Sims 3 Launcher
this post might be quite long as there is quite a bit of information that I need to explain. So when I started playing the sims about 9 years ago I downloaded a LOT of CC into my launcher. As time has gone on and I’ve gotten better at the game and game management I’ve discovered to not install most CC or even store pieces into the launcher. It tends to cause a lot of issues so I just avoid it entirely. However, because if my naivety when if first started playing, I didn’t take much care into getting CC from credible sources. Because of that I have had a long list of glitches, crashes, and bugs over the years. They were all fairly minuscule and easy to fix (they all tended to happen at different times as well). However there is one glitch that I could never fix. My babies developed a glitch about 3 years ago where the lace up boots attached to them and cause them to glitch out my screen whenever I turned my camera a certain way. I asked for help on here and got some helpful responses. At the time I was able to find the corrupted hooker boots in my launcher and delete them. I thought the problem was fixed but it was not. The glitch was still there but at that point I had no more patience to keep trying to fix it when it didn't really bug me that badly. Over the past few years at random times, I’d try to fix it by going through my launcher CC to fix the issue. I knew it wasn’t any of the CC in my mods folder as I took the whole folder out and the glitch was still in my game. Around the same time that I first noticed the glitch I realized that my launcher would crash anytime I scrolled through my installed CC tab. This made it very hard to try and delete any cc from the launcher( another reason I just didn’t try and fix it for the longest time). It’s been a few years since this and I’ve gotten used to the problem. I found a mod called baby feet that would hide the effects of the glitched looking skin and as long as I didn’t zoom in to close to my babies everything was fine! So today I decided to just go through my launcher and find any CC (like houses, worlds, and sims) that I wanted to keep before completely wiping my launcher clean. For so long I was being stubborn about deleting my launcher CC and now I just wanted a fresh start. So I did just that, because my launcher hasn’t let me scroll through for the better half of 9 years, I used lady Duchess’s updated launcher so I could use the search bar. Everything was going pretty good. I was able to make a list of the CC I wanted to keep by searching certain categories of items, for example I would search lips and any custom makeup that had the word lip in it would pop up.
I made a note of all the pieces I either wanted to keep or run through a software like Dashboard to make sure they wouldn't harm my game again. By removing my DCCache files I was able to figure out what main file had the broken CC in it which was file number 19. When I figured that out I took the other dcb files out of my game and left just the corrupted file installed. However rather than showing me the cc that was supposed to be in that bundle it showed me the exacted same 30 pieces of CC that would first appear when I opened the tab if I had all of the files installed. The only way I could see the actual cc that was supposed to be in that bundle was if I kept the other files in my DCCache folder. That caused an issue because I couldn’t scroll through the tabs where I new the broken CC was. Since it latched itself into my babies I new it was most likely a piece in the CAS or object category. However anytime I would try and scroll through those two tabs in particular my launcher would crash. I can scroll through my worlds (because lady duchess’s new launcher adds a world tab) my pets tab (I don’t have any pet cc in my launcher but it doesn’t crash my launcher when I click on it) and my lots tab with out any crashing. But anytime I try to scroll through the all tab, objects tab, or the CAS tab my launcher crashes. Again I’m used to this and totally expected this to happen. I figured a while back that the same cc that’s causing this glitch in my game is causing my launcher to act up as well. Since I couldn’t go through the corrupted file, I just went through the others by placing them back into my DCCache folder and made a list of the CC I wanted to keep. After I placed the #19 file back into my DCCache folder, I started deleting the CC that I had written down from the tabs I could access with out crashing. I deleted all of my custom worlds and patterns figuring that the less CC I had in front of the corrupted file/files the easier it would be to get to the cc I hadn't listed down yet. I couldn’t go through the other tabs with out crashing still and my search bar technique was starting to crash the launcher as well. So rather than fight anymore for that cc I just highlighted everything and deleted it. Once it finished I went back into my DCCache and deleted the files that were left in there. I closed the launcher and re opened it to find that I still had some houses in my launcher. So I tried deleting them again with the uninstall button. The square with the plumbob and the loading bar popped up and the bar loaded about one tick before the page crashed. I kept trying to delete it through the launch and it wasn’t working so I tried to delete the files in my DCCache once again, still nothing.
Since the CC pieces that wouldn't go away were houses that I wanted to keep I just took those repeat houses out of my cc Magic so I wouldn’t have any copy’s and started downloading the cc I wanted back again. So far I’d only downloaded some community lots, hairs colors, and some CAS pieces but they all went inside of cc Magic. Once I started downloading the worlds I put about 4 in my downloads folder and attempted to download them through my launcher. The bar and plumbob popped up but then crashed again. I was quite confused at this point so I tried repairing my game through origin. Still no luck, I tried adding back in the old DCCache files and tested to see if I could delete anything and I could but all the dcb files had to be in the DCCache folder before it would officially uninstall anything. Since my plan hadn’t worked I just completely uninstalled my game from my pc via origin since I keep detailed backups of all my files. I deleted my electronic arts folder in my program files and deleted my sims 3 files in my origin games folder. I completely wiped my PC if any sims 3 game. Then reinstalled, did my first test run and it worked great. So I fixed my setting and added my mods folder back in then tested the run again. It ran great and I kept checking my downloads tab to see if anything was popping up and everything was good. Btw I failed to mention that I keep back ups of all of my sims 3 directory files. I keep a copy of my documents > EA sims folder. I keep a copy of my Program Files(x86) > EA sims file and a copy of my Program Files(x86) > Origin games files. I make sure to back up after any heavy amounts of tinkering because of bad past experiences. So rather than use the old sims 3 folder I had just taken out of my now deleted, broke, game, I took the folder that I kept as a back up out of my other hard drive and still only moved specific things just incase certain files were broken that my “new” reinstalled game would produce as fresh. I only moved my Packages file out of my Mods folder and my overrides folder out of my mods older. I let the game generate its own new cc Magic cache files and resource.cfg file for my mods folder just in case. I ran, it was fine but when I came out although most of the houses that I had deleted were now gone, not all of them we’re. There is still one and my launcher and it will not allow me to install or uninstall anything. I tried going back into my now fresh DCCache folder and delete the file that is now obviously generating this cc in my launcher but it just re appeard. I don’t know if the lot is the broken cc (I think it might be) but even if it isn’t I’m going to remove it regardless, just in case. But now I’m at an impasse, I would have continued to try and fix it tonight. But I have class and work tomorrow and this was my only day off this week. So I had to get in bed but I really wanted to at least get this out there so it hopefully get some responses. Just to clarify this is not me wanting help with CC navigation since I know that is more tailored for places like mod the sims but I really just want to delete the cc from my launcher and figure out why I can’t install or uninstall anything through it. I figured a repair AND a complete uninstall and reinstall would fix the issue, since the sims does tend to correct any issues itself once reinstalled but my game didn’t and I’m a little worried that something may have gotten into my launcher coding or something of that sort. If anyone has any advice it would be much appreciated!
@Spellbound18 One thing to note is that the launcher won't read .dbc or .ebc files unless they're numbered in order, as in, there's a dcdb0 and a dcdb1, etc. So if you were trying to look at the content of dcdb19.dbc by itself and didn't renumber it, that's why the launcher wouldn't show the content.
Still, right now it seems like this is enough of a mess to justify rebuilding the entire user folder. There's no need to reinstall; just move the existing Sims 3 folder out of Documents > Electronic Arts and onto your desktop, and the game will spawn a new folder the next time it launches. This removes all mods and cc so you can test on a vanilla game.
If you still see installed content when working with a clean user folder, that suggests that OneDrive is syncing the contents of Documents and downloading anything it finds missing, for example the Sims 3 files you're trying to remove. If this is the case, stop here and let me know.
Otherwise, you can copy over one of your saves, and NRaas mods if you use them, but nothing else, and see whether any babies are still affected. I'd suggest aging up any current babies and having your sims produce a new one just to be thorough. If you have NRaas MasterController installed, you can use its Instant Baby command instead of sitting through a pregnancy. Let me know what you see.
Please leave CC Magic out of this, at least for now. While it can be a very useful tool in some circumstances, it can also obfuscate the process of removing bad cc.
