I recently reduced my mods folder from 20gb to 2gb of just core mods, and installed my custom content through the launcher. At what point will it actually lag? When I had the 20gb, it was merged and the loading time was 4 minutes and this is also with every expansion pack selected. I wasn't using 90% of that custom content so I kept what I wanted plus my mods. Will cutting down like this improve performance?
@SharketteLaw92 Lag has a number of different causes, especially when you include the varying definitions of lag commonly used. Some have nothing to do with a player's third-party content, e.g. weak hardware, a system issue not caused by hardware, or a poorly made or overcrowded world. Some of this can be addressed in various ways, although upgrading or replacing a weak computer may not be in the picture. Sometimes the save itself is overloaded—the game engine can unfortunately only handle so much before performance starts to suffer.
Some lag is caused by mods or cc, but it shouldn't happen at all with well-made content. When it does, it often seems to be random, but there's usually an identifiable cause. For example, a bad cc item may cause no problems at all until a sim is wearing it, or the "wrong" sim is wearing it, like when an item is miscategorized as being valid for all age groups. The solution there is simple: remove the bad cc, and the problem should go away. That makes testing easy too, since you should see results right away.
Mods are more difficult because by the time you see lag, they may have already corrupted your save past the point of repair. That's certainly not always the case, but it's a distinct possibility and even an inevitability with a couple of popular mods. If you want to make sure your particular mods are safe to use, the best place to ask is on the NRaas site. You could list your mods and ask if anything should be removed; the people there will recognize any potential issues on sight.
For the rest, when the lag happens, a little investigation is in order. Sometimes all you need to do is quit without saving, and everything's fine again; sometimes it takes a bit more intervention. But on a strong-enough computer with no bad mods or cc, you should always be able to address the issues that appear without having to deal with permanent lag.
Okay. Right now, lag is not my problem, what's happening is that I downloaded custom content, all of it was safe, none was corrupted but, no matter what I do my nraas mods will not work. I remove the custom content and it still does it. Yesterday it was working fine, before downloading the stuff. So I reverted back to a backup mod folder that I KNOW was not corrupted and it still doesn't work
@SharketteLaw92 Did you delete the five cache files in your user folder?
If that doesn't help, try setting up the Mods framework again, or download the framework from Mod the Sims and test it. The two sample mods should at least work; if they don't, please post the full file path to the Packages folder where the mods are located.
I tried all of that and it doesn't work. My mods folder is in my documents/electronic arts/Sims 3/Mods
@SharketteLaw92 Please post a screenshot of the folder that has your mods in it; include the address bar, above the list of files and folders.
Please also check the last modified date on deviceconfig.log, inside the same Sims 3 folder. Let me know whether it matches the last time you opened the game.
I've just reset my laptop, reinstalled windows and now reinstalling sims 3, then I'm going to try the mods folder again
Update: re-installing did not fix the problem. But I disabled one drive and downloaded all my mods including nraas and reinstalled them. It worked. They're all showing up along with my new CC. I suspect that one drive may have been the culprit here
@SharketteLaw92 That's not surprising at all. I was trying to figure out which user folder the game was reading, because what you described sounded very much like it was using a second folder, and OneDrive is the most common reason that two separate folders exist at all.
