Moving House

Moving In  
Splitting a family
Moving Sims between Towns  
Moving House MAY cause Miscarriage  

Moving in

In this screenshot Sutty is just the original Sim, as first created, so she is homeless. I find a suitable home for her by placing a copy in the appropriate Lot. You can use a downloaded Sim, or one of the provided families, or make your own in Create-A-Sim.

Choose a home that she can afford and move her in.

Or use the Freerealestate cheat.

Splitting a family

The Wrong Way

Moving from one house to another can be fraught with worry. In Sims 3, it can be tricky to get right. Here is one trap I fell into, which might help you to avoid it....

I had a family with three Sims. They had a house and decided to sell up and move to alternate accommodation. So I chose the "Move" option from the mobile phone in Sim's inventory. A window comes up with options. I chose to move two of the Sims out, leaving the third Sim alone in the tiny house, a shack in a pretty hollow in the woods in Riverview.

Unfortunately, the user interface falls down here. Logically, I thought, I chose "Move out" for the two chaps who were moving out. The game actually SAYS that they will be moved into suitable accommodation. It lies! As they had only a few thousand between them, I assumed it would be an empty lot. I was wrong. They disappeared from the neighbourhood screen, nowhere to be found, and joined the ranks of the Homeless Sims living in the Town.

Select an actual HOUSE to move into. Don't choose "kick out". Pick the "House" button and buy them an actual house. The Kick Out option is for people you don't like very much, and thus you boot them out onto the street with nothing but the clothes on their back, and leave them to earn their own way up from total and utter poverty. When you boot them out, they go onto the clipboard and can be placed elsewhere.

The Fix

To retrieve Sims from the Homeless state.

Using Awesomemod (and many thanks to the denizens of MATY for advice here)

The Right Way

When you Split a household, the game seems to want to put ALL the funds in the playable part of the household. The Sims moving out need to become the playables, if only until they are in their new house. The active Sims get the money, they get the funds in the move out menu so that you can use it to buy a house. Once they are moved out, you can use Edit Town and Change Household back to the family you were playing before.

Moving Sims between Towns

Once a family or single Sim is successfully placed and moved in, the game creates a copy of them in the neighborhood bin. This appears to be a "Feature" and is another thing that's very confusing for Sims 2 players. They can be safely deleted from there; this will not harm the family "living" in your town.

This feature can be used to move the saved (copied)Sims into another Town - assuming they are not there already. I ASSUME this would be a Very Bad Thing, as in all science fiction stories :) I used this method to move a Sim I made, Sutty Gentian, to a home in Riverview. (Sometimes Story Progression will take a random Sim from the Bin and move them into a house, so it's worth checking the households from time to time. Again, they can be safely killed off\disposed of\moved out without harming your INTENDED playables..)

Of course you can also save out a Sim that you have played in your Town, with or without house, keeping all the Sim's skills (but you will of course lose the relationships) in a way that is pretty much analogous to our way of moving Sims 1 Sims, and move that Sim\family and their house if required, to another Town. 

Moving House MAY cause Miscarriage

It has been reported that when a pregnant sim moves house, the family ties to the father may be cut. The only solution I know about is to not move. I haven't tested what happens when you'd only move the father. It is rather annoying that the game does nothing to prevent this, since to me it's not always immediately obvious whether or not a sim is pregnant =/