Hi;
It's possible that the game saved your individual households, but may have reverted back to a default instance; I would recommend looking into your saves folder and seeing if a previous version of your save is available from before the patch.
Steps you can take to attempt to load a previous save (AKA: Restore a .VER file.)
(Make sure Sims 4 is closed before doing the steps below)
1: Go to your Saves folder. (The most common location is C:\Users\UserName\Documents\Electronic Arts\The Sims 4\saves ) (This may differ if you saved Sims 4 to a separate location.)
2: You should see a series of .SAVE and .VER files in this location; each .SAVE file should have a .VER ranging from 0-4 on it.
3: (Before proceeding, make sure you save all contents of this folder to a separate location; you will be altering file extensions and file names.)
4: Once everything is saved, look for the .SAVE file that has the most recent modified date; look to the .VER files associated with it, and find one that has a date just before you started experiencing issues.
5: Once you have found the .VER file in question, proceed to move the .SAVE file it originated from to a separate folder. (I recommend a temp folder on the desktop.)
6: Rename the .VER file to the exact name as the .SAVE file. (This includes the file extension, and the name.) (You will get an alert saying that changing file names may result in the file not working properly, select OK.)
7: Remove all other .VER files related to the .SAVE file.
8: Attempt to start the game. (The game will attempt to load the changed file as your most recent save. If this does not work, try a previous .VER file that was saved in Step 3.)
I've had to use this step a couple of times after I experienced hard drive failure; hopefully this helps you restore a previous save. (You might lose a little gameplay time, but better to lose that than a whole file.)
- B
