Error Code 12!!

"Charlottesmom;c-16531571" wrote:
He*II I have a $3,000 Alienware Gaming laptop with all the bells and whistles and I still get Error 12's on occasion! I've been playing on my $700 HP for the past few weeks and haven't had one yet! I agree they tend to happen most when building/setting up a town or decorating.

@Charlottesmom I was wondering if you were going to pop in here and mention that. :lol:

:kissing_heart:

@Nikkei_Simmer I'm running my game on a potato too :p (10 year old computer this year!) and I've maybe gotten an Error 12 ONCE in 10 years! I wanna say (my memory su'cks anymore these days :confounded: ) that I got the Error because of a corrupted mod. Removed it, no more problem.


To the Original Poster: I'm so sorry you have to lose all your progress because of the darned Error 12! :confounded: We've all been there... **pats back** <3
I hope you have a backup save, but if not, be sure to backup your saves all the time from here on out. Create a folder just for them on your desktop so they are readily accessible in cases like this.
((((Hugs))))

Yep, our potatoes keep pluggin' away, don't they? @emorrill.

It’s to do with how much the game is loading at once. In my case I started getting it after playing in one town, on one lot for 8 years. My town wasn’t overcrowded and I had spare lots so I think it was to do with the sheer amount of dead sims and history I had, and the game having to load all that information up every time.

It’s good that some people have never experienced it. But it’s bound to happen at some point if you play in a world with heaps of customised lots or sims over a very long period of time. I wouldn’t expect a new or newish game to have this error unless you have done extensive editing. Graphics play a big role too, especially if sim and lot detail is on high.

I have a proper gaming desktop now but it could still happen to me again. The more stuff you change, the more things the game has to load. That’s the way I think of it. It’s a fragile game :/

Edit: I don’t mean to sound all doom and gloom here... but no one is safe from this error. It's a real game killer :lol:

@coco when I get an Error 12 on a very complex lot I can usually get the game to save by temporarily activating a basic lot with only one sim in it.

A lot of the time, playing in bigger worlds can give this problem even if you have a state of the art gaming computer. Even before I started using CC and only played Vanilla, I'd get the Error 12 problems a lot.

One of the biggest factors in error 12 is length of play session. Given a long enough run of having the game open, if you have all the stuffs installed, you will eventually get an error 12. My actual game folder for sims 3 is 31.9GB, 24.3GB of sims 3 files in documents.
Even if you are terrible at maths, you can see how over time this can be problematic.

Oh... after typing that up, I feel like for that much hard drive space, this game could easily look like Black Desert Online. :(

Not relevant to the OP since they have plenty of RAM, but newer forum members are being directed here so it's worth listing other reasons not yet mentioned why gamers on lower end systems might encounter this error. If their system doesn't have enough RAM to work with in the first place, the game will not get what it needs when it calls for more and can easily throw an Error 12.

- For those with 2 GB of RAM total (not seen as often today except on much older, lower end computers), the game is practically a non-starter on Win 7/8.1/10 because after Windows gets what it needs, there isn't going to be enough left to service the game. Officially the base game can run on such small amounts of RAM, but that was before the EPs, when it was unpatched, and back when XP and Vista were the current operating systems.

- Those with 4 GB will fare better, but are still limited for the same reason as the newer versions of Windows will often use half of that for itself. Other programs and processes running alongside of the game like web browsers will make this worse. Having integrated graphics rather than a dedicated graphics card will also put more stress on RAM usage. The game can't get ~3.5 GB of RAM if it's just not there for it to use. Other less complex programs will use the paging file and virtual memory when this happens, but TS3 does not page well and that leads to more instability.

- Those on 32-bit operating systems (also less often seen but they are still out there) have systems that can only address 4 GB total and are limited for that reason.

- The Mac version of the game is limited to 2 GB of RAM usage no matter how much the player has installed and available, so players on that version will run into this limitation far more quickly.