Devastating Sims 4 Glitch Makes Player Lose Photos They Saved for 7.5 Generations

Growing a long-running family tree in The Sims 4 is no simple task, and one unlucky player lost photos of 7.5 generations due to a pesky glitch. Building so many generations in The Sims 4 takes a lot of time and effort, but the evidence of all that hard work has unfortunately disappeared, seemingly forever.

The Sims 4 has been going strong for over a decade now, with this year marking its 12th anniversary. In that time, players have been building in-game families and seeing how far these family trees can go. Keeping a single Sims 4 character alive is difficult enough on its own, but keeping track of multiple generations really adds to the challenge. The Sims franchise is one of the most popular life sim franchises around, but that popularity and longevity doesn’t mean it’s safe from glitches that can alter a player’s progress in truly devastating ways.

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Sims 4 Player Loses 7.5 Generations Worth of Family Photos in a Matter of Seconds

The player who has been plagued by this particular Sims 4 glitch is Reddit user iiappie. This fan managed to carefully collect photos of 7.5 generations before the glitch destroyed all the time in effort they went into recording the lives of each family member. They shared a screenshot of the various walls that were once covered in family photos. Now, all the frames are simply blacked out. This player went to such lengths to record each generation that every wall has a connected bookshelf that holds the history of that particular line of the family tree. It was truly an impressive effort, which makes the disappearance of so much in-game history all the more devastating. When explaining just how much was lost, iiappie said, “They’re all gone now. I don’t usually get upset by things like this, but yikes, this sucks.”

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While the photo shows six walls, the seventh one can be found on the second floor of the house. When this glitch happened, iiappie was currently working on building the eighth generation. Fellow Sims 4 players have commented potential fixes, though. Reddit user Efsamo offered a link to a fix they had previously posted on the game’s subreddit, while other players hoped that loading a past version of the save file would work. As of right now, there hasn’t been an update on whether iiappie has been able to recover their pictures or not. Creating a family in The Sims 4 that runs for multiple generations is something that a lot of fans strive to accomplish, so there’s no telling just how long this player has been working on growing the lineage.

Plenty of Sims 4 fans shared their sympathies with the player, with some even mentioning that similar glitches have happened to them in the past. Others were simply impressed at how many generations iiappie was able to stretch their family. This glitch doesn’t just happen to family pictures, either. It can even happen to paintings. Reddit user Rumlowbones commented, “I quit playing because the family portraits my sim painted of his dead parents and his wife and children all turned white.” Even though there are regular Sims 4 updates, it seems like this problem has persisted for a very long time with no fix in sight.

At the moment, it doesn’t look like iiappie’s photo library is going to be restored. Tips and tricks from commenters hopefully fix the situation, but only time will tell. Killing Sims in The Sims 4 is one thing, but killing the memory of 7.5 generations has to hurt after working so hard to keep record of all that history.