Cannot save legacy family to bin, or copy them. Running out of options. «12...Next Go

Lozzomatic

So, I have a historical legacy which has gotten to generation 4, who I WAS going to send to University.

I decided, 'Hey, I may as well move them out now to a new town, right? The new patch said it would be easy and there would be no bugs.

Anyhow, I tried the 'Unsinkable' move-to-new-town option via the phone. They packed up, got in a taxi and drove off.
Sunset Valley! A new start, with no bugs!

Basically, the family aren't there, it popped up the menu screen to make a new household and my family may as well not exist.

So I reloaded the previous save, tried the save to family bin option, aaaannnd...
Nothing. Loaded like it WAS working, only to fail miserably and add further dissapointment to my belt.

So, I tried the evict family option only to get more nothing. They disappeared.
I tried moving to a new house but yet again when I did the save to bin NOTHING!
The household consists of three kids (one a young adult) two adult parents and two dogs. I have no outside of the store CC, and no mods. My computer has plenty of space for more expansions AND I have the up to date patch too.
I have NO idea what to do, other than re-create the family as best I can and start afresh but that means losing the liniage in the family tree and I don't want that.
I just wanted to have a legacy reach generation 10, to do a 'through the ages' legacy.
Can ANYONE help?

(edited to remove some whining, because apparently that got me nowhere.)

Karritz

Have you tried clearing your cache files?

There might be some extra info there that is stopping this process from happening.

Another possibility is you may not have enough system resources to do what you want to do.

zanysazy

Oh nooo I had one issue with my game and EA are the worst company in the world!

You said you reloaded the previous save so I am assuming you still have them there on that save and you have not lost them yet you are just having problems moving them?

You do not need to use the move family to bin option, Just create a copy of the household then move them into the neighborhood of your choice. You have not lost the family so why the big crisis? Relax

Lozzomatic

I have tried clearing caches several times for other bugs, like having select sims not aging, but that did nothing

The system resources I'll look into, but the computer I have had about 2 terra bites of space when I bought it and I still haven't used all of it.

How do I check if the save itself is corrupt beyond repair? How do I check via the computer systems?

Lozzomatic

double post, sorry about that.

Zanysazy , there have been several issues that popped up even before this, like with the aging glitch occurring, having a werewolf teen who turned into a dwarf werewolf teen who the game failed to recognise as a teenager and still had him in elementary school.

Then I had a pet dog in game that wouldn't age so I had to force age it into elder hood.

Then of course I had this occur yesterday.

With the 'make a copy' idea, how do you mean? I thought you could only save them to bin, share or evict the family.
Is ther a video tutorial somewhere?

I'm sorry if I came across as overreacting, I have High Functioning Autism, so although I'm smart enough to get a Degree in Animation, I do get easily frustrated. Sorry about that.

But I do have to say, similar things like this have ruined other legacies I made, and it always hits around generation four. Next time I'll save the family as a copy in generation 3!

Lozzomatic

Bumpity, bump bump.

litabelaqua

Im not sure if this would help, but would a system restore be worth trying? restore back to a time before you tried the move? I don't know if this will work, but it may be worth a shot.

Have you looked at the saves file in Documents? There may be a .backup file, so save a copy of that, then rename the .backup to take out backup. That may work.

Lozzomatic

My computer itself is okay. I have had no issues with saving work, no crashes and no bugs or whatever, in fact I still have about well over 1 terrabyte to work with, plus I do a regular scan to be safe.

I have just emptied my old saves of now deleted families I used to play, and emptied the recycle bin. I will re-empty the caches and generally have a good clear out of things I know I wont need (I was making a new world through the CAW tool, but I uninstalled that programme just earlier today)

I have several back ups of the save before the move (I don't save it when the move fails.) so I should be okay.

what do you mean by 'take out backup?' Is there a tutorial?

I may get that Twalian's mod to use the porter thing and see if that works. Is it any good?

Lozzomatic

So I have tried out a tutorial I have found on youtube where you copy the save to the desktop, then delete the save in the document file, copy the backup file and paste, re-nameing the backup-copy file by deleting the backup-copy name. Is that what you meant?

I'll get back to you on this if it works, I just have some work to do before I play again. Here's hoping that it works!

LucyBorgia

I would exit the game, and and run whatever cleaner package you have on the computer, to clear out whatever outdated stuff is potentially clogging up your computer (I use Ccleaner, on my phone right now so I can't do a link). Then run disc defragmenter to have a good tidy up.

Depending on how often you already run them this will take some time... I get a book & my phone to browse the internet & suit by the computer to stop it going to sleep :-)

I would then go to NRaas' site & download Traveller, to help when you move people, Overwatch and Error Trap to help get rid of glitches, and Saver to help with saves in the future.

That was the groundwork! Now, open your documents & go to your EA folder, go to Sims 3 folder, go to Saves folder. You'll see all your saves there. They'll have extensions to them & some may have "bad" as the extension - these ones are corrupt & won't work properly. Go down the list of your saves & look at each 1. For uncorrupted games, you'll have a normal version & a backup version, for any corrupted saves, you'll have 3 versions: normal, bad & backup. Best practice is to make a copy of the backup file to your desktop before deleting the normal file & the bad file; then rename the backup file by removing the ".backup" extension.

Go back into game & hope it now works...

(That took me longer than I wanted to type as my son with ASD keeps asking me to look at his Sims game!)

LucyBorgia

Lozzomatic wrote:

So I have tried out a tutorial I have found on youtube where you copy the save to the desktop, then delete the save in the document file, copy the backup file and paste, re-nameing the backup-copy file by deleting the backup-copy name. Is that what you meant?

I'll get back to you on this if it works, I just have some work to do before I play again. Here's hoping that it works!

That's it.

Lozzomatic

Is it supposed to take a while loading the save after this fix?

It's taking a while.

Lozzomatic

Still not able to save to bin. Tried twice.

Can't share the family either.

Just tried evicting them and THEN saving to bin, still nothing. Tried it twice actually.


*sigh*, I think I'm just going to recreate the older heir and place him alone in Sunset Valley and start from there. I'll do a test save for him, to see how it goes, but I am still rather disappointed about this.

Any other ideas?
***
edit***

Just tried saving a premade family to bin, that had not problems whatso ever, so someone in the legacy family is bugged, but I have no idea who it could be. How do I check?

LucyBorgia

Can you go into edit town & split the family up?

Or, I just had another thought - someone had said in the World Adventures forum that having gravestones in inventories.can mess travel up. Can you get into the game for long enough to go through all the personal inventories & get rid of any potential problems? Sell stuff off, place gravestones in the lot, etc.

Lozzomatic

I have tha gravestones in the FAMILY inventory, however, they do have a few things in their personal inv too. Would homework affect it? If so, how do I get rid of it?

Also two of the kids have a bug where they don't age. Can this stop travelling?

Is there a list of things that can stop travelling?

Mariesalias

Clear everything out of their personal inventories that they don't need (only keep photos and things that can not be re-created). You can delete old homework, but current homework should not be an issue. I would move the urns to their personal inventories. Empty the family inventory. I have had multiple issues with stuff in the inventories with my legacy and have almost lost my family too many times because of it.

Instead of trying to move out the whole family, try moving out just the heir. Try it with nothing extra in his inventory first. If it works and he moves to a different house, take him into CAS and try to save him to your bin. Go into edit town and see if you can save him to your bin as a household. Save your game using Save As and give it a new name (like heir name 1).

Now you can go back to main menu and reload the previous save and try to move him out with the urns/important stuff in his inventory. If it works, save your game with the save as again, and give it a new name (like heir name and ghosts 1). Now you are prepared at least if you can't save the rest of the family.

If you have been able to save your heir separate from the rest of the family, then you can either start over with the heir, or go through this process with each of the other family members (though you probably will not want to make a new save for each, but you can try saving each in CAS so you have their looks and can re-create them easily if needed.) Once you figure out which family members are not glitched, you can then move out all the other members who are not glitched together (or split them off in edit town). Once you have them safely in a new house, use the Save As to make a new save for them. Then you probably want to save them to the bin in edit town so you can place them in a new fresh town.


If none of the above works, you can try installing Error Trap, Overwatch, and Master Controller from the Nraas site and try and repair your sims or hope the mods will catch and fix whatever is causing the issues with your family. Good Luck!

Lozzomatic

I just cleared out all personal inventories, and removed the gravestones from the family inventory and placed them outside to transfer to Chris's Inventory.

The gravestones just disappeared. Is my game corrupted?

Lozzomatic

Actually I just had a thought. When I created the founder, Hans, he was saved in the family and households bin as usual. He is still there actually.
The family name is Muller, and that is what he is saved as. So as there is already a saved 'Muller' would the game not save the family due there already being a 'Muller' family?

I get no option to rename the household as Muller2 or anything, so could that cause it? I'll retry the empty personal inventory thing.

It may be wrong, but it's all I can think of really.

Mariesalias

It does sound to me like your save is corrupted. Try to get your heir out so at least you don't have to start over!

The Nraas mods may help too. My legacy family got their first generation house/save messed up. At the time I was not using ET and OW. I managed to get my heir, the parents, and a sibling out and into a new save/town. That was over a year ago. Just a couple months back I went back into that save with ET and OW in and they made the save playable again. Since then I have gone back to other saves I was forced to leave and been able to 'rescue' family ghosts and photos that I had been forced to leave behind. I had issues following my Legacy family for generations that turned out to be caused by items from the consignment store in their inventories, family inventories, or the WA chests (I use them for storage).

I hope you are able to figure out your issue and fix it! Good Luck!


ETA: Oh, it should not be because they have the same name. I always keep the family/legacy name for my heirs (male or female) and I have several different generations saved to the bin/library all with the same name.

Lozzomatic

I think I'll give it one more shot and get those mods. I'll try saving the family as a whole, and if that won't work, just the heir.

Plan b will be to recreate them. I have a degree in animation and can draw them pretty decently, so as I have whipped up a quick sketch of them last night all I'll need to do, is sort out the traits and signs. This time though I'll copy a backup of them in the bin after another generation. I won't be caught out again!

What causes corrupted saves anyway? I don't use mods, but now I guess I'll have to, and I only use store things. Although I did get a car from the community store.

Stormkeep

Try loading the save with the NRAAS ErrorTrap mod installed. It may fix whatever is causing your issue so that you can get the family exported to the bin.

Also you can try exporting each of them to the sim bin from a mirror so that you don't have to manually re-create them. This may also help you figure out which sim is a problem.

Lozzomatic

Stormkeep: do you mean saving them through 'change appearence?' I certainly give that a go if it'll work.

I have a feeling that the sims that are bugged may be the younger kids. All other family members age up with no problem, but the younger ones (teenager and child) stopped, and I have to manually age them up. I could be wrong, but at least I have a few options. Ill try them today.

Stormkeep

Lozzomatic wrote:

Stormkeep: do you mean saving them through 'change appearence?' I certainly give that a go if it'll work.

I have a feeling that the sims that are bugged may be the younger kids. All other family members age up with no problem, but the younger ones (teenager and child) stopped, and I have to manually age them up. I could be wrong, but at least I have a few options. Ill try them today.

Yes, from the change appearance at a mirror; you can save a sim from there which you can then later load from CAS. They won't show up in the household bin, just in CAS. I save all my legacy sims this way because of game bugs that can occur if you play a sim that is also in the household bin. No bugs happen keeping a backup this way.

Lozzomatic

Okay, I just got error trap, overwatch and porter. I will try these out and see what happens.

turistas9

Lozzomatic wrote:

Okay, I just got error trap, overwatch and porter. I will try these out and see what happens.

should of got master controller. i had an issue where it i could save anything to the bin.. i went to nraas and resetting everything (resets everything in the world)

Lozzomatic

I downloaded the mods but am still having issues transferring them.

However,Stormkeep you suggestion worked, and so far I have had both he heir and his dad saved to the bin. I will now go back and save his mum and his two siblings.

I think I can get over losing the dogs. I liked them and all but, they only really cluttered up the house with massive rocks. I could get them another dog so...whatever.

I'll just restart from here, but in my eyes, they are still generation 4 even though the family tree says otherwise. I can easily familyfund their way back into being rich.

Thank you for the suggestions anyhow, I'll be more careful with the saving now.