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BotchedParrot's avatar
2 years ago

Save bug (could be related to build item bug)

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? 1.98.158.1020
What expansions, game packs, and stuff packs do you have installed? Vampires, Snowy Escape, Romantic Garden, Outdoor Retreat, Holiday Celebration, Get Famous, Fashion Street, Eco Lifestyle, Desert Luxe, Cottage Living, Backyard Living, Cats and Dogs, City Living, Discover University, Get to Work, Get Together, Island Living, Seasons, Dine Out, Jungle Adventure, Spa Day, Cool Kitchen, Kids Room, Luxury Party, Perfect Patio, Spooky, Toddler Stuff, Vintage Glamour
Steps: How can we find the bug ourselves? While saving game using 'Save As' in live gameplay mode.
What happens when the bug occurs? Using the "Resume" button to attempt to load the save every time.
What do you expect to see? I expect normal gameplay without impeded progression and going backwards in time.
Have you installed any customization with the game, e.g. Custom Content or Mods? Yes
Did this issue appear after a specific patch or change you made to your system? Neutral/Not Sure 

This was gonna be a long story, but I'll try to keep this to the point.

I too am one of the countless players who encountered the build item bug* - but with a twist that I think that this is triggering an issue I'm very concerned with.

From my experiments and observations since before version 1.98.158.1020 was introduced when that build item bug occurred, some clues appeared to highlight another issue that's my main concern.

I have a save bug which puts my household to a state from the last time I loaded it. However, some of the newer stuff such as new births in a certain period of time, for example will retain these sims. Because of the time travel paradox created by this problem, they lose the information as to their relations with sims. And as such, their parents would still be pregnant with them while they still exist as being birthed by them in spite of the information loss. Basically, a good way to keep duplicating sims and unintentionally expand households.

Another clue that appeared for me was the first time that this phenomenon appeared during the death of an elderly sim. Due to unpreventable circumstances, the death occurred anyway, and in the process that it produces a headstone/urn, I initially couldn't find it on the lot (their home) they died upon. Instead, imagine my surprise to my discovery that this asset actually was transferred to my own household - and not only that, duplicated because of the fact this occurred between saves.

As an emergency measure and temporary solution because of the duplication and paradox, I made my sim create a servo (might as well have introduced a new sim, and either way, no difference) for purposes of upkeep and cleanup to cull the excess I was not prepared for. Because this servo becomes a member of my household (and I saved this at that time), the next time I loaded my game from that stage, I was still rubberbanded back into time and not only repeated this issue, but the servo disappeared because of the save state. That is also in spite of the fact they still appear in the preview shot of my save. The paradox would defeat the purpose of my attempts.

I unfortunately cannot load the original point in which this problem began as I was overwriting the original saves in my haste, which naturally culls the save that was the point of origin, but I'm afraid this is moot anyway because it may have occurred without my notice at any point anyway and would continue to do so. In effect, I would assume all saves from that point on are corrupt or at risk of corruption. Even new saves.

In fact, because I use mods, I have been careful of saving through the world edit screen as that's a known issue. However, as best as I can ascertain, it is persistent by my convention of saving through the live play screen and producing a similar result as if I used the world edit screen. Therefore, I am facing a catch-22 conundrum.

I have already tried a fresh install, as well as the method of refreshing my mod's installation because it is affected by this bug. Because the build item bug is persistent anyway, it does not appear to be affected by my mod especially with reports by people having the same build item bug without mods by my observation, and I am under the suspicion that the build item bug or something affecting it is therefore affecting my save bug. Or, perhaps, the save bug is the culprit. Either way, the save problem itself would go unnoticed largely without playing for a long session enough to notice the amount of progress and time partially lost by the save behavior and the loaded save's state. In fact, no error window pops up, as it would not produce a particular code, believe it or not.

I have managed a temporary solution for my mod (and yes, even with the updated version that was all I had, the issue is still there), but as it appears that even with a new save, the problem is inherent with the base game. Since the mod I use was reactive to this problem rather than being the cause after experimention, I am less likely to conclude the mod is causing the issue (especially if I'm taking into account of the reports of the build item bug appearing without mods).

So, again, I have already tried a fresh install, so I would presume it is in effect and still persistent in version 1.98.158.1020 as it appeared since the previous version. Either it was not fixed, or a change in that time previous that was used caused the bug to appear. My save has since been corrupt enough to make me stop playing it, and I do not have any means to restore what it should have been. There was a lot of work put into it (about 3 years running, thousands of sims and I don't mind that it's about a 2 hour load time for as long as it's just for fun), which to scale with limited means to "restore" what it should have been would be a daunting task for me if I ever elect to do so. However, since I would presume the problem would occur anyway, doing so would be just as moot in this state. If it would affect a new save as well anyway, this is game-breaking and therefore unplayable.

I don't know if my theory is correct, but alas the concurrence is too much of a coincidence to dismiss. I would expect that the save bug is a major factor of both the reason the build item issue exists, or at least something within the game that is casing both issues.

*One thing I want to highlight is that the build item bug does affect new saves, and actually does occur at the first instance of visiting a lot. In one example on a new save, this was apparent as it was triggered randomly when I had the sim I was playing return to their own house lot from visiting another lot. The house itself was either largely unchanged or I added a non-mod item to it and in both circumstances, errors for both would appear with states with mods running (build item bug + mod bug) or without mods running (build item bug alone). This was also on a fresh install of the game and fresh install of the affected mods. Nothing else. Therefore it leads me to conclude there is a residual issue with the main game itself by process of elimination.

EDIT: Also, to be clear I do not use OneDrive. Everything is internal. Not on an external drive. I know how saves can be renamed and all that (a point which I only started using that method to test saves and organize to mitigate confusion - only after the fact this problem was occurring). I just know the game itself is persistent with this behavior with new/copies of the saves with the offending problem to tell me the game has an issue with saving progress properly. There is nothing else I can think of and certainly have not edited anything else prior to the problem itself - and especially unable to do so with the base game itself manually since I don't code, mod, reverse engineer, or produce games, let alone possess the skillset to even help myself in this manner. I'm stuck with a broken game for now.

8 Replies

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  • EA_Cade's avatar
    EA_Cade
    Icon for Community Manager rankCommunity Manager
    2 years ago
    Hi @BotchedParrot,

    A fresh install is not the same as a clean game state.

    You're seeing this with no mods or CC enabled, and after removing the Sims 4 folder as described?
  • @EA_Cade

    I'm really not sure what you mean by saying "A fresh install is not a clean game state". I already tried that method. It makes a fresh install with factory settings. It was not retaining the original files which were kept in the original folder, having been renamed as instructed.

    As I said in the report above, your question was already answered. I performed all combinations with and without mods and the errors are present.

  • EA_Solaire's avatar
    EA_Solaire
    Icon for Community Manager rankCommunity Manager
    2 years ago

    @BotchedParrot 

    In your original report, you mention fresh installing the game and updating your mods- we need to ensure this is not a mod-related issue, so we need to be sure that you have done a factory reset of your game and then fully tested this issue prior to adding any of your mods/CC back in. 

    Is this what you have tried, or did you fresh install, update your mods/CC and then test the game after the mods were added back in?

  • @EA_SolaireI confirmed it isn't mod related, and more particularly, the reaction with the mod I get when that is installed at any time specifically was with concern to game data issues it reads - both of which ends up affected in the original save and newly unmodded saves.

    Without mods, the issues are still present. No part of the original save loaded in the state I expected when I had saved it, which is the same as if I were just using the original installation of the game. For new saves, I would have the same bugs with and without mods.

    Again, I have tried every combination with and without mods and still seeing primarily the build item bug and quirkiness with my saves. I did not do just one pattern. I made several experiments over several combinations with and without mods, producing the same results.

  • BotchedParrot's avatar
    BotchedParrot
    2 years ago

    I just now had a new thing where I had saves that ended up being named "Scratch" even after I had originally named it. 😕

    Which got me curious about what would happen if I just rename the save. Even without loading it, if I just rename it from anywhere in the game, I realized the game generates it as a new save as if I just simply loaded and used Save As. Consequently, the original save with the original name is kept, but bumped down as a recovery save, rather than just renaming the same file in the same slot.

    But a rather more bizarre circumstance was going on with that.

    At one point a copy of the original save I was using was roughly 122 MB in size. However, when renaming it so it does what is described above, the "new" save is now a whopping 221MB-ish!

    I have archived the saves I had when I had this problem to compare, which a majority of my saves now elsewhere and not affected by the game could be looked at. Including my own save, it was typical for saves to be at +200MB, even for the backups in the same slot. I'm not sure what changed now.

    Despite what should essentially be duplicates of the same save with the only difference ideally being in name, it makes no sense for it to produce this much of a discrepancy of save size.

    All in all, as far as I can tell, basically the game is giving me the groundhog day effect every time I load my saves, and it appears it's because it was saving my saves that way. It's not a noticeable effect unless you know where to look. Again, newly-created, vanilla saves being loaded with mods running after the fact would produce one of the particular mods I'm fortunate to have telling me there is a problem with the save data. So I guarantee it was not infested by mods. I don't have any mods that have any special save features. As far as I'm concerned, I'm using the game's own UI, and the game is not properly saving my saves.

    With that in mind, this appears to be the main source of the build item bug from my perspective.

  • BotchedParrot's avatar
    BotchedParrot
    2 years ago

    Update:

    Given the game was updated at this time that repaired the build item problem, my issue still persists in spite of it. Someone suggested to me that one of my mods, MCCC, should have it's cfg files deleted so it refreshes the settings as it helped them before, given it seems to be a clock issue (initially this made sense to me, as I deliberate turn off aging and slow down time for a more realistic gameplay). I tried this, but it was still not successful. Yes, before you ask, all related mods were updated through this whole time (I would get warnings screaming at me if I don't, so this is as current as it gets). Whatever caused the issue is still unfixed in this state as it were since the beginning of this issue.

    Basically, again, my saves still somehow set me back in time (and in some respects, some objects overlap due to my progression), as well as having the original error I had from another mod along with it. I have a temporary solution for the mod error, but my main gripe is how I'm not loading the save in the state I saved it in, or that the saving process is broken in which I load it in that condition.

    This may be all too familiar to people, but there are no warning alerts through either saving or loading, so the only way I can tell there's an issue is how progression is mismatched from the last time I played it. All the relevant solutions addressing the problem that I know about, or all the things that should've patched it, appear to have no effect. This leaves me wondering what specifically would be causing the issue, whether it's a file conflict or bad code. All I can tell is that no matter how many times I would try to replace the install, refresh my mods and files, I'm still having a bad time. It would be nice to know specifically what part of this is disrupting the saving or loading process instead of wasting time trying to 50/50 and refresh everything when it doesn't work.

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