Re: Sims 4 crashing during game play

I did what you said. I pulled my folded on my desktop. My game crash only after a couple of minutes.  I already repaired my game last night

@Audr3y16  Then the first thing to do is update your graphics card driver; your current one is from 2017.  You can download a the new driver from here:

https://www.amd.com/en/support/graphics/amd-radeon-hd/amd-radeon-hd-7000-series/amd-radeon-hd-7950

Expand the Windows 10 64-bit category, and download the driver dated June 3, which is the latest stable driver.  (The newer one is optional.)

Test the game in a clean folder a couple of times and let me know whether it helps.

I downloaded the drivers. The game worked fine for 2 days and know it's crashing again ☹️. I did the thing you said to, to put the sims $ file on my desktop and play the game with a clean file. The game still crashed. Is there something else I can do? 

Thank you

@Audr3y16  There's plenty more you can do.  One simple test is to play with your computer completely offline.  Sign into Origin and put it in offline mode, then turn off wifi and/or pull the ethernet cable.

If that doesn't help, try a clean boot.  The idea is to make sure there's nothing running alongside the game that could possibly interfere.  Here's how to do it:

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

If that doesn't help either, please run another dxdiag, so I can see if there are any new helpful errors.

Nothing worked. ☹️

@Audr3y16  Okay, the next step is to run a couple of commands to check Windows system files.  Here's how:

• Hit Windows key-X
• Choose either “PowerShell (Administrator)” or “Command prompt (Administrator),” whichever option is offered
• Inside the window that appears, copy and paste “DISM.exe /Online /Cleanup-image /Restorehealth” without quotes into the window, and enter
• The system will start validating soon. If it throws an error, please list it here
• After it reaches 100%, hit Windows key-X again
• Again, choose “PowerShell (Administrator)” or “Command prompt (Administrator)”
• Inside the window, copy and paste “sfc /scannow” without quotes into the window, and enter
• Post the message you receive here

If this doesn't help, let me know.  Also, are you seeing crashes in the same parts of the game as you did before?  Or can you not play at all now?

Well my game is crashing all of sudden as well. It'll get to the green diamond and crashes out. The September update has rendered this game completely unplayable. I've done ALL of the troubleshooting ideas, sfc, dism, clean boot, uninstalled all of my gpu drivers in safe mode, made sure all of my drivers for my 5700XT were updated and yet nothing. I even uninstalled both Origin and Sims 4 as well and nada. It's clearly something within the latest update that's causing this. I have other titles from EA and they work just fine, this is the only game that's having trouble, is there fix coming to fix this? 

@BlackHatSims  Given that your game is crashing right away, and that you've tried almost everything else, this may well be caused by a Windows security update.  But of course those updates are important in their own right, and uninstalling one should not be done lightly.  I wrote a similar post on the same subject yesterday:

https://answers.ea.com/t5/Technical-Issues-PC/Sims-4-Crashing-on-start-up/m-p/8200576#M151367

If you would like to avoid uninstalling the update, there may be other steps you can take.  I don't have the latest Windows build myself, so I can't test on my own, but let me know if you'd like suggestions on steps that might help.

Hi, the first thing didnt find an error. 

This is the message that I received after the second thing you ask me to do

Windows Resource Protection found corrupt files but was unable to fix some of them.
For online repairs, details are included in the CBS log file located at
windir\Logs\CBS\CBS.log. For example C:\Windows\Logs\CBS\CBS.log. For offline
repairs, details are included in the log file provided by the /OFFLOGFILE flag.

I can play the game but only for a couples of minutes. I think the crashes after 3 minutes. When this is happening, the game just close and there is no message.

Thank you so much for your help

@Audr3y16  Please filter the CBS log to show only the entries pertaining to sfc.  Type cmd into the search box in the lower left corner of your screen, and click on Command Prompt.  Then copy and paste this command into the window, and enter:

findstr /c:"[SR]" %windir%\Logs\CBS\CBS.log >"%userprofile%\Desktop\sfcdetails.txt

Then attach the log to a post here.  The corrupt files mentioned might be nothing, a simple mismatch that can be disregarded.  But it's worth checking.

Voila 🙂

Yes, I am having the same exact issue after trying everything suggested.  Even the Windows security update rollback.

I read another poster's response about disabling the latest update which I have btw but I'm not willing to do that just yet however, looking back last Tuesday is when I got the update from Microsoft but I hadn't played the game until Thursday with no issues and on Friday is when all the trouble started. So it's either the Windows update or the September update but I'll un-install the Windows update to see if it's the culprit or not and I'll report back.

@Audr3y16  Sorry for the delay; I wanted to ask someone else about the files listed in your CBS log.  Since they're all about Windows Defender and PowerShell, they're unlikely to be the cause of the issue.  Now that you've run DISM and sfc though, does your game still crash?  Please remove your TS4 game folder, if you've put it back in Documents\EA.

If that doesn't help, please try another clean boot.

If that doesn't help either, then you might also be affected by the recent Windows security update, even though your error logs were initially different.  It's certainly never recommended to uninstall a security update though, so you might be stuck waiting for Windows to fix the issue.

@Chonkerino  Please run a dxdiag and attach it to a post.

https://help.ea.com/en-us/help/pc/how-to-gather-dxdiag-information/

Please also list the troubleshooting steps you've already taken to try to resolve this issue.  "Everything" covers a lot, and there are quite a few suggestions floating around that you may or may not have tried.

It's not really working better. Is there a way to know that it's really the windows update without uninstalling it? I would like to know in case it's not that.

@Audr3y16  Right now, I don't know of another way.  In theory, you could uninstall it just long enough to launch the game, then reinstall it immediately afterwards.  I understand why you wouldn't be comfortable doing that though.  I would love to troubleshoot this myself, but I don't have 1903 yet.  I've asked around a bit to see whether other people might have suggestions or workarounds, and I'll get back to you if there's anything useful to share.

Ok thank you so much for your help!

@Audr3y16  There are a couple of things you can try, if you're still interested in experimenting.  I don't know whether they'll help without uninstalling the Windows security update, but at the very least, it would be good to know that nothing worked.

Please set exceptions, in all antivirus/firewall programs you have installed, for both Origin.exe and TS4_64.exe.  Please also set an exception in Controlled Folder Access (a feature of Windows Defender) for both.  It should only be necessary to add TS4_64.exe, but might as well be thorough.  Here's how to change Controlled Folder Access settings:

https://crinrict.com/blog/2019/03/windows-10-defender-controlled-folder-access.html

Please also remove your entire Sims 4 game folder from Documents\Electronic Arts while testing.  A clean folder will spawn each time you launch the game, as long as it gets far enough.  Be sure to delete this clean folder after each test.

In addition, temporarily disable OneDrive (no need to uninstall it) while testing.  Here's how:

https://www.windowscentral.com/how-disable-or-uninstall-onedrive-windows-10

If these steps don't work, please try all of it again, this time adding another clean boot.  Here are the same instructions as before:

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

I understand how frustrating this must be, but the more information we have, the sooner we might find a solution.  All we know right now is that some people with the security update can still play, and that uninstalling it doesn't help everyone.  More information is always useful.

I tried everything you said and it didn't change anything. So, I uninstall the last security update from windows. I tried to play with my saves and the game crashed. After, I played with a clean folder. And i played for a long time. I didin't crash. So I tried putting my save in the new folder and the game crashed again. 

Is my save files the problem?

@Audr3y16  That's interesting; thanks for the update.  You tried using a clean game folder a couple of times before, where your saves wouldn't have been loading, and that never helped.  But apparently the combination of uninstalling the security update and removing your existing saves fixed the problem?  What happens if you leave your old saves out of the game folder, but you try to load a new save that you've just created today?  I'm just wondering whether the problem is something about your old saves, or whether it's the fact that there are any saves at all in the game folder.

@Audr3y16 @BlackHatSims and @Chonkerino  Please try disabling RivaTuner Statistics Server or MSI Afterburner.  A couple of players have reported that RTSS is the problem, and that it ran even during a clean boot.

@puzzlezaddict Thanks for the tip! I suspected that Riva Tuner Statistics Server had been causing my DirectX crashes but disabling it had no material effect on the game, the crashes persisted with the same frequency and severity--CTD often, BSOD only slightly less often.

I'll share that what ultimately fixed the issue for me was to run a BIOS update on my motherboard. It was running a years-old and very out of date BIOS--that predate all of the most recent predictive execution security fixes and the like.

After updating BIOS and ensuring that all of my device drivers were up-to-date and Windows was updated to 1903, all of the random/intermittent CTD and BSOD completely stopped.