How to fix broken roommates in The Sims 2

If you’re an avid Sims 2 player, you may have toyed around with the roommate system that came with The Sims 2 Apartment Life. Unfortunately, there’s a rather big bug that Maxis never fixed: roommates remain stuck in their roommate state when added to your household through marriage or by moving in.

I ran into the bug during a Twitch livestream and tried everything: making the roommate “Find Own Place” and moving him back into the house, attempting to add him into the household via cheats, resetting him, and everything else you can think of. Eventually, a member of my community found a solution via the ModtheSims forum, using SimPE to remove the roommate stasis.

If you’ve never done that before, I’ve put together this guide detailing how to quickly do it in three simple steps.

A playable Sim and their roommate who just moved in but is not recognised as a fully fledged member of the household. — You can see the roommate Sim (On the right) has just moved into the household, but the game still classes him as a roommate.

1. Download and install SimPE

SimPE is a downloadable program that essentially allows you to edit EVERYTHING within The Sims 2. You can change elements of the game’s neighbourhoods, objects, and your Sims, including relationships, memories, personalities, and more. If you don’t know what you’re doing, it can screw up some of your game, so just be careful and research what you want to do before doing it. Also, please remember to back up your game and neighbourhoods – you don’t want to lose generations of Sims!

SimPE can be downloaded from ModtheSims.com, one of the best websites for Sims custom content (CC) across all games. Download the most up to date package and install it on your PC, that’s it.

2. Backup your game and neighbourhoods

Before you do anything, make sure you head into your game files and make a copy of your neighbourhood and store it somewhere safe. Just head to:

My Documents > EA Games > The Sims 2 Ultimate Collection > Neighborhoods > [Your neighborhood]

If you do not have the Ultimate Collection, the file destination will be the same just renamed to your copy of the game, like The Sims 2, for example.

If you’re not sure which neighbourhood is yours, the naming usually goes like this:

N001 is Pleasantview
N002 is Strangetown
N003 is Veronaville
G001 is Riverblossom Hills from the Seasons expansion
F001 is Desiderata Valley from the Freetime expansion
E001 is Belladonna Cove from the Apartment Life expansion
Anything else is a custom hood

3. Fix your Sim

Once you’re ready to fix your Sim, simply open SimPE and make the program load up your neighbourhood:

Click Tools
Click Neighbourhood
Click Neighbourhood Browser
Find the Neighbourhood your broken Sim is in and click Open

How to find and open Neighbourhood Browser using SimPE.

A menu showing the neighbourhood selection in SimPE.

It can take a few minutes depending on the size of your neighbourhood, so just wait a little bit. Once ready, you need to find and open your Sim:

Click Tools
Click Neighbourhood
Click Sim Browser
Find your broken Sim and click Open

Again, it can take a few minutes for everything to load, but once it is ready, you then need to open the Extended Browser by:

Click More
Click Extended Browser

Finding the correct flag for your Sim in SimPE.

A pop-up should appear with a table. Simply scroll through the table and search for “PersonData Flags 1”. There should be a number in the next column similar to “0x810”. To fix the Sim and make them an ordinary member of your household, you simply need to remove the first number after the “x” so the number becomes “0x10”.

Click OK and save the changes via the File > Save menu, and then quit SimPE. Boot up your game and load up the household. The Sim should no longer be a roommate and function as an ordinary household member, just like in the picture above. Done!