To get or not to get MODs

I love mods. My game is modded eight ways to Sunday and I am willing to stuff in a few more! I have the absolute essentials for me from NRaas like MasterController, Debug Enabler, Overwatch, etc; Toddler mods that let my little ones scribble on the wall, play in puddles, eat from the pet food bowl, explore their world and so much more that makes them way more fun; mods for the babies that give them feet, hair, hats and cute clothing, allow breastfeeding and makes the changing table from the store work better, even changes their ugly green bottle to white; I have mods for children so they may help out with the gardening, laundry, play instruments, order food while out and about, pay the bills and more; I have environmental mods that change the lighting, change the atmosphere, replace the default taxis, change the raindrops even, etc; I have mods that wipe out route failure animations, idle animations, foot tapping while waiting, apple conjuring, buying food from the fridge (have to go to the store to stock the fridge), etc; I have mods to allow sims to properly serve meals, autonomously go for a walk, be able to roller skate around town, open a few windows, sleep on a couch, do yoga, etc. I also have Zerbu's Ultimate Careers and most of the careers in my game are now open so I can pop by any work location and actually watch the sims who are employed in that career doing work relevant to it. There are many more.
So yes to mods.
All the mods.
Since the game has finished production I don't have to worry about updates breaking mods or my game, I can mold the Sims 3 into my game I want to play and the do so beautifully. The mods have been well and long tested and trusted. They're a beautiful thing!

@AftrNoonOvrRide I played mod free for several years. I added my first mod in 2014 and that was Nraas relativity that controls time in the game. I was actually very frustrated with the way the sims just didn't have time to just have fun if they worked at jobs during the week. I was pretty much ready to quit the game as it just wasn't fun playing a time management style game.

A friend told me about the mod and how to set it up. It was as if I was playing a new game. My sims suddenly had time to eat, shower and do other things before rushing out the door to go to work. I slowly added other mods as I got more comfortable working with them. Mods suit my play style and allowed me to enjoy the game in new and exciting ways. It all depends on what you want out of your game as to whether you will enjoy the mods. I don't have as many as some, but I have a lot. They all provide a bit of a tweak that just makes things a lot more enjoyable for me than the vanilla game out of the box. Some of the mods like Error Trap and Overwatch help take care of EA's glitches and fails to fix things that should have been fixed so the game runs much better.

I think an important thing worth mentioning here is that the decisions to mod or not and which ones to use are reversible. Most mods can easily be removed with no harm done to ongoing saved games and no extra steps required except that the cache files should be cleared. NRaas mods are like that, one only has to be careful in a few specific situations such as removing the Careers mod while a sim is working in a custom career or going to school may cause issues; removing Traveler when active play is in a custom vacation world will leave your sims unable to get back home again. Some mods do come with special removal instructions or routines that need to be run first, a few can't really be removed without destroying an ongoing game save that has used them (these are much less common). But it's not like the entire game install becomes toast if one is trying some mods and they just aren't working out well for the player or it turns out they were outdated or incompatible with something else in play. :)

@Charlottesmom Error 12 has little to do with how much memory your computer has. It is about how the game was developed by EA.

Just imagine you have a 2 litre bucket and you have 3 litres of water and you want it all to go into that 2 litre bucket but when you try to put it in there it reaches a point where some flows over and you get unhappy so you buy a bigger house and have another go at putting 3 litres of water into you old 2 litre bucket and then wonder why it still won't work because your house is so big now.

The thing is Sims 3 was designed to have just under 4 GB of memory available to it. There is no way to increase that. If your computer has 100 GB of RAM and is running nothing else, the game can still only use that 4GB of memory. So, if your lot gets too complex and the computer needs a bit more memory to process something while it's saving then, like the water going into the bucket that overflows as soon as it passes the 2 litre mark, the second the computer tries to use that little bit extra memory, even for a split second, you get an Error 12. This is why I try to find an empty place in my world when I'm saving as I've noticed this usually reduces the amount of RAM being used by the game. It doesn't work 100% of the time and I do still get Error 12 occasionally, but I'd say it works for me at least 98% of the time and I have now got a really good idea of when it isn't likely to work before I even try it to see if it does save. Sometimes it surprises me and saves even though I was sure it would crash on me. Fortunately, none of the games I'm playing at the moment for my videos are giving me problems with Error 12 and it's been a while now since I've seen it happen but I do still go off to a quiet place in the world to save most of the time just in case.

The only time increasing the memory your computer has will assist your game is if you have less than the 4 GB the game can use available to it. You need to have enough RAM for your operating system, background processes and still have about 4 GB for the game.

The big thing mods have done for me is to allow me to play families again. I stopped playing families because the family tree would break. I remember once having a small family with twin toddlers. Then suddenly one of the toddlers was no longer in the family tree and showed up as a stranger to its mother. That sort of thing happened to me over and over and over again until I got so frustrated that I stuck to playing households of 8 unrelated young adults and just watched what they got up to autonomously for a while then I'd make another household of 8 young adults and build them a huge house full of stuff to see what they did with it. Then I'd get tired of that and do it all over again.

Once Sims 4 was released I decided to try mods and now I can repair my family trees so I can play families again. I can even add extra sims to them if I want to. And I've found all sorts of other things that I like to have in my games. But before Sims 4 was released I was mod free and I played like that since June 2009. Except - after having huge problems with Isla Paradiso I put in Error Trap and Overwatch but only had them in my game while I was playing in Isla Paradiso. If I was in any other world I was without mods.

I really should be asleep now - it's almost 1 am.

Happy Simming

@Karritz , Thank you, that explanation actually made sense to me...being a major computer nimrod is really bad when trying to figure out what the occasional error is all about. I was, on my old computer just removing all duplicates from the library and that would usually solve error 12. I had tried an empty spot on occasion and sometimes it did work. I luckily haven't had one for a while...though you know karma will bite me in the tushy today and I'll get one! :s

..and yes...time for sleep! :wink:

I haven't tried playing without my over 700 Mod files for a long while though I remeber the game being unplayable without Mods in it to fix the issues and I found it unplayable in larger worlds without awsomemod disabling the automated school assignment system which is horribly glitchy and game-breaking.
@igazor -My legacies would've been toast a long time ago without AM in there to fix school routing and my 100 baby challenge would've gone down in flames before too long with automated school assignments enabled.

"TadOlson;c-16338698" wrote:
@igazor -My legacies would've been toast a long time ago without AM in there to fix school routing and my 100 baby challenge would've gone down in flames before too long with automated school assignments enabled.

Okay, thought the better of it and decided my original response here was too harsh. Apologies to any who saw me in a moment of weakness.

But Tad, honestly. Enough with your school auto-enroll issue already. You found your solution for it and it was not (and couldn't be) within the scope of NRaas mods for reasons already explained many times over. I must ask you to not page me on this forum again.

I won't if I don't have to and I was just telling how I found a fix for the school issue as it can break a save if it gets bad enough.Some of us had to load our games heavily with tons of Mods to fix the issues we kept having as it was making the game unplayable for us and I still wish for a fix for the autoamted role assignments from Ambitions that disabled them right out of the box in a new game without having to port settings in first.It's one issue that's causing lag in the game for some of us and just annoying to others who aren't getting lag from it.

"Charlottesmom;c-16335881" wrote:
@dothesmustle , The worse that’s happened with my laptop is the occasional error 12 which is confuddling as I have boatloads of memory but it’s not that often since I cleared out my library of doubles/triples of Sims, Houses and Community Lots. I have a very pricy gaming laptop and Sims 3 typically runs fantabulous, haven’t had lag since I stopped playing on my old laptop. I only visited IP a few times to kidnap Sims but I’d like to play it sometime to see how horrible it really is. i own about 3/4ths of the store and have billions of patterns (I create them) but still no lag.

I fully appreciate that there are mods available for players who need/want them to enhance their play but for me at this point I just decline. ;)

Your game is running out of memory, why the error code 12. it's not your computer. You need to save more frequently especially as your game save gets larger. I save every sim day or sometimes even more than that. If your in build mode I save every few minutes. @igazor can help you with game save cleaner

"phoebebebe13;c-16339019" wrote:

"Charlottesmom;c-16335881" wrote:
@dothesmustle , The worse that’s happened with my laptop is the occasional error 12 which is confuddling as I have boatloads of memory but it’s not that often since I cleared out my library of doubles/triples of Sims, Houses and Community Lots. I have a very pricy gaming laptop and Sims 3 typically runs fantabulous, haven’t had lag since I stopped playing on my old laptop. I only visited IP a few times to kidnap Sims but I’d like to play it sometime to see how horrible it really is. i own about 3/4ths of the store and have billions of patterns (I create them) but still no lag.

I fully appreciate that there are mods available for players who need/want them to enhance their play but for me at this point I just decline. ;)

Your game is running out of memory, why the error code 12. it's not your computer. You need to save more frequently especially as your game save gets larger. I save every sim day or sometimes even more than that. If your in build mode I save every few minutes. @igazor can help you with game save cleaner

@phoebebebe13 , ;) Yeah I do need to save more often, gonna try to remember to save after every 1/2 hour or so. When in build mode I actually throw partially built whatever I'm working on into the library then save. I learned a long time ago to not wait till a build is finished to throw it into the library, lost a few half built builds that way, I will save more often in build mode now though. :smiley: