Moving Mods and the Sims 4 to a D: drive

@ohjosiek  Saves, mods, and other user content are stored in Documents > Electronic Arts > The Sims 4 regardless of where the game itself is installed, and Sims 4 won't look for that data anywhere else.  To get around this, you can move the Documents directory to D, which is supported by Windows, but please only do this if D is an internal drive; Windows would react badly if Documents were on an external and that external happened to be unplugged at some point.

https://www.tenforums.com/tutorials/74952-move-location-documents-folder-windows-10-a.html

Or you can use a symbolic link to redirect the Sims 4 folder, or the Electronic Arts folder, to the location of your choice on D:

https://crinrict.com/blog/2020/02/moving-windows-documents-folder-to-external-drive-via-symbolic-link.html

Please make sure you have the file paths exactly right before doing this; even one space or letter out of place can bork the command.

In either case, make a backup copy of the Sims 4 user folder, or at least the subfolders (like saves and Mods) you wouldn't want to lose, before proceeding.  This process is safe if done correctly, but it's easy to mess up the first time you try it.

@puzzlezaddictThe D drive I have is an external drive (more specifically a Game Drive. Even more specifically a WD_Black P10 Game Drive). Is there any way to safely have the game on that drive as well as my mods+CC? I don't have any actual game saves that I really really care about (I like starting fresh in every game). The only thing I care about is my Mods folder so I'd like to keep that and I will make a copy of it saved somewhere on my PC.

@ohjosiek  Using a symbolic link is fine for an external drive; I was only saying don't move the entire Documents directory to an external.  With the symlink, if you ever launched Sims 4 without the external connected, you'd get an error, but then you'd probably realize the problem immediately and there would be no harm done.

The only other detail to make sure of is that you don't want the two Sims 4 folders to overlap, you want them within two different folders on D.  For example, this would work:

D:\Games\The Sims 4\[game's program files, the stuff from Origin]

D:\Sims Data\The Sims 4\[user data, e.g. mods]

If you copy over everything in your existing Sims 4 user folder, or the folder itself, you won't need to start over, although you of course could if you wanted.

Once you've gone through the symlink process and confirmed that the game is working and reading your Mods folder, you can get rid of or move the backup you made.  Ideally, you'd put it on a different external device just in case, but cloud storage would also work.  For example, Google gives 15 GB free storage via Google Drive.  If you zip the Mods folder before uploading it, it'll take up a lot less space.

Hi, I just tried to follow the symbolic link tutorial that you sent me. I made it to the Command Prompt step and followed what to do and this (see attachment) is what I got instead of what the tutorial said I should get (I'll copy and paste what the tutorial said the response should be). 

What the tutorial said the response should be: 

Press ENTER
You should now see the following in the command prompt window
“Connection created for %UserProfile%\Documents\Electronic Arts\The Sims 4″ <<===>> E:\The Sims 4“ (for your path)

Please continue to help. I'm not very tech-savvy so I'm really unsure as to what I'm doing. Thank you!

@ohjosiek  The first time you tried the command, you left off the quotation mark at the end of the second file path.  The second time, you still left off that last quote mark and you also didn't leave a space between the two file paths.  This is the command you want to use, assuming that D:\The Sims 4 is the correct location:

MKLINK /J “%UserProfile%\Documents\Electronic Arts\The Sims 4” "D:\The Sims 4"

@ohjosiek  Yes, please do post the full file path of the new Sims 4 folder you want to use, and also the current Sims 4 folder.  You can see the file paths in the address bar or by right-clicking and selecting Properties > General and looking under Location.