My sims 3 game works perfectly for most of my save files, but for 1 specific file, it crashes every few minutes. The save file that crashes is an old save file. I've been playing it for about a year, and have 8 generations, and tons of family members. I'm wondering if the huge family trees are causing the crashes, since the game has to load up all that family history. But, can this really be the cause of the problem? I do not use CC, and the only mods I have are NRAAS and story progression. Please help me understand how I can make this save file less complicated so that the game doesn't crash every time I open it. I've put so much time into this save file and don't want to just delete it. Thanks <3

@tlobliviate What it sounds like is that your save is in fact going over the RAM limit of the game, maybe almost as soon as you start playing. Some of this is fixable, for example when there's corrupt data or a glitch the game engine is trying to resolve, it can take extra resources, so addressing the underlying problem directly will remove those extra demands. Some of it may only be manageable, to the point where you can keep playing this save, but maybe for only an hour or two instead of six. The travel transition is fragile and breaks easily even in saves that are otherwise running well. I'm not surprised it isn't working in yours. Among other things, the new world needs to be loaded into RAM, and some of the data from the previously played world isn't always released first, or even at all. Still, if you don't want to travel in this save, it would be understandable. I don't think the large family tree is necessarily an issue, although it can be related to factors that do cause problems. One common issue is when a sim has an overloaded relationship panel—it's difficult for the game to keep track of all that, and more so when several sims know all those people. Another issue is if you play with memories enabled, because memories take up far more in the way of resources than they should. It's a good idea to disable memories, but that doesn't really help with the ones that already exist. So, after all that, I would suggest installing NRaas ErrorTrap, Overwatch, MasterController, Traveler (if you ever want to try traveling again), Relationship Panel, Register, and Traffic. ET and OW clean up errors in general, MC will be used for a town reset, RP in case the relationship panels are an issue, Register manages service and role sims, and Traffic prevents the overspawning of vehicles. While I would only consider the first three or four (depending on travel) absolutely necessary, at this point, your save needs all the help it can get. ErrorTrap is a core mod, so be sure to download the version that corresponds to your type of install; there are separate versions for patch 1.67/disc, 1.67/Steam, and 1.69/Origin. The others all work equally well on both 1.67 and 1.69. Load your save, let the game clock run a few sim-minutes, and you'll probably see a pile of error notifications in the upper right corner. That will mostly be ET and OW doing an initial cleanup. To be thorough, pause the game after about five sim-minutes, let it run another five, then use "save as" to rename the save, so you have the original as a backup, and quit. Delete the five cache files in your Sims 3 folder in Documents\Electronic Arts. For reference: CASPartCache.package compositorCache.package scriptCache.package simCompositorCache.package socialCache.package Load the save (under its new name), and again let it run for a couple of sim-minutes. Click on City Hall and select NRaas > MasterController > Town Options > Reset Everything. This can take a few minutes to run, depending on how overloaded the game is and the speed of your hard drive. When it's done, run the game a few more sim-minutes, save as, quit, and delete the five cache files again. Reload, let the game run for a couple of sim-minutes, then put it in windowed mode. Bring up the Task Manager and see how much memory Sims 3 is using. If it's listed in percentages, right-click on the header to switch to absolute values. Please also let me know how much memory you have installed overall.

@tlobliviate Wow, yes, you're managing to run all those packs together in macOS. It's not surprising your save would crash constantly then, given how much memory it uses. The Windows version can use up to ~3.7 GB RAM at a time (4 GB minus some overhead), but the Mac version is hard-capped at 2 GB due to the way it was initially programmed. The Windows version also originally had a 2 GB memory limit, but it was patched to be able to use more; the Mac version never was. As you've seen, and I've seen from time to time as well, that doesn't mean the game will immediately crash if it goes over the limit. I haven't paid close attention in a while, but it's possible macOS does a decent job of compressing unused data. It's also possible that the Activity Monitor isn't reporting the data correctly. It's kind of a moot point though. This particular save is using too much memory right away, and so the crashes are totally unsurprising. Opening houses isn't going to help either: it takes more RAM to simulate two houses and the sims inside than one. Sims 3 is also notorious for not releasing all the memory it was using but no longer needs, so closing a house again might not free up all the RAM that was used when it was open. Checking random data like ages and relationships should only have a minimal effect, if any. At this point, you can keep playing the save and hope for the best, but there's no guarantee things won't get worse. There are ways to try to keep memory use down overall, from disabling the interactive loading screens and the in-game shopping experience to purging RAM every so often. Sim memories are a huge resource hog, although as mentioned before, disabling them now won't remove the data from the existing ones. Here's a more complete list of things you can do to keep resource use down: https://www.nraas.net/community/TIPS-FOR-BETTER-GAME-PERFORMANCE Here's how to purge RAM on a Mac: https://bluebellflora.com/resetting-ram-during-gameplay/ StoryProgression is also a heavy mod in that running it will take more resources. I don't know what your settings are, but it might help to slow down the speed of SP, or even play without it in this save if you can stand it. Given how long you've played this save though, you might end up needing to move your sims to a new world. If you do, don't use the EA method of calling on the phone and moving; save the sime to the library, quit to desktop, reload and start a new save, then place the sims there. If you want to keep their house, save it separately. The sims won't know anyone in the new save, but they'll keep their skills and relationships to each other, as well as their jobs if those jobs exist in the new world. If there are more sims than just your active household that you'd like to keep, you can save them separately and repair their relationships using MasterController once they're in the new save. Or you could pack them together with NRaas Porter, which would preserve all the relationships among the sims. If you end up going that route though, it's best to ask on the NRaas forum. I've never done this myself, and I know there are small details here and there that can matter very much, for example making sure to pack the graves of ancestors to preserve the family trees. By the way, I don't think I answered this before, but you asked how to keep sims from moving into town. There are various StoryProgression options you can use, depending on what you're trying to accomplish—one thing you can do is block a certain empty house from being occupied. But the simplest approach of all is to remove the fridge from the lot. Sims won't move into a house that doesn't have a fridge.

@tlobliviate Switching between a browser window and the game shouldn't cause crashing on its own, although it can if your system is already running close to capacity with just Sims 3. Yours has more than enough memory; I'm thinking in this case of the processor, or perhaps that the graphics card is involved in something else you're doing and doesn't switch back and forth well. Sims 3 also doesn't always respond well to being minimized, at least on some systems. I find it does fine though if I put it in windowed mode and leave it up. Playing the game and playing a video at the same time is more demanding than playing one and having the other on pause. Whether your system can handle those extra demands depends on the specs of your computer, your OS, and other factors. It's difficult to be sure what's happening on your computer without being in front of it and watching the output of some hardware monitoring app. It's really speculation though, unless you notice something specific. At any rate, if the game crashes when you run YouTube or some application at the same time but not when you just play, then that's enough of a pattern to say you probably should avoid doing that. When you save a household to the library, the sims lose all relationships with people not in that household, and that includes dead relatives. This is also true of the option to move sims to a different neighborhood through the phone interaction. The point of using NRaas Porter is that instead of transferring single households, you pack a number of them together, preserving all the info among them. If you put the tombstones of the dead relatives in the inventory of one of the packed sims, the ancestors' data, and the relationships that follow, will be intact. So for example, using Porter, if first cousins living in different households bring their dead parents' urns with them, they'll still be first cousins in the new save, regardless of whether you unpack them to the same household or different ones. The fridge tip is a great idea, and it's not mine. Someone else posts the suggestion often, and I and others steal it mercilessly. The nice thing about it is it works whether you have StoryProgression or not, and without having to go through any other mod options.

@tlobliviate What world is this current save in? How large is your household, and how many sims live in the world? What about the active lot: is it stuffed full of clutter or created objects (paintings, sculptures, inventions, whatever), and are there hundreds of objects in the sims' inventories or in storage chests? There are plenty of other reasons a save can become overloaded and start crashing, but those are some of the more common and easily addressable issues. Additionally, which mods do you have, aside from StoryProgression? There are also ways to try to help a save run better, depending on which mods you use. Let me know if you're willing to add a couple others from NRaas as well.

Thanks for the reply 🙂 I'm playing in Sunset Valley. My town has about 50 people in it. I would like to make it much less but i don't know how, because random people just fill up all the empty houses or show up and never leave the town. I just went around and deleted some paintings. My sims family is 4 people, they live in a pretty big house, but there is no clutter. I also emptied out their inventories. Do you think the crowded inventories of family members I moved out of the playable household could be causing problems? I have the nraas mod, and the story progression mod.Thank you <3

Game crashes in 1 save file and not another

14 Replies

puzzlezaddict
Hero+
6 years ago
@tlobliviate What world is this current save in? How large is your household, and how many sims live in the world? What about the active lot: is it stuffed full of clutter or created objects (paintings, sculptures, inventions, whatever), and are there hundreds of objects in the sims' inventories or in storage chests? There are plenty of other reasons a save can become overloaded and start crashing, but those are some of the more common and easily addressable issues.

Additionally, which mods do you have, aside from StoryProgression? There are also ways to try to help a save run better, depending on which mods you use. Let me know if you're willing to add a couple others from NRaas as well.
tlobliviate
6 years ago
Thanks for the reply 🙂 I'm playing in Sunset Valley. My town has about 50 people in it. I would like to make it much less but i don't know how, because random people just fill up all the empty houses or show up and never leave the town.
I just went around and deleted some paintings. My sims family is 4 people, they live in a pretty big house, but there is no clutter. I also emptied out their inventories. Do you think the crowded inventories of family members I moved out of the playable household could be causing problems?
I have the nraas mod, and the story progression mod.
Thank you <3
puzzlezaddict
Hero+
6 years ago
@tlobliviate StoryProgression and the other mod you mentioned are both NRaas mods, and there are a few dozen others. (Please edit your post to remove mention of the other mod; it raises the rating of the game and is therefore not supposed to be named on this site.) Which other mod do you have? And would you be willing to add a couple others also from NRaas?

Overstuffed inventories can contribute to overhead, as can many other accumulations of data (like cluttered households). Unless there's a broken item somewhere, none of this should cause crashing on its own, but the combined effect of several factors can raise the resources required to run a given save enough that the game engine can't keep up. It doesn't sound like this is the case for you though. Sunset Valley is also one of the most stable EA-made worlds, so that shouldn't present any problems; the population is well below the number where it could start to cause a problem. There are certainly ways to prevent more sims from moving in, but let's leave that for now.

It would still be helpful to know which packs you have installed though.

The reason I keep asking about mods is that there are ways to reset the town or otherwise try to repair a save, depending on which mods you have installed.
tlobliviate
6 years ago
Hi. Yes I am open to using more mods as long as you think they will help.
I currently have generations, world adventures, island living, university, into the future, ambitions, late night, and supernatural installed. Whenever I try using world adventures, university, or into the future, (where my sims have to travel to another location) the game takes about 30 minutes to load, and if it does successfully load, it will crash pretty soon afterwards. When I tried returning from France, the game file got really badly corrupted. I fixed that, but decided to never use world adventures for this save file again. Idk why everything is so glitchy with this save file.
I think I'll go through townspeople's inventories and houses and start deleting clutter.
Do you think the long family trees are an issue? At least 3/4 of the town is a part of a very long family tree. One time, I used Nraas to open a townspersons family tree and the game crashed. That's why I mention the family trees. However, I don't know how I would fix that problem without having to delete all the townspeople, which I don't want to do.
Thanks so much for your help!! Hopefully this information will be useful to you.
puzzlezaddict
Hero+
6 years ago
@tlobliviate What it sounds like is that your save is in fact going over the RAM limit of the game, maybe almost as soon as you start playing. Some of this is fixable, for example when there's corrupt data or a glitch the game engine is trying to resolve, it can take extra resources, so addressing the underlying problem directly will remove those extra demands. Some of it may only be manageable, to the point where you can keep playing this save, but maybe for only an hour or two instead of six.

The travel transition is fragile and breaks easily even in saves that are otherwise running well. I'm not surprised it isn't working in yours. Among other things, the new world needs to be loaded into RAM, and some of the data from the previously played world isn't always released first, or even at all. Still, if you don't want to travel in this save, it would be understandable.

I don't think the large family tree is necessarily an issue, although it can be related to factors that do cause problems. One common issue is when a sim has an overloaded relationship panel—it's difficult for the game to keep track of all that, and more so when several sims know all those people. Another issue is if you play with memories enabled, because memories take up far more in the way of resources than they should. It's a good idea to disable memories, but that doesn't really help with the ones that already exist.

So, after all that, I would suggest installing NRaas ErrorTrap, Overwatch, MasterController, Traveler (if you ever want to try traveling again), Relationship Panel, Register, and Traffic. ET and OW clean up errors in general, MC will be used for a town reset, RP in case the relationship panels are an issue, Register manages service and role sims, and Traffic prevents the overspawning of vehicles. While I would only consider the first three or four (depending on travel) absolutely necessary, at this point, your save needs all the help it can get. ErrorTrap is a core mod, so be sure to download the version that corresponds to your type of install; there are separate versions for patch 1.67/disc, 1.67/Steam, and 1.69/Origin. The others all work equally well on both 1.67 and 1.69.

Load your save, let the game clock run a few sim-minutes, and you'll probably see a pile of error notifications in the upper right corner. That will mostly be ET and OW doing an initial cleanup. To be thorough, pause the game after about five sim-minutes, let it run another five, then use "save as" to rename the save, so you have the original as a backup, and quit. Delete the five cache files in your Sims 3 folder in Documents\Electronic Arts. For reference:

CASPartCache.package

compositorCache.package

scriptCache.package

simCompositorCache.package

socialCache.package

Load the save (under its new name), and again let it run for a couple of sim-minutes. Click on City Hall and select NRaas > MasterController > Town Options > Reset Everything. This can take a few minutes to run, depending on how overloaded the game is and the speed of your hard drive. When it's done, run the game a few more sim-minutes, save as, quit, and delete the five cache files again.

Reload, let the game run for a couple of sim-minutes, then put it in windowed mode. Bring up the Task Manager and see how much memory Sims 3 is using. If it's listed in percentages, right-click on the header to switch to absolute values. Please also let me know how much memory you have installed overall.
tlobliviate
6 years ago
Hi! Thanks for all of those instructions. I did everything you said, and now I see that the Sims is taking up 2.3 GB of memory. My Mac has 12 GB of memory in total. I did notice that the loading screen was much shorter than it normally is. So it seems like your instructions are working. Also, it only took about 3 minutes to save, which is much better than the usual 6-10 minutes. I have done much playing yet, so I'm not sure if it will still crash or not.
PLUS, the 'chat' option for toddlers is back! I haven't been able to chat with toddlers for years because the option disappeared for some reason. It's back now. yay!
How does error trap work and what do I do with the overwatch mod? I have them installed now.
Thanks for your help. I REALLY appreciate it. <3
puzzlezaddict
Hero+
6 years ago
@tlobliviate ErrorTrap and Overwatch run on their own, without any need for user input. You can of course mess with the settings if you want, at least for Overwatch, but the default settings have always worked fine for me.

ErrorTrap finds stray data that's corrupt or not tied to anything or otherwise doesn't belong, and cleans it up. So you might get notifications about piles of laundry and plates from cooking being deleted, sim data recovered, that kind of thing. These reports are not indicative of a problem, just ET doing its job. If your game starts crashing, or you get repeated errors about a particular sim though, you can take the related scripterrors (in Documents\Electronic Arts\The Sims 3) to NRaas and ask for help. People there can interpret the scripterrors and make suggestions for troubleshooting whatever the specific problem happens to be.

Overwatch cleans up other kinds of data, for example abandoned cars and stuck sims. It runs when you initially load a save, then every night at 3 am by default. The deleted cars and stereos that get turned off are nothing to worry about, unless the cars number in the thousands, in which case installing Traffic would be the best approach. If you get repeated notifications about a sim being stuck or not aging, that should be investigated, but an occasional error here and there can be ignored.

By the way, are you really playing in macOS, or have you Bootcamped or installed Parallels or something?
tlobliviate
6 years ago
Ah ok. Yeah, I got a bunch of aging errors. But after a few sims minutes, they all aged up anyways. Thanks for the info about the errortrap and overwatch mods, and thanks for telling me about the option of asking NRaas directly about my problems.
And yes, I'm pretty sure I'm playing on macOS. I didn't do anything fancy with my game. Just put in the disc and started playing.
The game did crash after I went around and used NRaas on a bunch of sims. That usually happens -- when I use NRaas so much at once, the game can't handle it. Idk if that's fixable.
puzzlezaddict
Hero+
6 years ago
@tlobliviate Okay, now I'm curious. When you open a folder, does it look like this:

or one of these?

And when you say you "used NRaas on a bunch of sims," what exactly did you do? Please list the categories you pick, so I know what specific mod you're using, and what function of that mod is involved.
tlobliviate
6 years ago
I attached a photo of my screen.
When I say I used NRaas on a bunch of sims I just mean I used NRaas Master Controller, then clicked on intermediate and checked their ages, and checked their relationships. I also changed some relationships using the NRaas Master Controller mod. I also 'open' a lot of houses to check on the people inside. But, I only open them one at a time, because I'm scared that having a bunch of houses open at once will cause a crash.
Hope this helps <3