Recovering broken dead sim

[cwhitney]

So a sim wanted to see a ghost, so I decided to pack her up and visit a cemetery.  Once there, I discovered one of the tombstones was missing, the one the cemetery was named after, no less.  I went looking for ways to respawn the tombstone and discovered the method using the teleporter and the debugger.  Sadly, this did not work, as he was not available in the default character menu, or any other menu.

So I checked him on SimPE and discovered he was listed as unlinked, with no character data.  I have no idea what happened to cause this, but I digress.

Anyway, I looked some more and discovered that it's pretty hopeless bringing him back as is, but I just thought I'd make one last attempt.

I have a couple backups from the various expansion packs that have him character file in them.  If I overwrite the current file with one of the old files, would that bring him back without causing some nasty side effects?  Even if I use one of the backups from when he was still alive?  I'm assuming he'd be alive when I loaded the game, but would that completely screw up something that would be better left alone?  I'd try to bring him back dead, but I'm not sure when the character file got shredded, so I may have to go further back.  Does anyone know of any unpleasant circumstances that could arise from doing this?

[DrNerd]

Do you have the nounlinkondelete hack?  That at least stops unlinking.

If you were going to try to replace the character file, I'd do it with one from after he died.  I know you can't replace character files if they're alive, and I'd assume you wouldn't be able to replace the file of a dead character with a copy from when he was alive.

The trouble, though, is that if the file did become unlinked, there's a chance that the shredded character file data is in the process of destroying your neighborhood.  Even replacing the file won't change the damage that's already been done.

If you have a backup from when his tombstone was there, I'd revert to that instead of trying to slap a Band-Aid on the current neighborhood.