Sul Sul Simmers,
In our last blog, we shared our commitment to investigating concerns that some players had around save file corruption, and we’re here to update you on what our team has been working on and where our investigation currently stands.
In this update, we’ll share our progress, what we’re still investigating, and the next steps we’re taking. From collaborating with players to analyzing save data and exploring technical leads, here’s where things stand today.
We’re committed to being transparent with you about our processes, and while we don’t have all the answers yet, progress is being made every day. Thank you for your patience, your feedback, and your passion for The Sims.
The Sims Team
Our Progress So Far
We’re focused on identifying any potential causes of corruption, implementing preventative measures to avoid future issues, and resolving any identified problems to ensure your gameplay experience remains safe and reliable. When we refer to “save corruption”, we mean situations where the game itself won’t load, a save file fails to load, or a save loads but is missing assets, such as thumbnails or Lots.
To tackle this, our specialized team is focused on save integrity. Here’s what’s been happening:
- Community Collaboration: We asked you to share your impacted saves, and we’ve received dozens of them so far. Thank you for providing these, please keep them coming!
- New Tools: We’ve developed a new Python-based tool that helps us extract, analyze, and summarize the data in save files provided by our players. This is helping us provide more actionable data to investigation teams.
- Player Save Database: We’ve organized incoming reports to better understand potential patterns, such as file size, code versions, number of packs, use of mods, and more.
- Review of Past Fixes: Our team has analyzed historical corruption cases to learn from previous solves and spot any recurring causes.
Our Current Investigations
From attempting to reproduce the issues reported by players both with and without mods, we've identified the following issues as strong leads. These require more time to investigate before we can confirm anything concretely, but we wanted to keep you updated on what we've learned so far.
Scratch File Concerns:
One of our most pressing leads involves scratch files. These are important but temporary files the game relies on, and reports suggest they may be disappearing or getting deleted, which could trigger corruption.
We’re looking into the root cause of these deletions now, focusing on any areas where The Sims 4 files would come in contact with other systems, cloud backup services, and other external factors that could be deleting or overwriting these files.
Lot Data Issues:
Another major area of focus is Lot data:
- Some Lots provided to us show up with missing or extremely minimal information in saves.
- We’ve reproduced cases internally of endless loading/white screens linked to certain build behaviors like super-stuffed Lots, with and without mods.
- We’re also tracking any potential links to specific expansion packs or objects, though corruption reports predate packs like The Sims 4 For Rent.
Other Areas of Focus:
- Excessive rental units alone don’t seem to be the primary cause of corruption at this time. While more units do increase error reports, data also suggests it’s likely tied to overall save complexity rather than unit count alone.
- Instances of corruption existed before the release of For Rent, and our investigations into individual packs remain a top priority.
- In some cases, specific types of mods called script mods are leaving behind files after the mod is removed that can cause issues in The Sims 4, though we have not yet linked this to corruption.
Our Next Steps:
- Continuing to test venue type data transfer across saves.
- Deepening our investigation into scratch file deletion and common external programs.
- Exploring historical cases of save bloat to understand potential connections.
- Out of an abundance of caution, we’re removing the bb.increaserentalunitcap Residential Rental Unit cheat in an upcoming update, as a preventative step while broader fixes are developed. This step is needed to mitigate any potential risk.
We know how much your saves mean to you - they represent countless hours of creativity, storytelling, and play. Please keep sharing reports with us, as each one brings us closer to understanding and solving these issues.
The Sims Team
