So...what exactly causes corruption of save games?

This game we love so much is a mess, from a data handling standpoint. EA does a lot of funny (and not so funny) things with game data with the result you are describing being quite common. We could begin listing out the various causes of game file corruption but...er, how much time have you got? This might take the rest of the week and it's only Monday on my end.

The NRaas mods that specifically help prevent data corruption and preserve long-time gameplay are Overwatch, ErrorTrap (this is a big one!), Register, Traffic, Traveler if any form of world travel is invloved...we could add a couple of smaller ones in like Dreamer and one that we are not allowed to discuss on this forum for the very specific issues they solve. Where MasterController helps is with its ability to run a Reset Everything from the Town menu on City Hall every so often, usually every once every few sim weeks is sufficient. Are all of these but especially ErrorTrap in play?

There are also player practices that are known to destroy ongoing games, such as allowing worlds to become way overpopulated with residents to the point where the game engine can no longer handle them, trying to load up games from having retreated to the Main Menu instead of quitting all the way to the desktop or Origin (if relevant) in between sessions, scrapbook memory overload, and running the game with too many Dream Managers on inactive households at the same time. We document (or have tried to) all of this and more here:
http://www.nraas.net/community/TIPS-FOR-BETTER-GAME-PERFORMANCE

Testingcheatsenabled is neutral to the game and its data, I don't know where this claim comes from but I have also seen it made elsewhere. I actually play with it on all of the time, this is a feature of Overwatch that can easily be switched on. A couple of the others like MoveObjectsOn and BuyDebug can certainly cause problems of different types if they are left engaged after having been used or while a game is being saved.

"Idontrcall;c-17454485" wrote:
What does leaving Buy Debug open do? I go in there a lot and leave it open after I get one of those handy dandy chests from WA? I always close out of testing cheats (because I heard that about it, too), but buy debug will stay available after I'm out of testing cheats enabled.

From player reports, it can cause saving the game to fail and what looks like successfully made saves to then not be loadable. I don't think anyone knows the exact circumstances under which this happens or doesn't, but since unlike with testingcheats there isn't any real benefit to actually playing the game with BuyDebug on other than convenience for the next trip back into Build/Buy, it doesn't seem like as much of a hardship to keep it off when finished with it or at least before the next save is made.

"Huiiie_07;c-17456736" wrote:
Crash Log Analyzer told me my game crashed because of custom content...which is weird because I didn't add anything new and the game hasn't crashed all this time before.

I think it just lists cc if it finds any at all, whether it has any relation to the crash or not.
TS3 needs some care to keep a game running for a longer time. There can be lots of different reasons for crashes.

@Huiiie_07 - I'm afraid we can't begin to understand what is happening there without being able to read the script logs that are generated as a result of those errors. They could be minor, worthy of ignoring, something that's easy to fix, or indicating something more serious with the ongoing game. If you could bring them to us at NRaas, we would be happy to help interpret them.

They accumulate in your TS3 user game folder in Documents and look like ScirptError+(name of computer)+date/time stamp+some hex codes. When you get to about 11-12 of then, they should start overwritiing each other with the oldest ones going out first.

"Zei;c-17459120" wrote:
@igazor What is a dream manager?

A Dream Manager is what tracks and credits sims' dreams, promised wishes, and opportunities. Under EA standard, only the active played household has Dream Managers running on them. If we switch households, that stops and all dreams and promises get dropped.

If mods are used to switch active households, we have the choice as to whether to make the switches Dream Catching or not -- how to do this depends on the mod. Dream Catching means that the DMs continue to run on the now inactive household. Too many of these, and how many is "too many" is impossible to define as it will be different for everyone and every world, can be detrimental to game performance.

If using NRaas mods, we can see how many sims in our world have DMs running by using a MasterController filter. For example, on City Hall, NRaas > MC > Sim > Basic > Family Tree (or something harmless like that) > Filter to Has Dream Manager. The ones on inactive households can be cleared all at once with MC > Town > Drop All Dreams and Opportunities. This doesn't affect the active household, just the others, but unfortunately the drops cannot be done selectively.

I'm following this post my self.I seem to get a lot of corrupt saves and end up having to keep starting over.
I never heard of the testingcheats causing issues while saving, but I do have that activated often.

What does leaving Buy Debug open do? I go in there a lot and leave it open after I get one of those handy dandy chests from WA? I always close out of testing cheats (because I heard that about it, too), but buy debug will stay available after I'm out of testing cheats enabled.

I didn't know about buydebug causing problems, that's definitely good to know. I haven't really used it in my current save, but did in prior ones and only deactivated testingcheats before saving, since I thought this would automatically disable buydebug as well since you need testingcheats to activate it in the first place.

Can't really say my town is overpopulated, I just recently checked and apart from the premades that came with it and the occasional paparazzis or tourists it still seems to be at an acceptable amount. I am definitely adding ErrorTrap to my collection, I didn't know that it was that important for game performance. I already knew about exiting to desktop before switching saves, but I didn't know it could straight up break them if I don't. That's definitely good to know.

I am kinda confused about this game to be honest. My new pc has much better hardware than my old one and definitely exceeds the minimum requirements by a mile (it also runs really smoothly), but it just crashed completely unexpected a few hours ago. Since I am too lazy to open another thread, I am just gonna be asking here in case anyone knows: what could have caused my game to crash? This particular save never crashed to desktop before, the only thing remotely similar that happened two times was that it would freeze indefinitely and I had to exit it manually, but I just blamed that on my old pc :D

Mine's been doing the same thing. I have to click that save button every minute it seems so I don't lose my progress. Happening in both Appaloosa Plains and Isla Paradiso.
Might try that reset whole town thing and see if it helps.