Re: Delayed interaction menu when clicking on sims, computer and fridge.

Hey, thank you for the quick response! I started a new file and even with all my mods removed, it still seems just as slow. It takes about 1 second for the Fridge Pie menu to show up, then a whole 3 seconds for the food menu popup to show when my Sim is level 10 cooking. It loads in about 1-2 seconds at level 1 cooking. If I was only cooking once a day it wouldn't be too big of a deal, but it really makes making food to sell very tedious (and this is one of the biggest highlights for me of the Cottage Living expansion).

This was with the Simple Living lot challenge enabled. Surprisingly, it took even longer with the challenge removed. The pie menu always loads in about 1 second, but the food menu took 4 seconds to show up on most attempts, with one instance taking a whopping 9 seconds to load (I tried a total of 5 times).

I have all the DLC except for Batuu. This was a blank save file where I did nothing but create a sim, go into a house, use the fridge to measure the time, use a cheat to set my cooking to level 10, and then use the fridge again. My specs are way beyond anything TS4 should need (attached).

@ElDimentio  Please test in a new save not in the Cottage Living world, with a couple different fridges, just to be thorough.  While you're playing, please also check how much of your CPU Origin is using the Task Manager—sometimes it takes all the resources it can, for no good reason.

By the way, it's unlikely to be the cause of this particular issue, but you'll get better performance overall if you plug your monitor directly into the graphics card rather than into the motherboard as is now the case.

@ElDimentio  Try clearing Origin's cache:

https://help.ea.com/en-us/help/faq/clear-cache-to-fix-problems-with-your-games/

and repairing the game: open your Origin game library, right-click on the Sims 4 icon, and select Repair.  Even if you've repaired before, it might work better without Origin using stale cached data.

If that doesn't help, try disabling any apps that include an overlay, for example Steam or Discord.  It shouldn't really make a difference, but some overlays conflict with each other or with the game.  Disable Origin in-game as well: hover over your username, select Application Settings, then the Origin in-game header, and disable the option at the top.

If that doesn't help either, try playing in a clean boot:

https://www.windowscentral.com/how-clean-boot-windows-10

It would also be weird for this to make a difference, but given that I haven't seen other complaints about this, it does seem like something is going on with your particular computer.

The suggestion to plug the monitor into the graphics card is about overall system performance.  Your GPU is capable of much more than Sims 4 could ever demand of it, especially on a 60 Hz monitor (even in QHD), so you probably wouldn't see any difference there.  But it would help in other more demanding games.

Yup, also experiencing slow cooking menus here.

@ElDimentio  I understand what you're saying, but if this were a universal problem, there would be a lot more complaints about it.  So I'm trying to figure out what's different about your setup.  It's obviously not that you have weak hardware, but maybe there's something else running in the background.  Or maybe this would be fixed by uninstalling and reinstalling Sims 4, although that seems a bit extreme, and a repair is usually good enough.

The monitor being plugged into the motherboard will absolutely lower the overall performance of your system.  I'm not talking about fps drops, I'm talking about lower fps overall than you'd otherwise see.  How much lower will depend on the games involved and your motherboard, and as a practical matter, you might not notice any difference at all with a 2080 ti driving a 60 Hz screen.  That really depends on the games you play.  But what is absolutely true is that the graphics card passing data directly to the monitor is much more efficient than the card passing that data through the motherboard.

And again, this has nothing to do with Sims 4, this is something I saw in your dxdiag that I thought was worth mentioning.

I'm noticing this delay when opening the Cook... Menu too. It ranges from 2s for a lower cooking skill level to around 5s for my chef. This adds up a lot if you're using that menu frequently. I wonder if people aren't reporting it because they use a different pie option on the fridge, or tend to use Sims with lower cooking level?

This has been happening to me as well ever since CL. This is indeed a problem with a number of players as noted here: https://forums.thesims.com/en_US/discussion/992294/weird-delay-in-getting-refrigerator-and-stove-menus-to-popup and here https://www.reddit.com/r/Sims4/comments/otdfis/is_anyone_else_having_a_huge_lag_when_asking_sims/.

Took out mods and it didn't help. Started a clean game to test and and it didn't help. Switched out fridges and stoves and it didn't help.

That's what I'm thinking too. My Sims all have Cooking at 10 so . . . 5 seconds. And if I don't pause the game, clicking the fridge also pauses my Sims. Weird.

I'm having the same problem since I bougth the cottage living pack as well. Before no issues.

It has to do with this pack. Can this be fixed please.

It's not a pc problem it's the Living Cottage pack problem.

I never had this issue before and I bougth the pack 2 days or so ago and since then I have this problem as well.

OK peeps, here's what I've figured out that will "help." (Mind you, this is still an issue that needs to be fixed because it is totally reasonable to expect to put your produce in the icebox.)

1. Keep as little as possible in your refrigerator. Do you ave all your fruits and veggies in there at high counts? Well, that apparently mucks up the menu. Only keep a few fruits and veg in there at a time.
2. So where do you keep your produce? A trunk/chest. Either the base game versions or (better in my book) the Discovery University wooden chest. With the base game chest, everything you put into it is stored across all base game chests on your lot. With the DU chests you can have chests that store different things (one chest for produce, one for collectibles, one for magic items, etc). The base game chest ought to work that way as well IMHO. Heads up SIMS creators.

In doing this, my pie menu opens pretty quickly. I found this out when I moved my kid out to start college and he had an empty fridge. And so far, not "filling it up" seems to be the trick.

What I have also realized is that the patch that made food spoil again didn't help. I had households with loads of dishes in the refrigerators. I was kind of digging that my food kept. But suddenly, with the patch, my fridge was stuffed and things were going bad every few days and then every few hours. And clicking on the fridge and waiting was ANNOYING. So, clean out your fridge and get a trunk/chest.

Let me know if this works for you like it worked for me.

I'm experiencing this as well and this significantly helped as a workaround.  I have a sim who makes food that never spoils, so now apart from prepared group meals she's stocked up on, I put everything else that can't spoil into a chest.  It's not perfect, but it's a big difference, so thank you!