@Luciaaafs I hear good things about both Kuree and Regul save cleaners, so choose whichever one has better instructions, or try both. By the way, for the expansions, I actually was asking if you had any others running in this save that you didn't mention, not whether the ones you did mention were active. I had those eight active and no others.
For prevention, the best thing you can do is not use mods that are known to break saves. Without knowing which ones you've used, I can't tell you if any are on that list, but I will say the only one that does NOT tend to break saves but also can't simply be removed is AwesomeMod. If you were using that, it would certainly explain all the errors I was seeing, since I never use it myself.
Having a very large population in the homeworld won't corrupt a save in and of itself, but it can make the save heavier to run and give the game more chances to make errors. Similarly, these tips for better game performance generally just keep saves leaner and easier to run, but that has the side effect of lowering the chances of a problem.
https://www.nraas.net/community/TIPS-FOR-BETTER-GAME-PERFORMANCE
You don't need to take every single step, but at the very least, either disable memories or use a mod to significantly limit their generation. This might have the largest impact of any single feature.
The other highly useful step is running a MasterController town reset every six to eight sim-weeks, perhaps more if your save seems to be getting bogged down. If you find the resets disruptive, you can run them at night and/or exempt the active lot, so your own sims aren't reset, just the rest of the town.
Thanks. I'll try one of those save cleaners.
I don't have awesome mod. Is there a list of mods that are known to break saves? I can look and see if I have any (which i very well might).
I do have a mod that significantly limits the memories. I could definitely do a town reset more often. I'll look through that link and see what else I can do.
Thanks for the advice!
@Luciaaafs I don't know of a master list of broken mods, but one popular example is SimsMX's Hospital Overhaul. (It was a great mod until an update broke it, and it was never fixed.) Another is a very adult-oriented mod that we generally refer to, on official sites anyway, with the initials K and W. Then there are mods that can cause lots of errors but don't generally break saves, for example More Sims in Clubs v.1 and one of the zodiac mods; I'd have to look up which one. Some mods also conflict with others—neither causes problems on its own, but the two can't work together. These generally don't break saves even in combination either.
If you'd like a more detailed evaluation, it's best to post at Mod the Sims or on the NRaas site with your full mod list and ask for an opinion on which, if any, need to be removed. It's sort of outside the scope of this site, but more importantly, the few people that post here are not familiar with all of the more obscure mods, so a problem could easily be missed.
