How does a large game save develop?

Does it come from managing the household with the collection?
Or from building houses in the worlds, as well as decoration existing houses?
Is this also dependent on the purchased packs and kits?

advice

discussion

puzzlezaddict
1 month ago
HakhaKZ1 Saves get larger the more sims you've played and the longer you've played them, and the more houses you've built and the more complicated those builds are. Saves can also get larger due to various game bugs. And the total number of sims, including unplayed ones, can drive up the size as well, so make sure the game is allowed to cull unplayed sims.

If you want smaller saves, create a different save for each household you want to play; don't just drop them all in the same save. And don't place houses or community lots you're not going to use. It's fine to have a few interesting builds, just not several worlds full of them.

You can also check your save file size every time you quit, and if it's getting larger, think about what changes you made in the last play session.

There's no magical formula to keeping saves small though, other than not playing the game much at all.

7 Replies

billblogs
Rising Veteran
1 month ago
HakhaKZ1 I develop a large save by bringing in new sims via the scenarios. It gives a bit of gameplay as well as developing the save. I have quite a few packs though. Newcrest is a good area to develop with your own builds and new families.
HakhaKZ1
Seasoned Ace
1 month ago
billblogs I want to avoid a big save.
For this reason, these questions.
puzzlezaddict
Hero+
1 month ago
HakhaKZ1 Saves get larger the more sims you've played and the longer you've played them, and the more houses you've built and the more complicated those builds are. Saves can also get larger due to various game bugs. And the total number of sims, including unplayed ones, can drive up the size as well, so make sure the game is allowed to cull unplayed sims.

If you want smaller saves, create a different save for each household you want to play; don't just drop them all in the same save. And don't place houses or community lots you're not going to use. It's fine to have a few interesting builds, just not several worlds full of them.

You can also check your save file size every time you quit, and if it's getting larger, think about what changes you made in the last play session.

There's no magical formula to keeping saves small though, other than not playing the game much at all.
HakhaKZ1
Seasoned Ace
1 month ago
puzzlezaddict Thank you very much for your response and tip.
SanniSilli
Seasoned Ace
1 month ago
I think almost everything in your savefile will make it larger. How many worlds (=packs) you have, how many lots & how detailed the lots are. If you have big buildings and lots of furniture it makes it bigger. How many units of residental rentals. How many Sims the savefile has (your own + townies). Also things like clubs, relationships between Sims, pics & paintings by refrence you have. I think also mods/CC and screenshots may have an effect.
LeissaMyst
Seasoned Veteran
1 month ago
I mean, I do everything puzzleadict says "Do Not Do" and my save files are....rather optimal lol. You should've been there for SIms 3 with all packs by this point, Isla De Perido was a nightmare for saves. Speaking of HDD Space, you should also make sure to manually purge all those fashion photographer and interior decorator photos from the library...why those (often repeated) photos are even stored is beyond me. It'd seem like there would be a better option to just take them for those specific objectives and not store them to the HDD unless you absolutely wanted to; instead of having to go through your screenshot manager and delete everything every so often. Although doing this will cause any inworld photos using that image to turn black (nothing they can do about this one, you deleted the image it was referencing. Still wish there was a way to tell which photos were inworld references and which had been discarded/sold in the screenshot manager as I often take several repeats of the same shot, so it can be difficult to tell which photo coincidences with which image.)
puzzlezaddict
Hero+
1 month ago
LeissaMyst As always, it's a matter of degree. Do you place a custom house on every lot in the world or just a few? Do you play all the resident sims or just a few or one extended family? You can actually see the file sizes of the unzipped save (in scratch) increase when you add more detail to your save. This is obviously unavoidable if you want to play at all, but some is better than a lot.

The point about the photos is a good one though. As for getting rid of the right ones, you could do it in the moment, or you could progressively remove files testing with a backup copy of the save to see what effect it has. As long as you don't permanently delete anything, you should be fine.

S4Studio also has tools to view different types of Sims 4 files. I've barely used it myself, but maybe you'll find a way to view the images by poking around a bit.

By the way, the world of Isla Paradiso didn't do anything at all to bloat Sims 3 saves. Its issues were in its construction and could be fixed or removed with some extra effort. What DID bloat saves was travel—all those extra .nhd files, one per world—as well as having memories enabled.