Hello,
I bought The Sims 2 Heritage Collection. It works fine -I can create my family and play for a bit- but at some point, maybe when my family is around 10 days old, my game crashes and displays a ‘fatal error’ message. This has happened with two different families at about the same time. And when I restart the game, it always crashes at the same point.
Does anyone have a solution, please?
Thanks in advance <3
Sims 2 is a bit fragile. It's good you've got it working. It's good practice to save regularly, and shut down and restart the game every half hour/hour or so, the longer it runs the more likely to crash. Also it is a bit of a memory hogger, so it's best to play it without loads of other programmes running. I usually play with one eye on my resource montior and without chrome/edge/dropbox etc running at the same time. I don't know if this will stop what's happening to you, but may help.
Thank you for your reply! I try to save as often as I can, and I’ll make sure to play without any other programs running. However, now when I start the game and load my family, it runs for about 10 seconds before crashing. Do you have a solution for this problem ?
I've got some old tricks I've learned after years of playing Sims 2 - these might not work for you, or with this version of Sims 2, but they might be worth a go.
Have you got any mods or custom content? If so, take them out and see if you can still play. If you can, it might be down to having a mod/CC that's too old/incompatible with all the EPs/SPs. In that case do 50/50 testing until you've worked out what's happening.
Try moving the family out and move them back in - it could be the lot is corrupted for some reason, and moving out resets it. (You will have to refurnish the lot - there are ways round this, e.g. mods or bulldozing the lot and replacing with another lot.)
Are you playing with a family that was in the library? One of them (Ottomas) has a pregnant sim, and I think I've heard in the past this can cause problems. Likewise people have been talking about pets being a problem if they have a job and been promoted - is this the case for your family?
Do a full refresh of the documents folder: Rename your Sims 2 documents folder, start the game up, and it will create a fresh Sims 2 document folder. If you've been playing Pleasantview, for example, delete N001 in your new document folder, then copy paste N001 from your old folder to the new one. Sometimes the document folder contains a glitch that can be resolved with this kind of refresh.
After doing all this, and it still is a problem, it might be a case of waiting for EA to come up with something.
PS Unfortunately there is no "save as" in Sims 2, so I regularly back up the neighborhoods I am playing (particularly when things are going wrong), i.e. copy paste them to somewhere else on my computer, and rename them so I know what/when they are from, in case I need to go back to a previous save. Unfortunately they can be quite large so I do delete when I think it's safe to do so.
