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furby_irl's avatar
furby_irl
Seasoned Newcomer
17 hours ago

Issues with Symlinks

My computer does not have very much storage space whatsoever, and the Sims eats up most of it. I've recently purchased an external hard drive for some extra space, and was hoping to, at least partially, transfer some Sims files over, as it has three times the storage space of my laptop. However, this didn't seem possible without uninstalling, which I am entirely unwilling to do. I learned about symbolic links and thought they would suit my needs, so I went ahead and installed Link Shell Extension to make it simpler to set one up.

While establishing the symlink was very simple, the game seems to refuse to run with a symlink in its folder. The folder I was symlinking to was my (exceedingly large) Mods folder, stored on an external hard drive. Typically, watching Task Manager, when I run the game from Steam, it starts up as a background process, taking up a large chunk of processing power (as is typical) before petering out very quickly and using only about 0.5% of my memory. The game itself does not run during this process whatsoever, and after about five minutes, it serves me an error about missing game data (although once it said it failed to initialize my video card?) and closes.

I've tried setting up symlinks, junctions, symlink clones, smart copies, smart mirrors, DeLorean clones, and even tried to manually establish a symlink through CMD, which invariably tells me "Cannot create a file when that file already exists." I've tried it with both an empty Mods folder in the Sims 4 folder and no mods folder whatsoever, I've tried establishing the link inside the new Mods folder. I then moved on to attempting to move the entire Sims 4 folder to the external hard drive, which serves similar errors. At one point, I accidentally created a link to an empty folder, and the game created entirely new files, but otherwise, it just refuses to run. Everyone else who I see online seems to be able to run the Sims 4 perfectly fine in the presence of a symlink, but mine refuses to take them, and I have no idea why. I feel like I've tried pretty much everything.

launching
missing content
steam

1 Reply

  • puzzlezaddict's avatar
    puzzlezaddict
    Hero+
    5 hours ago

    furby_irl​  Please list the locations of the symlinks you currently have and where they point to.  I'd like the full paths for each one as well as what is inside the redirected folders.

    The error in CMD is because there was already a file or folder with the same name in the same location as where you told it to create the symlink.  That's not a surprise if you already have some kind of junction there, or if you started the game again and thereby created a new Sims 4 folder or any subfolder inside.

    If you'd rather start from scratch, please see this guide:

    📓[GUIDE] [PC] Choosing where Sims 4 data is stored | EA Forums - 12598500

    Moving the game's program files does technically require reinstalling.  However, there's a shortcut, detailed in the guide, that works some of the time.

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