Hello. This is the story of my battle against broken CC.
So a couple of days ago I've got a very annoying problem where when i put any CC hair on my sim, his icon starts loading forever. Like this:
Even if i afterwards chose any maxis hair, the icons still wouldn't load. Then when i tried going in game mode the sims portrait wouldn't show up.
I tried deleting all of my hair and that solved the problem, so i tried putting them in one by one and deleting all of the hair that causes the bug. The thing is that when i tried loading the game with all of the hair that was still working, the problem still occurred. I have no idea whats going on and it seems like i'll have to play from now on without any CC hair which is a huge bummer. I've repaired my game multiple times, reseted the Sims 4 folder... nothing seemed to work.
Today, when i just now tried to load my household, it wouldn't. Yesterday it did, today it doesn't. The loading screen loads forever, even after that jingle you get when you arrive on a lot. Starting a new game didn't help - i simply couldn't save my sim because of the forever loading icon.
Now its even not the hair anymore. I ran the game without the hair and the problem still occurred. So this basically means that i can't play the game with cc anymore? I'm annoyed. Im frustrated. I don't know if i'll ever be able to play with CC again. I tried fixing my game through S4Studio, that didn't help. My game worked just fine only last week. Now its a nightmare.
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Also have you tried starting a new save game to see if your cc works in a new game?
It could still be a piece of bad CC that somehow got broken during a patch and took a bit to corrupt your game.
I would pull all your CC out of the game (saving it on your desktop) then delete the cache file and then run a full game repair in Origin. Then check your game to see if it's working properly (try it with a new save first) and then slowly add things back in until you can figure out what piece of CC is causing you trouble. Once you figure it out pull all your CC again and run another repair game before adding your good CC back in since sometimes bad CC can linger.
Alternatively I believe you can use Sims4Studio to also weed out the bad CC if you have it but I've never used it so I don't know how it works exactly.
S4Studio says all of my CC is completely fine.
Not to make light of your situation which is no doubt frustrating, what you have here is somewhat of a mystery and, well, in the spirit of the venerable Sherlock Holmes, you need to look at the "impossible". Rule that out and what's left, "however improbable, must be true."
EDIT: I must confess I merely skimmed this thread so perhaps I missed it, but before anything else, did you try to restore/run a save made before all this started happening? Kind of like the Windows troubleshooting option of "Last Known Good" run of the programme. If everything runs properly you may have a buggered-up save. But that is a mere wild guess.
@catitude5 I think I read you correctly about "disable patches" If that's the case, "bravo!" I do that as well. I refuse to let the patches run (by launching "offline" until I know the major mods that I depend on to render the game playable for me such as MC Command Centre-- are properly repaired. )
And now that patches seem to be popping up more frequently than once per month, even,-- I wait all the longer. We, myself and my roomie who play separate games on the same machine, did not allow the "Pets" prep patch nor anything thereafter run until late May. By then all the mods and such were fully updated beyond "hotfixes".
The only thing i think might've caused it the mod i downloaded called "Outfit Tools - Copy Any Outfit v2b" by scumbumbo. It had custom cheats and i used one of them called "reset.bathing" which helped with the issue that sometimes while showering sims would wear clothes. I thought that might've for some reason break my game, but i deleted the mod and yet the game is still broken.
Also after that i ran through the S4Studio fixes i never used before like "Disallow CC for shower", "Disallow CC for Aliens", "Disallow CC for townies" and "Disallow CC for vampire". Maybe that has something to do with the issue, i don't know.
But i really really doubt that those things could break the game. Because if the mod causes issues (especially a scumbumbos mod) people usually point that out pretty quickly. And CC fixes... i mean, they're supposed to fix the game, not ruin it!
I just can't take it anymore. I'll wait until the next EP, maybe. I no sooner get one problem solved, they create another, and all my work is for nothing.
They ruined it so bad, I had to pull everything and start over. Without CC this game isn't fun at all. They are like a big snowplow running through you game.
I purpled the additions I want to mention: Did you add these in that 2 to 3 day window? if yes I would suggest you take them out if for nothing else to rule them out.. But if you did these things right before the problems started I'd say you found the issue.
Other than that, are there no hardware issues with your machine? Do you run an SSD or a traditional HDD? In either case issues with those can affect software operation. I know I am reaching here and my roomie is the household geek, not me but I picked up some things from her along the way about these infernal machines, and your issue is quite perplexing.
@catitude5 Oh, as they say here in th States, "I hear ya" on that one! That they have to issue patches on a regularly scheduled basis -- "It's Patch Day!" -- is just plain annoying.
Not only do most of them not even apply to my game, as we learned from the Pets patch they all too often generate more problems than they solve.
(Remember that one? Your Sim Can Flirt With His or Her Dog!!)
They had to burn midnight oil to patch that patch the next day.
I don't think i ever had software issues, but I'm really not a computer person so i can't be certain.
And in the future do as @catitude5 @Miki (the aforementioned ever-loving roomie) and I do, just to name the ones I know of, and don't allow future patches to run until the creators of your favourite mods can catch up.
But with the frequency of these patches that may be a bit of a chore.
Side note, quite unrelated, your avatar. Adorable!. What sort of creature is that?
(P.S Thats my Russian dwarf hamster on the avatar, glad you like him! )
I read the thread and the only time I had a game refuse to load as in getting stuck "loading" and playing the music, etc. But that was when I tried to load a very old save to 'go back to what once was". This doesn't seem to be your problem.
I saw Kimmy's (Park) notes and if you ran a virus scan, if nothing but to rule out malware doing something to system resources and therefore affecting the game's ability to run-- and it shows clear then the issue is in the game program itself. Something happened those few days ago and now it's corrupted.
You didn't mention deleting the entire Sims 4 folder. AFTER pulling out Saves, Tray, Mods and Config. The latter is optional) Put them on the desktop, delete the Sims 4 folder (or move it to the desktop. When you launch the game it generates a new one. First see if it'll load up. It'll be total vanilla but this way you'll see if it runs at all. Then replace the new Saves Tray and Mods folders inside with the ones you put on the desktop,.
If the problem persists, then I'm afraid there's something it doesn't like about your CC. But that is odd because it happened well after the June patch yet before the July 10 one.
One other thing, if you can load the game at all, even vanilla, check the game settings. perhaps some of the settings are too high. They shouldn't set themselves but I have seen where once I update the driver for the GPU, the settings go from "High" to "Very High" and I have to reset back to "High" because the latter causes lag in the game.
Sorry I can't be of more help. If none of this works, set aside, as before, copies of your Saves Tray and Mods folders and uninstall/reinstall the game and any additional paid content you may have bought.
This may take some time, as the base, any additional stuff and the patches will all load in whatever sequence the download sets.
But this ought to fix the issue. And as always, add your CC and mods gradually and check to see if it still runs.
Note: Scumbobo mods are usually pretty well done and shouldn't botch your game.
@Park an average Syrian hamster is about 5-7 inches. A Russian dwarf hamster is only about 3 inches.
Regarding the little creature.. Almost a mouse, but much cuter. Not sure how long they last, though. The smaller the shorter they say, at least with mammals.
Regarding the issue of record, since you tried everything with no results I'm afraid you're going to have to uninstall and reinstall the game from scratch, setting the Saves folder aside at the very least. Of course see if the new game launches before reintroducing Saves because based on what I have seen personally with old saves, your "endless-load-and-music" issue is when you loada corrupted save and at this point, sorry to say, they may all have been ruined.
Hope to be wrong on that one. As for Mods folder, save it for reference but after that .. I would start over and only with ones that worked before Scumbob's mod.
He is usually rated quite well but if trouble started after that one, well, there lies the culprit, I'll wager.
If you do this also set aside your tray folder or you will lose all of your Sims and Houses. You may want to set aside your screenshots too.
Some unsolicited geek advice: If not already done, you should consider a disk image backup of your entire system. This preserves everything on your HDD/SSD. Those are usually used when cloning a hard drive but have other useful attributes. Update it regularly and if anything like this happens anywhere in the system not just this game you can roll back the entire machine to where it was, preferably when it ran well, and you can go from there will less fuss and frustration and detective work which wastes a whole lot of time as you now know..
I do disk image backups all the time as a solution to really bad malware such as ransomware. If one of their bugs should get into my system I simply zap the whole disk and restore an earlier image. All gone ransom ware all gone encryptions.. and the best part, No Bit coin For Them!
And I mean disk image not the standard "backup" that comes with Windows. Saved to an external drive and offline, it is untouchable. "Backup" saves files and settings but not programs. A much more cumbersome proposition.