Anecdotal lag reduction
So, most of my saves aren't particularly laggy, but my beloved Super Sim save was APPALLING. One of my Sims peed himself because he was too laggy to use the toilet. No one would go to bed for hours because they were too laggy. The pets kept trying to run away because no one would interact with them because they were too busy standing still and peeing themselves.
Seriously: https://youtu.be/U2-173q1fU8 You can hear me rage-clicking trying to change the active Sim. I told one to go to bed around 0:15 and he finally obeyed at 0:54.
I adore this save, as I've spent a ludicrous number of hours finishing every aspiration with this Sim, maxing every skill, raising her children and marrying them off and continuing to play them from time to time for story progression (I could mark them unplayed and let MCCC do it, but what if I don't agree with what MCCC does? lol). The kids all have beautiful gallery homes and millions of Simoleons because they all get death flowers, money fruit, and Simoleons when they get married. The main household is Super and her mom, both Immortal witches (took potion of immortality and I used a mod to make it, you know, work and also stop aging) a vampire, and an immortal merman. I've been playing long enough that MCCC has produced great-grandchildren (or more) for all the old townies (on long lifespan).
I've been gradually trying to clean out their inventories on the advice of Sim gurus in previous livestreams, because Super's mom is a gardener witch who's into herbalism and had the associated inventory bloat, Super has done every aspiration and is working her way through every career (and their kids and the Servo Super built also worked and earned career rewards), and also we're trying to complete every collection. It became appalling after we did the Cottage Living aspirations, where we temporarily moved out of 1 Torendi Tower (leaving our adult daughter and Servo there to hold down the fort) and moved to Henford-on-Bagley to explore farming. We returned home and immediately implemented Simple Living and built a greenhouse on the roof to grow veggies, and also brought our bird friends, bunny house, and chickens (the penthouse terrace is pretty weird, but that's part of its charm! The roof is also covered with solar panels and windmills and has a Scientist's satellite dish and a big rocket on it). I'd noticed that the lag was awful at the house but if they went to a community lot it was fine. I was considering moving, which made me sad because I love their penthouse.
Things that seemed to help, in order of least to most useful:
- Redecorating and switching out all the weird mismatched furniture and wallpaper accumulated over generations. .Deleting a lot of clutter.
- Running unused career rewards through the Recycler.
- Putting stuff from their inventories into ICYA crates organized by item type and selling duplicate items, and putting finished collections on a different lot. (The game almost crashed when I sold the 99+ money fruit.)
- Cleaning out the flower arranging table, which had uncountable (99+) death flowers in it, not to mention other flowers. (Super was a floral designer at one point and we harvested all flowers religiously for her arrangements while she was.)
- Turning OFF Simple Living
- CLEANING OUT THE FRIDGE.
And when I say "cleaning out the fridge," I mean that I got into the habit in Henford-on-Bagley of putting all veggies into the fridge so anyone in the household could use them, so we had almost $5000 worth of carrots. So many veggies were labeled 99+. I dragged each pile of veggies into the least hoardtastic Sim's inventory, dragged 5 back into the fridge, and sold the rest.
Which makes me wonder... if you hoard horrifically in the fridge, does the game have to enumerate every item in the fridge every time they get slightly peckish, especially if they have Simple Living, so they can decide if they want to get leftovers? Or are they trying to decide whether they need to clean out the fridge (the latest post-CoL obsession) and getting hung up on enumerating all those carrots?
(OTOH, y'all, if you're $9,999,999 there's no incentive to sell anything ever. I have four adults who all have the fabulously wealthy aspiration's Shrewd reward trait, so if we give our kid $5,000,000 Simoleons we're back to $9,999,999 in a matter of a month or two. I'd love to have more high-ticket items, like vacation homes. There are only so many Cordelia beds we need with a vampire in the house.)
Anyway, I hope that helps someone (devs?). Here's an after video (two adult sons came to visit!), which... it's not perfect but no one is passing out or peeing themselves? https://youtu.be/LJk7JUD2ANE
