Possible Reasons Why My Sims Turn into Dogs

**X-posted @ Tumblr**


Since I lost the picture I was going to use for this, I will simply pose this question: Can a Sim turn into a dog? Yes? No? WTF? Well, maybe what's below can help us find the answer.

In one of my obsessive custom content searches I came across this article on MTS.  The initial question posed was a good one: Is there a list of non-intuitive things NOT to do in a Sims game? A reasonable query, given that the creators of the Sims made a lot of things in this game more complicated than they should be as just a general rule of thumb. As I started reading further, my mere curiosity began to turn into unmitigated fear because I am guilty of so many of the Sims 2 "don'ts" that were mentioned.

I can't tell you how many times I've deleted Sims (especially Maxis pre-mades) out of the Sim Bin, I think I may have tried to get someone to play footsies with Mrs. Crumplebottom once or twice, and even though I have multiple sub-hoods attached to my main hood (and that is not counting the ones I've made and later deleted) I have never, ever used an anti-redundancy hack.  All these unknown no-no's have made me wonder if this is the reason why my Las Vistas hood keeps crashing on me (inevitably).  I've remade this hood from back-ups at least three times now, and after about 3-6 months it starts to act funky.  Could these things be the reason why or at least part of the reason?  

I probed further and found a tool called the Hood Checker that the article referenced.  Well, when I ran it, it did come back with a lot of "errors" that had to do with some of the no-no's that were mentioned in the article, especially when it comes to deleting Sims from the Sim Bin.  There were a lot of invalid memories of the deleted Sims and other Sims who may have breathed the same air for 5 seconds.  According to comments in the thread, these memories have no source now and no where to go so they just sit there in the game and fill it up with broken crap. That broken crap seems to infect other elements of the game until your hood becomes corrupt and unplayable. Sound familiar???

My opening question is in reference to a "Sim" who was a very pretty female at one time that somehow morphed into a deformed upright walking dog that never even crossed her path or lived with her family.  Her name even changed by itself as well from "Melora" to "DD." Since I didn't play with that family regularly I have no idea when the change happened.  All I know is that when I sent Isabella out on a date with Nico one evening "DD" was Smustling it up with the two of them in all of his/her/its deformed glory. I had previously moved out one of the other family members and deleted him from the Sim bin. Shortly after "DD" appeared the entire family became corrupt with their bodies seeming to disappear underground with only their little plumbbobs blinking in mid air.


I've had other strange occurrences too, such as the infant that walked in mid air and spoke with a very deep adult male voice (another deleted Sim example) and this incident that still happens occasionally. 


So could the very simple, seemingly harmless things mentioned in this article cause such arbitrary and incurable damage?  I don't know, but as far as I'm concerned I'm not doing any of them again and at the risk of sounding paranoid....I think it's time for a rebuild.