Strange issues trying to recover corrupted sims 3 save

@Agalaro  What you've described is typical when a save is corrupt: the loading process bounces and doesn't show the sims or most of the household data.  If you can, try switching to a different household in Edit Town.  That may or may not help, but at this point, there aren't a lot of options.

If you're willing to try a few mods, I'd suggest adding NRaas ErrorTrap, Overwatch, and MasterController.  You can find descriptions here:

https://answers.ea.com/t5/Technical-Issues-PC/Sims-3-Common-Game-Fixing-Mods-Hero-Approved/m-p/9838855#M244208

ET and OW clean up bad data on their own, with no need for player input.  MC doesn't do anything at all unless you use it to issue a command, and in this case, the town reset is the command you'd want.  The problem is that sometimes a save can be too corrupt for these mods to fix it.  But if switching active households doesn't help, and you don't have another backup save, there aren't any good options left aside from hoping these mods can repair most of the damage.

If you can load the save with these mods in place, let the game clock run for a few sim-minutes, then click on City Hall or an in-game computer and select NRaas > MasterController > Town Options > Reset Everything.  When it's done, which may take a few minutes, it'll let you know.  Let the game clock run for a few more sim-minutes, then "save as" to rename the save (so the current backup remains intact should you need it later), quit, reload, and see whether the save is playable again.

While troubleshooting, be sure to delete the five cache files in your Sims 3 user folder, in Documents > Electronic Arts, every time you quit the game.  These files should be deleted regularly anyway as well.  For reference, they are:

• CASPartCache.package
• compositorCache.package
• scriptCache.package
• simCompositorCache.package
• socialCache.package

Thank you very much for the advice, I ended up just starting over since I had saved the particular sim to the bin and I wasn’t actually that far into her story and I attempted to mitigate further problems by saving as with a new name every once in a while. Even after doing that, yesterday my most recent save became corrupted and I had to load one from 7 hours before, obviously losing lots of progress. To help mitigate this issue MORE I went so far as to set an alarm once an hour to save as a new file so that if it happened again I wouldn’t lose so much progress. Now, 5 of those saves are corrupted and the one that just loaded for me loaded with a missing object warning and a completely unpopulated town. I’m at a total loss on what to do now. There must be something about the save causing it to corrupt. My sim is a genie, an acrobat, lives in sunset valley in the pre-fabulous lot. Are any of those things known to cause excessive glitches?

I will try those mods if deleting the caches doesn’t work but since so many saves are becoming corrupt I think this particular sim is just cursed ☹️

@Agalaro  If you own Store content, that content disappearing can cause the missing objects warning.  Another possibility is that some of your expansion or stuff packs have disappeared, either temporarily or permanently.  Losing an SP could result in missing objects but is otherwise fine; losing an EP can corrupt a save.  Even if you didn't deliberately use any of the pack's content, related data gets attached to the sim, and then it's left stranded when the expansion disappears.

Even a created sim can corrupt a new save if that sim has data attached from an expansion that is no longer present.  This is more hit or miss—it depends on what data is gone, for example an outfit can be cleanly removed while a lifetime wish may not be.

I don't know for sure that this is happening to you, and it's not always easy to spot if the packs involved aren't ones you use heavily.  But you can check each play session by loading Buy mode and trying to sort by pack.  Click the snowflake icon on the right of the user interface, and you'll see an icon for each installed pack.  If one of your packs isn't listed, it hasn't loaded.

If doing this every time you load the game is too annoying, or you think you'll forget, you can place one item from each pack you own in your sim's house.  These can be small clutter items and hidden away under the foundation or in the attic, all lined up in a row.  If and when an EP or SP doesn't load, its item will disappear, triggering the missing objects warning, and you could simply view your little collection to see what's gone, and of course quit without saving and reactivate the pack.

I would still highly recommend adding some mods to help protect your saves.  They won't do a thing for disappearing content, but ErrorTrap and Overwatch do a great job of cleaning up junk data before it can corrupt a save.