@michelleealexis The alarm will definitely go off; the question is whether you'd see it. You might have to allow notifications; I'm not sure. But you could easily experiment, setting an alarm for a low number that you know your system will exceed quickly. If not, there's always Windowed Borderless Gaming, which works very well with TS3.
Or you could just figure out how hot your computer runs normally. Once you've set a baseline, you might realize you're fine switching to windowed mode once an hour to check and otherwise leaving it alone. The only way to find out is to run the tool and see what kind of temperatures you're getting.
The mods I use to keep my game running smoothly are all from NRaas, which has very high standards and a large user base to test before anything gets released. Here's a list to start with:
- ErrorTrap and Overwatch together clean up glitches and corrupt data before it has a chance to do more damage. Both run in the background and don't need any player intervention. This includes resets of stuck sims and flushing of stranded objects. ET will throw scripterrors when it corrects an issue, but they're usually routine cleanups. Keep the scripterrors (in your TS3 game folder in Documents) only if you're having issues with a save—the NRaas people can read them and interpret them for you.
- Also make sure to get the version of ET that's build for your type of install. I think you're using Origin, so get the Origin/1.69 version, not the disc or Steam version.
- MasterController doesn't do anything unless you tell it to; it's a menu of commands you can run. It's great for resets, whether of a sim, an object, a lot, or the entire town. (Most of us do a town reset every few sim-weeks, maybe sooner if the game starts to lag.)
- Traveler replaces EA's (broken) version of the travel transition with its own, no player intervention needed. It also allows your sims to vacation in any world you have installed, or to switch hometowns without losing the data from the previous world, plus a few other functions you can play with if you feel like it.
- I mentioned Register as controlling service and role sims, including stray animals. You can set the numbers for any category. It also fixes things in the background, whether you play with the settings or not.
- Traffic manages the spawning of vehicles, both regular cars and things like the ice cream truck. You can choose to disallow or limit the numbers as you like. One cause of lag is the incessant spawning of performance limos, sometimes in the hundreds a day. Overwatch will clean these up on its nightly run, but sometimes that's not enough, and Traffic prevents them from appearing in the first place.
- You may want GoHere to disable boat routing in worlds that don't allow for it. I haven't used it, but I don't have IP installed. There are also other functions that you may like; read the documentation page for more details.
- Hybrid corrects a few issues with supernaturals, and also allows a sim to have two or more occult states at once.
There are plenty more mods at NRaas, but it's usually better to figure out what function you want in-game, then find the mod to fit, rather than keep adding them to see what they do. Besides, this seems like a long enough list to start with. Once you're comfortable with these, and your game is running well, you can start expanding.
