My game is seriously broken, please help!!!!

lauravonawesome

This is a brand-new save in a brand-new town. I've only been playing for about 3-4 days; played a little bit this morning and everything was fine. I saved my game and went to work.

I came back this afternoon, saved & quit as I had something else to do on my computer. I did that for 5 minutes, then logged back into my game and was horrified to see this:



Once again, brand-new save in a brand-new town. Vanilla game. No mods, cheats, hacks, or CC. No error code 12. Nothing with ".bad" in my saves folder.

I'm trying not to panic. But I'm scared that this is going to happen to any saved game I try to play... Should I risk opening another save, or just cut my losses and reinstall everything?

I just saw another post about someone whose Sim randomly disappeared while she was not in-game and the game registered it as a death. Is this what happened to me?

ANY help is appreciated at this point.

-von

LaBlue0314

I had it happen to me once, where I got a bad save. It could have been something had happened while it was saving. I started up a new game file, and did not see a repeat of that issue that caused the problem. At that time I did not have any mods or CC in my game either.

SimplyJen

Is this the first time seeing it? Close without saving if you can help it and restart the game. I've had sim portraits go blank before and restarting the game or picking up the house+household in edit town mode then placing them back down worked.

lauravonawesome

LaBlue0314 wrote:

I had it happen to me once, where I got a bad save. It could have been something had happened while it was saving. I started up a new game file, and did not see a repeat of that issue that caused the problem. At that time I did not have any mods or CC in my game either.

If that were the case, though, would there not be a ".bad" file in my saves folder?

It may have been a new save, but I'd already put so much work into it... I had a Sim with close-to-max guitar and painting skills, level 9 in music career, with a fine arts degree. And all of it is gone.

Is there any way I can salvage any of it?

lauravonawesome

Simasaurus09 wrote:

Is this the first time seeing it? Close without saving if you can help it and restart the game. I've had sim portraits go blank before and restarting the game or picking up the house+household in edit town mode then placing them back down worked.

I tried closing without saving, didn't work. When I reload, it's the exact same thing. My 3 Sims and their cat are all missing.

I made a copy of the town to try your second suggestion with. Maybe it will work, I hope.

Sigh.
-von

BatmanFanGirl

If it was a bad save you can go into your saved games folder and delete the folder if you game title that ends in extention .bad, that could help.

lauravonawesome

BatmanFanGirl wrote:

If it was a bad save you can go into your saved games folder and delete the folder if you game title that ends in extention .bad, that could help.

And that's just it: as I mentioned in the opening post, there is no ".bad" file in my saves folder.

I'm in the queue for live chat, just in case Simisaurus' suggestion doesn't work. Sad face. Not how I wanted to spend my evening.

BatmanFanGirl

lauravonawesome wrote:

BatmanFanGirl wrote:

If it was a bad save you can go into your saved games folder and delete the folder if you game title that ends in extention .bad, that could help.

And that's just it: as I mentioned in the opening post, there is no ".bad" file in my saves folder.

I'm in the queue for live chat, just in case Simisaurus' suggestion doesn't work. Sad face. Not how I wanted to spend my evening.

Oh, man, I'm sorry I didn't see that part, sorry! I hope you find a solution.

lauravonawesome

BatmanFanGirl wrote:

Oh, man, I'm sorry I didn't see that part, sorry! I hope you find a solution.

Thanks. I hope so too... As far as I know, my game is up to date, but Deepak from life chat sent me a super patcher and said it should fix everything. He says to just reinstall the base game, but I'm afraid I'll lose all my stuff.

If not, then I've found a temp fix: moving the household to the library and replacing the lot wasn't enough, so I copied the household to the library and deleted the original, then put the copy back into the house. All their relationships are gone, obviously, but it's better than nothing.

I might try one more thing before uninstalling. Good thing I copied the town, huh.

Mikezumi

lauravonawesome wrote:

BatmanFanGirl wrote:

Oh, man, I'm sorry I didn't see that part, sorry! I hope you find a solution.

Thanks. I hope so too... As far as I know, my game is up to date, but Deepak from life chat sent me a super patcher and said it should fix everything. He says to just reinstall the base game, but I'm afraid I'll lose all my stuff.

If not, then I've found a temp fix: moving the household to the library and replacing the lot wasn't enough, so I copied the household to the library and deleted the original, then put the copy back into the house. All their relationships are gone, obviously, but it's better than nothing.

I might try one more thing before uninstalling. Good thing I copied the town, huh.

Sorry you are having problems

Before you go uninstalling, I would perhaps post this in the tech section and see if anyone else has a solution for you. EA Live Chat are notorious for telling people to uninstall and reinstall. It is not always the answer but it keeps you out of their hair for a while because it takes time!

Bobbo

You could also try resetting all the Sims by doing a

resetsim *

In a chat window.

ETA: I remember there being a fix using DebugEnabler, a mod, from NRAAS. Of course, that would mean adding a mod to your game.

PepsiCoca

I'm sorry for reviving this thread, but I'm having this exact same issue and I think this is a game-breaking bug. The portraits of the sims won't show, and anytime you order them to do something, they just dissapear, teleport, or start doing a T-Pose. Eventually this will happen to the whole town, making the game absolutely empty and unplayable.

It will keep happening even if you start a clean, vanilla save without mods. So far the only solution I see is reinstalling, which sucks...

GraceyManor

@PepsiCoca
Hi there, perhaps you might like to post a thread in the technical threads:
https://forums.thesims.com/en_US/categories/technical-discussions-en
There's many active and helpful players over there and you may get a response quicker. as this thread is from 2014, the OP and others may or may not be around still.=)

igazor

PepsiCoca wrote: »

I'm sorry for reviving this thread, but I'm having this exact same issue and I think this is a game-breaking bug. The portraits of the sims won't show, and anytime you order them to do something, they just dissapear, teleport, or start doing a T-Pose. Eventually this will happen to the whole town, making the game absolutely empty and unplayable.

It will keep happening even if you start a clean, vanilla save without mods. So far the only solution I see is reinstalling, which plum...

It would usually be worth it to first try starting a new game or force the game to spawn a new, no content TS3 user game folder in Documents and see how things go from there.

Unless hard drive damage is happening, the game's Program Files do not typically change with usage and that's what a reinstall affects. Reinstalling is often unnecessary and unfortunately doesn't tend to fix anything if the real culprit is elsewhere.

TadOlson

That UI failure issue happened to me once when I was new to the game in 2012 and was still playing Mod-free after the family I was playling had their baby taken by the game social worker and the save slowly became so corrupted that I had a toddler able to be directed to do all kinds of adult interactions with his mum including adult romantic actions and other sims had interaction menues not matching ages.It was a badly broke save and that's one way the UI can break.I couldn't even open the save after that UI failure session and ended up deleting it.

igazor

The player who revived this thread is having issues with their entire game install, not just one save that has gone bad. We are assisting them at NRaas (am assuming it's the same player since the symptoms described are exactly the same).

TadOlson

Game installs can be corrupted by a bad patch or a computer virus getting into the computer and another cause is installing from a faulty disk.