@imlyss159 When you exit a town to the Main Menu but don't quit the game entirely, some of the data from the save that was just active remains, and loading a different town will introduce that old data to the new save. This is a known source of corruption and could definitely explain the issues you're seeing.
To confirm this, remove your game folder from Documents (again) and launch the game, generating another clean folder. Start a new save, look around and make sure there's nothing wrong, quit to desktop, clear your cache files, and start another new save (without ever loading the previous one). Again, make sure everything works properly; if it does, then switching towns at the Main Menu was probably the source of most if not all of your issues.
I'm not sure whether your current saves are salvageable, but you can try, if you want. It's a good idea to start with another clean folder, add ErrorTrap (be sure to download the version for patch 1.69) and Overwatch, clear your cache files, load one save, and let it run for a few sim-minutes. Then click on City Hall, and select NRaas > MasterController > Town Options > Reset Everything. The command might take a while to run. Then quit to desktop, clear your cache files again, and reload.
If this doesn't get rid of the corruption, you can go to Edit Town, evict your active family, save their house to the bin, bulldoze the lot, replace the house, and move the sims back in. If you do this all in one Edit Town session, without saving and replacing the sims themselves, they'll keep their jobs and relationships but lose their promised wishes and opportunities.
If this doesn't help either, then the only other thing you can do is save your sims to the bin and place them in a fresh town.
I'm a new member (first post, hello). Is there a new member thread for Sims 4 tech questions? Thanks
Hi there. New posts on the TS4 Help Center on this forum have been shut down and the section converted to Read Only. Players are encouraged to post tech and game issue questions on EA's AHQ board instead. There are no member/new member restrictions on AHQ. https://answers.ea.com/t5/The-Sims-4/ct-p/the-sims-4-en
To give you the background story my james and rudy got engaged and are living together. (Both in my active household. one day james, who has mastered handyness and has lv.8 inventing, Goes to repair his stereo and is electrocuted right in front of his fiance. they get a visit from our friend Grim. the reaper. a few days later my rudy gets the O my ghost opportunity and brings back james (as a Ghost), and he is only romantic interest relationship. rudy wants her real man back so she spends her days mastering cooking, gardening and fishing so she can make ambrosia to bring him back. with all the time of her being out the house james managed to get the next door neighbor Erin pregnant with a ghost baby named Jerry(erin and G baby Jerry not in my active house hold.) the day jerry was born james visited erin and bought her a crib and toy box and played with jerry for a while. A few days later james floats back over to erins and the baby is nowhere to be found. Jerry always showed up dark and dead in the family tree. please help me find jerry.
@Legend420 I saw this post yesterday, as I'm sure others did, but I at least didn't know exactly how to help you. From what I understand, never having been in this situation, ghost babies and toddlers in inactive households are unstable and prone to disappearing. Mods often help, particularly NRaas ErrorTrap and Overwatch, and MasterController to perform manual resets. The mods will often "recover wandering toddlers"; that may be what's necessary until the kid ages up.
Without mods, you can try resetting the baby. Open the cheats console (crtl-shift-c) and enter "resetsim Jerry Kennedy" without quotes (or whatever the baby's last name is). Then you might want to manually age up the kid so he doesn't disappear again. In the cheats console, enter "testingcheatsenabled true" without quotes, and then shift-click on the baby and select "trigger age transition."
hi, I use a mac and would like to know if theres a way for me to remove expansion packs from the game without me having to re-download when I want to use them again, I have too many and my computer, being 8 years old it can't handle them. My WIFI is pretty slow (it's currently at 6mb/s but ive seen it get into the kb/s) so i want to avoid having to re-download them. thanks
@thecakebear1 As far as I know, there's no way to deactivate packs while keeping them installed on your computer. What you could do is keep the disk images you downloaded from Origin and then use those to reinstall packs when you want them. Origin has an option to keep legacy installers after use, but it doesn't usually work. What you can do instead is download a pack, then copy its .dmg before installing.
To find a disk image that has been downloaded but not installed, open a Finder window and click on your hard drive on the left, under Devices. (If you don't see it, go to Finder > Preferences at the top of your screen, select Sidebar, and make sure Hard Disks is checked under Devices.) Open Macintosh HD or whatever it's called, then Library > Application Support > Origin > DownloadCache. Inside will be a folder with two files, one of which is the dmg for the pack you just downloaded. You can right-click on this file, copy it, and then right-click inside another folder to paste it. These files are somewhat large, so you may want to keep them on an external drive.
Finally, when you're installing the pack, make sure to copy down its product code. You'll need to supply this when you reinstall from disk image.
When uninstalling a pack, make sure you clean out its hidden library files as well, or your game won't launch. Here's how to find them:
Okay so i played this family for quite some time and i started out with 2 sims who were poor and now they have a full blown dynasty, and are rich and famous. And i had this evil family dog. So i had 8 sims in a household and they wanted 10 children, so i moved them out cause all of the children were grown and had families of their own. And they moved to a new house with the evil dog. And had a new baby and a bunch of animals. That evil dog attacked her own puppy its crazy so i gave her up for adoption cause i again ran out of room in my household and i wanted them to have one last baby. But then i switched households with the other household to adopted that evil dog cause i felt sorry for it. And i adopted it and it never came, and now the game crashes all the time. That person that delivers pets came and she just stands in front of the house and the dog never came. And I an plum, saved the game thinking it will fix itself when i restart the game. And now i can't do anything in the game, and yall have no idea how much effort i put in this family. So my question is can i somehow delete that save and return the old save where i never gave that dog for adoption? Or is that not possible? Or do you have any other solutions? I'm sorry for my grammar, English is not my native language. Has anyone had a similar problem, can this be fixed with a mod maybe?
@Sims3playa The adoption scenario is prone to breaking, especially with pets. The social worker gets stuck en route for whatever reason and never shows up, but the game thinks the adoption is still in progress and won't let anything else happen. Many of us use NRaas mods to prevent all kinds of game issues; MasterController in particular has an "adopt" command that very reliable and serves the same purpose. You could also use MC to manually add a sim, including a pet, to another household without running the adoption scenario at all.
Mod the Sims has excellent instructions on how to install mods, as well as a framework that you can download and transfer to your TS3 game folder without any extra arranging necessary:
For your current game, though, it's probably best to revert to a previous save, if you have one from before you started this adoption. Even if you never use "save as" to rename your save (and thereby generate a backup), the game itself keeps the file from the second-to-last time you saved. It will be inside Saves in your game folder with a .backup extension—if your current game's save folder is labeled SunsetValley.sims3, your backup will be SunsetValley.sims3.backup. Delete the .backup extension and rename the save (i.e. SunsetValley1.sims3), and it will be available to load from the Main Menu. Then you can try adopting again, if you want; just be sure to make another backup beforehand.
Better yet, you could add MasterController to your game, along with NRaas ErrorTrap and Overwatch for general save cleanup, and then manually add the dog to whichever household you choose. Click on the ground of that house or its lot tag, NRaas > MC > Household > Add Sim, and then you can use the filters (like "current household," if the dog still lives with your current family) to narrow down the list of sims and pets, or just press X to dismiss the filter and scroll through the entire list.
If you only have a backup from after the adoption started, you still might be able to fix the issue. With MC in place, click on City Hall, NRaas > MC > Town Options > Reset Everything; the command will take a while to run. If this doesn't help, you can go to Edit Town (if the game will let you), evict the family trying to adopt, save their house to the bin, bulldoze the lot, replace the house, and move the family back in. If you do this all in one Edit Town session, the sims will keep their jobs and relationships, although they'll lose their promised wishes and opportunities. If you can't go to Edit Town while this family is active, MC also has a command that lets you switch active households on the fly. Just click on the house whose sims you'd like to make active, NRaas > MC > Household > Make Active.
By the way, whether you add mods or not, you should delete the five cache files in your game folder in Documents. In fact, it's a good idea to do so regularly, whether you're having game issues or not. For reference, they are:
CASPartCache.package
compositorCache.package
scriptCache.package (this one must be deleted any time you add or remove mods from your game folder)
thank you so much, i will try with the backup save, i don't think that the mods will help cause everytime i'm playing the family wherever i click it crashes right away, so i can't edit the town nor can i do anything. The game loads, and i don't have any sim selected, and no pictures of active sims are in the left corner and i tried seeing if it will load after a while but it just crashes. So i don't think that the mods would help. Thank you for your help and information. :)
Hi everyone. So I keep installing CC and it says it is successful and I check it in the install area of the launcher but it never shows up in the game. If I quit the game and open the launcher the previously installed CC is no longer installed. I repeat the process with the same result. Any help? Thanks
@chelseagirl74 The cc you're trying to install could be problematic in some way. But it sounds more like you have a corrupt .dbc file in DCCache. These are bundles of custom content (the .ebc files are store content), and they can become corrupted just like any other file. It's usually best to delete a bad .dbc file and rebuild its content, but if you don't want to go this route and the other cc in that bundle still shows up in-game, you can just create another .dbc in a clean folder and add your new cc to that.
Pull all of your .dbc bundles out of DCCache (inside Documents\EA\TS3) and install a couple of the new cc items. Then start a new save (you don't want to use an existing one for testing, especially when your other cc isn't in your game folder). If the new cc shows up, go ahead and install the rest of it, no more than about half a dozen items at a time. Test again, and if all of your new cc is still there, you can add your old .dbc bundles back into your game folder. Be sure to rename the newest file so that it's numbered one higher than the previous highest. (So if you have dcdb0 through dcdb4.dbc, your new one will be dcdb5.dbc.)
If your custom content doesn't install properly even with all the other .dbc files out of the way, then it's time for a clean game folder. Pull the entire TS3 folder out of Documents\EA and launch the game, and a new folder will spawn with no content. You can install your new cc into this folder and then move the old .dbc bundles into it as well, just as described above. Once you've tested to make sure everything shows up in-game, you can move your saves and other content into the clean folder as well.
(By the way, if you can't install one or more of your new cc items into a completely clean folder, the problem is the cc itself.)
Here's an explanation of all the files found in your game folder, so you'll know what to keep:
im learning to use the tsr workshop but when i go to clone an object such as a horse bridle nothing comes up. nothing under horse comes up. What could i be doing wrong?
im learning to use the tsr workshop but when i go to clone an object such as a horse bridle nothing comes up. nothing under horse comes up. What could i be doing wrong?
Hi there.
TSRW always was a very fussy program to work with. Not sure there is much support to be had for it on this forum, although you could try the TS3 creators' sections. This section here is really about tech support for the game itself and the systems that run it, not as much for third party content creation tools.
If no one else answers, it's more likely you will be able to find some better assistance at TSR or on the TS3 content creation sections of MTS (Mod The Sims).
I made this account specifically to get help with a dilemma I caused for myself. It starts with trying to get my Sim, now back in their home world of Appalooza, to marry her college boyfriend. I keep having issues with trying to invite Sims from other worlds on a long distance visit, where they are set to arrive the next day at 9:00 am and then they never arrive, their relationship block is still in a gray panel, and I can't cancel the invite or try to send a new invite. So I googled that issue, and came across Igazor's suggestion to use Master Controller to force a new invite. I used Nraas > MC > Basic > Invite Over > Homeworld = University. And bam! The boyfriend showed up way in the distance of Appalooza, driving his own taxi, with a text prompt telling me he'd be over shortly. And then he disappeared for a minute again right before materializing at my front door. To my horror, there were two of the exact same Sim waiting at the door.
Okay, no big deal, just reset one, send him back to home base? I don't know what I thought that would do to help. This would all be fine if my Sim wasn't now caught in a cheating dilemma -- the game thinks she has two boyfriends, and even when asking one of the clones to be her roommate, both clone Sims display the "roommate" icon on their relationship square. So it seems anything that happens to the clone boyfriend I didn't reset will then happen to the reset-attempt clone. The only difference is that the reset clone still has the University as his home world.(From here on out, these details are not saved, but this illustrates what I have tried and found didn't work.)
So I tried to force kill the clone I reset, and selected "Invisible Sim". It did something really weird after that. My Sim has the "Heartbroken" moodlet for two days, but the clone's relationship square still makes it seem like he's alive. Like, he didn't die, they just broke up. And my Sim's new reputation is "Keeping His Options Open" and her boyfriend-roommate won't accept any romantic interactions. He somehow knows I cheated but never "confronted" my Sim for it -- he was even the one I asked "what do they say about me?" Now I'm completely stuck because I can't get anywhere near this enigma of a clone I tried to kill off. What do I do now? Is there any way I can get rid of one of the clones?
@permanentlydamp - Well, certainly that isn't supposed to happen! But one piece of information on the potential cause is that we always recommend having a few NRaas mods in play that help protect these foreign visiting sims from data corruption. This is more like a data split (between two partial mini-sims, one of whom shouldn't exist), but the idea is the same. The mods in question are Overwatch, ErrorTrap, Traveler, and RelationshipPanel. Do you have all or most of these going in addition to MasterController?
It's still always risky to ask a foreign visiting sim to move in that way because even with the mod protection things can go wrong (as you have just seen). Asking to become a Roommate is a bit strange as well because roommates are non-playable characters (NPCs), not residents, and are not whom our actively being sims should be marrying even if all these other odd things didn't happen. There are much safer ways to go about this, but we can get to that later.
From where you are now, I would strongly suggest not saving and reverting back to your most recent save or backup where the bf was still back in Uni World and trying this all again a different way. Possible?
@Igazor - Thanks for getting back to me so quickly.
So I have Overwatch and ErrorTrap installed into my game. Would adding the other two you mentioned be helpful to me?
Also could you explain a little further why "Ask to be Roommate" was a bad decision? Should I have skipped this process and gone straight to marriage?
If by reverting to a save or backup you mean that I was smart enough to create additional save files, then I'm in a further state of embarrassment. I'm not a smart Sims player in that way, I'm afraid. I won't be horribly offended if you give up on me. Where I currently am, my home lot displays my playable Sim and the university-boyfriend-roommate. When I last played I invited the clone over because I believe he was reset to somewhere within Appalooza, even though his relationship panel turned grey. He showed up at the door and I was a click away from my "kill him and hope this all stops" option. I'm glad I saved before that because then I would have been screwed.
If there's no fix for this weird data split I can just abandon this relationship path, but my next option was another sim she met at University. So that takes me back to you first point about mods -- will having the four that you mentioned help prevent this from happening again?
@igazor Hey man, quick follow up. I added Traveler and RelationshipPanel to my game.
As for backups, I looked into what I have in my PC save files. My actual save file and my .backup have the same time stamp of 11:57PM, yesterday. So I'm a little concerned that if I follow tutorials to switch my .backup to my current save file, nothing will change. But bear in mind I've never dealt with save files this in depth before, so assume I don't know what I'm talking about.
I'm gonna keep trying to mess around and see if anything changes but I'll avoid saving, of course. Thanks for the help again.
@permanentlydamp - Sorry, I don't "give up" on players quite so quickly.
The key date is the modification date/time of the currently being played world's nhd file within the regular or backup saves, not the date/time on the save folder itself (that one is pretty meaningless). I'll save the lecture about making extra saves for a bit later.
When you invite a foreign world sim over for a visit, whether that be by phone (the EA/difficult way) or by MasterController, the sim who arrives is a mini-sim. That means a partial copy of the one left behind in their homeworld, Uni Wold in this case. They don't often travel with enough data to make a complete sim out of them. Any changes that happen, such as new friends, relationships that move forward or go backwards, a skill learned, etc. while in that state get resolved with the real sim the next time the real sim appears on screen. The four mods help to prevent corruption from getting these sims to move in as permanent residents, but aren't always 100% effective. You can tell you are looking at a mini-sim by trying to bring them into CAS or change their outfits. If they are not a full sim, you can't do this, not with testingcheats nor mods, as mini-sims travel with only minimal wardrobes and will spawn temporary additional outfits like sleepwear or athletic that we cannot control only as they are needed.
The safest way to add a foreign sim to your homeworld is to go to their homeworld and get them to move in with your sim (somehow, there's a few ways to do this) so that they return with you and become part of your household. Another is to use MC's Add Sim > Homeworld > (filter to the foreign world) when the sim is NOT already visiting and this forces the full sim to move into your world, added to your household, a different one that already exists, or one of their own. At this point they become a full resident.
But players will ask these visiting mini-sims to move in or marry them anyway. We know it's tempting to do so and that's where the four mods try to help by lessening the chance of data corruption and duplicate sims.
The reason that asking them to be a Roommate is odd is that Roommates are nonplayable NPCs, not residents with proper households. If you really want a sim you cannot control in your household (though it sounds like not), it would be safer to ask or force them to be residents of the homeworld first, then they become an NPC upon accepting the offer to be a Roommate. And it's never a good idea to try to marry a homeless NPC, they really should have a household of their own or be part of yours before taking that step. It seems odd for Roommates to be considered "homeless" but that is what they are, part of a virtual household that has no permanent residence nor finances as that is how EA has defined them.
And now for the promised lecture -- make more saves! This game is delicate with or without mods and it's always wise to have a few Save As copies of our ongoing games that we care about standing by in case we need to revert to any of them. A good strategy is to always Save As (never Save & Quit!) and change the name of the save slightly each time by adding a number, letter, or date to the end. After a while you will accumulate more Save As copies than you need and can start deleting the older ones. But relying on the one and only backup save that the game makes for us when overwriting an existing one is not really a good recipe for sanity when something like this goes wrong. I have what must be 150 saves from various points in time of my seven year old ongoing game stored away in various places, not all in the active game folder. That is admittedly kind of insane, but in between that and just the 1 auto-generated backup save would be the amount that helps makes longer running ongoing games much safer to work with.
A year or two ago, I purchased an ASUS ROG G752VL-BHI7N32 from Best Buy. Due to a battery issue, the laptop would not power on for more than a few seconds. Geek Squad was not able to fix the laptop due to the high cost, so I was only offered store credit under my warranty plan. At first, this particular gaming laptop ran The Sims 3 fairly decent for the amount of CC and mods I had installed, but gameplay started freezing, slowing, and lagging as time went on.
As of now, I have not picked out another gaming laptop since I am unsure of one to choose from. I am quite a newbie to the gaming world, so I would appreciate if someone could guide me in the right direction towards a laptop well suited for a game of The Sims 3 running on all expansion packs, excluding two, and a large chunk of CC and mods on medium settings.
I have pursued several threads on here pertaining to SSD and HDD, but I am still unsure if I should purchase a gaming laptop with a combination of the two storage types or one with a large bulk of SSD?
From what I have read, The Sims 3 runs significantly faster on SSD, and because I play with a great deal of CC and mods, I was advised get a 500GB SSD. My price budget is at the maximum of $1,600, so I found a gaming laptop within that price range and amount of SSD: ASUS - TUF Gaming FX705GM 17.3" Laptop - Intel Core i7 - 16GB Memory - NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060 - 512GB Solid State Drive - Black
To my knowledge, I could also install The Sims 3 on the SSD and store my CC and mods on HDD. So if I were to acquire a laptop with both SSD and HDD, how would I transfer my CC and mods to the HDD while running the game on the SSD? Here is a laptop I discovered with a blend of the two storage types: ASUS - TUF Gaming 15.6" Laptop - Intel Core i7 - 16GB Memory - NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060 - 1TB HDD + 256GB Solid State Drive
Also, considering The Sims 3 is an older game, would I be better off downgrading the graphics card for the sake of saving a couple hundred dollars? I heard the game doesn't run well on newer cards, so are the gaming laptops I linked above suitable? In general, what would be the best graphics card to play on?
I apologize if my questions have been answered before, but I am in desperate need of assistance. This is my first time posting, so please let me know if I need to reiterate anything. Thank you!
@cupcake0021 I think you've covered almost everything; the only question I have is if you're using your Best Buy store credit for this purchase. With a budget of $1600 (U.S. dollars?), you can get a custom-built laptop instead of off-the-shelf, but I'm not sure what Best Buy offers in that department. Either way, you could certainly find a laptop that would run TS3 and all packs on high settings.
TS3 doesn't need an Nvidia 1060; a 1050 ti would do just fine, even on a laptop. (Desktop hardware doesn't need to be quite as strong to get the same performance.) You'd also need a 2.4 GHz processor or faster, and not U-series; 8 GB RAM, although 16 GB would be better for the sake of future-proofing; and at least 512 GB storage. But with your budget, you'll be able to get all of that and more.
The reason an SSD is better for TS3 is that any process that loads into or out of RAM will be much faster. This applies to launching the game, loading saves, traveling, and even opening CAS and Build/Buy—the categories will load more quickly, which can make a big difference when you have most packs and a lot of cc. But a 256 GB drive is too small to comfortably hold TS3's program files, along with your saves, mods, and cc, especially as you play longer and your save files get larger. You'd constantly have to shift files to a larger HDD or an external drive in order to keep enough free storage (at least 35-40 GB) for Windows 10 to operate.
You could certainly install program files on a small SSD and redirect Documents to a larger HDD, but you'd lose much of the benefit of the SSD. Since all of your created and installed content (saves, mods, cc, store stuff, saved households and sims, patterns, etc.) resides in your game folder in Documents, not the program files, you'd be loading all of that from the HDD.
As for the graphics card, TS3's files don't cover any model manufactured after about 2013. (The Nvidia 600 series is the last one listed in graphicscards.sgr.) So all newer cards are unrecognized, but that's easy enough to fix. The bigger concern would be limiting the in-game frame rates, since TS3's fps limiter is completely useless. But that would also be simple enough to address once you had the game installed. Both issues would be equally relevant no matter what card you bought.
There are a couple of players here who can help you pick out or customize a laptop, if you'd like. Just confirm your budget and country, clarify whether you'll need to shop through Best Buy, and list anything else you'd like the computer to be able to run, now or later.
@puzzlezaddict Wow, thank you so much for the extremely fast and helpful reply! I have a completely better understanding of everything, now.
You mentioned I needed a 2.4 GHz processor or faster, and not U-series. However, majority of the gaming laptops I considered buying on Best Buy have a 2.2 gigahertz processor. And so, I located one with a 2.8 gigahertz processor: Dell - Inspiron 15.6" 4K Ultra HD Laptop - Intel Core i7 - 16GB Memory - NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060 - 1TB HDD + 512GB SSD - Matte Black
Although, when I looked at the processor model number, the Dell laptop had a quad-core CPU. I am not tech savvy, whatsoever, but I realized all of the laptops containing a 2.2 gigahertz processor had a 6-core CPU, and those with a faster processor coincided with a quad-core CPU. My question is--do I go for a laptop with a 2.4 GHz processor or faster, as you advised, or can I subside with one possessing a 2.2 gigahertz processor and 6-core CPU? In the past, I read somewhere that majority of games, just newer ones, don't need a 6-core CPU, so a quad-core CPU would be adequate enough.
Also, which processors are considered a U-series?
And that would be amazing if any other players could help pick out a laptop with me--I feel badly for bombarding you with so many questions. Indeed, I am using Best Buy store credit for the purchase. I have a budget of $1,600, but I would like to stay around $1,200. I do live in the U.S., and I intend to shop solely through Best Buy. My main concern for a laptop is running The Sims 3, but I intend to download a couple other games, like Roblox, Minecraft, and one or two from Steam.
I'll preface this by saying it's beyond my knowledge to be sure about this. But if you're referring to an Intel i7-8750H processor, I think it would be fine for TS3. You're right that having six cores changes things considerably. The idea is that you don't want your processor constantly having to turbo just to run the game, and slower processors with fewer cores, especially those in the U-series, would certainly have to do so. That extra strain could damage them or the other hardware in the laptop. Again, though, you probably want to wait for confirmation from someone who's better with hardware than I am.
You're also correct that most games, TS3 included, don't need a six-core processor. In fact, TS3 runs just fine on a dual-core in a desktop, although laptops do better with quad-core. But if the models you want mostly have six cores, that's certainly not a bad thing.
And any U-series processor would have a U on the end of its model number, so you'd know that was what you were getting. The U signifies that they're designed to ratchet down their power to conserve battery life, rather than run at full strength all the time, which is not what a computer should be doing when running even a moderately demanding game like TS3.
Side note: I wouldn't recommend getting a Dell (or HP), as some players have been unhappy with their performance. Typical recommendations are MSI, ASUS, and Acer, although that's by no means an exhaustive list.
It looks to my (again, untrained) eye that the laptops you're looking at would run Roblox and Minecraft without trouble as well, but you might want to list the "one or two" games you're interested in from Steam. @chesterbigbird will be able to tell you what the true recommended specs are for those, as well as help you pick the best laptop for the price.
You're not "bombarding" anyone here with your questions, either. This thread was specifically created to offer all kinds of tech assistance to new members, and those of us who respond do so because we enjoy helping.
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To confirm this, remove your game folder from Documents (again) and launch the game, generating another clean folder. Start a new save, look around and make sure there's nothing wrong, quit to desktop, clear your cache files, and start another new save (without ever loading the previous one). Again, make sure everything works properly; if it does, then switching towns at the Main Menu was probably the source of most if not all of your issues.
I'm not sure whether your current saves are salvageable, but you can try, if you want. It's a good idea to start with another clean folder, add ErrorTrap (be sure to download the version for patch 1.69) and Overwatch, clear your cache files, load one save, and let it run for a few sim-minutes. Then click on City Hall, and select NRaas > MasterController > Town Options > Reset Everything. The command might take a while to run. Then quit to desktop, clear your cache files again, and reload.
If this doesn't get rid of the corruption, you can go to Edit Town, evict your active family, save their house to the bin, bulldoze the lot, replace the house, and move the sims back in. If you do this all in one Edit Town session, without saving and replacing the sims themselves, they'll keep their jobs and relationships but lose their promised wishes and opportunities.
If this doesn't help either, then the only other thing you can do is save your sims to the bin and place them in a fresh town.
https://answers.ea.com/t5/The-Sims-4/ct-p/the-sims-4-en
NRaas has moved!
Our new site is at http://nraas.net
To give you the background story my james and rudy got engaged and are living together. (Both in my active household. one day james, who has mastered handyness and has lv.8 inventing, Goes to repair his stereo and is electrocuted right in front of his fiance. they get a visit from our friend Grim. the reaper. a few days later my rudy gets the O my ghost opportunity and brings back james (as a Ghost), and he is only romantic interest relationship. rudy wants her real man back so she spends her days mastering cooking, gardening and fishing so she can make ambrosia to bring him back. with all the time of her being out the house james managed to get the next door neighbor Erin pregnant with a ghost baby named Jerry(erin and G baby Jerry not in my active house hold.) the day jerry was born james visited erin and bought her a crib and toy box and played with jerry for a while. A few days later james floats back over to erins and the baby is nowhere to be found. Jerry always showed up dark and dead in the family tree. please help me find jerry.
Without mods, you can try resetting the baby. Open the cheats console (crtl-shift-c) and enter "resetsim Jerry Kennedy" without quotes (or whatever the baby's last name is). Then you might want to manually age up the kid so he doesn't disappear again. In the cheats console, enter "testingcheatsenabled true" without quotes, and then shift-click on the baby and select "trigger age transition."
I use a mac and would like to know if theres a way for me to remove expansion packs from the game without me having to re-download when I want to use them again, I have too many and my computer, being 8 years old it can't handle them. My WIFI is pretty slow (it's currently at 6mb/s but ive seen it get into the kb/s) so i want to avoid having to re-download them.
thanks
To find a disk image that has been downloaded but not installed, open a Finder window and click on your hard drive on the left, under Devices. (If you don't see it, go to Finder > Preferences at the top of your screen, select Sidebar, and make sure Hard Disks is checked under Devices.) Open Macintosh HD or whatever it's called, then Library > Application Support > Origin > DownloadCache. Inside will be a folder with two files, one of which is the dmg for the pack you just downloaded. You can right-click on this file, copy it, and then right-click inside another folder to paste it. These files are somewhat large, so you may want to keep them on an external drive.
Finally, when you're installing the pack, make sure to copy down its product code. You'll need to supply this when you reinstall from disk image.
When uninstalling a pack, make sure you clean out its hidden library files as well, or your game won't launch. Here's how to find them:
https://bluebellflora.com/manually-uninstalling-an-expansion-or-stuff-pack-in-the-sims-3-for-mac/
https://www.nraas.net/community/MasterController
Mod the Sims has excellent instructions on how to install mods, as well as a framework that you can download and transfer to your TS3 game folder without any extra arranging necessary:
http://modthesims.info/wiki.php?title=Game_Help:Installing_Sims_3_Package_Files/Setup_and_Files
For your current game, though, it's probably best to revert to a previous save, if you have one from before you started this adoption. Even if you never use "save as" to rename your save (and thereby generate a backup), the game itself keeps the file from the second-to-last time you saved. It will be inside Saves in your game folder with a .backup extension—if your current game's save folder is labeled SunsetValley.sims3, your backup will be SunsetValley.sims3.backup. Delete the .backup extension and rename the save (i.e. SunsetValley1.sims3), and it will be available to load from the Main Menu. Then you can try adopting again, if you want; just be sure to make another backup beforehand.
Better yet, you could add MasterController to your game, along with NRaas ErrorTrap and Overwatch for general save cleanup, and then manually add the dog to whichever household you choose. Click on the ground of that house or its lot tag, NRaas > MC > Household > Add Sim, and then you can use the filters (like "current household," if the dog still lives with your current family) to narrow down the list of sims and pets, or just press X to dismiss the filter and scroll through the entire list.
If you only have a backup from after the adoption started, you still might be able to fix the issue. With MC in place, click on City Hall, NRaas > MC > Town Options > Reset Everything; the command will take a while to run. If this doesn't help, you can go to Edit Town (if the game will let you), evict the family trying to adopt, save their house to the bin, bulldoze the lot, replace the house, and move the family back in. If you do this all in one Edit Town session, the sims will keep their jobs and relationships, although they'll lose their promised wishes and opportunities. If you can't go to Edit Town while this family is active, MC also has a command that lets you switch active households on the fly. Just click on the house whose sims you'd like to make active, NRaas > MC > Household > Make Active.
By the way, whether you add mods or not, you should delete the five cache files in your game folder in Documents. In fact, it's a good idea to do so regularly, whether you're having game issues or not. For reference, they are:
Pull all of your .dbc bundles out of DCCache (inside Documents\EA\TS3) and install a couple of the new cc items. Then start a new save (you don't want to use an existing one for testing, especially when your other cc isn't in your game folder). If the new cc shows up, go ahead and install the rest of it, no more than about half a dozen items at a time. Test again, and if all of your new cc is still there, you can add your old .dbc bundles back into your game folder. Be sure to rename the newest file so that it's numbered one higher than the previous highest. (So if you have dcdb0 through dcdb4.dbc, your new one will be dcdb5.dbc.)
If your custom content doesn't install properly even with all the other .dbc files out of the way, then it's time for a clean game folder. Pull the entire TS3 folder out of Documents\EA and launch the game, and a new folder will spawn with no content. You can install your new cc into this folder and then move the old .dbc bundles into it as well, just as described above. Once you've tested to make sure everything shows up in-game, you can move your saves and other content into the clean folder as well.
(By the way, if you can't install one or more of your new cc items into a completely clean folder, the problem is the cc itself.)
Here's an explanation of all the files found in your game folder, so you'll know what to keep:
https://sims3.crinrict.com/en/2011/01/faq-user-files.html
TSRW always was a very fussy program to work with. Not sure there is much support to be had for it on this forum, although you could try the TS3 creators' sections. This section here is really about tech support for the game itself and the systems that run it, not as much for third party content creation tools.
If no one else answers, it's more likely you will be able to find some better assistance at TSR or on the TS3 content creation sections of MTS (Mod The Sims).
NRaas has moved!
Our new site is at http://nraas.net
I made this account specifically to get help with a dilemma I caused for myself. It starts with trying to get my Sim, now back in their home world of Appalooza, to marry her college boyfriend. I keep having issues with trying to invite Sims from other worlds on a long distance visit, where they are set to arrive the next day at 9:00 am and then they never arrive, their relationship block is still in a gray panel, and I can't cancel the invite or try to send a new invite. So I googled that issue, and came across Igazor's suggestion to use Master Controller to force a new invite. I used Nraas > MC > Basic > Invite Over > Homeworld = University. And bam! The boyfriend showed up way in the distance of Appalooza, driving his own taxi, with a text prompt telling me he'd be over shortly. And then he disappeared for a minute again right before materializing at my front door. To my horror, there were two of the exact same Sim waiting at the door.
Okay, no big deal, just reset one, send him back to home base? I don't know what I thought that would do to help. This would all be fine if my Sim wasn't now caught in a cheating dilemma -- the game thinks she has two boyfriends, and even when asking one of the clones to be her roommate, both clone Sims display the "roommate" icon on their relationship square. So it seems anything that happens to the clone boyfriend I didn't reset will then happen to the reset-attempt clone. The only difference is that the reset clone still has the University as his home world.(From here on out, these details are not saved, but this illustrates what I have tried and found didn't work.)
So I tried to force kill the clone I reset, and selected "Invisible Sim". It did something really weird after that. My Sim has the "Heartbroken" moodlet for two days, but the clone's relationship square still makes it seem like he's alive. Like, he didn't die, they just broke up. And my Sim's new reputation is "Keeping His Options Open" and her boyfriend-roommate won't accept any romantic interactions. He somehow knows I cheated but never "confronted" my Sim for it -- he was even the one I asked "what do they say about me?" Now I'm completely stuck because I can't get anywhere near this enigma of a clone I tried to kill off. What do I do now? Is there any way I can get rid of one of the clones?
It's still always risky to ask a foreign visiting sim to move in that way because even with the mod protection things can go wrong (as you have just seen). Asking to become a Roommate is a bit strange as well because roommates are non-playable characters (NPCs), not residents, and are not whom our actively being sims should be marrying even if all these other odd things didn't happen. There are much safer ways to go about this, but we can get to that later.
From where you are now, I would strongly suggest not saving and reverting back to your most recent save or backup where the bf was still back in Uni World and trying this all again a different way. Possible?
NRaas has moved!
Our new site is at http://nraas.net
So I have Overwatch and ErrorTrap installed into my game. Would adding the other two you mentioned be helpful to me?
Also could you explain a little further why "Ask to be Roommate" was a bad decision? Should I have skipped this process and gone straight to marriage?
If by reverting to a save or backup you mean that I was smart enough to create additional save files, then I'm in a further state of embarrassment. I'm not a smart Sims player in that way, I'm afraid. I won't be horribly offended if you give up on me. Where I currently am, my home lot displays my playable Sim and the university-boyfriend-roommate. When I last played I invited the clone over because I believe he was reset to somewhere within Appalooza, even though his relationship panel turned grey. He showed up at the door and I was a click away from my "kill him and hope this all stops" option. I'm glad I saved before that because then I would have been screwed.
If there's no fix for this weird data split I can just abandon this relationship path, but my next option was another sim she met at University. So that takes me back to you first point about mods -- will having the four that you mentioned help prevent this from happening again?
As for backups, I looked into what I have in my PC save files. My actual save file and my .backup have the same time stamp of 11:57PM, yesterday. So I'm a little concerned that if I follow tutorials to switch my .backup to my current save file, nothing will change. But bear in mind I've never dealt with save files this in depth before, so assume I don't know what I'm talking about.
I'm gonna keep trying to mess around and see if anything changes but I'll avoid saving, of course. Thanks for the help again.
The key date is the modification date/time of the currently being played world's nhd file within the regular or backup saves, not the date/time on the save folder itself (that one is pretty meaningless). I'll save the lecture about making extra saves for a bit later.
When you invite a foreign world sim over for a visit, whether that be by phone (the EA/difficult way) or by MasterController, the sim who arrives is a mini-sim. That means a partial copy of the one left behind in their homeworld, Uni Wold in this case. They don't often travel with enough data to make a complete sim out of them. Any changes that happen, such as new friends, relationships that move forward or go backwards, a skill learned, etc. while in that state get resolved with the real sim the next time the real sim appears on screen. The four mods help to prevent corruption from getting these sims to move in as permanent residents, but aren't always 100% effective. You can tell you are looking at a mini-sim by trying to bring them into CAS or change their outfits. If they are not a full sim, you can't do this, not with testingcheats nor mods, as mini-sims travel with only minimal wardrobes and will spawn temporary additional outfits like sleepwear or athletic that we cannot control only as they are needed.
The safest way to add a foreign sim to your homeworld is to go to their homeworld and get them to move in with your sim (somehow, there's a few ways to do this) so that they return with you and become part of your household. Another is to use MC's Add Sim > Homeworld > (filter to the foreign world) when the sim is NOT already visiting and this forces the full sim to move into your world, added to your household, a different one that already exists, or one of their own. At this point they become a full resident.
But players will ask these visiting mini-sims to move in or marry them anyway. We know it's tempting to do so and that's where the four mods try to help by lessening the chance of data corruption and duplicate sims.
The reason that asking them to be a Roommate is odd is that Roommates are nonplayable NPCs, not residents with proper households. If you really want a sim you cannot control in your household (though it sounds like not), it would be safer to ask or force them to be residents of the homeworld first, then they become an NPC upon accepting the offer to be a Roommate. And it's never a good idea to try to marry a homeless NPC, they really should have a household of their own or be part of yours before taking that step. It seems odd for Roommates to be considered "homeless" but that is what they are, part of a virtual household that has no permanent residence nor finances as that is how EA has defined them.
And now for the promised lecture -- make more saves! This game is delicate with or without mods and it's always wise to have a few Save As copies of our ongoing games that we care about standing by in case we need to revert to any of them. A good strategy is to always Save As (never Save & Quit!) and change the name of the save slightly each time by adding a number, letter, or date to the end. After a while you will accumulate more Save As copies than you need and can start deleting the older ones. But relying on the one and only backup save that the game makes for us when overwriting an existing one is not really a good recipe for sanity when something like this goes wrong. I have what must be 150 saves from various points in time of my seven year old ongoing game stored away in various places, not all in the active game folder. That is admittedly kind of insane, but in between that and just the 1 auto-generated backup save would be the amount that helps makes longer running ongoing games much safer to work with.
NRaas has moved!
Our new site is at http://nraas.net
A year or two ago, I purchased an ASUS ROG G752VL-BHI7N32 from Best Buy. Due to a battery issue, the laptop would not power on for more than a few seconds. Geek Squad was not able to fix the laptop due to the high cost, so I was only offered store credit under my warranty plan. At first, this particular gaming laptop ran The Sims 3 fairly decent for the amount of CC and mods I had installed, but gameplay started freezing, slowing, and lagging as time went on.
As of now, I have not picked out another gaming laptop since I am unsure of one to choose from. I am quite a newbie to the gaming world, so I would appreciate if someone could guide me in the right direction towards a laptop well suited for a game of The Sims 3 running on all expansion packs, excluding two, and a large chunk of CC and mods on medium settings.
I have pursued several threads on here pertaining to SSD and HDD, but I am still unsure if I should purchase a gaming laptop with a combination of the two storage types or one with a large bulk of SSD?
From what I have read, The Sims 3 runs significantly faster on SSD, and because I play with a great deal of CC and mods, I was advised get a 500GB SSD. My price budget is at the maximum of $1,600, so I found a gaming laptop within that price range and amount of SSD:
ASUS - TUF Gaming FX705GM 17.3" Laptop - Intel Core i7 - 16GB Memory - NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060 - 512GB Solid State Drive - Black
To my knowledge, I could also install The Sims 3 on the SSD and store my CC and mods on HDD. So if I were to acquire a laptop with both SSD and HDD, how would I transfer my CC and mods to the HDD while running the game on the SSD? Here is a laptop I discovered with a blend of the two storage types:
ASUS - TUF Gaming 15.6" Laptop - Intel Core i7 - 16GB Memory - NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060 - 1TB HDD + 256GB Solid State Drive
Also, considering The Sims 3 is an older game, would I be better off downgrading the graphics card for the sake of saving a couple hundred dollars? I heard the game doesn't run well on newer cards, so are the gaming laptops I linked above suitable? In general, what would be the best graphics card to play on?
I apologize if my questions have been answered before, but I am in desperate need of assistance. This is my first time posting, so please let me know if I need to reiterate anything. Thank you!
TS3 doesn't need an Nvidia 1060; a 1050 ti would do just fine, even on a laptop. (Desktop hardware doesn't need to be quite as strong to get the same performance.) You'd also need a 2.4 GHz processor or faster, and not U-series; 8 GB RAM, although 16 GB would be better for the sake of future-proofing; and at least 512 GB storage. But with your budget, you'll be able to get all of that and more.
The reason an SSD is better for TS3 is that any process that loads into or out of RAM will be much faster. This applies to launching the game, loading saves, traveling, and even opening CAS and Build/Buy—the categories will load more quickly, which can make a big difference when you have most packs and a lot of cc. But a 256 GB drive is too small to comfortably hold TS3's program files, along with your saves, mods, and cc, especially as you play longer and your save files get larger. You'd constantly have to shift files to a larger HDD or an external drive in order to keep enough free storage (at least 35-40 GB) for Windows 10 to operate.
You could certainly install program files on a small SSD and redirect Documents to a larger HDD, but you'd lose much of the benefit of the SSD. Since all of your created and installed content (saves, mods, cc, store stuff, saved households and sims, patterns, etc.) resides in your game folder in Documents, not the program files, you'd be loading all of that from the HDD.
As for the graphics card, TS3's files don't cover any model manufactured after about 2013. (The Nvidia 600 series is the last one listed in graphicscards.sgr.) So all newer cards are unrecognized, but that's easy enough to fix. The bigger concern would be limiting the in-game frame rates, since TS3's fps limiter is completely useless. But that would also be simple enough to address once you had the game installed. Both issues would be equally relevant no matter what card you bought.
There are a couple of players here who can help you pick out or customize a laptop, if you'd like. Just confirm your budget and country, clarify whether you'll need to shop through Best Buy, and list anything else you'd like the computer to be able to run, now or later.
You mentioned I needed a 2.4 GHz processor or faster, and not U-series. However, majority of the gaming laptops I considered buying on Best Buy have a 2.2 gigahertz processor. And so, I located one with a 2.8 gigahertz processor:
Dell - Inspiron 15.6" 4K Ultra HD Laptop - Intel Core i7 - 16GB Memory - NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060 - 1TB HDD + 512GB SSD - Matte Black
Although, when I looked at the processor model number, the Dell laptop had a quad-core CPU. I am not tech savvy, whatsoever, but I realized all of the laptops containing a 2.2 gigahertz processor had a 6-core CPU, and those with a faster processor coincided with a quad-core CPU. My question is--do I go for a laptop with a 2.4 GHz processor or faster, as you advised, or can I subside with one possessing a 2.2 gigahertz processor and 6-core CPU? In the past, I read somewhere that majority of games, just newer ones, don't need a 6-core CPU, so a quad-core CPU would be adequate enough.
Also, which processors are considered a U-series?
And that would be amazing if any other players could help pick out a laptop with me--I feel badly for bombarding you with so many questions. Indeed, I am using Best Buy store credit for the purchase. I have a budget of $1,600, but I would like to stay around $1,200. I do live in the U.S., and I intend to shop solely through Best Buy. My main concern for a laptop is running The Sims 3, but I intend to download a couple other games, like Roblox, Minecraft, and one or two from Steam.
You're also correct that most games, TS3 included, don't need a six-core processor. In fact, TS3 runs just fine on a dual-core in a desktop, although laptops do better with quad-core. But if the models you want mostly have six cores, that's certainly not a bad thing.
And any U-series processor would have a U on the end of its model number, so you'd know that was what you were getting. The U signifies that they're designed to ratchet down their power to conserve battery life, rather than run at full strength all the time, which is not what a computer should be doing when running even a moderately demanding game like TS3.
Side note: I wouldn't recommend getting a Dell (or HP), as some players have been unhappy with their performance. Typical recommendations are MSI, ASUS, and Acer, although that's by no means an exhaustive list.
It looks to my (again, untrained) eye that the laptops you're looking at would run Roblox and Minecraft without trouble as well, but you might want to list the "one or two" games you're interested in from Steam. @chesterbigbird will be able to tell you what the true recommended specs are for those, as well as help you pick the best laptop for the price.
You're not "bombarding" anyone here with your questions, either. This thread was specifically created to offer all kinds of tech assistance to new members, and those of us who respond do so because we enjoy helping.