If you've played The Sims for a while, and have several neighborhoods and a bunch of back-ups, you might sometimes have a hard time trying to find a specific family as it was saved at a specific time. Like it does with many things, The Neighborhood Handler makes that process a lot easier. Accessing the family index is pretty easy: check the "Family Index" option and then click "Continue..." at the main screen (Chapter 3). The Neighborhood Handler will take a little while to load the families in all the neighborhoods. If a back-up is protected, it'll ask for the password of that back-up. That's necessary because the program needs to read the neighborhood.iff file, which is the password-protected file. If you don't have the password of a back-up, simply click "Cancel" when it asks for it and it'll skip that back-up. Once The Neighborhood Handler is done with all the loading (depending on how many back-ups and neighborhoods you have this can take a long time), you'll be shown something similar to this:
At the top you can select the back-up or neighborhood to show families of (or "All" to list all families). The box below that can be used to select a specific family. In the case shown in the screenshot above, the Newbie family is selected in Neighborhood 1. You can see that family's money they can spend on furniture, food, etc. after "Cash". How much the house is worth can be seen if you check out the number after "Value". The "Total Value" is a combination of both. Homeless families usually don't have a house value. After "House" you can see in which lot number they live. For instance, the number 7 in the example above means the Newbie family lives on Simlane 7. The "Friends" number is the same as shown in the neighborhood screen, when you hold our mouse cursor over the home. As you might know, that number can be inaccurate. At the bottom you see the list of the family members. If you select one of the members, you'll see their name, picture and biography.
There are 4 buttons on the screen. The "Neighborhood Details" button will show the details screen of the neighborhood. By clicking "Show Home" you'll be able to view the house the selected family lives in (if any). More information can be found in the Viewing/Changing Details chapter in this manual (Chapter 4). Then there's the "More Details" button. Click that to see this:
The screen can differ depending on what kind of Sim you selected (Adult, Child or Pet). In the case of adults, you won't see the third column with some of the interests if you don't have Hot Date, Vacation, Unleashed or Superstar installed. There isn't much to say about this screen - you can just see some details of the selected family member. Just click "Back..." when you're finished checking it out. You'll then be taken back to the Family Index screen which is described above.
Related chapters: