These are
TSR's guidelines for uploads, that might help give you some guidance. It's a bit difficult to figure out sometimes since it'll also depend on your computer specs and what it can handle. This might be a good reference point.
I'll give you my personal CAS guidelines that I use for stuff that my Sims wear / use all the time:
Hairs: Nothing more than 15k
Fullbody CAS: Nothing more than 25k (I have one 36k piece but I only use it for story scenes.)
Accessories: Really depends, normally nothing more than 2k, 3k at a push.
For BuildBuy I generally don't go over 10k polys at most.
As a general note, I won't download
anything that's over 40k, whether it's CAS or BuildBuy, or if it's a temp story prop or not.
On a side note, if there's some CC you REALLY want in your game but the polys are ridiculous, you can knock some polys off of it in Blender and it isn't too difficult. (Though I don't really blame you if you don't want to spend time fixing other people's CC so it doesn't fry your PC/laptop.)
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This person goes into how to do these things to help lower polys using Decimate, which reduces mesh polys. It also goes into using 'Merge by Distance' which gets rid of unecessary extra bits, sometimes you can knock off 7-10k polys just by doing this. (This mentions TS3, but the Decimate and Merge by Distance is still relevant.)
If you want to do this, also a note that older Blender versions, Merge by Distance is instead called Remove Doubles.
Also, special characters in .package names can cause lag (certain symbols etc.) You can speed-remove these using
Bulk File Rename Utility. However, be sure to only use this on CAS /BuildBuy and not your actual mods, apparently it can mess with mods (I guess mod scripts referring to mod file names and such.)
- When you go to the relevant folder to do this in Bulk File Rename Utility, select the file names you want to change, then where it says Remove, check 'Sym' and then go to Rename in the bottom right to get rid of symbols.
