@BillFlowerpot It does sound like your game is corrupted already, or perhaps massively overloaded. When you move the sims to a new lot, can you save them afterwards, either before or after quitting and reloading? The point was to see if that process, which is a kind or reset all by itself, would make it possible for them to save.
You can also try the various suggestions in a clean game folder. Pull your existing one out of Documents\EA and onto your desktop, and launch the game to create a new one. Then copy over Saves from your old folder to your new one, and load the save. You'll probably get a warning about missing objects, but since you're not saving your progress, it's not a big deal. You can always tinker with your sims' wardrobes later, when you've placed them in the new save.
The .package files in Library can be transferred anywhere you want as well. I understand that you don't have any new files in there; the point was that if you did manage to save the sims, you could use the resulting Library file rather than having to go through the process of exporting them.
The last-ditch approach would be to save the sims in CAS and recreate the family later. The resulting sims would be new, with no skills or money, but there are cheats to restore the money, at least. Bring up the cheats console (crtl-shift-C) and enter "testingcheatsenabled true" without quotes. Then shift-click on a sim (or is it crtl-click, I never remember) and select Edit in Create a Sim. From there, you can save the sim to the CAS bin; the resulting file lands in SavedSims.
I have plenty of suggestions that would clean up your game and speed load time. Most of them involve mods. Some others:
- Turn off memories. These are a huge drain on performance. It's not going to help as much now, since the sims in your world probably already have overstuffed memory journals. It will help in future saves though.
- Turn off the in-game shopping experience and the hidden object interactive loading screens.
- Turn down water and high detail lots in the graphics options; these are the biggest resource hogs. I have mine on "mirrors only" and 2, respectively.
- Don't login at the launcher or Main Menu.
- Keep your sims' inventories as empty as possible. A few items is fine; a few hundred is not.
- Don't overclutter your houses and community lots. The more objects on them, the longer it takes to render the lots.
- Delete everything in FeaturedItems inside your game folder. This is the store trying to sell you stuff.
- Avoid playing in broken worlds, like Isla Paradiso, or fix them first. Avoid excessively large custom worlds as well, like Alpine County—they're impossible to play in for an extended period of time.
You don't have to do all of these things; just pick a few that suit you and see how it goes.
Also, for any given family, you can evict and replace them in Edit Town. If you don't actually save and replace them, they'll keep their jobs and relationships but lose their promised wishes and opportunities. (Of course, inactive sims don't have them anyway.) The more thorough reset would be to evict them, save their house to the bin, bulldoze the lot, replace it with its bin copy, and move the family back in, all in one Edit Town session.
The thing is though, this save might be too far gone to recover. You can always try, but there's no guarantee any of this would work. Even the mods can't fix everything, although they do a good job of preventing corruption in the first place.
