Rather Long Sims 4 Rant

Before I continue with my The Sims 4 stories, it is with sadness that I inform you that the Wilsons recently lost the beautiful celebrity home they had just moved into. I don’t know exactly what happened, what I know is that it happened right after the For Rent EP update (which I didn’t buy or install, but yes, I did update). From that day on, my sims, who were on vacation in Sulani at the time, were unable to get back in the house. Every time they tried to return, the game would get stuck eternally at the loading screen. I tried everything, even evicting them and returning them to the house. Nothing, just the screen kept loading forever.

I also tried to demolish the lot to re-install the house, but every time I did this, (and I tried a lot of times), the game either crashed or kept loading infinitely. After many attempts of a lot of things like repairing the game, resetting it to factory settings, removing my mods folder, restoring saves, and all the solutions I know (I am die hard when it comes to troubleshooting The Sims), I finally decided to leave it alone and accept that my sims would never recover their beloved house and that they had to move.

Now they’re happily living again in Brindleton Bay, in one of the bigger houses there; they are comfortable, and going on with their lives, though I still really miss and long for the other house, which is still sitting there, since I have not been able to demolish it to put a new one. It’s still stuck there, which annoys me to no end cause I like my cities clean and functional, and just knowing that there is an abandoned and inactive house there really upsets me.

I know I could start a new save and install the house in a clean Del Sol Valley, but that would mean Allan and his family would lose all their current social and work relationships, which at this point for me is unthinkable, with all the networking they have established, co-workers, school friends, romances, etc. Plus, what about all the makeovers I did to everyone they knew? I mean, I saved every townie I made over in my library, but would I have to reinstall them one by one? Maybe, but how? I still don’t know much about this game; I know that in The Sims 3 it wouldn’t be a problem for me.

Anyway, the Wilson’s story wasn’t over, it wasn’t difficult to move them, the only thing that hurt me were Allan and Zoe’s awards, trapped in their lost home. But in one of the rare and fortunate times that I was able to enter the bugged house in build mode, I saved the room where the awards were in my library, and then installed it in the Wilson’s new house. That’s how I rescued the awards that now lie on a shelf in Allan and Zoe’s new bedroom.

I continued to play and got a lot more photo footage of them, in addition to what I had before the update disaster. By the way, this is the first time I’ve had problems with an update, of any kind. I pride myself in being an expert at troubleshooting The Sims, but I guess I still have a lot to learn regarding The Sims 4, which is a relatively new game for me.

Anyway, I plan to uninstall the entire game soon and reinstall it on my other hard drive cause I’m running out of space and will need more since I plan to get a few other game packs in the future. Once my game is reinstalled, I’d love to be able to demolish the ruined house in Del Sol Valley and, if possible, reinstall it on the cleaned-up lot to give the Wilsons back the home they lost. So, if by any chance someone read this very long post to the end, and has gone through something similar to this, (i.e. not being able to enter a house but also not being able to demolish it in order to reinstall it), please let me know if you were able to solve it and how. Any new ideas, other than everything I already mentioned and all those obvious solutions around on EA’s Q&A, would be welcome.

Sorry for the rant, and thanks for reading this far. 🩷

Note: The house is Famous Mansion, from the Sims 4 Gallery, by emma4101, original by JL_Sims 4. Never had issues with it before.