Keeping a Save File Playable

OfSylvanGlade

Hello!

I've just reinstalled Sims 3 on my new PC and decided to play it for the first time in years. I prefer Sims 3 to Sims 4 so much so I'm looking forward to it. I'm just a bit nervous about save file corruption. My biggest issue with Sims 3 was how often this happened. Once you played in a save file too much and got past the second generation the file would get so big that it'd stop saving and you'd stop being able to play in it. Is there a way to make sure this doesn't happen? Should I just keep my multigenerational games to Sims 4? Thanks!

igazor

I am still playing the TS3 saved game I started in late 2011, others who use NRaas mods are able to report the same with varying degrees of success. Not everyone can manage to keep things going for quite that long and sometimes players wander away from the game way before anything start to go seriously wrong. I play rotationally and barely have time to start up my game at all some weeks, so it's not like I'm on generation 300 or anything like that but it's all still moving along just fine. My Generation 2 had 16 children between two siblings, with their families now spread out among various connected worlds by way of NRaas Traveler, so it's really like I have several games in one.

Without mods designed specifically to enhance performance and preserve gameplay, just about everyone finds that the only way to keep playing forward past a few generations is to periodically move the active household to a new world the EA way (meaning every few generations, not every week) which is essentially starting things over with the current sims, and they keep track of their sims' extended genealogy and family history in other ways outside of the game. I've never had to do that, although I have gotten bored with one or two worlds along the way and pretty much abandoned them.

Even with the mods in play, a certain amount of patience, willingness to fix things, monitoring of overall world behavior, and game file maintenance are required to keep things moving along. A lightly populated homeworld with 50 or 60 residents will tend to be easier to take care of in the long run (depending on how many kids the other residents have each generation) than one stuffed with over 200, which will require more work and attention. The built-in EA story progression tends to break down after a couple of generations, if it takes even that long, but the two modded varieties, that would be NRaas and AwesomeMod, are designed to not do that and theoretically can keep going forever.

Here's our page of standard performance tips, some require mod usage but not all of them do.
http://www.nraas.net/community/TIPS-FOR-BETTER-GAME-PERFORMANCE