Have you started to disable/uninstall packs?

My save is only few years old, but has a lots off my own made NPC/townies, all assigned to their roles by mods. I also have a very large mod folder. Also I have pretty large collection of cc hairs. Not all so low poly.

Only EP I do not have is for rent.  Missing several kits too. 

My computer is getting oldish too, at least by modern standards. 

Loading times are around a minute to main menu and about same to household. Sims are playable right after household loads.

I have considered disabling something tho, but that's more for doing certain challenges. 

I think my loading times have increased, but I blame my almost 9 year old computer.

I had set my game graphics lower at some point, but a couple of weeks ago I changed my lighting setting very high (I really missed having real shadows in game) and now my game is a bit more prone to crash, but it still runs quite well, so I have kept the settings like this.

My save is 6 years old. I have 156 sims in my households. No mods or cc. I'm missing a couple of EPs, GPs, SPs and many kits. I don't want to uninstall the packs I own, but I could try turning eco footprints off. I have also considered buying a new computer.

kukkahilla wrote:

I could try turning eco footprints off.

Oh yes I forgot this. I totally have eco effects off.

And for some time now, for obvious reasons I have played weather off.  But if raining indoors now gets fixed, I will turn it back on.. and that will cause some FPS drops for sure, maybe pretty much too, but has no effect on loading times and still I have no lag right after loading a household. 

If you do decide to 'bounce' some of your Maxis sims, Simmingal​, be sure to save them to your gallery library; that way, should you decide you want to add them back in for your game, they'll at least still have all their skills and stats, rather than you starting them from zero once more. 😉

Do you have Sims with large inventories or lots with a lot of clutter? Those things are known to bog down a game too. 

I try to clean those from time to time, MC Command Center have a setting for that which clears up inventories. A lot of townies might still have a lot of lumps of clay in their inventories since I played Eco Lifestyle (in case people don't know, there was some NAPs that spawned a crazy amount of lumps of clay in all sims inventories).

I don't have lots with lots of clutter anymore, I tried to keep the save relatively clean from having too many lots with clutter.

I've not disabled any packs yet. I own all EPs + some extras, so I probably got everythng that adds to game performance issues (which kits don't). My save is from 2014, and last time I counted I played 700+ sims actively. Before I got myself a decent gaming computer this January, it took about 5 minutes to start the game, and the same to enter a house. I have tons of CC, and starting a new save without the CC folder improved greatly on loading times and lag, but I suspect the biggest impact came from a fresh save not involving the memories/milestones etc/like for all my sims. It was like this in my TS3 too, the history/memory in my save killed my game. It never helped that new DLC added more simology and UI. I wish we could opt out simology from certain packs. My first to go would be milestones that I have totally no interst in, abnd that also clogs up the simology panel being rather massive.

In the old days I figured that a few things could reduce my lag. Those where deleting old saves that were no longer important, deleting library lots/sims, making sure there were not too much screenshots and recorded videos in those folders.

I learned to live with my lagging game, performance was not too bad while playing in the same hood and all surrounding stuff was already loaded, I noticed a bad effect once moving focus to a different hood or world.

After switching to a new computer I experience no lag on highest settings, but there exists no such thing as a paradise: The new computer has much smaller harddrive than the old one, so I already need to tidy up. I also realise that I might need to skip a few future packs. The fairy one made it easy on me, because I'm totally not into that theme, and it seems like a different game compared to my running TS4 universe. I made the dicission when I realised that I did not actually know that we got plant sims...  Anyway, spending this much time on my sims game, I figured it would be worth it investing in a better computer, 

Your save sounds similar to mine. The milestones might be something that I should consider if I should keep, I don't use them that much either. I noticed that my performance in my save was slightly better in the basegame worlds as well, i guess they are smaller and are not as demanding. 

Yeah the simology panel is starting to get cluttered now, and they will add luck with the new Enchanted by Nature pack which I assume will go into simology as well.