@leahorr Please add NRaas ErrorTrap and Traveler. ET cleans up problem data in the background before it can cause corruption; Traveler replaces the broken EA travel transition with a more stable version, among other things. I'd never play without either one. Overwatch is great, but it's meant to work in conjunction with ET. MasterController doesn't do anything unless you use it to issue a command. I would also add Register because I've seen a lot of errors related to role assignments in the 64-bit Mac version, and Register clears those up by default.
The issues with sculpting and interacting with ocean water are in fact part of this version of Sims 3. The glitching sounds aren't universal but are somewhat common, and the pink lines are, as far as I know, always present on Macs with ARM chips. The ghost hunting issues are Sims 3 in general.
None of this should cause crashing, with the possible exception of glitchy sounds if they're coming from a sound driver that doesn't get along with the game. The test for that is to play using only the computer's built-in speakers—if this driver were causing crashing, we'd see a lot more reports tied to it. That doesn't mean you can't use headphones or external speakers, only that it's helpful to test without them.
For the crashing itself, aside from the extra mods, I'd suggest not running anything else alongside the game. Your computer's 8 GB RAM is shared between the processor and the graphics chip, and the OS will use up to half that, leaving relatively little for the game. Sims 3 can use over 2 GB just on startup, not including what the graphics chip borrows, with memory use increasing after a travel transition or in an extended Build/Buy session. So it's best not to have any other apps eating RAM while you play.
I would say that having 20-25 GB free on your internal drive is sufficient to prevent this from being a source of crashes or general system issues.
