[CD] [W] Paint Mode for pets and werewolves adds unnecessary texture to a save

Side note on this subject: the texture saved are really compressed and it causes the texture having a lot of compression artefacts, that are especially noticeable at the seams. This will also be an issue for custom tattoos that will be really bad in terms of quality if this is not changed.

Down-in-Simsland  I noticed this when I was looking through S4S for the "litter" issue and wondered what it was. Thanks for clarifying.

Different, but similar I also notice a lot of photo and paint from reference images that I knew where long gone from my Save. Seems like there are a lot of issues where the game has no method of cleaning out cruft.

All of these probably add to the bloat. 

Yes, any texture that is added to the save, like photographs or painting for reference are there forever, even if you delete the associated item.

If you use custom paintings from the gallery and add a full wall of those paintings on a lot, only keep one of them, and delete the rest, all the pictures will be added to your save file.

Is there a way to clean/delete these textures manually? 

It's possible, but I would recommend it only if you are quite confortable using Sims4Studio to edit your savefile. There might be bugs doing it, so I prefer to warn people before.

• Open your save in Sims 4 Stuidio
• In the filter box, type "Texture" to display only the custom textures in your save. That will include all the photographs, the paintings from reference, and the custom furs. Click on the File Size column header to sort items by size: it will be easier to find duplicates as they have the same size.
• To delete an unnecessary item, just click on it and click on Delete at the bottom.

The tricky part is to detect which texture is used in case you have multiple duplicates:

• Open your save in Sims 4 Stuidio
• Filtrer by "Save Game Data" to find the main informations about your save and click on it.
• In the right panel, scroll until the end until you find the line "sims". Click on Edit items on the right of it.
• A window will display all the Sims in your save. Find the Sim(s) and/or the pet(s) using a custom fur, and click on them. 
• Filter the right panel by "custom_texture". If the Sim/pet use a custom fur, you will have an id displayed at the right of this "custom_texture" (if it's not the case, you will have "0000000000000000"). Copy and paste those ID somewhere where you can list them (ideally with the Sims they belong to).
• I would recommence closing Sims 4 Studio without saving before opening it again to delete textures (i experimented that opening the sims info would cause some issue if you save after).
• Reopen your save on the Studio, and as described above, when you find a texture with multiple duplicates, you can identify the one that is used: it's instance will be the same as the id your retrieved before. You can keep this texture and delete the rest.

I hope that helps.

It would be better if the game automatically cleaned up unused textures on sims, pets and objects but here we are. Maybe a utility can be created to identify textures that are not tied to a sim/pet/object ?

Down-in-SimslandThank you so much for the instructions! 😊 

Let's hope they will investigate and do something about this issue, it's concerning when there is severe bugs regarding big save files and then issues that bloat the save file sizes at the same time 😅