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Downloading TS3 For The First Time In Years, What Do I Need To Know?
I have all packs except for Movie Stuff, Katie Perry, and 70's 80's 90's Pack. I'm not sure if I want everything installed though. Are there any packs you all for sure recommend I install? I know I want to install Seasons, World Adventures, Late Night, Generations, University Life, Island Paradise, and Diesel Stuff. I'm on the fence about Pets for now.
Also, I have some questions:
Town Life Stuff: Is it true you can take your sims out to buy groceries with this pack? Can't remember.
Fast Lane Stuff: Do you have to have this one installed in order to gain access to cars? Can't remember.
Ambitions: Do you have to install this one in order to get tattoos? Can't remember.
I'm going to try to play it with no CC. But I do miss the CC cars. I feel like once I start downloading, I'll go down the rabbit hole and end up with GBs of stuff, not sure I want to do all of that.
Also, I have some questions:
Town Life Stuff: Is it true you can take your sims out to buy groceries with this pack? Can't remember.
Fast Lane Stuff: Do you have to have this one installed in order to gain access to cars? Can't remember.
Ambitions: Do you have to install this one in order to get tattoos? Can't remember.
I'm going to try to play it with no CC. But I do miss the CC cars. I feel like once I start downloading, I'll go down the rabbit hole and end up with GBs of stuff, not sure I want to do all of that.
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Comments
Some answers to your questions:
1. Groceries are a base-game feature, you don’t need to install any packs to go grocery shopping. Each town you load up will have a supermarket, which is where you go to buy groceries. The supermarket is a rabbit hole where you simply select the things you want from a list and buy them.
2. Cars are a base-game feature too, they can be found in Buy Mode.
3. You don’t need to install Ambitions to give your Sims tattoos, it’s a base-game feature too (I myself don’t have Ambitions). However, you do need Ambitions if you want your Sim to be a tattoo artist (via the Stylist career).
TS4 Sims in TS3
Seasons and Pets are the top demanding packs if your computers specs are a concern. Also forgot to add... V-sync is not built into The Sims 3 but it is very important. Turn it On if you have a dedicated card. If you're playing on a Mac, the game has some limitations vs playing on Windows.
You can buy groceries with the base gsme. Sims are not required to though. If you don't buy groceries then they will buy the ingredients straight from the fridge anyways.
I use a mod to force my sims to buy groceries... pretty much disables fridge shopping. Cars come with the base game. Fast Lane just adds cars.
This question I am not 100% sure... I want to say Ambitions is required but someone else knows.
S3 simblr: http://simplysimming.tumblr.com/
S4 simblr: http://simlogic.tumblr.com/
Welp
S3 simblr: http://simplysimming.tumblr.com/
S4 simblr: http://simlogic.tumblr.com/
Yep I'm on a Mac. I did some Googling. It seems playing on a Mac is pretty much impossible if you have a newer Mac. My only option is to Boot Camp. Looking into that now, only thing is I want to install Windows on a totally separate external hard drive. I don't want to install it on my main drive. So I'm working on that
If you have a desktop, consider getting an additional internal drive installed. Laptops are more difficult to upgrade. Some laptops allow the drive to be changed or additional add-on. Then you would faced with the task of cloning the original drive over to the new one unless you're not replacing the main drive. Be sure to check your warranty beforehand because this could void it. I'm not a Mac user so this may not be accurate for Macs. @igazor Should scold me and tell me to stay in my own lane since he uses Mac.
S3 simblr: http://simplysimming.tumblr.com/
S4 simblr: http://simlogic.tumblr.com/
A couple things I might add to my earlier post:
Routing issues arise with Pets mainly because of two things. Firstly, puppies and kittens can’t climb stairs (like toddlers, they must be carried), so they may route fail in places where, for example, the only way into a house is up a small flight of stairs. When this happens, the game may lag or even freeze up. Secondly, the game spawns wild horses in the world. From experience, horses are bulky and tend to get stuck in awkward places. The only way to fully disable wild horses spawning is by using mods (NRaas Register), since EA’s option for this seems to be broken.
Island Paradise is a great EP, but Isla Paradiso (the world that comes with it) is infamous for being super laggy due to poor urban planning on EA’s part. There are fixed versions out there that work really well, but even then, it’s still recommended to use lag-reducing mods (e.g. NRaas Overwatch and ErrorTrap) when playing in these worlds.
TS4 Sims in TS3
https://bluebellflora.com
https://bluebellflora.com/sims-3-packs-not-showing-as-installed
Another helpful player here, @puzzlezaddict, may be able to assist. I haven't worked much with TS3 for Mac directly except for some short-term testing for other players since quite a long time ago when I Bootcamped myself.
But even without those barriers and the others that some of the more recent hardware combinations present, TS3 for Mac is a mess. Yes, Bootcamp by all means if that is within reach. But you do not want to Bootcamp to an external drive. No matter how spiffy the external connection will be, it will always introduce data delay, lag, and bottleneck elements that no one needs to deal with even before we talk about launching a game on it. Bootcamp is best done on a partition of an internal drive. The partition, once set up, has no impact on the operation of OS X on its own partition on the same drive as only one OS can be booted into at a time. The challenge is that one needs to have a large enough drive with enough available space to work with to account for the two partitions for this to make sense.
@Chazzzy - May I ask which Mac you are working with? Model, year, processor, RAM, graphics card, drive space -- most of this is available right from About This Mac off the Apple menu.
NRaas has moved!
Our new site is at http://nraas.net
iMac Retina 5K, 27-inch, 2017
3.4 GHz Intel Core i5
8GB 2400 MHz DDR4
Radeon Pro 570 4GB
1TB Fusion Drive
I was nervous about partitioning because I didn’t want to lose my current data
I'll just add that I've had no problem playing TS3 on a 2017 macbook. Even though my graphics card isn't technically supported, it still runs the game fine, but I think that's not true for some slightly older cards. Still, there is a fix that might work (BluebellFlora again). When I installed on my new computer, I started with the base game and Ambitions, one of the packs that causes the Unknown Error issue (as does Late Night), and this fixed it—I just had to create an Ambitions alias to launch the game. With later packs, the Ambitions files were not getting copied where they needed to go, so I followed these instructions (the video is very helpful), and now I don't have any issues. I think you might need to repeat the last process every time you install a pack that's newer than anything else you have, but since I installed a handful at the same time, I only had to do it once.
Even with all of the workarounds, TS3 for mac still has a hard limit of 2 GB RAM, unlike the ~3.5 GB available on PCs. But that might be enough for you while you're just getting back into the game. Right now, I only come dangerously close to the limit when I have a large family (12 or so, 3-4 generations), get lazy about cleaning out inventories, and have my sims visit their friends' well-appointed houses. Purging RAM helps some, but for me at least, it only lowers the RAM use by 50-100 MB, depending on how long I wait to do it. Also, I'm not playing with Seasons or Pets, which would probably be impossible to run on a mac for any length of time.
Apple's Bootcamp Assistant manages the creation of the new partition for you if the free drive space is available. There isn't much risk of data loss at all, though of course backups to an external are always a good idea anyway. I have a 2 TB internal on my (older) iMac and devoted 360 GB to the Windows partition. Wish I had gone larger now and shifted more of my file storage elsewhere, but I do prefer the space for data on the OS X side myself. Existing data is not wiped when the partition is created through the Assistant, again this works as long as the free space is there.
NRaas has moved!
Our new site is at http://nraas.net
I did manage to get TS3 (plus all my expansion packs and custom content) up and running on my 2016 MacBook Pro (with Windows 10 Bootcamped on it)
3.1 GHz Intel Core i5
8 GB 2133 MHz LPDDR3
Intel Iris Graphics 550 1536 MB (I was afraid that the game would have issues with my graphics card, but everything went smoothly.)
I have High-End Loft Stuff, Pets, Seasons, Island Paradise, Into the Future, University Life, Late Night, and World Adventures.
TS4 Sims in TS3