Please use this thread going forward: Save Game Corruption (Disappearing Lots/Error 800 or 801) | EA Forums - 5037272
I think, the point was that you can have the bug without For Rent; For Rent just makes it much more likely for it to occur, but it’s not the cause of the issue. The cause is that the game cannot handle too many assets/lots/builds/objects in one save. At least this is what I got from sharing and reading experiences in this thread
Absolutely, as I've stated from my experiences before. The issue of corruption started for me before For Rent because I had used the Copy Worlds mod by Zerbu. I reencountered this issue because of For Rent since adding any rentable residential buildings added to the amount of lots that would initiate the corruption. A few days ago I was finally able to have lovestruck ep removed from my account as having it installed at all caused corruption.
Im very worried that as the exclamation marks no longer appear over lots there are many people who are now unaware that their worlds/saves are now corrupted.
If the DEVs want us to have unlimited playable Sims, then the DEVs must also open up the memory system for lots too. The real issue here is memory. Seems like when you build or go in and mess around with your owned lots or build a new lot, it somehow messes with the coding where it starts deleting some of the old lots or makes them corrupted forever. I believe the DEVs were working on the new coding for this but somehow, it messes up the game. Therefore, they left it alone. I believe if somehow they fix this problem of disappearing, corrupted, missing, infinite loading lots, you would basically have to start a new game. With so many people that have been playing this game for years and invested so much time and money, the DEVs doesn't want to disappoint the players. I also believe the DEVs knew this for awhile now. I dare anyone from EA to go on here and correct my statement and have a solution for everyone. I mean, I have all the DLC's made for this game and love it but it's bad that it's constantly broken.
24 years playing with The Sims since the start. 30+ years in the software industry. Over $700 invested in just Sims 4 alone and countless hours trying to fix broken lots, saves, and more. EA is a terrible company run by a greedy and short-sighted c-suite/board and we've all known that since they purchased Maxis.
I waited for almost a year to finally purchase For Rent as it seems so aligned with the way I'd like to build properties and households. 1 week after installing this broken and buggy DLC, it's broken lot after lot after saves in all the worlds I tried to build/run a rentable unit no matter if I played with mods/cc or not and kept to just 6 rental units. Sure I've had issues for the last couple of years with some lots, but never anything like this.
If we collectively could charge back to EA all of the beta-testing time we've spent trying to fix this mash-up of ancient code driven by greedy management, they'd be bankrupt already!
I've been with the Sims and in tech long enough to know how to try and fix the save file corruptions and use every method EA and these forums provide in an attempt to make the game run smoothly. Never have I been closer to quitting entirely than in the last 3+ months!
This file/save/world/lot corruption is worse IMHO than any other screw-up foisted on the Sim community and the the executives are just pouring more fuel on the Sims 4 funeral pyre with rushed-out new DLCs instead of fixing what they KNOW is broken. This same greed has almost bankrupted Sonos and many other tech firms run only by the quarterly revenue goals and not by taking care of the very customers who make their careers/wealth possible. Such fools they are and make many of us feel like fools by continuing to feed the beast.
If it wasn't for the amazing Sims community that support this product far better than EA, we'd have all probably given up many moons ago.
I've submitted save files a number of times but I really don't think it helps. They know they broke this rickety old code, but they won't stop till we do.
Best to all and fingers crossed I'm wrong.
Would you or someone else who knows be so kind to summon up the signs of a potential corruption before it's too late?
@olga_k2 wrote:
Now only the most experienced players can notice the problem, before it's too late to roll back the save.
I did not experience this terrible corruption yet because I am extremely careful since the Release of For Rent. I must admit that I got very paranoid about lot corruption this year. It causes so much anxiety for me to the extend that it is not healthy anymore.
I would be thankful if someone could - in a few words - write down the warning signs of a coming game corruption, so I and others can notize it early enought to roll a save back before the big corruption breaks out.
Thank you.
@MissLjupka wrote:Would you or someone else who knows be so kind to summon up the signs of a potential corruption before it's too late?
@olga_k2 wrote:
Now only the most experienced players can notice the problem, before it's too late to roll back the save.
I did not experience this terrible corruption yet because I am extremely careful since the Release of For Rent. I must admit that I got very paranoid about lot corruption this year. It causes so much anxiety for me to the extend that it is not healthy anymore.
I would be thankful if someone could - in a few words - write down the warning signs of a coming game corruption, so I and others can notize it early enought to roll a save back before the big corruption breaks out.
Thank you.
What is the size of your current save file? For me, 130,000 KB is when the corruption starts. That is Rent DLC off or on. I can basically play the game normally if the save file is 120K to around 125K KB. I hear some people can play up to 140,000 KB before corruption starts.
Once I notice that my save file has reach 130K, I have to start deleting some lots. First is the Rental Residential as those lots take the most memory, then I start with the big lots like 40X40 and up.
For some reason, on the new Life and Death DLC, I started playing the quests and Reaper Career, the memory started to sky rocket up and starting to corrupt my lots in Willow Creek and New Crest. That's when I reload and start deleting lots. It really sucks but that's the only way I can play the game.
@MissLjupka wrote:For myself and some friends who have also been struggling with this issues, it started when we noticed:Would you or someone else who knows be so kind to summon up the signs of a potential corruption before it's too late?
@olga_k2 wrote:
Now only the most experienced players can notice the problem, before it's too late to roll back the save.
I did not experience this terrible corruption yet because I am extremely careful since the Release of For Rent. I must admit that I got very paranoid about lot corruption this year. It causes so much anxiety for me to the extend that it is not healthy anymore.
I would be thankful if someone could - in a few words - write down the warning signs of a coming game corruption, so I and others can notize it early enought to roll a save back before the big corruption breaks out.
Thank you.
1. Long established lots in Willow Creek had disappeared after the installation of 4Rent.
2. When Res Rental units were placed there, they initially ran well (5 unit and a 6 unit build, no cheats). But when revisiting them, only one floor would show as accessible.
3. The same rentals would then devolve over just a few days into UN-playable (would not load, Error 800, and or/infinite loading screen).
4. Soon that spread to ALL units no matter which designation in Willow Creek. So we tried to build in Oasis Springs (2 of the original Worlds shipped with the base game). Same FAIL, now O.S. is unplayable.
5. Now both Willow Creek and Oasis Springs show orange warning triangles over many previously perfect properties whether they are Res, Generic, Bar, etc.
6. One 6-unit rental in Tomarang will only show 2 of 4 floors so you can only load 2 households.
This all started to occur as soon as we installed and built our 1st rental and progressed day by day until the entire game file(s) are corrupt! We lost over 2 weeks of development! (for some it's months of loss). Others on here have posted that they had corruption issues starting 2-3 DLCs prior pointing to issue with save file sizes +++
What we collectively did for now:
1. Located a SAVE from the day or week before 4R was installed and loaded that game (sad in the realization of all that we had made was destroyed).
2. Carefully deleted any lots/households that we were not playing or lost interest in to lower the save file size.
3. Deleted any rarely used CC down to just a few build and create a sim items.
4. Converted the 8 individual res rentals units we painstakingly designed/built into just residential so at least they could be played with individual households. Until and IF EA fixes this malignant bug.
5. The game seems stable now, but it's only been 48 hrs.
6. We will NOT download any Rental units from the Public Gallery - some of those are already cheated and may contribute to the spreading corruption issue.
What didn't work:
1. Repairs (all 22 of them),
2. Removal of broken rental lots/households (can't even get to the property b/c of the bug)! + Removal of all cache files.
3. Reboots, Re-installs, Reaching out to EA directly - all a huge waste of time.
4. Playing without CC, Cheats, or Mods. NO DIFFERENCE PERIOD testing over 40 lots/world/saves.
5. De-listing For Rent DLC in the game properties to keep it from loading. (this may help some but also throw up a number of errors as well).
In some sense we had it better than many who have tipped over the Sims Codebase trigger for lot/world/save spreading corruption super-bug! We only lost 2 weeks and many hours of careful design, build, families etc, many have lost hours/days/months of work/play.
My System: Pro build Origin Gaming PC - Win 11 + 12th Gen Intel + 32gb RAM + RTX 3090 graphics card + 2TB SSD main drive + 1gb ISP service + DX12 + Fullscreen.
As so many helpers and heroes on here state over and over - BACK-UP, SAVE, RECORD WHAT BREAKS. We now hit SAVE with any major change in the building or household. We also use the SAVE AS menu when making an big changes in a world or event so we can name those and easily find them later.
I hope it never happens to anyone else, but it is and Game Ender!
Thank you, that's right. but hard to call it a good experience when you can't use expansion packs and rebuild houses, experiencing a bunch of restrictions and constantly checking if the save is broken. It's stressful. Plus, at a certain point you get stuck in a time loop and can't make any changes to the save anymore.
Hero Crin and EA community staff-
Please explain WHY THIS THREAD has been marked SOLVED???
This makes no sense as it has NOT been solved and is still an active (and yes frustrating) issue for many players/customers.
We have TRIED all of the solutions offered, it's NOT WORKING. Save, Lot, World corruption is still happening at unprecedented rates since the last 3-4 DLCs were introduced.
@kassey22000 wrote:Hero Crin and EA community staff-
Please explain WHY THIS THREAD has been marked SOLVED???
This makes no sense as it has NOT been solved and is still an active (and yes frustrating) issue for many players/customers.
We have TRIED all of the solutions offered, it's NOT WORKING. Save, Lot, World corruption is still happening at unprecedented rates since the last 3-4 DLCs were introduced.
Definitely not solved. It's like the person or team that was working on this part of the game got canned/fired and put a password on the software where the new troubleshooting team can't go in a fix the problem. LOL 👿
To whomever re-opened this thread, Thank You! Maybe more frustrated simmers can upload their broken/corrupted save files and just maybe the QA staff at EA might spend a little productive time trying to fix this serious set of killer bugs.
One can hope.
Yes, this bug is still unresolved.
I first encountered this issue about a year ago while converting existing buildings into Rental Residential with "For Rent" pack. This forced me to abandon a save I had played for several years. After this, I didn't play The Sims for nearly a year. A few months ago, I started a new save, demolishing all buildings in all worlds and evicting every Sim, rebuilding the worlds from scratch. (I own all world expansion packs.)
I was gradually filling all towns with buildings, including Rental Residential lots, except for Willow Creek and Newcrest. When I reached Tomarang, the infamous orange exclamation mark appeared in Willow Creek. Since I haven’t done any gameplay other than constructing buildings in this save, it’s clear to me that this bug arises due to the lot count limit imposed by the game. This limit seems to be exceeded more quickly the more worlds and Rental Residential lots a player has, which may explain why users without all expansion packs don’t encounter this issue as often.
I find this incredibly frustrating, as I enjoy the rental lot feature. Despite spending months rebuilding a new world from scratch, I’m now facing the same bug again. It’s baffling that abandoning the rental lot feature is the only way to avoid exceeding the lot limit. How can the developers continue releasing new expansion packs without addressing such a critical issue?
@olga_k2 wrote:
@chyeun27I was so desperate and tired of waiting and wanted to move to a new save. I thought maybe the problem really was in my old save. If the new one is also damaged by adding lots, then there is no point in playing this game anymore.
Yes and this will continue to happen to many more loyal Simmers. It’s almost as if someone/group within EA has a Death-Wish against The Sims (hmm maybe the last DLC is the clue 😉).
As more and more folks abandon this once great game, there will be less and less revenue, and eventually the game will be delisted and dropped. Now that we know Porject Rene/Sims 5 has been shelved, I see a bleak future for this franchise 😔 EA has shot itself in the foot so many times already.
There is so much trust lost already, I don’t think I or my friends (or many others) will ever come back to any future EA attempts to resurrect this franchise.
EA fix this malignant bug or at least have the temerity to admit you can’t and then at least we can make a rational decision whether or not to continue to risk hours/days/months of play.
I wonder if there is anyone at EA who reads these, who has enough guts to slip the last 4 pages of this long thread up to someone on the leadership team.
Unacceptable and poor customer service. EA should be ashamed of themselves. This is getting do ridiculous.
@karoschmitz A patch a couple of months back eliminated the exclamation marks without eliminating the problem, so you can no longer use looking for exclamations as a way of checking whether you have the bug or not, sadly. I have been periodically loading into particular lots in Willow Creek and Newcrest that tend to break first for me, just to check whether the surrounding lots look like defaults or like the stuff I've placed. That's about the only way to check for this now, I'm afraid.
I am so angry about removing the visual information that something is wrong. Now we just don't know if something is broken and I have better things in life than checking every world in the game before saving. I don't even know how I would spot it now. I just stopped playing.
Amazing how they are ignoring this thread yet are aware about this issue to the point they remove visual signs of the issue and that's it. If you don't see the problem, there is no problem, right?
Because EA/Maxis is actively IGNORING this thread and the others around corrupted saves/lots/games, my advice to friends and family who also used to love The Sims is: STOP all purchases of ANY DLC! The game code appears to be collapsing under its own weight. Save what your can and back up those saves to another location/drive/storage etc. Yes there will be some tempting new offers as EA continues to milk this franchise to death. However, adding new content/packs/etc. appears to break the game badly especially if you already have a lot of other DLCs installed.
I believe the reason they aren't responding here or on social media or Reddit, etc. is because they KNOW it's the end of the line and don't want to admit it publicly till they squeeze the last dime out of us.
See also:
https://www.reddit.com/r/thesims/comments/1cljuns/i_think_for_rent_broke_my_savefile/
The question is will there be a solution from EA? I have several save breaking bugs in my game now to the point where I can't help myself with workarounds. I even used Sims 4 Studio to clean up the save game but this led to other problems.
I would consider myself as tech-savvy and tried a lot to recover my save that I'm attached to since years. At this point there is nothing I can do and I guess many other Simmers face similar problems. It's really time for EA to find a solution for these ongoing save breaking bugs.
I've never been at a point where I can't play a game anymore due to so many problems.
Understandably enough I'm not able to purachse more content because I can't play the game due to all these problems.
Quick update on this...
This issue as reported by other simmers is not just related to 'For Rent'. Having residential rental properties exacerbates the issue but it is not the sole reason for why this bug happens. I've deleted all my residential rental properties and purchased all the latest packs and i was running the game okay for a long time. However this issue of houses disappearing, endless loading screens etc has re-appeared this week in my game since populating all the lots in Ravenwood from the new pack. As mentioned earlier in the thread, EA have removed the exclamation signs over the lots and thus made it worse by not even allowing us to identify the corrupted lots from world view! My summary is that the game doesn't like big legacy saves, or having lots of builds with lots of objects/clutter in 95% of your worlds.
My laptop is a pretty good spec (have upgraded RAM etc over the years) so i've got some heavy builds in my game from creaters like soulsistersims and don't have an issue with performance. However it doesn't matter, as the game definetly has some 'memory cap' on what it can process. The only way to fix this is by deleting builds in your worlds that aren't important to you and leaving the deleted lots as empty 'residential' with no households in it.
EA really are shameless...
@rachelwolfeThanks a lot for the hint!! When you are checking in Willow Creek and Newcrest, is there a pattern about which lots tend to break first? Are these especially big lots or just always the same lot locations? I wonder where I should load into to see if I have this issue yet, I randomly loaded into 1 per neighbourhood in Willow and Newcrest and all surrounding lots still look like the one I had placed. Is it mainly these 2 worlds where it's good to check regularly? And are you visiting them in live mode or build mode when you observe the surrounding lots to be wrong?
I can answer some of your questions. For me houses disappear when there are too many lots/sims in the worlds. There is some kind of threshold of lots and sims for when the game gets buggy and the lots disappear. I haven't found out when this happens exactly and I don't play with big lots.
My workaround with this issue is to not play with every pack and to delete lots in worlds I don't use. It's best to just focus on a few packs and worlds and then you should be save from this game corruption. The more packs and worlds you use, the faster your save will get corrupt. Hope this helps.
