Earlier today everything was fine and my neighbourhood Hallowbrook was flourishing prettily. Then this evening I logged in to find that two families (rather influential families I might add, they had friendships with many sims and owned a few businesses) simply vanished. Their homes are now empty and for sale, the businesses are unowned. I tried googling and it might have something to do with overpopulation? But so far I can't find any solutions to bring back sims once this has happened.

Is this the end of my neighbourhood? I don't think I have the energy to rebuild everything I changed since my last backup :/

If you have the Mac version of the game (not sure, but going by the EPs you have and type of glitch), this could be a glitch that happens when you reach the maximum file limit.

Some info and possible solution: https://modthesims.info/showthread.php?t=608063

Also, if you do have a Mac, backup your game often. Seems like this bug strikes quick and seemingly out of nowhere.

Tip for the help section - if you click the category for a post (to the left), you get all the posts in that category displayed. Could be helpful if you need Mac help in the future and want to look at old topics to find possible answers first (you'll want one that says "OS X (Mac)" - there's one in the stickies so it's easy to find. It's also helpful if you mark yours as a Mac topic if it is one).

How many downloads do you have installed? Usually the first sign of hitting the file limit for me (on my old Mac game and my new SC game) has been disappearing lots from the lots bin.

Admittedly there is a LOT in my downloads folder. Don't know how many files but the folder size is roughly 3.6gb.

Disappearing sims is a sign of corruption, nothing to do with your download folder size. If you are on a mac, yes they have a hard limit on files before things start to disappear. PC does not have this issue but you can hit a 'file limit' in that you will start to get crashes, very slow loading and pink flashing.
You need to backup often and run Hood Checker. If you are on a Mac back up even more often, preferably the hood after each play session, since you can't use Hood Checker.

Right click the folder and click on "get info". That should display the number of files in the folder. You should also check the number of files total in your game by repeating the same procedure on the "The Sims 2" folder. If you have around 10,000 files, then you've likely passed the limit. You can also remove the error log files (and put them elsewhere) if you have any under your "logs" folder, they count towards the limit and serve no use. I'm still trying to figure out how to surpass the limit myself as my machine is upgraded to Big Sur and the numbers don't match up (see my post here). I even loaded up my old Sims 2 game on my old laptop to see the number of files there was and there was over 15k files (I did try to manipulate the file limit). Check out this Tumblr thread explaining the issue, however the solution may not work if you're running on El Captain or higher.


We can run hood checker, I have finally figured out to do so (albeit a tad late to the party). You just need to run Parallels and it works like a charm. I do backup my game files on a daily basis to an external hard-drive and highly recommend that you do the same, no need for a total Time Machine backup every time.

I plan to test out increasing the file limit myself but haven't been able to get my machine to backup on Time Machine since I updated to Big Sur. I'm also considering contacting Aspyr support about this issue as it's still offered. Sorry to hear about your neighbourhoods though, but an easy way to clear up some space is by deleting the pre-made ones as well.

@simmer22: I'll take a look at that link and thread when I have the time

@joandsarah77: I wasn't sure if this was corruption or some random bug but it feels like corruption to me

@trambling101: just checked, my download is almost at 10000 files but not quite (the exact number is 8398). I wonder if the file limit has something to do with upgrading OS? I ran into a very similar problem with another game, Morrowind recently. After upgrading to Mojave 10.14.6 I kept crashing the game after a specific number of mods installed (yet my old playthrough supported waaaay more mods).

Okay so you are on a mac, I couldn't see where you said that, but I do know that Mojave is Mac. It helps if you can be clear in the initial post.
So run Hood Checker in the way that rambling suggested. It won't get sims back but it will help the sims who are still there.

Some problems and bugs are Mac spesific or only happen with the Super Collection or the CDs (the File Limit issue or the borked default face issue are examples of Mac problems that frequent the help topics).

Whenever you need help with your game it's important to write in the first post if you've got the Mac version of the game, which game version you have (discs or Super Collection), and which Mac OS you have, and also mark it as a Mac post. Any other potentially useful information should also go into the first post.

I guessed you had a Mac based on your EPs and the problem you had - but there's been times when we've been far down on page 2 trying to sort things out before the OP says, "oh by the way I'm on a Mac". Sometimes have to scrap all our ideas and start from scratch when that happens. Several of the programs and fixes available for TS2 are made for Windows so they don't work directly on a Mac (at least not without some workarounds), which can make it difficult to diagnose some types of problems.

Yeah I'm on Big Sur and for some reason I see no difference although the max file limit supposedly increased. I genuinely believe that there is a hard limit located elsewhere and I plan on running the tutorial linked to see if anything changes (will be creating a fresh game copy and seeing if it will blow up like it did when I initially started my download spree prior to starting a neighbourhood). Based on the info there, you should also have a higher limit if you're running on Mojave, yet clearly the information does not check out. What I mean to say is that for me the Sims 2 SC runs so smoothly on my current 2017 MacBook Pro and takes less than a minute to boot up with the 3.2gb of CC I have in my game. In comparison to my old 2009 MacBook Pro, it took approx 10 minutes to boot up my disc version of the Sims 2 Bon Voyage (and I seriously did not think that my laptop would make it) and another 6 minutes to load up a neighbourhood. It crashed moments afterwards while I was looking through the neighbourhood with tab (just could not handle the load, lmao).

I finally figured out my issue with backing up as well, turns out that starting on Big Sur, Time Machine will only backup to APFS formatted drives and no longer HFS+ (just ought to share this tidbit of info in case anybody else is wondering). I have my computer backup performed so now I can try changing the limit and observing what happens.