ATTENTION There is an error in the video. Looks like gossip about missing Sims *(with no character file)* CAN spread. Mind you, the experiment from 35:24 was not the only one I performed - I did a whole series of mischief trying to get the Sims to gossip about missing characters, in so many different configurations, modded & vanilla game, RPC launcher or no launcher - and I just couldn't do it. I don't know why it didn't work during my tests, guess my Sims just didn't feel like gossiping🤷‍♀ But yeah, Sims CAN spread $Subject memories via gossip, I managed to trigger this yesterday whilst testing something else. So apologies for including inaccurate information! Don't worry too much about them though - HoodChecker is good at detecting them (they will be marked as [Invisible] in the log) and you can use the Batbox to easily clear gossip. I do recommend running HoodChecker before you backup your game, just as a general health check. Also, *DELTEING SIMS FROM THE BIN IS STILL FINE*, regardless :) But maybe don't delete character files lol. On the upside, I have some VERY interesting discovery about the squiggly lines, looks like I finally cracked this mystery :) It will be the topic of my next little video, so stay tuned. Thank you so much for leaving this many lovely comments! You asked a lot of questions as well (which makes me very happy, please keep asking!). Some of them popped up multiple times, so... FAQ Q: How to detect deleted Sim Descriptions (i.e. the adult male placeholders) other than in game? A: HoodChecker - the memories section! You will see the "Incorrect Subject Instance" errors for memories about that Sim, even if they never moved neighborhoods, since their Sim ID will stay the same (because the character file is unchanged), but they get a new Sim Description, and therefore new NID. This is the ONLY instance of "Incorrect Subject Instance" errors that is actually a cause for concern. I don't know why I didn't mention it in the video, it's pretty important 🤦‍♀ Q: If the Sim moves to college, are they switching neighborhoods? (i.e. does the game generate stub character files)? A: No. All subhoods (including college campuses) are still part of the main neighborhood. They all use the same Neighborhood.package and the same Characters folder. Q: If you have to backup the game so often, what's the point of even playing the game? That means corruption is still a cause for concern, right? A: You don't have to make backups as often as me, but I would argue that you SHOULD regularly backup everything that you are emotionally attached to :) That includes The Sims 2 saves, but also stuff like pictures, documents and save files from other games that you spent hours on. Yes, the game is prone to crashing on modern machines (hello pink soup), and a crash can corrupt your save file. But you can also lose save files to OneDrive, overzealous antiviruses or a simple power outage, or even your hard drive can die due to shock damage if you play on a laptop, and that's nothing to do with the game. It's just good practice, that doesn't mean you should be afraid of playing The Sims 2 :) Q: Will rolling the pacifier/testing stuff in CAS affect the Sim Creation Index? A: No. You need to save a family in order for a new Sim Creation Index value to be commited. You get blanks when you create a family, cancel one or two Sims, but then decide to save the family anyway. Q: If you manually clear out family ties and memories, will the game still generate the stubs after moving Sims between neighborhoods? A: Looks like... no! I performed some tests a few days ago and it seems like you can move Sims between neighborhoods without dragging half the hood with them if you clean up memories & family ties. Q: What about NPCs? How do they affect corruption? A: I had to limit the scope of this video, so that is my next big focus. Right now I can tell you that these two actions on UNIVERSAL NPCs do modify your objects.package: adding them to your playable household & having kids with them. I am still not sure what is the extent of the changes and what that means to your game. Also, I still can't see how adding NPCs that *do* have a character file is supposed to corrupt your neighborhood, it seems like they function just like playable Sims and the game generates their replacements, but again, it's still under investigation, so maybe don't mess around with NPCs for now :) Q: Is it okay to use deleteAllCharacters, then? A: 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. Q: What are your plans for this channel? A: I do want to make more videos, but I won't commit to a regular upload schedule, since having a full time job makes it a bit more difficult :) Also, I came back to potentially writing a new version of HoodChecker. I won't make any promises just yet, but I have started refactoring the code and it's looking good so far. When it's in an acceptable state, I will make my GitHub repository public and I will probably need testers at some point. Stay tuned! I might add more questions here, so feel free to check back on this comment :)

The hood corruption guide on the wiki always felt more like a creepypasta than something trustworthy xD

Didn't think I'd be watching Bella Goth talk about corruption for two hours this week but it's a welcome surprise nonetheless

This is implied several times during the video but I wanna make it clear: the fact that you can see *signs of corruption does not mean the game is badly coded, but quite the opposite*. It is very VERY easy for invalid data to completely crash an application; and the fact that the game not only does not crash, but keeps trying to make sense of whatever data is left and to show placeholders means that they went above and beyond to create robust code. It is impressive how well it works, given that, as we learned, Sim info is spread throughout several linked data tables AND given that there's arbitrary code running in the game (mods) that can mess up those tables. That's a programmers nightmare.

I just think it's incredible that after 18 years this game is not only still being played by a large audience, but that new discoveries are still being made to this day. Not to mention all the amazing modders and custom content creators keeping the game fresh.

this entire situation really feels like the epitome of "you think people would go on the internet just to lie?"

'Some people have all the anti corruption mods and use hood checker regularly and never make back ups' It's me, I'm the baddie

the language around corruption is so scary. i feel like ppl forget how robust the game actually is, and how well-coded it is. there was a point in time where i was a bit scared to do normal gameplay because i was anxious about corruption. whenever a bug or a glitch happened i'd be like *ah well it was fun playing*. it was a crazy time shjfsk

It's very interesting how the myth that deleting sims using the bin would corrupt your neighborhoods became widespread and accepted as truth across the community. it's like a classic example of "if something is told repeatedly enough times and for long enough, it becomes the truth"

Yeah, when I thought about it logically, deleting the character file seemed a lot more dangerous than using the bin in the game, because I noticed a lot of that Sim still stays and it just felt safer for references. Thank you for the work!!!

It's insane so many people thought the Sims 2 was the most unstable game in the whole franchise, considering all the failsafe the programmers coded. Sims 3 couldn't run more than a few expansion packs at once, and Sims 4 still has countless micro bugs in normal gameplay that constantly get fixed and broken (presumably because it was never meant to be the game it is today, it was supposed to be always online). Sims 2 looks like if you don't do anything stupid your save will play for years

Something about how a good chunk of reasons for glitches is "and/or playing on a mac" is just so funny to me

The Sims wiki also has a horrible policy of documenting sims as having the unused power aspiration when sims actually have no aspiration due to corrupted data. The numerical codes for having the 'nothing' aspiration and power are completely different in SimPE.

"this sim has a relationship with her bed" ok me too tf

I really hope Plumbella watches this. It will 100% help her understand the lore she loves from a technical perspective!

1:34:42 Obviously the answer to what happened is that Lilith punched Angela so hard, she knocked her clear out of the timeline and out of existence.

All this fear-mongering about how badly programmed The Sims 2 is and how easy it is to "corrupt" your game, but it turns out it's possibly the safest and most well-thought-out entry in the series. It always confused me how such an outstanding game with lots of heart and dedication clearly poured into it, can be considered a ticking bomb. Turns out it was just people playing a game of telephone and misinterpreting harmless little bugs as signs of impending doom. Like yeah, it's not flawless and there are hiccups and issues, but nothing out of the ordinary for something as complex as a life simulation game.

Absolutely flabbergasted to learn that deleting Sims in the bin/deleting gravestones, the *"number one DO NOT DO THIS UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES"* rule I've heard for years is actually safe. This video is SO good and informative, and it definitely eased some worries I have as a barely-tech-literate person with major glitch/file corruption anxiety who shudders at the mere THOUGHT of having to open SimPE (Genuinely the tech anxiety once got so bad that for like a solid year the mere action of turning on my laptop made me literally sick with dread. Unrelatedly, I apparently have a panic disorder- )

I love how the Sims 2(and 3) players have been so dedicated to helping the game run to it's possibly-most-solid state. Most games run on a proverbial combination of wd-40, duct tape and a dream, and while modding is so common in a lot of games, even game fixes and QoL improvements, there's just something special about sims 2 mods.

Girl you already KNOW you're gonna have to do the sims 3 next

The whole "deleting sims from the bin will corrupt your game!" thing was always so weird to me - I ALWAYS delete sims from the bin. I don't want the Ottomas family hanging about, or random other sims interacting with mine when I never played with those households - and it just made me feel better to see an empty sim bin. I never once had an issue, and thought it was so strange that people claimed it caused problems. Been playing since 2004, still haven't had a single problem related to sims bin deleting. It's so nice to see this being cleared up!

Just as a heads up to people: Don't completely trust Sims the Wiki. It's editors are a bunch teenagers(now young adults) who takes advantage of the Sims online traffic and spreads misinformation about all the games. They mean well, but the harm they've done has been community shaping. Example is they kept coming up with the constant "timeline inconsistencies" as "Everyone is on the Elixir of Life/Dyed their hair because of model differences". Edit: Forgot to mention, they have a bad habit of ignoring corrections or debunking of their own incorrect information. This is not meant to slander them, just a warning that a lot of the Wiki's information will be incorrect.

I absolutely “adore” that narrative on forums that if you did something someone told you not to do, then you are the one to blame for bugs. I remember playing for hours in my childhood and even playing with simpe & cheats and nothing actually happens I also want to know about ‘dangerous’ interactions with npcs and what it can cause

using the sims 2 to teach good programming practices is amazing and i kind of love this specific niche

I'm so happy that this misinformation is finally being cleared up after so long and that the Sims Wiki FINALLY removed the misinfo. Thanks for the video! ❤❤

no memories, no skills, no career history, no personality? finally people like me represented in video games

I woke up from a nightmare about corruption, and I naturally searched for videos to calm myself down and oh boy, this was exactly what I needed. This video is a solid masterpiece, and I’m thankful for all the time and effort you put into this.

I dare to say that it's the most important video for the sims 2 community that was ever created. Finally we have a reliable source debunking this enormous myth of corruption that scaries everyone and keeps possible new players away. It's amazing how many wrong concepts existed through the years that occurred to be just wrongly interpreted/misunderstood pieces of information scattered around the internet forums. I'm in complete awe for the amount of work you put into making it and thank you very much for it, it was really informative and fascinating video

"Deleting sims from the family bin causes corruption" is the simmer's "it's illegal to drive with your interior lights on"

As a former MATY member, it's "good" to see that place hasn't changed in 15+ years, glad this got recommended!

Okay, is safe to delete sims from the bin. But like, is more fun to kill a Sim off if you need to get rid of them! WHY THE HECK would you want to DELETE the Sim in first place LOL Jokes aside - This video is AMAZING! You did such a great job in it April, congratulations and thank you so much for making this!

I've been watching and reading a lot about TS2 corruption lately and have been following some of your posts about it, so I was very happy to see this video pop up. It's funny, I remember having so many problems with presumed corruption as a kid, enough to the point that I ran to the forums begging for help-but when I try to remember what issues I actually had (besides crashing), I just... can't. I definitely messed around in ways I probably shouldn't have, though: moving occupied lots between neighborhoods, fiddling with testing cheats in ways I didn't understand... When I confessed to deleting Sims from the bin, I remember being so horrified as other forum users told me my game was corrupted and would destroy itself in a BFBVFS. Like, I was maybe 10. Shit was scary. (In retrospect, a lot of my problems were probably thanks to MacOS absolutely hating Sims games lol.) I find it really interesting to think about how TS2 is so prone to these kinds of problems specifically because it has the most detailed and interconnected systems of any of the games, and therefore, the most potential points of failure. As you mention, so many pieces of data are spread across so many separate files-want trees being so complex that they need to be stored separately; lots containing data about Sims that have occupied or visited them, what they did while they were there, which items they used and how often... Any failure in syncronization or communication between these files, and things start to go wrong. Of course, this is also why so many people consider this game to be the best in the series. Sure, it may be lacking in open worlds or fancy build tools or certain quality of life features, but none of the other games ever took the risk again of making the Sims themselves so fleshed-out, multifaceted, and enjoyable to play with-and I'm certain no future game ever will. The Sims 2's greatest strength is also its greatest downfall, but in my opinion the tradeoff is worth it any day.

I always thought corruption sounded like some kind of magical eldritch horror. Nice to know that that's because it's mostly the product of magical thinking! Thanks for your hard work. You've made me feel much better about the game and about how these things work.

first of all: congratulations on finishing this incredible video!! this has truly been the most anticipated video of the year for me, and it certainly did not disappoint! all your hard work investigating and experimenting shows ❤️ my opinion on corruption has changed a lot since i began researching for my corruption series, and i truly regret being so hyperbolic and contributing to the spreading of misinformation initially. so now i try to do my best to rectify these mistakes and i hope one day i can make a video as brilliant as yours! this video is exactly what we need! i’m working on the bluewater village video at the moment and i still have a few sections to record and edit, with one addressing whether sims were improperly deleted or not, and i wanted to use examples like what hoodchecker may pick up - like swafs not belonging to any sim, or relationships with sims who seemingly don’t exist - but present forward the theories that a) unassigned swaf records seem to just... generate, for whatever reason and b) hoodchecker may be incorrectly interpreting object ids as sim nids, thus flags normal relationships like the ones between sims and beds as being between a nonexistent sim and a valid sim. however, i was unsure how to go about backing up these claims. but now, thanks to your research, i feel more confident in sharing this information! it feels so nice that i won’t have to just be like ‘so there’s a possibility hoodchecker could be mistaking object ids for nids, but idk for sure’ you know haha apologies for talking about myself here, but i just really wanted to tell you how i have been waiting patiently (and very excitedly, lol) for this video! excellent job! and thank you SO much for recommending my videos! i feel a little starstruck haha now go enjoy playing this game without needing to spawn a hundred toddlers in the hopes that one would inherit an improperly deleted sim’s nid 🤣

As someone who has a phobia connected to glitches (especially visual ones in realistic games, like The Sims franchise) I've always been terrified of corruption in The Sims 2. It also made watching some parts of the video frightening (especially missing aspirations part and sims being pets, the latter will for sure give me nightmares), but it was all so worth it! What you, Lazy Duchess, Pescado and others have done is an absolute blessing for the whole TS2 community and I want to thank you for that, because understanding how everything works makes playing the game so much more bearable and enjoyable! I hope this video will get more recognition, because the amount of important info on corruption is insane and it's a must-watch for any The Sims 2 lover!

How is this not on the NEWS 😱 I’ve been playing sims 2 since I was a kid, and I’ve always deleted sims with the family bin and have NEVER had an issue, I thought I was just lucky 😅 thank you so much for all your hard work and efforts with this. It is greatly appreciated. I may have to watch a few more times to understand it but for me, knowing that you can delete sims in the bin is a weight off the shoulders

I can't be the only one that keeps coming back to rewatch this every now and then, right? lmao

Finally, i can breath through. As an older Sims 2 player i remember how many hours and days, months and years i've invested to trying solve the problems myself, finding solutions. And this is it. I'm so thankful to our community for people like you April, who has answers for us. Honestly, i feel so free now, because i don't have to stress out anymore because of some problems because of this game. It helps me immense, although i'm not a techy person myself and i don't understand programming like at all, is not my table. I have a better view now on everything and i'm so endlessly happy, so many things you are talking about is so much understandable. Finally someone who explains it in a better way. A thousand thank you, you've just made my day.

Cannot put into words how gobsmacked I was to see this is the only video on your channel. This is a SUPER high level of quality, I super appreciate your thoroughness into a topic I honestly wasn't interested in until now. Good stuff o7

Wow this video is so well researched and helpful. I was never really that worried about corruption or paying close attention to it (though I was vaguely aware of it,) until I reinstalled the game in 2020 and my hood got badly messed up lol. But I have to say after I started making videos experimenting with things that are supposed to cause corruption (even game corruption,) I've realised just how hard it is to properly break the game. I killed off about 100 sims and deleted their graves at one point lol, and nothing has happened since, so I'm not surprised to hear that doesn't actually cause corruption. I also often use the Sims Wiki as a source (which I probably shouldn't rely on so much as anyone can edit it and they don't always provide sources/proof etc.) A lot of the info there is accurate but there's also a bunch of stuff that I've found isn't while testing (or at least wasn't replicable in the version of The Sims 2/3 I tried it in.) Also thanks for the shoutout. :)

i'm so glad you took the time to dispel these myths, AND did enough research to come up with a plausible account of how "deleting sims from the bin will corrupt your game" could have started in the first place! thank you for sharing with us, this was so so cool to hear about all the technical details and the ways that superstitions spread.

This video made me finally download the Sims 2, and be blown away by the detail that the game has. Sidenote: Sims 4 seems to actually do the full deletion including the references, as a sim with a dead parent and a step-parent saved to the library will lose all connections, including the original parent, upon re-adding them to the game in a new save.

13:30 love the kevin callout

the way i link this video to every "HALP!!!! CORRUPTION????" post

As someone who is Autistic with a special interest in computer science and logic. I absolutely LOVE your content!! Keep it up! Its amazing and fascinating to me! 💙💙

Thank you for making this video! I feel like the Internet, especially the early 2000s Internet, has a habit of uncritically spreading what are essentially modern day superstitions without question. I've literally had people tell me they refuse to play the game because they are utterly convinced it's running on life support and will implode and die and probably break your whole computer if one thing goes slightly wrong. I'm a complete fool when it comes to technology and I've never had any problems with my game corrupting the hysteria is way overblown. Edit: ngl in retrospect all the "don't delete tombstones/mess with ghosts or your game will be CURSED" was definitely more the product of the video game creepypasta golden era than anything based in the programming.

Back in early days, like the first few years of the game being out, it wasn't a common thing to advise against deleting sims from the bin. In fact, I remember being confused when I first encountered it. As you say, why would a developer include an option to do something that would ruin the code? But it was absolutely advised that you shouldn't delete character files from your game folder, which clearly still holds unless you wanna fiddle in simpe.

I know absolutely 0 about coding but as a long-time Sims 2 enjoyer who certainly has had "don't delete sims it'll break your game!!1" into their head (despite actually never experiencing any noticable corruption in my game) this was SO interesting to watch through! Props on the efforts taken to break all these concepts down to something easy to digest even for a layman like me lol

Loved the cat after toddlers with lifetime wants!!! cute

Omg finally a voice of reason! I appreciate all of the HARD work it must have taken you to put this together, not only to complete the study itself but to produce this incredibly detailed and easy to digest video. I'm one of those who have been a complete sceptic of corruption as a whole, because I've never heard or read any convincing arguments - just anecdotal evidence and speculation about some sort of lurking corruption bogeyman. But you explained it so thoroughly and so logically that I feel like I understand it finally, I can't thank you enough for that. There are two mysteries that's been boggling my mind for a while now, and I feel like after this video, I am at least one step closer to understanding what could be happening. First one is: sometimes, sims randomly get romantic relationships with each other. Like: all of a sudden, they show up with wedding rings on their fingers, being married (or engaged to, or in love with) someone they have never met. After discussing this with others, it appeared that it might be connected to whatever the Hood Checker does to broken relationships. After watching your video though, it seems that maybe that's not the case after all, but rather the game filling in missing data in the background if needed... That's very interesting. Second one is that I've noticed that character files are generating in my character folder sometimes, looking like a copy of an already existing one. As for example, I have both a "N001_User00447" and a "N001_User00447.1" character file. I suppose that is a sign that at some point, the game tried to save on the "N001_User00447" file, but it was reserved by something else, so it created a "N001_User00447.1" file? Just speculating here, but as I said, I feel like I might be one step closer to an answer after your video. Thank you so much, you blew me away with this one 🤯, and I can't believe this was your first video ever? It's so well done! Huge kudos! ⭐

Awesome video. Thank you for really diving into the code. I get really annoyed when people disparage the Sims devs and their hard work. People don't know just how incredibly ambitious the game and its systems were for 2005.

This is one of the best examples of explaining a deeply technical topic to a non-programming audience I have ever seen.

I feel so changed, my whole life was reset by this video, I am currently studying dentistry but MY GOD WHEN I FINISH no one can stop me from getting an degree in computers. YOU ARE MY ROLE MODEL

My brother once had a toddler straight up disappear mid game when he was in a family of two parents, and 2 other kids. He put it in the high chair, paid attention to some other things, tried to find it, and there was no evidence of it. It was gone from the family panel as well. We didn't think to check the memories or any sorts of files because we were relatively young and naive to that sort of stuff. There was no chime that a social worker came, the kid was just straight up gone. It's been so long since that happen, so there may have been a save and exit at some point, but from my memory it just evaporated mid-game.

It does make sense now that they “soft deleted” or his Bella Goth. The point is that she wasn’t dead, but was gone and couldn’t be brought back.

Okay, stop everyone. First of all I have to thank you for this video, my mind has blown but now I feel that all my stress about corruption has suddenly flown away and I have to write a very long comment. I've always been a very skeptical and paranoid person and when I saw that suddenly The Sims Wiki changed the guide about corruption saying that deleting sims doesn't cause corruption, after years of that information, I admit I was very angry. In my head I thought "how?! how it's possible that something that has been like this for years has now been debunked? We have proof that the game gets corrupted by deleting sims!" I'm stupid but curious, so I started researching various forums, looking for why people said that many things didn't really corrupt the neighborhood, but the answers never convinced me. "Because I think it's not a danger", "because I saw that X's save is still intact after years" and "because all the information the game needs is present" weren't answers for me. Finally thanks to this video I understood what all this meant. I'm part of a small Italian community of The Sims 2 players and I've been pestering everyone with these corruption rules to keep their neighborhoods from becoming corrupted. Eventually we all became paranoid and ended up having nightmares at night where we dreamed our neighborhoods were corrupted…and now…everything is clear. I don't think, coward and paranoid as I am, I'll ever delete any sims or tombstomes, but at least now I'll play much more relaxed.

Keep in mind, a lot of Sims 2 information was created during it’s release and expansions. The player-base was more diverse than the original title, which drew in more casuals, mostly younger children. You would often see on the top of many google searches of posts about the Sims 2 made by children as young as 11, based on their message board signature. It would make sense why there’s so many contradictory statements concerning the game’s mechanics and under the hood events (when does Ghost appearances occur, calculations at the start of a new day or right before the start of the haunting; for example). It feels like school yard misinformation passed around for nearly 2 decades. Good on you to provide facts and evidence, rather than just blindly accept what’s written on a wiki.

Just fyi, the hexadecimal system doesn't reference the 0x00 at the beginning of the sims neighbor ID number, it's only referencing the last two numbers in the ID. I'm sure you (April) probably already know that, but just in case anyone else needs to know that information. Also, great video!! Idk if you ever play The Sims Medieval, April, but if you could do a deep dive on the modding process and community for that game (similar to this video), that would be so amazing! I feel like that game often slips through the cracks in regards to sims youtubers, and it still has an active modding community.

I'm obsessed with this video (and about squiggly lines one). I keep rewatching it on the background over and over. Help

I... I don't even play the Sims, nor do I do any coding or anything, but this still has been so fascinating all the way through. I cannot explain why, but the presentation and audio balancing is definitely very solid, along with the scripting and explanations making mostly sense even with me having zero Sims 2 experience and extremely little coding experience.

I have to be honest. Have been playing Sims 2 ever since it came out, and never experienced or heard about corruption until I joined the community moat recently. I've deleted tombstones for years no problem

After watching this for two hours and struggling to understand, I can only say one word about this video and the creator... Masterpiece!

Great video. Probably the most fascinating part of this story is this myth itself. It's easy to forget as a programmer just how mysterious and almost mystical computers are to most people.

Your research lifted a HUGE weight off of my shoulders. I've been playing the same neighborhood since the beginning of the pandemic, and, early on, I accidentally bulldozed an entire graveyard instead of a vacant lot like I meant to, and I've been paranoid about corruption setting in ever since, to the point that I stopped playing The Sims 2 entirely for almost 2 years! Not only that, but I've been even more paranoid recently because, a few days ago, I accidentally moved out of a house without taking a sim's urn with me, and, when I went back for it, it had disappeared along with the furniture, and then the game proceeded to crash! Over the past few days, I ran the corruption checker several times and made backups after every Sims session. What a relief! Thank you so much!!!

I find this so interesting! I played a lot of Sims 2 as a tween but I was not involved with the community at all, so I had no idea about this myth. I deleted plenty of sims and messed around plenty, and never had any issues other than the occasional superficial bug.

I've been playing sims 2 since 2006 and have done almost every single "corruption no no" listed on the sims wiki. I never experienced widespread corruption, aside from occasional glitches, UNTIL playing on a mac within the past 2 years. My game recently corrupted over a few months - started with a disappearing sim, then lots, and now it won't even launch. Before this video, I thought I must have just gotten lucky all these years and that doing something like deleting a sim from the family bin had finally caught up to me. Now I'm thinking these issues are rooted in playing on a mac!

The first time I played Pleasantview, way back when I was eleven or so and playing on an absolute brick of a desktop, I deleted Daniel Pleasant from the bin. He still showed up in the family tree and I never noticed any corruption-related errors. Honestly, I'm surprised my game never actually exploded back then, because I did some things that were *objectively* VBTs in the "total game corruption" sense, like trying to add universal NPCs to households. Thanks for this video, April! It was informative and did a lot to relieve my anxieties.

As an avid Sims 2 fan and software engineer (I'm again realizing that growing up in and around TS2 made me do it) myself, all I can say this video is a masterpiece. It's fulfilling my nerdy dreams 😇 We need more!

I'm so glad that a video like this exists. Corruption in The Sims 2 has always been something that's been so fascinating to me, having a two hour discussion and research video related to it is a dream come true.

This gave me a insight into rigorously checking when a reference is empty and testing when an ID is reused. I haven't played The Sims in years, that shows how wonderful this community is! Thanks a lot for sharing

This is now my favorite documentary

I have long thought The Sims 2 to be the best installment in the series, and it is the game I have by and far played the LEAST of, purely out of fear of corruption. This video has been a game-changer for me (somewhat literally). I'm really excited to get back into TS2. Thank you

A video that's 2 hours long, incredibly well researched, and super interesting, AND your first video posted?? This is fucking rad!!!

April coming outta nowhere with an absolute BANGER of a video, goddamn. Really fun watch, was really surprised to go to the channel after watching and see it is the only video!

You've made so many research that it could make a whole PhD thesis 😍personally I never knew that everybody thought deleting a family from the family bin is going to harm your game, I've heard about the tombstone thing, but deleted them anyway and nothing ever corrupted 😅thank you for the research, it was amazingy interesting to listen to you as I've always loved the sims 2 related technical topics!

I'm relieved to learn it's safe to delete Sims from the lot bin. Now I don't have to manually murder all the pre-made Sims every time I start a new neighborhood in order to unclog the family bin and populate the cemetery to make it feel more "lived in".

BACKUPS, yes! One can never stress too much on their importance. And if anyone, like myself, finds it too tedious to create them manually, there are lots of free programs that strip down the entire process to basically a couple of clicks. Some can even automate it, if I'm not mistaken. Thank you for an extremely detailed analysis of this 🔥

i got recommended this by a sibling because i love watching long videos about things i've never heard of before- this was a really neat deep dive into the sims 2, and makes me want to boot it up on my old pc again! thank you for the entertaining video, i learned lots on a subject i never thought i'd care about and it was super interesting coming from knowing nothing. i hope you make more content in the future, i'll definitely be here to watch!

This video is an absolute game changer. Thank you so much for disproving the false information and letting us sims fanatics know that the Sims 2 is pretty safe to play. My girlfriend has been scared of trying out the Sims 2 because of corruption, so I sent this video to her and now she actually wants to try it out! Thank you sososososo much! :)

I don't play The Sims at all anymore, yet somehow this popped up in my recommended. This video single handedly got me interested in studying databases and SQL! Given how empty your channel is, if this really is your first foray into UKposts content production… wow, I'm impressed, and I'll be sticking around in the chance you ever put out as deep a dive as this into whatever interests you.

Thank you so much for this very very very thorough explanation of all the little fiddly things that happen to the game and if they are corruption or not, what is happening in the back end, and the research of the history of perpetuating the thought that deleting sims from the bin was considered a bad thing for years. I have shared this multiple times and hope it reaches every corner of the community so people can enjoy their games again and gain more understanding. I really appreciate all the work you've done to look into this and it was well woth the wait! I'm also happy to say Lord Crumps was kind enough to REDO my entire neighborhood from scratch so Kashmire 2.0 no longer has all that NID and index resetting weirdness experienced over the last 16 years. It also gave me the opportunity to make my own townies, dormies, etc and put in the pescado mods BEFORE all the extra sims generated. And I make regular back ups :D

As a fellow person in compsci: Thank you so much for posting this. This is so informative and well made, not only did I enjoy it a lot on a technical level but also learned a bunch of new things. Plus because I am intrigued now, I have to test the game on a Mac lol. Please keep doing these!

The art easel and guitar are the perfect props for a Sims video.

Glad to see this. I was also skeptical because I've deleted Sims from the sim bin for years with no issues. And I very much appreciate the complete explanations. I love learning this stuff but my brain is broken and struggles to gather and organize information in my head. I appreciate your work on it!

This needed to be made years ago, but I’m so glad it finally has been! Thank you for being willing to apply your expertise to this wildly elusive subject!! One thing I will say is we definitely (as you said) need to give the original development team a lot more credit than we have, but you can see how well they built the base TS2 game compared to later features in the series (like how buggy later titles like Sims 3 can be or even things like apartments that were built later in The Sims 2 series itself). You can tell by how complex this game is that The Sims 1 & 2 really were born from the same era of the franchise and how we unfortunately more than likely won’t get that back. Not even necessarily because of EA but just how so many games aren’t made this robust at launch anymore, at least in the eyes of a consumer like me who grew up with The Sims 1 & 2. It seems everything is about appearance over function, and that’s disappointing, but I’m glad we have people like you and many of the other people you mentioned like Lazy Duchess and more who keep this game relevant still today. It’s earned its status as one of the best games ever made for a reason.

I can't remember entirely what I did but a few years ago I think I attempted to retrieve a backup from the recycle bin and replaced it over Pleasantview without deleting the current version first. Long story short I checked SimPE and the description entries for every Sim was wiped, even the base ancestors with "no character data" were set to adult males.

Back when I played Sims 2 regularly, I had one neighborhood I used all the time for taking pictures for sim stories. I think I had some backups, but I rode on the assumption that I was safe from corruption because I never did anything the guide said to avoid, and I almost always quit without saving, so I didn't think any changes to the nhood file were even being made. I had a RIDICULOUS amount of CC - I think 30GB! - and it took 45 mins to an hour just for it to load all that, and my game would occasionally crash just due to the stress lol I'm very thankful I never had any issue with corruption then. I'm also glad I didn't try to load that up on my current computer. Even though it's nicer and newer and more powerful, it also is running Linux, which has the "maximum number of open files" limit like Mac OS does. I cannot imagine that it would handle having *30GB* worth of files open all at once ...

I always love to see obscure deep dives like this! I've been tempted to make one about what's going on with the super Metroid murder beam

I literally put this and your newest video on at work all the time just to hear you talk. It's so satisfying to my brain listening to you explain Sims 2 corruption. You do such a wonderful job explaining everything!! ❤

This is such an amazing video!!! I can only imagine how long it took you to go through the whole investigation (and am surprised that you haven't lost your sanity in the process). I hope we will hear from you again real soon

What an amazing and interesting deep dive into such a long misunderstood topic. Can't wait to see more content!!

Thank you for making this. I appreciate you explaining not only what is/isn't safe, but also explain why.

I go back to this video every so often since i love your content so far and i just like listening about glitches/corruption in games and its super interesting to me.

I'm so extremely excited somebody FINALLY goes into all of this. I had considered making a video like this before, but don't have much knowledge about programming or codes besides the basics, I couldn't have done a better job than you did! My game has been through the absolute worst, like the literal WORST. I had OneDrive shred fractions of my Veronaville throwing some Sims of it back in time, meaning some Sims that were previously teens were now kids with teen bodies, that kinda thing, random people from their family trees disappeared. I did some minor fixes, but for the most part could just play the hood without it and it was fine, the weirdness disappeared over time, that kinda stuff. Even some stuff that people would call corruption, never really influenced my game much and I could just kinda ignore it as it is. My Strangetown and Veronaville both are messy to say the least, but I wouldn't say messy in the sense that it's gamebreaking, just weird hoods from playing them for years haha! Thank you so much for making this video and explaining so many of the misconceptions! :)

I'm glad you did go ahead and upload. I'm not really a Sims 2 player but I'm fascinated by technical breakdowns like this

I love learning about the technical stuff going on behind the scenes and I appreciate how well you explain it all. It’s great that you were able to debunk those rumors about the causes of corruption. It’s pretty wild that the community widely accepted these things as true for such a long time. It goes to show that there’s always room for error and for more information to learn from. Thank you for this video!!

This is probably the first time I've recognized all the youtubers referred within a video like this, haha. Fascinating stuff, I haven't been able to play TS2 since 2009 (lost my disc and didn't think to buy it when it was available online) but the inner workings of it has always interested me. Thank you for your contributions to the community's understanding of corruption!

This is so crazy! I played Sims 2 for years and still come back to it from time to time, but don't remember any issues with corruption (just the usual Sims bugs). Didn't even know this was such a controversial topic in the community 😅 Amazing video, so interesting!! 🙌

This is a really interesting video, I hope you'll make more like this in the future. It's cool to see the behind the scenes and how much one little change can break a whole league of other things.

This is awesome. I’ve always wondered what is going on under the hood with Sims 2 corruption and you cracked just about every mystery.