Game will save but doesn't update the actual save file.

@Saeiyna 

Are you just saving over the previous save every time or are saving using the "Save As" option?  In your 1st pic I see just one save listed in the panel, but it looks like you cropped it so, I'm guess you do have other saves.  

I've had something similar to what you describe before, several times actually.  Right portrait, wrong household name and the Resume option landed you on the wrong lot.  When that happens, it means something happened causing an error when you made the last save and may have corrupted it or caused it to abort the save process without giving you a visible error message, so the game couldn't/wouldn't load it and reverted to a previous version of the save.  Everything you did between the saves is simply gone as if you never made any changes before the last save.  Whenever that happens, it is a good idea to make a new save using "Save As" as soon as possible after you realize something happened before you play or attempt to save again so you can at least save what you have up to that point. You can then play on and see if it keeps happening and have something to fall back on if you need it.  I recommend that you do a game repair and delete the localthumbcache file before you start the game the next time you play.  At the least, delete the cache file as the portrait you see when you select the save to load is kept there and that will probably correct the portrait you see attached to the save in the Load panel so that at least will match the Household name.

Sometimes it will seem to self-correct, and you won't have any issues with saving or playing after a game restart and reload meaning it was a one-time thing that didn't damage the save.  But other times it won't, meaning that the save has corrupted which will only get worse if you continue playing the save.  One thing you should look for the next time you open the save is for any signs of triangle icons with an exclamation point in them on the lots. If you get an icon, which can be several different colors, each indicating some sort of issue, when you mouse over or select the lot as if you were going to open it, you might have more than a save issue as the icons are one of the indicators of corruption in most cases, Orange and Red being the worst.  My advice is that you look at every lot in every world in the save to see if you find one or more.  If you do find one, try to open the lot.  If the lot won't load, or if the does load and you find the lot empty with the sims who live there standing in front of it, that is an almost certain sign that you have a corrupt lot.  The sims living on that lot will mostly likely have been corrupted too. Tbh, at that point, you should try to save what you can to your Library and start a new save because it will only get worse, and you will lose everything.

Not what you wanted to hear, I know, and I admit it is worst case scenario.  But when you start to have save problems like you've described, the odds go up that it can happen.  The reason I ask about how you save is simply this.  If you routinely use Save As rather than just Save, you create a brand new save each time rather than overwrite the old one.  As each save can have up to 5 versions that you can use to recover, using Save As gives you more saves you can use to recover giving you more options to find an earlier version before the event that caused the corruption occurred.  Hopefully, you just had a one-time glitch, and everything will go back to normal but if it continues to happen, you should probably consider starting over in a new save with what you can salvage from the old one.  

Hope this helps.

This is suddenly happening to my game too. I had a save from August 29 that I opened on September 2, played for it for a little while, saved, exited, all seem normal (no errors), BUT when I went back in on September 3, I noticed that the icon for resuming the game was a different family than where I had left off the last time I played and saved, (it was the same from Aug 29), but I figured OK I’ll click anyway and it brought me to the map screen (not to the family in the resume icon), so I went to the family where I had left off on Sept 2 and the first thing I noticed was that one of the Sims in the household no longer had her job, which I distinctly remembered her working at on the previous days that I had played with this game.

Then I noticed that the things I had done the previous day were no longer saved (in fact, I now noticed Sim time had reverted to what it was on Aug 29), but strangely one of the items she had collected when I played on Sept 2 was still in her house (although no longer register in the collections window as having been collected—it was an axolotl from Lovestruck), and the fish she had caught doing the Sad Bear quest  were in the refrigerator. But she no longer had any fishing skill when she’d been level 2 or 3 before.

I did a “save as” changed the file name, tried to load the newly Saved As game, and it did the same thing with not saving any progress I made. Sim time reverted to what it had been Aug 29 ( although the save file time and date stamp keeps saying it’s today).

So then I did another test after using the recover option trying to recover the Sept 2 file . Went back to the family I was trying to play. Her job was missing again. Everything was erased back to the point of Aug 29, but the inventory in the refrigerator was from after Aug 29, and her job was gone again.

So this time all I did was give her her job back and then place a Christmas tree on the lot just as a test. I saved, exited, went back in and the same things happening again— it’s the wrong icon to resume the game, wrong last saved family showing. I go to the family I was trying to play, her job is gone again, the fish she caught are still in the refrigerator, AND Christmas tree I just added is there. That’s the only thing it saved from my previous session. All other changes erased back to what I had on Aug 29. Hmmmm.

I even tried playing the family on the resume game icon, but no changes would save for them either, even though the game acts like it’s saving okay. My husband thinks that it actually is having a save error but there’s no dialog box coming on the screen to tell me this (like we have with the saving error 0, etc).

I started a new game and all seems right with that game. If I go back in and try to resume the game it goes back to the family I was playing and all is well so far. 

So I think something is corrupted in my other saved gane, but I don’t know what corrupted it and that’s what’s got me worried. I don’t use any mods or CC. I’d only been playing this game file since Lovestruck came out, but I did have a lot of Sims added to it (64/150) from cupids corner, and all that, which is a lot more than I usually have in any saved game, but it’s not close to the limit. 

Just really puzzled at the moment. I did do the Repair game thing today when I first noticed the problem,  it it made no difference. I think the file is hosed. 😞

@Saeiyna @cchant86  Ok, when a bug like you both are describing behaves the way you say it is behaving by not only affecting the save you are playing but also any backup saves you test with, that's an indication that you might have somehow corrupted something outside the save. It could be the game files or another file within your user folder.  A repair or uninstall/reinstall of the game will fix issues with the game files.   If you tried a repair and that did nothing, the next step would normally be to do a full uninstall/reinstall. Even though a repair will usually replace the files it finds that don't match the original file specs, it sometimes doesn't work.  A second repair will sometimes fix it and sometimes won't.  Then to ensure every game file is correct, an uninstall/reinstall is the way to go.  But based on what you've said, I don't think that's your issue.

There is one other thing that can happen.  If you look at your user folder (The Sims 4), there are other files there that can become corrupted over time and cause weird things to happen with your game.  Neither a repair nor a uninstall/reinstall will fix those because they are in your user folder, rather than in the games actual program files.  There is another way to fix any problems with those files though.  That way is a user folder reset. 

To reset your user folder, all you need to do is rename your current user folder or move it to your desktop or another place outside of the game path.  Start the game and create a new game, go through with making and placing the mandatory sim on a lot, then save and quit.  That will create a new user folder with all new support files that reside in the user folder.

Open the folders containing your old and new and copy your saves folder in the old folder to the new one. If you have mods, copy the mods folder, repeat and rinse for the screenshots folder if you want to save any game pics and the tray folder if you want to keep everything you had in your library, the Custom Music and Recorded Videos if you have anything you want to save in those and finally the ConfigOveride folder if you use any overrides.  Once you have everything copied over from the old to the new, start the game again and test to see if you can save correctly again.  

Hopefully this will work to allow you to save again.  If it doesn't work though, the only other thing I know to recommend you to do is a full uninstall/reinstall via the EA App.

Hope this helps.

Something else I just noticed, the file size for the "corrupted" file (or the one that won't save) has ballooned up to 220,000k, whereas even my largest legacy save with multiple generations and many Sims is only 18,000k. Something really weird is going on with the bad save, and I'm still wondering if it's something to do with how Lovestruck downloads the Cupid's Corner Sims into the game, because that's the only thing I can think of that's different about what I've been doing in the "bad save" compared to other saves.

I'm going to keep playing around with the new save I made, avoiding Cupid's Corner, and see if the problem reappears. I also think I'll try going back into my Aug 29 save (the last time it worked before becoming corrupted), deleting all the Cupid's Corner Sims, and seeing if that changes file size and if it will let me save again normally. 

So I've been doing some playing around with the "bad" file but no good news so far. I deleted all the Cupid's Corner Sims and it only reduced the file size by like 200k. A miniscule amount. Then I deleted some lots I'd downloaded and the file went down to 119,000k but that's still quite large. 

I've been test playing with different families in the file, Sims I'd never touched before, and it seems like it's saving Build/Buy changes as long as they are things that don't go in a Sims' inventory (like cat wand and a child's bike didn't save probably because a Sim picked them up, but adding a cat dish and litter box to a house did save), but no Sims progress saves at all. I aged up a Sim, gave a bunch of Sims jobs, etc. and none of that saved. 

I noticed a couple people on the other EA Sims forums had this saving issue, too, so I commented there.

One of the threads is this:

I can't save my game anymore | EA Forums - 4963193

It was suggested I try the "Sims Info" mod to check how many total Sims are in the file. You can see my reply there but basically the "bad" file has 577 total, but a different save file for one of my legacies from July that works fine had 602 Sims (and that file is only 18,000k in size), so number of Sims doesn't seem to be the issue.

I have noticed in all my saving and save as-ing that the game is not renaming my files what I type in. It keeps naming the new copy the original file name and just tacking on the new date and time it was last saved. For example, I had a file called Lovestruck (Recovered) and did a Save As to change it to Lovestruck-Sept 6 and it just appears in the list as another Lovestruck (Recovered). In my Saves folder they're all getting new numbers every time I Save As, but in game they aren't displaying what I typed in for a new file name. So even that is weird. *sigh*

I'll post again if I learn anything else. 🙂

I have good news! Until today, my file had been completely hosed. It was 220,000K in size and nothing but random build/buy changes were saving. I fiddled with the file, tried using different versions of it, repaired my game twice (even did the thing where you remove the whole Sims folder and force the game to recreate it), and nothing helped, so I finally gave up last week and resigned myself to placing the Sims I'd saved in my gallery to a new file and starting over.

Well, after today's update, I noticed that the new file I'd been playing for about a week now had strangely DECREASED in size when I saved it just now. And that was after I'd added a couple new lots to the maps. Hmmmm.

On a whim, I loaded the "corrupted" file, let things run for a while (gave the Sims time to get to sleep), then saved again and the file size reduced from 220,000k down to 8000K AND when I loaded the game again, everything had saved! The Sims were in bed where I left them!

I have no idea what happened or why, or if this file is "all better now", but maybe I can play it long enough to finish the stories I was working on with it and then just move on to something else. But it seems like something in today's update fixed "something" because that is a huge change in file size when I did nothing but let the game run for a few minutes. I didn't delete anything from it. 

So, hopefully today's update with help a few others that have been having this problem with saving progress. ❤️