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NoLoveDeepT's avatar
NoLoveDeepT
2 years ago

Sims 3 Crashing Randomly During Gameplay

Hello, I've been attempting to run The Sims 3 for months with a great deal of difficulty. I've looked up all sorts of Q&A threads throughout the internet to figure out why, but I've been unable to stop my game from crashing to the desktop after a seemingly random amount of playtime. While I do have CC and mods, I found a troubleshooting program that seems to have removed any problematic content I downloaded which has helped but then boom- back to crashing to desktop. At first, it used to crash in CAS but after using the troubleshooting program (I think it's CC Magic) it seems to work fine. Now it happens during gameplay. I've removed mods, deleted a bunch of CC in the installer and that's actually seemed to make it worse. I've put some of those mods back with no luck. I have enough memory as far as I'm concerned and I use the simslauncher.exe for faster and swifter gameplay. My display is at the suggested size (it wasn't before and I do think that aided in the sudden crashing), I rarely play using the fast forward buttons and when crashing to desktop, my sims aren't doing anything difficult (last couple times it's happened while my sim was walking to their child). I feel like I've tried everything to no avail. It's at the point where the game won't even last a minute during gameplay (although I was able to redo my sims house for close to an hour and nothing happened). Anyways, I would appreciate any and all help. I'm really at a loss here.

pc
technical issues

3 Replies

  • puzzlezaddict's avatar
    puzzlezaddict
    Hero+
    2 years ago

    @NoLoveDeepT  Your computer's graphics driver is somewhat old, and it's a good idea to update it.  You can get the newest driver from Nvidia:

    https://www.nvidia.com/Download/driverResults.aspx/209129/en-us/

    Run the installer as an admin: right-click the download and select "Run as administrator."  Select the Custom (not Express) install option, and check the box to perform a clean install.  Restart your computer when the process is finished.

    For the Sims 3 issue, please try playing a new save in a clean user folder so we can find out whether the problem is related to your in-game content or something else.  Move the entire Sims 3 folder out of Documents > Electronic Arts and onto your desktop.  If you get an error when trying to move the folder, or it duplicates instead of moving, stop here and let me know.

    Otherwise, when you launch the game, a clean folder will spawn with no content.  Don't add anything to it yet; just start a new save and see whether the game crashes.  If it doesn't, copy over your save, but nothing else yet, and test that.  Since you're copying rather than moving the save, you don't need to worry about the effects of missing mods and cc—the original save will still be intact in the old folder while you experiment on the new one.

    If the game is still stable, you can start adding back your mods and custom content a little at a time, testing along the way.  Please do not use CC Magic or any other mod organizing tool, at least for now, just to keep things simple.

    If the game crashes at any point during this testing, stop there and let me know the context of the crash, both where you were in the testing and what you were doing in-game at the time.

  • NoLoveDeepT's avatar
    NoLoveDeepT
    2 years ago

    i am soooo sorry for the late response but just wanna say thank you for your response and being someone so incredibly helpful on this site. i tried everything you mentioned as well looked up another thread you responded to a couple years ago. tl;dr, i'm 90% sure my save file was corrupt which was sad because it was a generations challenge save file. :-\ but with your advice (and my girlfriend deleting something i actually haven't heard of in the game?? wasn't cache, i can't remember), my game has been working the past several weeks. i've been grieving my lost file and miss it but i'm not taking any chances. :-\

    thank you tons!!!

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