more actions may be needed than just not playing the household at all.
-not greeting the characters if they come on played lot; or if they are greeted, exit lot without saving.
-not summon the characters through hacks or spell; or if they are summoned, exit lot without saving
-avoid community lot trips since the characters could be at any of the destinations.
or there is a hack that when put into character's inventory that prevents the character from being a passerby. not sure of the hack's name or its site.

The Extreme Antisocial Challenge.

The Sims 3 is about as stable as an IKEA table. Especially with all packs installed. It's unplayable, truly, even on top of the line hardware.
As long as you know what you shouldn't do in The Sims 2 and have the correct mods etc installed, corruption becomes unlikely.

For some perspective, the longest I've played The Sims 2 is well into the 8th generation, with all packs and plenty of CC installed. The longest I've played The Sims 3 is barely into the 3rd, with only a couple of packs and almost no CC, after a while is just began crashing and every time I reloaded I'd have to replay things I'd already played through and I got frustrated and haven't attempted a proper playthrough of TS3 since (this was a good 4-5 years ago). The longest I've played The Sims 4...well, really haven't played it at all. Based on the few experiences I've had, The Sims 4 is definitely more stable out of the box, but at what cost? It's just boring. Yeah sure it has some cool things like CAS and...well, CAS. But it's still boring, every time I've tried to play The Sims 4 I have the most fun in CAS and then barely any after that. I don't know if the packs make it more fun but if I don't have fun with a base game, I'm not going to waste money on packs I probably won't enjoy either.

That's an offence to IKEA tables...

Basically two views on deleting sims from the bin. One by Mootilda and one by Chris Hatch. Chris is saying that another further step is needed. Since Mootilda isn't here to share her point of view it's a bit hard for a proper discussion to be had. Maybe she would agree or maybe she would disagree, we don't know. Since we don't know, I take the point of view that seems the safest and that's to not delete sims from the bin or in any other way shape or form.

Sorry didn't realize this had gone over a whole new page and my post made no sense without a quote. Also I need coffee lol.

@Liz I am happy that Window 10 work for you, The most important thing for me using my computer ( Window 7 ) is that my Sims can run. I am not into social media stuff on the net, ( coming here is my social club ) I do get and return e-mails.
But my main focus is playing Sims and other games I like hidden objects and mystery games, and adventure games. Along with window already build in games.
A friend I know have window 10 and she is always asking me how this work and that, I just look at her and say stop! asking me about Window 10 I have window 7 and have no idea at all of that system.

Where did he say another further step was needed?

I'll reply to this in Bootstrapo so everyone can see it. At the moment I can only see Charity's post in Classic View.

I think Jo must be referring to this:
In other words (if I understand Chis correctly) the corruption only sets in when you delete the unlinked Sim which was left behind when he/she was deleted in the Family Bin. The consensus elsewhere is, I believe, that the corruption starts as soon as you delete the family from the bin.

I'm sure Maxis' intention was that the unlinked Sim record would be sufficient to prevent corruption, as all memories, relationships and other things previously linked to the live Sim record, would now be linked to the "unlinked" Sim record instead (indeed I'm sure that is why the unlinked Sim record exists at all). but until now I thought that Maxis had got something wrong, and it didn't work. I'm sure I once saw a post by maxon saying that the danger lay in the possibility that a subsequently created Sim could pick up the identity of the deleted Sim. That seems to me unlikely as long as the unlinked Sim record exists.

As far as the 2 Sims that I deleted are concerned, I should point out that I did it when I had only been playing for 3 months, and knew a lot less than I know now. I deleted them solely because I wanted them to be sisters, but forgot to make them siblings in CAS. I realised my omission as soon as I clicked on the Save to Game button. If I did the same thing now, I wouldn't even think of deleting them; I'd open the 'hood in SimPE, and edit the Family Ties and Sim Relations records to make them sisters. As deleted Sims go, regardless of who is right, they're probably less likely to cause corruption than most, as I deleted their family immediately after creating it in CAS, without ever entering Live Mode. I had already made both Sims in Body Shop so it only took minutes to recreate them in CAS. They would have been problematic as townies, as they looked exactly the same as their replacements and had the same names. Had I known enough to be able to change their names and appearance, then I would also have known enough to make them siblings!

Here is how the 2 unlinked Sims and their replacements show up in the SimPE Sim Browser today:

From reading Mootilda's posts on this, I think that she was viewing the creation of stub characters as being a form of corruption in themselves. She often linked to this wiki article:
Game Help:Avoiding Hood Corruption^wiki
Here it states:

The latter part of that statement has no sources or evidence linked to it, and I would regard it as inaccurate. The stub files still have memory and relationship data (as confirmed by Chris Hatch here ), so I don't see how gossip about stub sims could cause corruption. The article doesn't elaborate on what errors are created 'in the long run'. I agree that the stub characters are not particularly desirable, but I don't see that they are necessarily indicative of a BFBVFS.

I was always under the impression that the stub characters' NIDs could be reassigned to newly-made Sims, causing issues such as inappropriate SWAFs. Is that not right, then?

I know exactly where you're coming from and totally agree. I only agreed to "upgrade" because it was early enough that if I didn't like 10 I could immediately ditch it and go back to the way it was before. No Sims, No Life! >_<

So if you've just made a family in CAS, or just opened a new neighborhood with the original binned sims included - and before you open any lots so the sims can interact - would it then be "alright" to delete them from the bin? They wouldn't have had a chance to interact with any of the other sims in the neighborhood, only other sims that would be deleted together with them, so corruption wouldn't have a chance to spread through other sims. Or could it somehow, even if the sims haven't had a chance to interact with anyone?

I'm not planning to delete any bin sims, I'm just curious because the discussion is getting a little confusing.

The NID is preserved in the stub so that shouldn't happen.

When a Sim does the gossip interaction, they use one of the gossip memories that they have; if they have none, they seem to pull a random memory from a random Sim. Although I'm not sure how this selection works, I wouldn't be too surprised if gossip could be pulled from the stub characters.

Here the plain old bottom line for me, all due respect to Chris hatch but Me, Myself and I, and my shadow will NOT delete any Sims I don't give a rat tail what anyone say.
It's better to follow your own personal gut feeling.

They use a random memory from themselves, but even if they used a memory from an unlinked sim it wouldn't matter, those memories do remain valid.



I don't blame you, although I regularly delete the families from test 'hoods I'd never do that in my main 'hood, that is why I made the mod to remove that delete button available (CJH_NoDeleteFromFamilyBin.zip).

However if someone has deleted a family or two from the bin there's no need to write that neighbourhood off, it probably will die eventually as they all do but it won't actually be because of that.
It is when you see those unlinked sims in SimPE that you thought you'd got rid of and decide to delete them from the neighbourhood that causes problems. The image AndrewGloria attached above pretty much sums it up, unlinked sims do retain their name, thumbnail image, a valid GUID and Neighbour ID so all data pertinent to them remains valid, provided you don't then delete them external from the game.

Thanks Chris! You've given me some peace of mind. I haven't the slightest intention of deleting any Sims in the future, but it's good to know that that "mistake" I made long ago probably hasn't done irreparable damage to my neighbourhood.

I know exactly when I deleted those Sims. I did it at 8:29 a.m. on 28th February 2013 -- I know because that's the date-stamp on their character files. Since they're unlinked, the game has had no reason to modify their files. That will be six years ago next month. I can't help thinking that, if I'd done serious damage back then, then the neighbourhood might not be playable today. So I'm probably being quite ridiculous worrying about them. How many Sims 2 neighbourhoods last six years?

I've had one neighborhood I started on my fossile laptop around 2007-2008, and continued on the stationary, and except for it not working on the new laptop (probably just too heavy to open), and one instance of pink-flashing so I had to reset from a recent backup, it's worked until my stationary started getting weird last year. I guess 6-7 years of frequent use and 2-3 years of infrequent use isn't too bad for a neighborhood... I'm curious to see if it'll work when I get a new computer, though. Except for that particular neighborhood, I don't think I've ever had issues with a neighborhood that stops working.

The one I'm using on my laptop is from 2012, though I haven't played much last year because the laptop is getting a bit weird (last half of 2018 my laptop has restarted if the game uses too much resources).

I was being generous

I'm sorry to disappoint and deliver bad news on top of Chris' explanation but I tried a little test and the results are, more than scary.

I deleted a single family from the family bin, family was already occupying the lot before that and a single sim that was a part of another household met a single member of that family.
I left that other household in the hood.

Now I checked in SimPE and nothing weird happened, files were intact, the only thing that was different is that the sims from that family were stripped of their 3D data and were set to type unlinked. Same like Chris said right?

Now I want to clarify that I initially started this test because I wanted to prove that what Chris said is actually true. Before this intentional attempt, I did delete families from the bin acidentaly, but I rarely saw the effects of the corruption so I thought there wasn't any. And I wanted a real solid proof that will once and for all have me sure that I can delete my sim families... well...
This proved me wrong.

Shortly after that, the squiggly lines started showing up in the thought bubbles... I thought that had to do with the deleted sims missing 3D data so I wrote it off as not a sign of corruption... but then, they started showing up everywhere.

Dogs started glitching out while intersecting the ground, game started throwing errors concerning the sims, sims would often stop mid animation or end up in a T-pose and finally shadows and lighting started glitching out, not just in one hood but in the whole game. Shadows were cut off at the base and prolonged on the other side, the lighting on the inside became extremely bright and started to look exactly like beta lighting and at this point I was getting worried... after the shadow issue, the symptoms of corruption started showing up in all other neighborhoods.

I continued playing, till eventually today I tried to open my game multiple times and the "Application has crashed. Application will now terminate" showed up on every single neighborhood. SO yes, it took deleting ONE family from family bin and few times of playing for couple of hours in the corrupted hood and just a tiny bit in other hoods to... Corrupt my WHOLE GAME.

I did not want to believe in words of people who probably tested this before me, but now I see why and how, and I advise NOBODY to ever delete a family from family bin... NEVER.

EDIT: Sorry for kinda resurrecting this, but I think it's worth it.

But wait, how can neighbourhood corruption spread into the lighting engine? All the data associated with sims excluding a couple like the Grim Reaper are stored entirely within the neighbourhood folder correct? Unless there's an even more serious flaw in the game code than normal corruption that seems impossible a bad save file could have any effect on the others. There wasn't anything else that could have caused it right? We can't really be sure with just a single test case, there's likely other variables at play here. Did you switch between neighbourhoods in a single play session? Incomplete memory management could be a potential cause in spreading the corruption, but that still might be a stretch.

mixa97sr, are you sure you haven't done anything bad to the "untouchable" NPCs or some such? Because straight-up neighborhood corruption in one neighborhood shouldn't affect the other 'hoods, since they're separate from each other. Only thing I can think of is if the NeighborhoodManager file got corrupted somehow, though I can't remember if this one acts like a cache file (deletable & regenerates without issues).

Could be the accumulated effect of having accidentally deleted stuff you shouldn't delete (probably in several 'hoods), and this was just the final drrop for your game.

You may want to check if any of the install files in the ProgramFiles directory have been recently changed.

Similar to AndrewGloria The current iteration of Rematra Village has been corrupted right from the start, I deleted duplicate sims via plaving their home with them back in having forgot or not knowing that causes unlinking and with out the no unlink mod shredding of the characters data.
Hood disappeared one day in 2016 just opened up the game and it was missing. Restored from back up and itsbstill chugging along well. Not quite 6 years, i think if I remember correctly is about 4 now.
Even with corruption Sims 2 can be playable. I've never tried S3 or S4 beyond demos and didn't like some of the differences between them and 2.

All data about a hoods sim population aside from univesrals is stored in the neighborhood folder.

No I explicitly deleted just one family and my game was clean up to this point so I have no idea what even happened in my game and how corruption spread but for some weird reason symptoms did appear in the other hoods as well and now none of them are playable. Even the ones I haven't played in after I started the corruption. All of them return a crash. It's bizarre.

And no I haven't installed any of the mods after the corruption started. Last thing I did was play with the Beaker Family in Strangetown toying around with career rewards normally, and that was it. So I really have no idea why and how this happened.

One thing to note, as soon as I installed a fresh vanilla UC game on a fresh windows installation, all the special NPCs (garden club members, matchmaker, hobby NPCs...), they were not dressed at all like they would be in the normal game... but it was unmodded, clean install on a clean system, so I went along with it.

^ The NPC issue might be a sign that your UC install wasn't as clean as you thought it was - might have gotten corrupted whe installing or some such. With AL present, some mods are also considered to be very important for the stability of the game (things EA never patched), so an unmodded game with some install errors already present could potentially be the cause of your issues.