How demanding are the various EPs?

@igazor can probably provide some advice for playing on a Mac. In general though, the following EPs are considered to be more demanding on computer resources compared to the other EPs: Pets, Seasons, ITF and perhaps IP. Particularly the first two. Stuff Packs only add objects and shouldn't affect performance.

Larger households definitely impact performance, especially in longer played saves. In almost every save that I've repeatedly encountered Error Code 12 has had 24 sims in the household. That includes my current game. The only way I managed to get around that was to move half of the household to a new world via NRaas Traveler and leave the other half behind. I'll go back and get the family members in the old world after the kids in the current world age to YA and move out. With a larger household I also get much laggier performance in older saves which I can ameliorate somewhat by removing NRaas SP modules. Anyways, in my experience household size is definitely a factor in game performance and RAM limitations.

It was indeed Pets and Seasons that killed my long-running game on TS3 for Mac. I could still start new games fine, but the existing one and its overstuffed households and heavily populated EA worlds was toast unless you like waiting 20 sim minutes for sims to react to click-directions, constant lag, 45 real time minutes to load up the game and half that to save (with Error 12 being the result half of the time). I don't think IP and ITF were even released yet back then. I could stay in resource intensive areas of the game like CAS and Edit Town without crashing for about as long as I could hold my breath, which even back then wasn't very long. The usual NRaas mod related solutions and constant purging of RAM by Terminal command throughout play did of course help but became ineffective after a while.

Some of this will be user play-style and system related, but the 2 GB limit is there and cannot be overcome for anyone. The best we can do is work around it by limiting the size and complexity of our worlds and the households we play or abandon it for the Windows version of the game by way of bootcamp. That previously mentioned ongoing game ported over flawlessly, TS3 for Windows immediately started running it "with two fingers up its nose" as the charming expression goes, and it's still going strong today.

@chicvibe I've read enough nightmare stories involving IP that I was already pretty dubious about going anywhere near it. It sounds like it's just more trouble than it's worth, at least to a minimally tech-literate gamer like me.

@TreyNutz @igazor Thanks so much for the input; it was exactly what I was looking for. With the typical forum chatter, I kind of figured I'd skip Pets and Seasons, but I was hoping the other EPs that appealed to me weren't on the list. (Actually, even if Pets ran like a dream I probably wouldn't buy it. I just can't watch pets die. It's actually why I quit TS1 way back in the day—I made a cat lady just so she could take care of the feral population, and almost all of them died within a sim week. I haven't really become any less sensitive in the intervening years, either.)

On the other hand, this may all be moot. I usually seem to find a way to overload the game no matter how simply I intend to play. Last night I crashed a brand-new game (only 5 sims, too; the proverbial straw was one of them setting up to get a tattoo), and three other times I had to force quit when the game stopped responding after a quit without saving. I may need to bootcamp sooner than I intended. Which of course will only move the goalposts back a bit, but I suppose I could stand to learn some restraint.

I don't do anything to specifically purge RAM; I mostly just schedule CAS and quit/restart/reload based on my completely subjective understanding of when my ongoing game might be under strain. (Part of how I judge is the amount of time it takes to save.) I'm sure there are several things I should be doing that I don't know about. Any suggestions? Keeping small households would preclude my building most of my favorite in-game families, at least eventually.

As far as the pets go, seeing them die of old age is exactly what I want to avoid. I was only saying that based on how I reacted in TS1, and how bad I feel when my *human* sims die of old age, it's not something I need in my game. I don't remember exactly how the TS1 mechanic worked, but I have a distinct impression that there was a feral population wandering through the neighborhood, and you could choose to adopt one if the relationship was high enough. I had my sim put out lots of food and try to engage some of the cats, but a bunch of them disappeared rather quickly. I guess I thought it was old age because they seemed to progress in every saved household, and my cat lady was added after I'd played for a while with other families in the neighborhood. I suppose if the cats were on the lot (with the game dropping their needs), and they either tried to eat and were blocked, or they "forgot" while otherwise engaged, they might have died that way. I never saw it actually happen. I just remember that some animals were suddenly gone from the game and the relationship tab. I'm just glad it didn't occur to me that there might have been a bobcat or coyote wandering around. Whatever the reason, I was disproportionally upset over those adorable little pixels, and I didn't want to play much anymore.

Watch the game's RAM usage in Activity Monitor. When it exceeds 1.8 or 1.9 GB, you're already in the danger zone. When it exceeds 2 GB, or maybe 2.05 GB or so, the game is over or it cannot be saved without an Error 12 which is essentially the same thing. Purging RAM gives one a fighting chance, up to a point, at staying under the 2 GB limit. I keep linking you to it, it's a command one types or pastes into Terminal while playing.
https://bluebellflora.com/resetting-ram-during-gameplay

The worst thing it can do is not help.

CAS and Edit Town are a little different, they also pull vram resources from the graphics card and can overwhelm resource usage even if RAM itself doesn't seem to hit the flash point. Note that once RAM usage goes over though, doing anything you can in-game (if it hasn't crashed yet) to reduce it won't help. The memory registers will already be filled with garbage. It's sort of like trying to do 12-digit math on an 8-digit calculator. We can perhaps suppress the overflow error as long as the user doesn't divide by zero, but the data displaying and ready for use won't make any sense.

TS3 for Windows has this problem as well as all 32-bit applications do, but the flash point is more like 3.7 GB. Much more generous and workable in most cases, provided that the user has enough total RAM to work with -- usually at least 6 GB, we recommend 8 GB or more if possible.

There really aren't any other ways to extend TS3 for Mac's abilities because of the way that the game is designed to run in a Cider wrapper emulating Windows XP.

@igazor Thanks. I see the previous link now; on my phone I can miss them as they sometimes show up without a distinguishing color.

I love the calculator analogy. I was the kid in sixth grade arguing for doing math by hand using fractions because the old calculators (no graphing ones yet, at least for us) were too "inaccurate" at eight digits and would let us build up rounding errors. Needless to say, I was never as unpopular as when I temporarily convinced the teacher.

Are you purging RAM frequently throughout play? You're going to run into that 2 GB limit sooner or later unless you keep playing small households in sparsely populated worlds, save quit and reload after every other CAS session or so, and don't get too attached to ongoing games over time.

On pets dying -- huh? My animals in-game only ever die of old age and beloved household pets get graves, so their ghosts are still around if I ever manage to progress my game long enough for that to even happen (some time constraints on my end, nothing game related). Must be missing something, I don't remember pets ever dying in TS1 either or maybe I had something in play that disallowed it. It's been too many years for me to remember. Were they particularly accident prone? You might want to consider feeding them occasionally? ;)