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. ❤️
