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There are a lot of sites out there where you can find answers to questions about The Sims game. I'll be adding tips and such every now and then but for most questions you have, head over to The Sims official web site and see if you can find your answers!

BEFORE e-mailing me for how to install things you download, or you are having problems downloading, or any other problem, READ these pages and if your answer isn't there or it isn't at The Sims official site, message board or anywhere else, THEN e-mail me about it and hopefully I can help answer it or lead you to someone who can.

Sorry about the length of this page....Everything is out of order but I'll organize it into sections later!

Just a few pointers for newbies....

• When you have a new Sim, for safety sake get them to study cooking. You can use the speed up feature to get it done quick! :) I always get my Sims at least 2 cooking skill points right off the bat. Otherwise you run the risk of your Sims being burned up in a cooking fire.
• Put a smoke alarm *found in Electronics* into the kitchen and another in the area you have a barbeque grill. If a fire breaks out, click on each of your Sims that are jumping up and down screeching and tell them to "Go here" to a place of safety. *You can't control a visiting Sim but if disaster strikes and the visitor dies, you can go back to the neighbourhood without saving if you don't want your Sims to die*. This helps clear the area for the fireman to get to the fire. I use one in the room that a fireplace is located in as well.
• Make SURE you have a space cleared in your yard for Sims and the fireman to get to the back yard. Completely blocking exiting access using fences or hedges keeps visiting Sims from being able to go home!
• If you have a Sim that can't leave your property, use the CTRL, ALT, SHIFT and C to "move_objects on" and delete the Sim! First be sure you have an exiting access that isn't blocked by fence, shrubbery etc. Deleting a visiting Sim won't hurt them!
• If your Sims don't have any "Mechanical" skills, don't get them to change a light bulb, repair the tv or computer! They'll be shocked to death. Call a repairman or better yet, turn on the Robot if you have Livin' Large! The robot also comes in very handy if your Sims happen to drink a nasty potion and starts destroying everything in site. He will fix the tvs, computers, sinks, etc.
• If you use the fireworks object, putting a smoke alarm nearby and telling your Sim to "Go here" to a point of safety, can help prevent Sim deaths.
• If you have a Sim to die while playing and you don't want a dead Sim, simply EXIT the house by clicking on the neighbourhood icon and DO NOT let it save! When you go back into the house your Sim will still be alive! As you play, save often just in case such a thing happens OR if the game crashes or freezes on you. That way you don't lose much.
• As you work on creating or furnishing a house, SAVE often. That way you don't spend an hour or more working on a house only to lose it all!
• Install a burglar alarm *Electronics" at exits and entrances. Putting up a 1-tiled wall at each end of your property and putting an alarm on it helps too because as soon as the Burglar comes onto the property the alarm goes off.
• I got real tickled while watching my mom play The Sims once. She was frustrated because the Sims kept going up the stairs and just disappearing and she couldn't see them. It was so cute and funny watching her! LOL If your house has 2 stories, you'll see on your game panel that you can go UP stairs or DOWN stairs! You can pick things up and move from one floor to another floor by using the move_objects on cheat and clicking on the UP or DOWN buttons *looks like house's 2nd story with roof and below it a lower floor*. It helps greatly when you have a Sim baby to care for!
• Speaking of Sim babys....when you first get one, PLAY...SING...SING. Don't try to play with it after that because in most cases it won't stop the crying! lol Every 6 hours they wake up and cry...FEED, SING, SING usually does the trick. Remember you can move the baby from room to room and floor to floor. There are baby alarms online that you can use and it will alert people in the house that the baby is awake. I used one and it notified EVERYONE in the house by waking everyone up. If the baby cries too long the child welfare agency fusses at you, then if you still don't get to the baby the social worker will take it. After 3 Sim-days the baby will blossom into a 9 year old! Its ok to let an older child miss school or the working parent to miss work one day to help out so mommy can sleep!
• My computer monitor is very large, however playing at 1024 x 768 I was missing out on a lot! I like to get close and "right in there" with them, so I play at 800 x 600. If you've been playing at a larger size, try it once and see for yourself which you prefer!!!
• Many sites have downloads for your game. Your eyeballs will be very happily scanning everything over and you start downloading. It is addicting....you'll go on downloading frenzies getting everything in sight! You'll go from site to site downloading every day or every few days and enjoy seeing the things in your game. You'll want more...and more!!! The next thing you know your very quickly loading game will start to take 20, 30 or even more minutes to load up! Its your downloading frenzies that caused that! hehe! Read "Too much stuff" below to find out how to "clean house" so to speak.
• Downloading objects for the game is a lot of fun, but here is a tip to help you keep up with it all. In your "Downloads" folder, you can make separate folders to store things in. Because of the fact that if you end up with too many build objects you will end up having doors turn into windows and such, if you'll make a folder inside your "Downloads" folder called Build Items or whatever, and stick all doors, windows, stairs, columns and such into that folder you can track down those items easier if you run into trouble. Also keeping up with flowers, trees and such in a separate folder can help too. The sites that you download objects from a LOT, such as SimGoddessess or WDS etc., keep their objects in a folder just for their objects. Paintings, rugs and such in separate folders. All this isn't necessary, its just a way to keep up with everything as well as makes it easier to track down items that are causing game problems later. Slapping all objects into ONE folder is fine if you want to do it that way, however to make things easier on YOU its best to separate! Suppose you have a bad object thats causing your game to crash?. If everything was in ONE folder you'd have a mess on your hands. However, being in separate folders you can track down the object quicker. More info on tracking down bad objects is somewhere down the page! :)
• If your game freezes during play, or you can't get into a house from the neighbourhood screen, or it all of a sudden shuts down your game, you have a bad object in there somewhere. If your game crashes during "create a family" or "change clothes" mode, you have a bad skin somewhere. More info below somewhere...
• If you find a site that has some things for your Sims game that you want, get them NOW, don't just bookmark intending to go back "tomorrow" and get them. Why? Because so many sites have closed down without any warning at all and you wouldn't ever have the chance to get the items you wanted! I learned that lesson when several sites that were on a server suddenly vanished over a year ago, so there went about four sites that I'd been meaning to go back to in order to download more things.

SLOW game ... LOW resources

• We all love to download things for our game. However, if you have an older computer that doesn't have much space or memory, and you go overboard installing things, you will slow your game down to a crawl. Having too many of the animated objects at one house doesn't help matters....it makes your game run choppy!
• In your game preferences, adjust the grass setting. It won't look very pretty but will help!
• Turn OFF the web page feature. Turn off auto-photos. Turn off auto-centering. Turn off PIP. Turn down the sound features.
• Game Copy World has a 'fix' that you can use to replace your Sims.exe file so you won't have to use the CD if your game runs choppy. This has its benefits, however be very careful to back up *COPY and PASTE* your current Sims.exe into a new folder first! If you don't you'll have a lot of problems later! Go into your CD and over-write the "music folder" files in your so you'll have sound in the game.
• Memory is pretty cheap now. I bought 250 MB RAM for roughly $60. You can clean off seldom used files from your hard drive to make room for other things too using a zip drive, CD RW drive, or a piggy-backed hard drive to make more room for your Sims things.
• Leaving a computer running day and night isn't good for it, regardless of what some may say. Re-boot as needed and shut it down when you aren't using it!
• Running Scan Disk and Defrag regularly can help greatly too.

Too much stuff!

• If your game takes over 20 minutes to load, you've gone overboard with installing objects, walls & floors and skins. If you want it to load quicker you can delete unused items to speed loading. My game takes less than 4 minutes to load...I heard some people's takes as long as an hour! Large files and others that aren't used help slow your loading. Those vehicles you downloaded and all those love style beds, buffet tables, and hot tubs are so cool, however they all add UP to slowing your loading down! One love bed can be nearly 4 MB in size! Remember...back up all your files before deleting anything!
• 1.The Sims Transmogrifier can help you get rid of objects you don't want. It can also be used to create your own objects. It can also be used to track down an object that is causing your game to crash. More info on game crashing is lower on this page.
• 2. EliSims can help delete unwanted walls, floors and roofs. You can also use their new version to change your Sims skills, money, personalities and much more!!! I love the changing personalities feature....I had Sims that were pretty hateful with NO nice! Others had NO neatness, no fun, etc!
• 3. Ridding skins *faces, bodies and clothing* takes a LOT of time and patience and is not for the timid at heart! :) Download The Sims Character Makeover...it is extremely slow and tends to crash quite often but it gets the job done! Maxis took this program offline due to all the problems it has, but you can still get it from TSR which is where the link takes you. Be very careful to back up all before doing anything so you can replace what you need to! When you install it, be sure to copy and paste the exe into your "The Sims" directory so it won't crash as often! You can't delete skins from that program but bring up your Explorer and go to The Sims game data/skins and highlight each skin and its parts that you want to be rid of and remove. Be sure you have a bit of knowledge of how skins are named so you can know what parts to delete. Leaving parts can cause your game to crash.
• Another use for Sims Character make-over is that you can edit your Sims faces and clothing. If you "adopted" a baby and it turns out to have a different skin color than the rest of the family, you can use it to edit the child's skin color. Make note in your game which neighbourhood the child is in and what the name of the child is. Bring up the make-over and "edit a sim" by using the arrow to select which neighbourhood its in, then click each "character" until you locate the one needing edited. Use the skin tone selection, change faces on the lower section, change clothing on the upper section. Sometimes I cannot get a Sim to come up without it crashing...thats where the following example comes into practice.
• Use the "edit a sim" feature to figure out which character in the neighbourhood you want to "delete". When you find out the character's number, bring up your Explorer, go into the Sims and the correct neighbourhood and delete the correct "character". Some people kill off unwanted Sims...I don't like doing that, I just do it by deleting them...its more painless to me! I know they aren't REAL but they look and act like they sort of are!
  
• If your doors, fireplaces etc. suddenly turn into windows, you've gone overboard with installing windows! The same goes if everything starts turning into doors, you've got too many doors, and so forth. Delete some OR you can check some of The Sims message boards to find out how you can make some of your build items show up in "buy mode".
• Visit The Sims official site and download File Cop. This program checks walls, floors, skins and other things and removes them if bad. However, it doesn't catch everything and doesn't catch a bad object!

• Centering
  When playing your game all of a sudden you are jerked off from where you are in the house to another location. Perhaps someone is using the elevator, a Sim visitor has needs, or for any of the other reasons this happens in your game. To keep this from happening turn OFF the auto centering in the game preferences while you are in a house. Turning it off in one house will keep it from happening in all houses....its a preference you set for the game the same as you set sound level, anti-alias and etc. Speaking of anti-alias, if your objects in the game have YELLOW around them, go into preferences and make sure anti-alias is checked!

• Guinea Pig
  YES, the guinea pig does carry a disease and if it bites your Sims, they will get sick and die! The best prevention is NOT to play the guinea pig in your game. If you do so, just remember this, no matter how well and often you clean the cage and feed the guinea pig, it will still BITE! There is NO way to keep that little sucker from biting, regardless of what you've read on other sites. If it does bite one of your Sims, he or she will start sneezing and caughing within a couple of days. This is the first stage...no matter how much you get them to rest and drink, they'll STILL DIE!
  
  Is there a cure for the guinea pig disease? YES there is! At the first sign of sickness, pause your game. Use your Ctrl, Alt, Shift and letter c on your keyboard. This will bring up a tiny little window box in the upper left hand corner of your screen. Type the following: move_objects on. Remember to type that underscore, exactly as I've shown, three words..."move_objects on", without the quotes of course!
  
  Now delete each member of your family by clicking on them and dragging downwards same as you delete trash and other things! Yes, thats right, not just the sick Sim, because remember this is a very contageous disease! If you don't delete your entire family, the next day another will have it, the next day another...etc.! Now, unpause your game and bring back each of your family members. They are now CURED! Some say that deleting your Sims will take away some of their skill points but I've never had a problem with it.
  
  Another method, which I haven't tried yet, is Killer Sims has a first aid medicine cabinet!

• Clown
  If you have the clown and want to get rid of him, head over to The Sims official site, go to the downloads and get the Clown catcher. When you get your Sims to pick up the phone, look under Services and you will see Clown Catchers.

  If you want to have the experience with the clown and don't know HOW to get him to appear, let your Sims mood levels get in the red. In your decorative objects you will find a picture of a clown. Hang it on the wall and get your depressed Sim to gaze at it. Just download the Clown catcher first so you can get rid of the clown when you've had your fill of him! He's cute but what a pain!

• Duplicate Sims
  If your Sims are duplicating themselves, delete the graveyard! Whenever you download a house that has the graveyard already in it, you MAY experience problems and end up with half dozen of each family member. That is a living nightmare!!!! What happens is when someone has skins you do not have in their game, when you install the house, of course you don't have the dead Sim skins in your game so it messes up the graveyard. Your visiting Sims even appear in the graveyard when they come to visit.

• Installing downloads
  Objects: C:\Program Files\Maxis\The Sims\Downloads
  You can make folders in there for separating your objects if you want. I have separate folders for the larger sites I download a LOT from, paintings, and tapestry rugs. All others go into just an "Objects" folder. Separating them into classification such as "seating", "surfaces" etc. you can do, but its a pain! I highly recommend making a folder especially for your doors and windows and other build mode items.
  
  Walls, Floors, Roofs: C:\Program Files\Maxis\The Sims\GameData
  You have a folder in there for each of those. There is one for objects in there too but I NEVER install anything in there. You can make separate folders to separate your walls or floors into categories. Skins you CANNOT! separate...they must go into "Skins" folder itself, no sub-folders or they won't WORK!!

• Mail Box
  If you download a house and the mailbox is missing, hang it up and replace the house. That is, unless you want to deal with the chaos it creates...you won't be able to greet a visitor, you end up having the repo man visit too. I'm sure you've seen the "mailbox fixes"? I've tried two of them...forget it and just get rid of the house because although it fixes some problems and you can pay your bills, the repo man still comes every three days. Either that or just use the ctrl/alt/shift/c cheat and type in the "move_objects on" cheat to delete the bills and that way you can KEEP your house. I heard that you can use the prepare_lot cheat and it will fix it but I don't know for sure.
• Teleportation ....make sure that you don't have trees, bushes or other things too near each end of your property or visitors won't be able to get off the lot and go home. Be careful to NOT delete anything from the ENDS of your property and do NOT delete the teleportation from in front of the house. Its this which enables the school bus and other vehicles to arrive and depart. If you do decide to get rid of them anyhow, remember that your Sims won't be able to use a Taxi to go "down-town" either!!!!!!!

• Downloading problems
  If you are having a hard time downloading things from any site, hold down your SHIFT key and click on the link. If that does not work then its something to do with YOUR computer! It could be a setting in the firewall program or even your anti-virus program or anything else. If you are a child trying to download things, this could be happening because of a feature your parents are using to protect you and their computer. Some settings are set to prevent downloading of any .exe file.

• Installing houses
  

  Firstly, unzip the house files. You'll notice that they are labeled "House01.iff" etc. If you have more than one neighbourhood, be CAREFUL about where you put the house...you can easily over-write a home that you had no intention of losing! Bring up your Windows Explorer *thats the yellow folder where all your other folders live :)* and go to

  C\ProgramFiles\Maxis\TheSims

  Now you will see UserData, UserData2 *if you have more than one neighbourhood*, UserData3, and so forth. Inside the folder of the neighbourhood you want to put your new house in, you'll see "Houses". Drag the new house into that folder and let it over-write the copy that is already there. Just be SURE you are in the right neighbourhood! Look above to see where walls, floors, roofs, etc. goes.

  When you bring your game back up, the house will be there. Your Sims family will have to be brought "alive" by clicking on their faces in your game screen.

• Sometimes people who create the houses name them Dooley_House09.iff or anything else other than House09.iff. You need to make sure that the house is simply House09.iff. Or House01.iff etc. or you'll not see a house in the neighbourhood screen!

Whenever you download a house that someone else made, the first thing you may want to do is to hit your ctrl, alt, shift and C key and type in the box, prepare_lot. If its missing its portal for vehicles or the portal for Sims to get off the property or the mailbox, chunk the house and go get you another one. As far as I know, nothing out there can properly FIX those things. I considered keeping one house that was missing the vehicle portal but keeping it would also have prevented me from enjoying watching them go Downtown with Hot Date. Using the prepare_lot cheat also keeps your Sims from going around complaining about all the cool stuff you just put in or around the house! :)

Deleting houses!

• Demolishing houses in the game is FINE. However, if you go into your Explorer and delete them you will get messages about "Its time to update..." I forget the exact words in the game..its been a very long time since I had that problem. Anyhow, if you want a house GONE and the lot restored to its orginal state, you have a folder called "TemplateUserData" in your The Sims directory. Open the folder and click on Houses, then COPY whichever lot number you need and PASTE *do NOT just drag it or you'll lose that template house permanantly* it into the neighbourhood you need a house replaced in. Copy using CTRL C and paste using CTRL V or use your "Edit/Copy, Edit/Paste" feature at the top of your explorer.
• If you want to create a new neighbourhood, simply COPY the TemplateUserData folder and PASTE it into your Sims directory, rename it to UserData6 or whatever neighbourhood you need it named to. EliSims will do this for you, but I would rather do it myself.

• Skins
  You can get bad skins and not be able to create families because the game crashes. If you download from the Exchange be VERY careful because files corrupt in the upload transfer somehow! Remove ALL of your current skins to a temp folder on your desktop, then download the families you want from the exchange, run "File Cop" afterwards and then put all your other skins back into the game. File Cop checks walls, floors and other files and gets rid of the bad ones. Get it at The Sims official site. I've had some body files totally wiped out so just be careful to not let something over-write and mess up anything that works! Visit some sites that offer skin help and find out which files make what skins work. Sometimes one of these may be missing and will cause a crash.

• Crashing houses
  Download and run Object ID checker. It checks for duplicate IDs. Download and get to know The Sims Transmogrifier.*TMOG* Object ID check will tell you if you have duplicate IDs and you can reclone the item using Transmogrifier but don't forget to delete the original after you reclone it. A downright BAD object won't show up using ID Checker. File Cop doesn't show bad objects either.
  
  Drag all objects out of the game folders and put on your desktop in a temp folder. Inside that temp folder make another folder for objects you check and find to be "ok"! A few at a time put the objects back in and run the game. If it does not crash, quit and do NOT save the game. As you check objects remember to move the ones you've checked already into the "ok" folder. Move more objects into your game folders and continue repeating all the above until you do crash. Narrow it down to what the offending object is and get rid of it. OR you can try recloning it using TMOG, but it doesn't always work...some objects are just bad from what I've discovered.

If you have separated your objects as I suggested elsewhere on this page, the FIRST folder you may need to check for bad objects will be the Paintings folder. Drag out all folders into a temporary folder on your desktop or somewhere and leave just the paintings in there. Bring up your game and see if it crashes or not. I say this because most of my crashes are caused by a painting. Its not the creators fault, remember that....it just happens! Just remember that if it does NOT crash, quit the game and do NOT save or you won't be able to find out what that bad object is! If you have separated your objects it helps track a bad one down quicker....not separating is ok too, but makes it take longer to trace things down.

It COULD be a bad skin causing problems. File Cop doesn't always detect it...get acquainted with Sims Character Makeover and you can fairly easily track down which file is causing problems. You could have a bad body file with nothing pointing towards it which will crash your game. This will show up running the Makeover studio because when you click on the body file it will crash out! Of course you could go through all your skin files manually by bringing up two explorer windows and looking at Xskin files and your other skin files and comparing what is there to what is not. That is a long drawn out pain!!! Just remember that when you download skins from sites to not let anything overwrite what you have already. NEVER download familes from The Sims Exchange without temporarily removing all current skin files to a separate folder first, download the families you want, then run File Cop, then replace all your previous skins. Same goes for walls & floors....to keep them from getting overwritten by corrupted files remove what you have beforehand. Another problem could be a missing cmx file or something else because File Cop tends to remove things it thinks are bad but may not be. Thats why its good to keep a back-up folder of your skins somewhere. Keeping backup of your objects, families and everything else is good too....update the folder backups sometimes too! That way you always have a fairly current backup on hand. Objects that are good one day can suddenly go flippy on you the next, so having that backed up file to replace it with is good!

Last Updated: 9 March, 2003