Hello, I have been playing The Sims 4 for several years, and since my very first Lets Plays were from The Sims 3, I wanted to finally try it myself. Yesterday I purchased, installed, and started playing The Sims 3. Everything worked fine at first and I really enjoyed the game. However, after about three hours of playing, I wanted to stop for the day. That was when the first issue appeared: I could not save normally. I had to use “Save As”, which worked at the time. Today, when I wanted to continue, the save did not appear in the main menu. When I hovered over the save file, the message said that an expansion pack was missing, which made it impossible to load. After trying different solutions, I eventually managed to make the save appear in the menu again, but when I clicked Play, I received the following error message: “A serious error has occurred while loading [save name]. It is strongly recommended that you restart the application.” I attempted several troubleshooting steps, but the error continued. I then tried starting a completely new save, but the same error appeared: “A serious error has occurred while loading Sunset Valley. It is strongly recommended that you restart the application.” At this point, I checked my Documents > Electronic Arts > The Sims 3 > InstalledWorlds folder, expecting to find the Sunset Valley world file. To my surprise, the folder was completely empty. It seems that I never had the Sunset Valley world file to begin with, which is strange since I was able to play the game yesterday without problems (other than the saving issue). Here is what I have already tried: Uninstalled and reinstalled the game, cleared the EA cache files, and followed the troubleshooting steps from your list. Unfortunately, nothing has resolved the problem. Could you please advise me on how to restore the missing Sunset Valley world file or otherwise fix this error? Thank you in advance for your help.
