@MCA_der_Negus You're right, the list of service sims is hardly overwhelming. What about filtering by Type of Role, rather than Type of Service? You should see listings like Proprietor (for clubs), or Stylist and Tattoo Artist if you have Ambitions. And check (same path) > Type of Pet Pool as well; maybe your town is overrun with strays.
@puzzlezaddict I checked that but it also doesn't seem to be a lot. I wonder where these 5000+ services are coming from.
@MCA_der_Negus Sorry for the delay; I had to track down an old save with a discrepancy between the total number of service sims and the ones in the categories the game listed for you. I'm not sure where those extra sims are coming from for you. Some of them may be sims that have aged out of their assignment, e.g. babysitters or newspaper deliverers, but have not been flushed or reassigned. Others may have been spawned as drivers for carpools. There's a bug in Isla Paradiso where resort workers keep spawning behind the scenes, but I don't know if it's caused by the world or the presence of the resorts, or whether you even have IP installed.
At any rate, it's probably a good idea to just get rid of all those extra sims. While they generally don't take up a lot of resources, 5,000 is too high, and it's possible the game is trying to push them to age up or perform a service that they can't, and that's weighing down your save.
The MasterController command you want Total Annihilation. This flushes all a sim's data, as if they never existed in the game. I had to experiment a bit to get a filter that would list all the service sims, not just the ones with a defined assignment (hence my needing to find an old save). But this worked for me: (click on City Hall) NRaas > MC > Sim > Advanced > Total Annihilation > Town Family > Service. To the right of "Service," you should see the number of sims; hopefully it says 5,000 and not 20-something.
Once you've selected Service and hit the check mark, the screen should list all 5k of the service sims. Just click All at the top to select them all for deletion. If there's a sim you like that's in the service pool, you'll want to move them into a home before running the command; of course they'll lose their service assignment, but at least they won't be deleted. (To add a sim to another lot, NRaas > MC > Household > Add Sim, then select the sim(s) and the lot to which they'll be added. MC will allow the command irrespective of money or other considerations.) The alternative would be to select all the sims manually except for the one(s) you want to keep, which seems like a lot of work.
And, as always, try this on a spare copy of your save, in case it doesn't go well or you decide you did want to keep one of those service sims after all. The TA command might take a little while to run on so many sims, but the action itself shouldn't harm your save.
@puzzlezaddict IT WORKED!!! It finally worked, I had this problem for months! The deletion progress took longer than I thought and after the process the game starts even a bit faster. The phones are now ringing immediately. I had one call that stopped the game for about 1 second but that's ok. I want to thank you for your patience and your help 🙂
I now have 77 service sims and after two sims days they were 78. I have story progression off but is there a way to stop them from growing? Is 70+ too much? Is there something like a max number? Thank you again.
@MCA_der_Negus I'm so glad to hear that getting rid of all those service sims helped. 78 is a much more reasonable number, and unlikely to affect how your game runs, although it still seems a bit higher than normal. Some of them will of course be the usual service sims that need to show up when called, either by you or the game, e.g. maids, firefighters, babysitters, newspaper and pizza deliverers. But it's entirely possible your save is still generating too many of them to fulfill some other function, and that without intervention, you'll wind up in the same place you started.
If you want to find out where they're coming from, you can get info on any particular sim via MC. There are probably several paths to do this, but one is (City Hall) NRaas > MC > Sim > Status > Career > Town Family > Service. Once you select a sim or sims, you'll get a report on each one listing their assignment type. If you see that one type has too many sims, or that a bunch of sims don't have any type listed, you'll know they're the problem. (A couple of sims without an assignment is probably fine; a new game I just started had two. They're probably just waiting to be assigned as coworkers or drive carpools or something.)
One potential source of service sims that I didn't mention before is the set of homeless street performers (acrobat, magician, singer) spawned when Showtime is in play. The issue is not that the performers exist, but that the game keeps assigning new ones, and possibly bumping the old ones out of their assignments, meaning they wouldn't be listed when you searched using MC > Demographics > Type of Service. There's no real way to stop this the game from generating these sims; even mods can't shut it down entirely. So the only useful approach is keeping an eye on the numbers and getting rid of the extra sims when necessary.
On that note, NRaas Overwatch has a setting to remove homeless sims that aren't currently assigned to a particular role. Sometimes it's a bit too invasive, as in, it might remove sims who exist for a reason that OW can't currently find (for example, the workers staffing the seasonal festival booths don't have anything to do the rest of the year). But it's an easy setting to test, and it wouldn't require you to manually sort or delete any sims. The path is (City Hall) NRaas > Overwatch > Settings > Clean up all Homeless > True.
@puzzlezaddict I cleaned up the homeless and it seems that it doesn't grow anymore. Thank you again for your huge help. I never thought the game could be fixed without a complete reinstallment.
