Game Freezing because of Father Winter (Aftermath Patch 1.69.57)

Product: The Sims 4
Platform:Mac
Which language are you playing the game in? English
How often does the bug occur? Every time (100%)
What is your current game version number? 1.68.156.1220
What expansions, game packs, and stuff packs do you have installed? Snowy Escape, Ecolifestyle, Discover University, Island Living, Get Famous, Seasons, Cats & Dogs, City Living, Get Together, Get to Work, Journey to Batuu, Realm of Magic, Strangerville, Jungle Adventures, Parenthood , Vampires, Dine Out, Spa Day, Outdoor Retreat, Knifty Knitting, Tiny Living, Moschino, My First Pet, Laundry Day, Toddler, Fitness, Bowling Night, Vintage Glamour, Backyard, Kids Room, Movie Hangout, Spooky, Cool Kitchen, Perfect Patio, Holiday & Grims Guitar
Steps: How can we find the bug ourselves? Just play the game.
What happens when the bug occurs? It happens on any screen, (CAS, gameplay, world maps), sometimes immediately and other times is takes ten minutes/ The screen will just freeze in the middle of play and the cursor changes to the spinning "loading" icon. When i right click on the icon in the menu bar, the pop up says "application not responding" and i have to force quit the application.
What do you expect to see? The game shouldn't freeze.
Have you installed any customization with the game, e.g. Custom Content or Mods? Not now. I've removed them.
Did this issue appear after a specific patch or change you made to your system? Yes
Please describe the patch or change you made. After the patch for Snowy Escape.

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Please ask if you need more info.

Product: The Sims 4
Platform:PC
Which language are you playing the game in? English
How often does the bug occur? Every time (100%)
What is your current game version number? 1.69.57.1020
What expansions, game packs, and stuff packs do you have installed? Dogs and cats and Seasons.
Steps: How can we find the bug ourselves? I'm not sure how this can be fixed.
What happens when the bug occurs? The whole world glitches and time stops. My sims just stand there blankly and I can't click on them but other graphics like fire and snow and blinking still work.
What do you expect to see? I'm hoping this can be resolved, it's my most played world and I have no idea why it is doing this.
Have you installed any customization with the game, e.g. Custom Content or Mods? Never used.
Did this issue appear after a specific patch or change you made to your system? Neutral/Not Sure 

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Hey! 

I have no idea if this is a common or easily fixed issue but I have several worlds which all run fine. Little to no glitching. I have no cc or mods but one of my worlds won't run correctly; in live mode it freezes after about 15 minutes of game time and they just stand there but the graphics of snow falling and fire still work and they still do an occasional head nod but they don't move and I cannot click on them. The game clock also stops and won't move. I have to hard reset my computer every time I try and play it. I've tried repairing the game about 6 times and nothing works. Help please!!!

How to fix affected Father Winter games

Depending on how badly your game is affected there might or might not be a solution. EA is still investigating a solution for this but we all know this won't be happening before XMas break.

Note: If you were lucky and only a few Father Winters have been generated, you can also just leave your save and let culling do it's stuff as you go along. So if you're game no longer freezes while playing, you can just leave them in. They are hidden so you will need a mod to delete them. If you want to clean up your save anyways, you can use Option D or E.

Option A: Backups

The best option is to load a backup if you have one. Even if you loose 2 weeks of ingame time, that's better than trying to fix your save. Even if you have one that's on Winterfest day and Father Winter has already spawned, you might get lucky with a backup if that doesn't have too many Father Winters yet.

• If you made your own backup before the SE patch or even just before Winterfest, use these. Copy the backup back to your saves folder and continue there.
• If you used save as at any point, check if any of the older saves are still usable. If so, use those
• Check on your automatic backups (you find those in your saves folder in documents. They are called Slot_yyyyyyyyy.save.verX (y being the number of your save that's broken, x being a number between 0-4 as the game keeps 5 older save points). Check on the size of the files. If they are remarkably smaller than the current one, then you're lucky. 
  
  You can find instructions on how to revert to that here: How do I restore a backup ?

Option B: Salvage your save

If you don't have a backup, this is the second best option and often the only one at this point. 

You will loose all inventory items and non-household relationships with this method so this might be devastating for legacy saves.

You do need to be able to load your save for this option. If it never gets past the loading screen, you can't use it. Most saves should be loadable to the map though. You don't need to load a family.

• Go into every lot that has a house you want to keep through build mode (don't load the family, go to build mode directly). From build mode, save the house to your library/gallery
  
• Go to the household manager and do the same for the Sims you want to keep.
  
• Start a new save and re-place all your houses and Sims.

Option C: Wait for EA (or a modder) to find a way to fix existing saves

EA is still looking into this to help you save your games, so hopefully they can come up with something. I wouldn't hold my breath for this to happen any time soon though (XMas break is coming up). Basically what you do is keep your save somewhere safe and start a new save to play in the meantime until there's a way to fix.

Option D: Delete Father Winters with MCCC

This option will only work under the following circumstances. Be also aware that it will take quite some time to delete Sims. Turn off all programs that use lots of RAM such as your browser before doing this. 

• You are on PC/Mac (sorry console players, I don't have a solution for you)
• Your save isn't too badly affected yet (meaning, the amount of RAM needed to delete the Sims doesn't exceed the RAM you have). I have 16 GB of RAM and was able to delete about 7000 Sims. On saves with more, the game crashed on me. It will also depend on how big your save normally is. Saves with large houses and lots of clutter will probably crash faster.
• You're not attached to your ghosts or other homeless Sims. MCCC currently only has an option to delete all homeless Sims, this will include all Sims in your household manager that don't live anywhere + all ghost as well as the Star Wars JTB characters (I don't know if those get recreated or not)
• You are not opposed to use mods. MCCC Is a script mod but you only need the base module and MC Cheats to fix it)

The method is described in my Blog here: Father Winter doesn’t appear at Winterfest/ Endless Generation of Father Winter under Mods that help with the issue.

Option E: Manually delete Father Winters

This is only really an option if you have say < 500 Father Winters. I deleted about 2000 manually yesterday and that took all afternoon.

To do do this, you will also need MCCC as the Sims are hidden. You need to unhide them first by clicking on the mailbox and then they should appear in your household manager. You can then delete them from there. Will write a separate blog post on this and link that later.

How do I find out how many Father Winters I have in my save ?

There's two methods but you'll need a mod for both: MCCC or Show/Search Sim Info Mod (google to find)

• With MCC: Follow instructions here to generate a log file: Who's Who? MCCC Population Logging. After creating the log file, open it with with any text editor and scroll all the way to the end of the file. That will give you an overview. The log file can be found in your mods folder where you put MCCC. The number Total Sims in Hidden Households will give you approx. the number of Father Winters.
  
• With SimsInfo: Start the game, load a household, click on a Sim and choose Show Sim Info > Search Sims. Put: Trait:FatherWinter in the search box and click OK. 
  
  This will list all Father Winters in your game and give you the total at the top
  
  

That sounded complicated. I don't feel up to it, can you help me ?

I decided that I will be offering helping clean up saves for those of you that can't do it themselves. This will be on a first come - first serve bases. I only have limited capacities so I can only do so many. I also cannot promise that I can save your game. If your save is > 100 MB in size, don't get your hopes up. 

I can only help in the following cases

• You are on PC or Mac
• I can only help if the game generated < 7000 Sims
• You are not using any cc in your game. Saves will be stripped of any cc or custom traits/custom .. in your game if I save them on my computer. I will need to load a house so the game will strip cc. If you don't care about that, I can help. If you do, I can't. I'm not putting cc/mods in my game for this.
• Be aware that I don't work for EA and I'm doing this on my own time. I'm not getting compensated for my time by anyone so I reserve the right to not help certain users (and no, I can't be bribed)

To send me your save, zip your saves folder and upload it to googledrive, onedrive or dropbox (please don't use mediafire) and PM me the link. Let me know that it's for cleaning up Father Winter saves. Please let me know if there's any homeless Sims/Ghosts you want to keep.

Product: The Sims 4
Platform:PC
Which language are you playing the game in? English
How often does the bug occur? Every time (100%)
What is your current game version number? The latest one
What expansions, game packs, and stuff packs do you have installed? Almost everything
Steps: How can we find the bug ourselves? The clock stop
What happens when the bug occurs? I walked back to my house and try to invite in my sims daughter then it froze and everything stop from there and I only started to play about 5 mins
What do you expect to see? I want the sims to walk and interact with other sims and walk normally
Have you installed any customization with the game, e.g. Custom Content or Mods? Never used.
Did this issue appear after a specific patch or change you made to your system? Yes
Please describe the patch or change you made. After the last update

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I only been inside the game for about 5mins and it crashed and my sims stood still and everything just stop and I tried to quit it but screen froze until I have to force quit it or shut down

@crinrict Yes I do! But I don’t see any Santa came to my house

I just tried to played my older save and it seems to work fine.. is there any where i can fix the current save ?

(merged post) - Atic

@crinrict thank you so much! i drop msg if i need help

sorry to bother you again! So, can I just delete the save that is crash and use the older, but will the crash happen again? 😓