Know What Is Inside Your Game: The Sims 3

Mariesalias wrote:

amjoie wrote:

Mariesalias wrote:
I did want to ask why deleting the World Caches was bad though? I was given to understand (some time ago) that it was good to delete them. So now I am confused.

Well, that used to work, but the game has changed. Each patch has given us new rules, it seems. Sigh.
...
This may be an odd circumstance, rather than the rule. Or it may now be how things will always work, now. I cannot say. But I can tell you, for a fact, that the old world files in both WorldCaches and InstalledWorlds are needed for some old saves, because of my experience. So, when I keep a save of a store world, I also include both the WorldCaches and InstalledWorlds files.

I see, thank you for explaining! You are always so helpful. :)

anettesb wrote:

I do delete the World Caches and havn't seen any problems....
on the other hand when I forget it I don't se problems either (like I did before) so I might go to a delete them if problems strategy....

it is very confusing that it changes all the time

I think I will adopt this strategy, as well. I have definitely had saves in the past that improved a lot when I deleted the caches, so I've been deleting the world caches every play session, along with the standard five. But you are right, I have not seen problems (in general) like before, either.

I'm going to tell you a little secret. I have never deleted ANY caches. I heard people talking about how it was absolutely necessary, but I never had a problem, so I never deleted them. My game has always run just fine, on the same old caches that it started with, and all has been well, all these years that I have played my game.

I have concluded that the reason I don't have many of the problems other people have is that I play with story progression turned off, I play with aging turned off, and I use awesome mod to depopulate a world before I start playing the world. Then I add a minimum of my own sims to populate the world, and play sparsely populated worlds, with a minimum of NPCs.

I think that means I have a healthy world, and all the caches stay "young" rather than being enmeshed in ever greater overflow of data, each game session. A lean, mean game just runs better, all the way around.

But for some people, story progression is what makes the game interesting. So they should play with it on. And some people like the world aging around them, so they should leave aging on. Some people are only happy in heavily populated worlds. Everyone has to make their own choices about how to play their game.

So, if deleting caches helps with the way you play your game, well, then do it.

But, from my perspective, if the only way you can get your game to play properly is to delete the caches before every play session, then your world isn't healthy. And I would start asking myself WHY the world isn't healthy. What is corrupting those caches, and why is it happening?

I would be troubleshooting my world to see which cache is persistently corrupting, by throwing only one away at a time until I found the stinker(s). Then I would play with and without mods, to see if the corruption is still occurring, mod-free. In short, I wouldn't accept corrupted caches as something "normal" for the game. From my experience, it isn't normal for caches to corrupt like that.