[ARCHIVED] Game Freeze/ Extended Loading Times/ Save Game Bloating

Update

Yesterdays patch fixed the LE from happening which means no more Father Winters are generated in abundance. 

What does this mean ?

For unaffected games: You can now have Winterfest with Father Winter again but I would still recommend making a backup before the holiday occurs

For affected games: Depending on how badly your save is affected, it may or may not be saved. I'm still testing but so far I'm not having much luck with badly affected saves. Reverting to a backup is the best option still cause fixing saves can be time consuming. 

The patch notes say games should fix themselves over time .. I think this means culling will delete your extra father winters .. if you make it that far.

I'll do further testing. I personally don't need any saves at this point but QA is looking for them, so please send your badly affected ones to SimQARobo

Summary of the Issue

There's several issues going on in this thread. The main one being an endless generation of Father Winters. If you already had one in your save (has to be Clemens Frost), then you should be safe. Do backup before the Winterfest if you decided to follow through with it.

Since the game just creates and creates and creates, the game will start to lag and then freeze. It will use all your RAM (or at least a lot of it). You will have an insane number of Single Sim households in your hidden households (can only be made visible with MCCC).

Another reason for this seems to be routing issues concerning platforms. Sims try to get to a place in a (sunken?) platform and can't cause of MoveObject placement or other reasons and just keep trying and trying until the game freezes.

How do I know if I have the Father Winter Issue ?

Typical Symptoms are

• Insane RAM usage
• Save Game bloating (compared to the backups, your save is exponential bigger in size (this is only happening if you actually saved your game in this state)
  
• Loading times are getting insane. Depending on your computer, the save never loads at all
• The time freezes. If your Sim freeze but the time goes on, then you have a dead lock and not this issue.
• You can't click on anything. No menu comes up
• You had a Winterfest but Father Winter never showed up.
• You get a LastException: Exception while updating the sim filter service.. (TypeError: apply_permanent_appearance_modifiers() missing 1 required positional argument: 'additional_flags')

The RAM usage, save game bloat, LE and the Winterfest with no Father Winters are the strongest indications that this is your issues, If you use mods, you can also use MCCC to check the hidden households (you need MC Cheat. Click on Mailbox > MC Cheats > Sims/NPC Household Cheats > Unhide Hidden Households

This is what you should see (depending on the packs you own). You will also see ghost + pet strays appear here. If you have LOTS of male adult Sims as well, then you have the Father Winter Issue.

How do I know if I have the platform routing issue ?

Typical Symptoms are

• RAM usage is steady.
• Save game size is not majorly increasing.
• Loading times are normal.
• The time freezes. If your Sim freeze but the time goes on, then you have a dead lock and not this issue.
• You can't click on anything. No menu comes up
• It only happens in certain households. Others are working perfectly fine.
• If you replace the house with another, the save works fine.
• There are no LastExceptions

Sounds like I have the Father Winter Issue. What do I do ?

There's several things you can do.

1. Load a backup from before the issue if you have any: https://sims4.crinrict.com/eng/2014/09/save-games/#wiederherstellen (the size of the file tells you which one you should revert to)
2. Try the mod way described in my blog:  https://sims4.crinrict.com/eng/2020/11/father-winter-doesnt-appear-at-winterfest-endless-generation-of-father-winter/
3. Some folks have also had success with disabling seasons: https://sims4.crinrict.com/eng/2017/03/disable-single-packs/ (Seasons is EP05). I tested this method and all it does is stop the LastException from happening and hence the new creation of Father Winters. If you only have a few now, this can solve your issue but if you already have 4000-6000 father Winters like some of the saves I tested, then the freezing just came right back. I don't recommend this method as you'll loose everything Seasons on your save, even if you just temporarily disable it to get rid of the LE and then enable the pack again (you do need to save) but I'm putting it here for completion sake. 
4. If you don't have a backup, the best thing to do is, save all your Sims and houses to the gallery and place them in a fresh save. You'll loose all money + relationships outside the family, so that might be a huge issue for legacy saves.
5. Wait until EA fixes this and play another save in the meantime. Depending on how many Father Winters you already have, it's unclear if they can clean the save better then MCCC though.
6. Remove any Winterfests from your calendar or at least remove Father Winter as Tradition.

Looks like I have the platform issue, What do I do ?

Locate any (sunken) platforms in your save and see if anything in them was placed with MOO. Other reasons could be a narrow platform and something that causes the Sims to route there like a speaker on the wall but not enough space to dance.

Try deleting stuff and replacing until you find what's causing. 

It's often somewhere Sims want to go on their own but can't, not user directed.

Unfortunately you can't switch Sims once the game froze and if you have NPCs on the lot, it can be them. Sometimes you get lucky and see which Sim has a stuck interaction in their queue. Go look there.

There's also a dedicate thread for this here: [WORKAROUND] Routing Issues with Platform freeze the game

I'm still looking into this to verify the theory, so if you need help, you can send me your save and I'll take a look. Instructions in my signature.

I don't think I have either of those issue. What do I do ?

Bit unsure how to handle this currently cause there are a lot of issues going on. I think for now it's best to use the tech forum of your platform.to post instead of here. Do state that you don't think it's the Father Winter issue but something else. Make your own thread and provide your specs. Describe what symptoms you are seeing and if you can isolate it to a certain save game, provide that as well.

Credits to kusurusu