were the cause of the problem. I started by adding in the Build Mode, CAS and Items Folders. Reloaded my game and the Elders were still present.
Added back in MCC expecting my elders to disappear. I thought that maybe I had something set up incorrectly in regards to my elders and played households, what puzzled me was my missing elders didn't show up anywhere in household management either, they just disappeared from all existence including the family tree. When I loaded back up again however, my elders were still in the family, so MCC wasn't the culprit. That left the script mods folder, which contains about 20 mods in total, the majority of these just designed to make the game more tolerable to me. Darker loading screens, blur removals, no maxis loading screens, no glowing fruit trees, that type of thing, nothing that should affect the rendering of an elder. I returned those mods to my game folder and reloaded. Once again everything loaded as expected.
Down to the final few. I had 5 mods all by the same creator and when I returned that group to the mods folder and reloaded, my elders disappeared! Took the group of mods out, they returned. Now, I don't have anything against the creator, let me make that perfectly clear!
I returned to Mod the Sims in fact and pulled up the info on each of the mods in question and discovered that one of them was actually tagged as obsolete! In the long run, it was my own fault, having a mod in my game that was no longer useable, but it did take some trial and error to discover and locate it. Once I removed the mod in question, for anyone wondering, it was a mod that removed the annoying walkstyles.. the knees together "gotta pee" walk, the shoulders slumped "tired" walk and what was affecting my elders was the "elder" walkstyle being replaced by a normal walkstyle by the mod, causing them to disappear when the script didn't recognize the mod as it had been made obsolete by a patch while I was no longer playing.
As soon as I removed the mod from my folder, everything is back to how it should be and my game is once again working fine with all my elders in place!