Know What Is Inside Your Game: The Sims 3

Mariesalias wrote:
amjoie: Thank you for your advise! I am saving this thread using save as, like you explained so I'll have it for reference. I need to do the same with the lag thread now that I know how.

The family that gives me the blank thumbnail is my legacy family and this has happened to them before. It is only ever this family it happens to. :\ Thanks to Twallan's mods, I have been able to keep playing them for over two years but I do seem to have to move them to a new town/save every generation. They started off in LL which corrupted before all the children were fully grown and it has become a theme with them it seems. I will make a testing copy of the save and see if I can get the thumbnaiol to spawn (they do have a plumbot so thanks for that extra info).



Bily_jednorozec may be onto something with the WA item. When this blank thumbnail happened during the second generation, I tested that save and tracked it down to something in one of their WA chests. I forget which one it turned out to be (my families usually have 3-4 of them to store different items, i.e. items for science station, cut gems and potions, family portraits and photographs, etc). I am trying to remember what that chest contained but it was a long time ago and I am not sure I remember correctly, but I think it was cut gems and potions. Maybe. I ended up just selling the chest and everything in it to get the thumbnail to show up again.

Anyway, after the blank thumbnail happened in that save, I had several issues happen with that save and almost lost my family a few times, including when I moved them out in edit town mode (to try to fix another issue) the game kept a doppelganger family in the house so I could not move them back in! They were not there but they were. I had to use MC to fix it all. In the end, I just moved the whole family to a new town (without thier house or anything that could be replaced, though kept things like portraits). And the new save in the new town showed as it was supposed to.

The save I am having the issue with currently is a rather new save in a new world (they do not seem destined to live in LP). I did take the WA chests out of their family inventory and keep two out (the science station one and the bot station one) and now that I think on it, the blank thumbnail did happen just after I did that (I was still working on filling the house). I don't believe they have a tent, but I could be mistaken. I'll check next time I am in game.

Maybe of importance to note that this family has portaits and photographs (in digital frames) that go back to the begining as well as the urns for all the ancestors (just the heir and mate each generation), and for some of the pets I was especially fond of. After nine generations (it is a 20 generation challenge), that is a lot of ghosts but luckily no more then 3-4 come out at a time. usually. I am not sure if old items like this can effect the saves though.

In reference to the caches: I do play with Twallan's Story Progression mod in. If i play without it EA's SP kills off all the infants, toddlers, and even many of the elders. So the game is unplayable without it for me. I like to play with an alive and bustling town that grows and develops along with the family I am playing. So aging is always on and my towns are pretty full.

I have had issues with past towns where deleting the world caches for it seemed to fix it (mostly types of lag if I remember correctly). I started deleting them regularly after that. Kind of ironic that what I started doing to protect my saves may now be messing them up. Gotta love this game! :roll:

I have to stop here as my son and nephew are demanding my attention (20 days until school starts ;P).

Given the new information, I would suggest three things:

1. Put gems/metals in the Supernatural gem cabinet. Put collectible insects in the Supernatural insect cabinet. Put nanites in their own nanite cages, stacked in the basement, by type, and grab what you need as you need them to build trait chips. Use the WA chests only for food harvests, herb harvests, supernatural harvests, and trait chips.

2. Hang photos, art, etc in a gallery designed to hold them all. You can grab them and put them back in your family inventory, if you move the family. (If you want the pictures for remembrance/ambiance, but don't care about having them individually displayed on an end table, etc, then it might be best to turn them into wallpaper. ZooProfessor has a tutorial on it, which might be a real solution for you. You can always save the real photos/art along with a copy of the family, exported to a Sims3Pack, so that you can get the real thing back if you ever need them for some reason. But, in the meantime, they could be displayed as wallpaper in your home, without the extra "baggage."

3. Take your family ghosts to a family ghost area of the graveyard, and keep them inside a building, so they stay urns. If you need to move the family, you can always grab them before you go. But this will get them off your primary lot.

I wish you the best of luck with your legacy family. I know you want to keep them for as long as possible. But may I suggest you save each family member to CAS, as a template? Then, if the worse comes to worse, you can at least remake a new CAS family that looks identical to yours, and continue the legacy from there.

I realize this isn't a perfect solution, because you would have to pretend a family history for them. But, other than skills, you can make them relate to each other in the same way as before. And if the ghosts are put in a graveyard of a brand new world, they can still be "family ghosts." The art and photos, saved as wallpaper, can still follow along with the new "old" family. And if you give them a house that has been saved with all the WA chests and supernatural cabinets, they will have all the same goodies.

The only thing missing is the extended family tree. BUT, then, it just might be the extended family tree that is glitching in the game, and causing the corruption that keeps popping up.

At least be prepared for the eventual demise of this played family, by keeping CAS templates. Your family definitely qualifies as "long in the tooth." And the day will come, at some point, that you will need to recreate the family in CAS, if you wish to continue the "legacy."

We have to remember that TS3 was designed to be played for three to six months, and then dropped to play the next new world for three to six months, and so forth. At the end of the game's run, you were meant to drop it, in preference for the next new shiny.

EA never intended for you to keep one legacy family for the entire life of the game. TS3 was never optimized for that kind of play. So, the very fact anyone is able to have legacies for any length of time is somewhat miraculous. You have done well, keeping them this long, when playing in a fully populated world with story progression and aging on. I don't think anyone could have done better. (hugs)