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lucainato's avatar
lucainato
2 years ago
Solved

Separating the game and mods

Hello! I come bearing a question about The Sims 4 and storage space/what drive it loads from. Right now, I have all my Sims content on one drive, say D:. Specifically, D:\Electronic Arts\The Sims 4 ...
pc
  • puzzlezaddict's avatar
    puzzlezaddict
    2 years ago

    @lucainato  What drives are you talking about here?  The way Sims 4 is programmed, it can't take advantage of the speed of an NVME solid state drive over a SATA SSD, although both are an improvement over a mechanical drive (HDD).  So if D is any kind of SSD, it doesn't really matter what's on D and what's on E—the limiting factor will be the game itself.

    If D is an HDD, whether it helps more to move the game's program files to E or the user folder (or just the Mods folder) depends on how much is in the Mods folder.  If it's a lot, then having Mods on E will likely be more beneficial; if it's a little, it would be better to move the game's program files to E.  I can't really tell you where the line is though because it's about both the amount of custom content (not so much mods) and the type.  You may also notice different results for the initial loading screen vs. travel transitions.

    If you're not sure, I would suggest experimenting a bit.  And if you don't actually notice a difference, you don't really need to worry about a few seconds gained or lost here or there.

puzzlezaddict's avatar
puzzlezaddict
Hero+
2 years ago

@lucainato  What drives are you talking about here?  The way Sims 4 is programmed, it can't take advantage of the speed of an NVME solid state drive over a SATA SSD, although both are an improvement over a mechanical drive (HDD).  So if D is any kind of SSD, it doesn't really matter what's on D and what's on E—the limiting factor will be the game itself.

If D is an HDD, whether it helps more to move the game's program files to E or the user folder (or just the Mods folder) depends on how much is in the Mods folder.  If it's a lot, then having Mods on E will likely be more beneficial; if it's a little, it would be better to move the game's program files to E.  I can't really tell you where the line is though because it's about both the amount of custom content (not so much mods) and the type.  You may also notice different results for the initial loading screen vs. travel transitions.

If you're not sure, I would suggest experimenting a bit.  And if you don't actually notice a difference, you don't really need to worry about a few seconds gained or lost here or there.

  • lucainato's avatar
    lucainato
    2 years ago

    @puzzlezaddict That's a really helpful response! I've done some googling and saw a few mentions of how Sims 4 doesn't benefit all that much from switching to an SSD, though I never figured out why that was, and plenty of people still mentioned their game ran much faster after the switch, so that gives some insight into that.

    D: is an HDD, yes, E: is an SSD. It sounds like putting my mods on the E: will be smarter, then; it has both a lot of CC and script mods. The test I did, I tested the reverse, with having the game on E:, and indeed didn't really notice a difference that way around. Granted, though, I only tested the initial main menu loading, no playtesting or loading any worlds, going into CAS, etc.

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