#savefile corruption

[dandelionsprout42]

Prevent Love Letters to Avoid Game Corruption

Main hosting on Mod The Sims.

Secondary hosting on GitHub.

I've seen many people, me included, who haven't been able at all to get NRaas ErrorTrap and/or Overwatch to remove the constantly spawning corrupted fake bills and fake OmniPlant giftboxes from postboxes. Far from all players are affected by them, but once they begin spawning in a savefile, it's (without successfully working gamemods) impossible to make them stop spawning.

But this time I dare bet that with this gamemod, there's finally a practically 100% chance of success, after some 13 years since the glitch first started appearing to players.

[simmerlou]

Happy Halloween all! 🎃

[pumpkinfox]

Wowza i'm alive

I know this isn't Phighting related but this is something based off a oneshot i'm writing and god its taking forever but i do enjoy the game :>

[sunleaf-sims]

times are dire but lilsimsies new (wip)veggie challenge is giving me life, mentally…. opens the game

[hyggetrait]

I absolutely love all your builds…esp your tartosa ones (like seriously I need all of them!) 😍 where did you find your produce stands for the grocery store?

Hi! Thank you so much and I am going to first apologize for how late I am to answering this. If you havent found it already, the stands are the Produce Stand Retail Fridge by BrazenLotus. They can be functional in terms of actually buying groceries through them.

[rking200]

Just a deviant and his bird

[alyimoss]

watching my friend play undertale I MISS UNDERTALEEEE

[certifiedbundleofsticks]

user error gotta be my least favorite type of error. like damn. i really did that

[m0n0lithical]

We have reached the point of 'obsessive game cleaning' where I am sick of sorting through my multiple backups for the savefile I want and have started to organize my save slot #s by categories 🫠

[degreesofrat]

wonder if i should include (yandere mod) sebastian stardew valley on this blog too 🤔🤔 potentially

[little-eye-guy]

i haven’t played caves of qud in a while but i’m pretty sure 1.0 is supposed to release this year..? so i’d like to hop back on then

[cowplant-snacks]

BEWARE of Residential Rentals!

I went to place a lot yesterday and my entire savefile suddenly corrupted. I realized it was corrupted because after I placed any lot, all of the other lots in my game reset to the original version of them. They all looked fine from world mode, but once loaded into any lot the issue persisted. Read more about these issue here.

I rolled back the save and it was fine so I decided to try and remove the entire pack and see what would happen. After removing the pack, I could place new lots and the game was fine. Which meant for me the issue is FOR RENT.

I was nowhere near the limit of residential rental lots nor did I use any cheats to have more than six units per lot. I was not placing a residential lot when it corrupted. So far it seems fine to add the pack back and just avoid the lot type.

TLDR: Removing FOR RENT prevented my savefile from corrupting when placing new lots. The steps I used to stabilize my savefile are below.

Hope this helps!

Steps to remove For Rent:

1. Remove savefiles and mods. Repair the Game. 2. Rollback to a stable version of your savefile. And repair the game again. 3. Evict families and convert Residential Rentals to Residentals. *Tag all units as one BEFORE changing the lot type. Simmers report that lots can corrupt otherwise.* 4. Use this to load the game without For Rent. 5. Follow this if you end up with two different Tomarang Worlds when you load the pack back into the game. I did. 6. Replace all of your household outfits that got messed up. otherwise some sims will be nakie.

Tips:

Backups: Helps if you have backups of your households and lots in your trayfiles. Fixing outfits: If you don't care about relationships you can delete and replace or use MCCC to copy and paste the outfits back on the sim. Or if you have a dresser file, run that for new outfits.

This has happened to me a few times, but this was the first time I decided to see if I could role back the game, avoid the corruption, and restore my savefile.

UPDATE: 3/18/2025 | 2:00pm

I noticed today that I can no longer load into units that used to be residential rentals. I’m going to roll back again and evict households, and then convert the units to residential BEFORE removing For Rent.

Additionally, I am seeing that people recommend converting all the units back to one, before switching a lot from a residential rental to a rental.

I’ll report back. Stay tuned!

UPDATE: 3/18/2025 | 3:05 pm

See updated steps above. Changing how and when I remove the residential rentals seems to have prevented the individual lots from corrupting. While testing I placed new builds, and loaded into various lots, opened and closed the game. So far things seem fine.

Things I will be doing moving forward.

Only play and place households in a few worlds.

Having less townies.

And following other guidelines that @rebouks shared here regarding lag because they help keep the savefile smaller.

Will update this post if I notice any other issues or anyone reports things to me.

UPDATE: 3/19/2025 - The new method above worked for most lots BUT there were a few former residentials that begun to have issues with infinite loading screens. I’m starting a new savefile file.

Good luck to anyone dealing with this!

[pis3update]

Prevent Love Letters to Avoid Game Corruption by Dandelion Sprout

"Arguably the most severe glitch in The Sims 3 that had not yet been consistently fixed in gamemods, is when an active household all of a sudden has their Sims be reset almost every time they choose "Get Mail" from their mailboxes, and the mailboxes would get continuously stuffed with unusable and unpayable bills and Omni Plant boxes, which are also very difficult to get rid off without e.g. NRaas Debug Enabler. The "No Bills" lifetime reward doesn't fix it, and replacing the mailbox with Buydebug doesn't fix it. No consistent widely working fixes for it have been found (NRaas Overwatch was listed in 2012 as being able to replace the "Get Mail" interaction with a fixed one, but is not listed as such in 2025). This overall situation left the glitch as a nightmare that made long-running savefiles near-unplayable... ...until now!

...continued on MTS."

More Info + Download @ MTS.

[bearphase]

A note on savefile inflation (and why we should be worried for more than just the new lot type)

I've been browsing the support forums for information on the corruption situation, and stumbled upon a particularly concerning post (from a forum user who has the same username as, and I thus assume to be, @down-in-simsland -- thanks for reporting this, hope you don't mind me posting it!)

So, customizing a cat, dog, werewolf, or (presumably) horse in Paint Mode can add duplicate texture files to your save, inflating it, at least in this case, four times more than it should reasonably need to in order to save the painted coat. The new tattoo features coming in Businesses & Hobbies are essentially "paint mode" for every human Sim, which is obviously concerning if paint mode for pets and werewolves already inflates saves.

Down-in-Simsland also tested for causes for this --

So, it seems that, for the moment, behaviors best avoided are 1) saving a Paint Mode coat and then going back in to edit it -- try to do it in one shot instead; 2) viewing pets and werewolves in the Gallery. I think this one is more important to note, as you can easily end up with lots of saved textures just browsing through the Gallery if you're clicking on households with pets or werewolves. If you wish to look for these in the Gallery, it may be preferable to do so via your web browser.

Another note in the comments on Gallery items: Rooms full of custom paintings/photos from the Gallery will inflate your save, as the images are permanently saved, even after you delete the associated paintings/photos.

(Interestingly, this makes the advice of "saving only photos important to your gameplay and deleting the rest" moot, as deleted photos will still inflate your savefile.)

Of course, if you're comfortable doing so, you can delete unused textures in S4S:

This issue is marked as "under investigation", so hopefully it's fixed before B&H releases, as it would make this issue significantly worse with custom tattoos.

[midsummermoon20]

Hi! Are you ever going to drop your build cc folder? I’d love to build with the things you have in your folder 🙏

Hello!

I have made a couple of virtual cc folders, that I post in the descriptions of my videos on YouTube. I haven't posted it here yet (because it changes literally everyday lol) here's one from January: Google Docs

EDIT: I found a slightly more recent one I made for my savefile (that ended up getting corrupted, thanks to For Rent) but I still have the cc list I made for it. You can find that one here

I am in the midst of a big folder cleanout rn, so I'm not sure when a more recent one will be updated!

[foxena]

Prevent Loss in Case of Save Corruption »

Corrupted saves are getting more and more common in this community. My save corrupted just the other day when I tried solving bugs related to For Rent. Thankfully, I had been warned and therefore I lost very little.

So to keep spreading awareness, and possible solutions, here is what I did that helped me save my savefile.

1. Backup Everything!

Make sure you keep backups of your savefiles outside of the game—on your desktop, an external drive, or the cloud. If you want to be extra safe, keep it in multiple places and keep multiple versions with notes on what's what. Do NOT rely on the in-game "Recover Save" feature, because if your save is corrupted, chances are the recovered version is too.

2. Don't Ignore Last Exception Errors

Make sure to have MC Command Center and Better Exceptions installed. These mods will give you more information about in-game errors.

If you get an error, look it up! This is what saved me. The error might be game-breaking, or it might not. There are multiple tools you can use for this. Personally, I asked for help in Deaderpools Discord server. Another option is to use The Sims 4 lastException Assistant.

3. Try to Recreate the Last Exception Error

If checking the Last Exception error hints at possible corruption or you're not sure what it means—basically if you can’t tell it’s TOTALLY safe—try recreating it.

Step 1: Check if the Last Exception error is mod-related

Remove all mods except MC Command Center and Better Exceptions. Take your latest backup from before the error appeared and place it in your save folder.

Load your backup save and see if the Last Exception error appears. If the error doesn’t show up, this suggests either:

The error is likely mod-related.

Or the original save (not the backup) is corrupted.

If the error does show up on the backup, try using an earlier backup or see if you can trigger the Last Exception error in a new save.

Step 2: Check if the original save (the one with the error) triggers the error without mods

Load the save with the error (not the backup) and try triggering the Last Exception error without mods.

If the error doesn’t show up without mods, it’s likely mod-related.

If the error still appears without mods and doesn’t show up in your backup, assume the original save is corrupted. Stop using that save and switch to your backup to avoid playing in a potentially corrupted save.

Final Thoughts

This is a pretty extreme approach, but it can help if you’re worried about save file corruption and want to avoid losing progress. Keeping multiple backups and regularly watching for exceptions is likely a good way to catch problems early.

Here’s the Last Exception that likely corrupted my game and would have made it unplayable if I’d kept using the save (it slowed my game down drastically):

[manus] business_service failed to handle zone load due to exception (AttributeError: 'NoneType' object has no attribute 'lot_template_id'), CategoryID: persistence_service:685

Tips to Avoid Save File Corruption

Let's end this monologue with a few general tips to avoid corruption altogether—because ideally, we wouldn’t need to use the process I described earlier.

Check Manage Households and delete unneeded NPCs. The game constantly generates new townies, and over time, they clog up your save.

Delete random objects left lying around in the neighborhood. I use the Destroy Object Cheat for this.

Sims’ in-game photographs take up a surprising amount of space. Don't hoard photos! Only keep a few per household.

Large homes with tons of clutter and objects can bog down your game. Delete lots you don't use, or keep them simplistic.

Residential rental lots have a lot of issues. Avoid using them altogether for now, or be very careful and keep a lot of backups.

Use "Save As", instead of "Save", regularly to create a fresh save. Overwriting the same file multiple times can bloat the file and slow down your game.

I hope this helps! If you’ve got any other tips that worked for you, feel free to share!