Talk:Social worker: Difference between revisions

::::::Seeing that there's a lot of confusion here, let me clear things up. Game corruption is when a Universal NPC, such as the Grim Reaper, Mrs. CrumpleBottom, etc. are modified in any way or form outside of their in-game purposes. That includes moving them in, making them selectable, changing their gender, etc. Neighborhood corruption occurs for a large variety of reasons. To be clear, the Social Worker is NOT a universal Sim - they have a character file and thus tampering with them will cause neighborhood corruption. I wrote a [[Game_guide:Avoiding_corruption|game guide regarding corruption here]].

::::::Niko, just because a Sim has a personality, interests, bio, gender, etc. doesn't mean they have a complete character file. Sims like the Repo Man, Social Worker, Social Bunny, etc. have an incomplete character file because they lack a lot of necessary data to be properly playable. The game treats these Sims differently than other Sims. By making them selectable, their character file doesn't magically become complete, but you've just changed the way the game treats that Sim. Since the character file is incomplete, and the game is trying to treat the Sim as a regular Sim, loose, dangling references often conjoin with the incomplete bits of the character file. This is basically what corruption is - it's when missing or incomplete data look for a new home, find one, and settle in, even if it makes no sense at all. Sim A and Sim B might have a baby, but Sim C may, for no reason, get a memory of having a child even if they've never met Sim A or B. That's corruption - there's incomplete data somewhere and the data went over to link up with it. Eventually, there will be so much misplaced data that the neighborhood will become unopenable by the game, or if it's bad enough, SimPE.