This issue now seems to be fixed in the 1.68.154.1220 November 2020 patch.
Thanks all for confirming it now seems to be fixed. If you start experiencing issues again please post 🙂
After about five minutes in game, the game gets classic spinning wheel and crashes the entire system; bonus graphical glitches.
origin has been reset, computer has been force rebooted numerous times. Game is unplayable post September 3 2020 patch.
Please can you provide more information about your Mac. Instructions on how to do so and what to provide here - http://answers.ea.com/t5/The-Sims-Mac/READ-FIRST-Sims-4-Mac-Help-Guides-and-Troubleshooting/m-p/4612396/highlight/true#M162
Please move your Sims 4 folder to the desktop and load a new clean game to see if it still happens.
And lastly, help with taking screenshots on Mac - https://support.apple.com/en-gb/HT201361
It’s impossible to take screenshots when the problem happens. The entire system freezes and becomes non responsive. Which is why I used my phone to get the pictures I can. Can’t even swipe to a different desktop. It really maxlines the system and creates a kernel panic essentially.
i have done a complete origin reset and a game reverification, and I had just reinstalled the game right after the previous patch because the game gave me the crashing error upon attempting to load the game. (I had only resumed playing after nifty knitting came out and that bug was fixed because I was tired of having game saves hosed.)
Honestly, I’m just tired of uselessly reinstalling stuff because a reinstall has never actually fixed anything when the game does this.
I have a iMac Pro, 32 gigs of ram, 8 core system. I can pull down the system specifics later, but it’s the baseline iMac Pro. I’m going to try to update to the latest Catalina which came out a little while ago to see if that fixes the game first.
If you could provide the full specs and answer the questions in that link it would be really helpful.
If you play in windowed mode does it still lock up the system? Sometimes I get the exact same thing shortly after loading the game on my 27" 2019 iMac.
I have to switch off my Mac at the power button.
Updating Catalina seems to have made the game playable. I've been building for about 5-10 minutes without the CPU crashing out. I usually wait a week or two to update Catalina/MacOSX because of rare instances of bugs making my primary work software (which is small development teams rather than huge houses) crash, so I've just kinda gotten into the habit of waiting a while before diving into updates unless they're necessary.
I updated to latest version of Catalina (I was one behind) and then I did a repair game, and the symptoms have *mostly* disappeared. I am still getting some annoying game lag, but instead of taking the entire system out, it freezes for a second or two before recovering... which is MUCH better. I can play rather than reboot my system constantly.
But here are the system specs just for curiosity's sake:
iMac Pro 2017.
Processor: 3.2 GHz 8-Core Intel Xeon W
Ram: 32 GB 2666 MHz DDR4
Graphics: Radeon Pro Vega 56 8 GB
Catalina version, which seems to have fixed it enough to be playable: 10.15.6 (19G2021)
