Sims & clock frozen, cannot click on anything

This has never happened to me before and I'm playing my 8th gen family, so I want to preserve the save file.

My sims were having a party and like half of my playing sims and the npc's just started standing still, wouldn't complete their tasks or even move. I could still click on them and even tried to reset them a few times with no avail. I could still control about half my family and they were going on as usual.

I think the issue seemed to fix itself after a while of trying. However, recently each time I go to play within about 5 minutes all the sims in my household freeze & stand still, but they still move slightly and sometimes the toddlers will keep talking. The clock is frozen and I cannot click on ANYTHING. I can't click on a different sim, I can't click on anything in the world and I can't even reset them with cheats. It stays on the sim I was last on and I can click on their inventory, relationships etc. But if I try click on a friend of theirs no options come up. And then if I try to save it or go to manage world it just freezes on the loading screen forever and I end up having to force quit.

I played another family for a while and went back to my original family and the issue seemed to have fixed itself. I played for maybe 30mins, but then it happened again!

I have scoured through my mods and used better exceptions to find any broken ones, I have also updated them all. I also tried clearing my cache and that seemed to do nothing either.

Please help, it's really annoying me and I don't want to loose anything or deleted all my mods.