This is a bit long and may be confusing, so please bear with me.
My game is in week 13, with aging on, so many sims have died and, at this point, a number have been culled from existence by the game's population management. From the beginning, I've periodically switched households to make other households try for baby to keep some of the original townie descendants in my game.
My main sim that I started with, Cade, is still alive because he's been using youth potions to reset the adult stage every time it gets near full. I'm using the same sim because I wanted to max a lot of skills and try as much as possible with him. He's been married twice now. He had two children with his first wife (Zoe Patel), who are now in the adult stage with children and spouses of their own. As Zoe was reaching the end of her second round of elder years (she reset once with a potion, and then I let her go) he started a long-term relationship with the neighbor (Babs L'amour, who I moved into the neighborhood myself, and who had no family ties to anyone at the time) who he had two kids with and then married later when she was an elder.
The kids (a teen and a child) don't live with them. Cade tried for baby while she lived next door, because I didn't want to play children again while I was focused on building his skills and completing collections. At one point when I switched to Babs' household, I noticed how late she was in her adult stage, and realized she would die before her oldest child would reach young adult. Since I didn't want to manage another family (I had him marry and move in Babs when she was near death so I'd be sure to get her urn/tombstone) I created an adult sister named Marie for Babs in manage worlds, and moved her in with the children, so they'd be cared for by their aunt and not deleted because they lacked a guardian.
Grim eventually took Babs, and I had Cade invite her ghost to move in when she spawned. This was after Zoe's ghost was culled by the game, which not only caught me by surprise, but also upset me, as there was no warning and I'd been curious if there'd be ghost drama if both wife ghosts spawned on the same night, since my sim was keeping his relationship up by charming and woohooing with Zoe's ghost whenever she came out. Originally I didn't want to play Babs' ghost, but I'd rather have a playable ghost than a deleted one, so she lives there now.
However, Babs' relationships to other sims have become strange.
A sim showing as a friend of hers (Trinity, a child of Travis Scott and Liberty Lee) stopped in, and since I know Trinity is an adult, I thought it odd that it showed only four social options under "more" instead of the usual five, with romance missing.
Writing out the family tree on paper, Trinity should not be related to Babs. One of Cade's daughters with Zoe (Babs' step-daughter) is married to Trinity's brother. How in sim nation does that make Trinity Babs' sister? The step-daughters themselves are listed as acquaintances, as non-committal Babs' ghost never remarried my main sim after death despite having full pink and green bars, and even shot him down when asked about being his girlfriend before she was in the household. In her panel, it says they are soulmates and best friends, and in his it says the same, with the added "deceased spouse" by it.
It is not because of any marriage relation from Marie, the sister I made for Babs. She is still single and has no romances with anyone. Babs' children are both teens, so they are not married, either. So I continue to look over Babs' relationship panel, and I see that the children of one of her step-daughters are nieces/nephews, but not the other step-daughter's children. They are just acquaintances and neighbors. Now I'm thoroughly confused, and then it dawns on me that it's not because of her marriage to Cade at all. It thinks the step-daughter's husband, Jarod, is her brother.
So I send Babs' ghost to visit the lot (she never met Jarod) and sure enough, the game says he's her brother, which explains why Trinity is her sister, because Jarod and Trinity are full siblings.
However, I know for a fact that Jarod and Trinity's parents (Travis Scott and Liberty Lee) are not Babs' parents! When I put her in the game, I moved Babs into a single home (Streamlet Single) in the same neighborhood as Cade (who lives at Bargain Bend) and the BFF household, but Babs never lived with them, nor did her children. When I created Marie, I used the free real estate cheat to put her and the two children in Cacti Casa in Oasis Springs, since it was empty with all the original residents long dead. I'm not sure if Babs ever even met Travis or Liberty, and I know they were both dead by the time I created Marie. They're not in Babs' panel. I know that Cade was acquainted with Liberty when she was alive, but when I checked his panel, Liberty has disappeared the same way Zoe did. He never met Travis. Oddly, Summer's ghost is still on his panel, even though she's from the same age group and household.
My best guess is that something in the game's management felt a need to replace the deleted family connection between Jarod and Trinity, and decided to randomly make Babs their sister. I don't know if this started before or after Babs died, but I suspect it was while she was a homeless ghost.
Has anyone else had anything like this happen? I don't like the idea that relationships among sims can be changed so dramatically and with no warning.
