Spring4Sims – The Best Finds, Downloads & Hints for Your Sims

Here’s what I’ve fixed and found out

• I reinstalled all my games and they worked fine.
• No problems with installing Outdoor Living, which is great.
• With no old Saves, Egypt runs fine.

What doesn’t work

• After I recovered my old Saves (I have actually rewritten everything in the My Documents/Electronic Arts/The Sims 3 folder), Egypt freezes like before. All my Sims are back, but Egypt just won’t run. That means there’s something in those files that makes the game freeze when I enter Egypt. I have no idea what it is. (No custom content installed.)
• I tried to install custom content again. I feel really silly now because I haven’t done that in like three years, I was only adding more and more. So of course I wanted to check MTS how to do it all again and make things work, but they’re having a Maintaince Mode. Damn. So I looked at eHow, did what they said and — it doesn’t work! Damn.
• EDIT: Oh, so there’s a new way to install custom content after your game was patched to version 1.12. Good to know! (I couldn’t load simswiki.info either, not only MTS at the moment I was trying to work things out.) I was doing it the old way, not putting all the files in My Documents. That’s because I remembered I did not have them there before. Oh well.

Now I’m not sure what to do. I could probably try to install all my custom content back, save some lots in Sunset Valley I really treasure and reinstall the games so Egypt works again. (I think I will do this.)

I could also try to delete my Saves and let the game create new Worlds again, but I’m not sure if the corrupted file that makes Egypt crash is located there… reinstalling again seems to be a safer option.

One last word: installing any the Sims games is a hassle. I’m seriously running out of patience.

Remember I made a backup like a week ago? Yeah, I think I felt something would go wrong this time. My copy of The Sims 3 Outdoor Living Stuff has just arrived and I was trying to install it. But the trouble is it just won’t install: it freezes. Now when I open the launcher, it says it won’t open because the installation was not complete. Damn!

Does it mean I’ll have to reinstall everyting? I think so. The good news is I made a backup just a while ago (I might loose just a couple of hours I played with Wolffs and one community lot I started building) and that this might help with my Egypt-problem (the game freezes right after Egypt is loaded). Maybe I’ll do it even today, just for the sake of giving it a try.

BTW I could of course take my current Saved Games files, but I’m worried the files might be somehow corrupted. The game was also patched at the beginning of the installation, so I think I’ll be just fine with the backup I made a while ago.

And by ‘pluses’ I mean bugs, but also something quite literal:

• The ‘Plus’ icons appear when I buy new furniture and/or sell someting; they disappear when I go to Live Mode, fortunatelly.
• The sinks have no bubbles when washing dishes. Again. Sigh.
• The sprinklers work, but no watter appears. Duh.
• When Sims fight, there’s no dust-cloud.
• Days left until the end of vacation are not counting down.
• And I still can’t go to Egypt, because it freezes right when the loading screen goes away.

New patch, please?

I’ve just bought a new set from TS3 Store, The Stäncké Collection, and look what I found: the clock is listed right between the fences! Oh well, that sucks. The good news is that it’s also in Electronics>Misc. Phew! But they should still take some extra care of the objects. They’re not really cheap and they can’t even put them in the catologue correctly.

I’ve always had this need to make a Sim that would be way too crazy but I failed terribly for some reason. Well, I found this stylist–don’t even bother to ask me about her name, that’s the first thing I forget about all Sims–and she had the most terrible style I’ve ever seen. So I put my hands on her, gave her a vest to show all her nice tattoos and changed the styling. Et voilà: here she is!

Her hair still has dark blue tips, but her makeup is definitely less heavy (the lips are very toned down, almost nude), her eyes are covered by retro-styled cat eyeglasses (I love them! They’re from TSR by DOT for free), but to make things a little bit more hip, I’ve decided to give her some footless leggings from LiliSims and edgy bracelets from Club Crimsyn. Her boots remain unchanged.

Her styling is fun and unique and hopefully it won’t make anyone puke anymore. More pictures after jump, also with ‘before’ picture–as always, click to enlarge. Make sure you check them out and let me know how you like this Sim now.

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Just a small update on yesterday’s post: after I figured out it was a bug that was causing my game to go so slow, I tried to get rid of it. The crazy Sims started celebrating Holly Alto in front of the City Hall as the ‘big new architect in the town’. Yes, how cool, especially when the whole town meets in the same place and causes my game to crash.

So I’ve decided to go from one lot to another, taking all the starving and exhausted Sims home to finally end that super-exciting ballon-confetti party. But guess what? After I went to another lot, the previous Sims were back! Arr! So, what now? I wished there was a way to reset the whole town, but then I thought of the resetsim firstname lastname cheat. I went back to the City Hall, hovered my mouse over every single Sim to see their names and wrote the cheat about 60 times. The Sims were disappearing home one by one, finally leaving the City Hall deserted. Hurray! I thought the hell was over. Wrong!

Just when I unpaused the game, the cars started appearing on the road and all the Sims were back. Grr! It didn’t help! The Sims wanted to party again like maenads (okay, not really). This time there was even a new townie generated to give Holly Alto the medal (she was there again, too), but she seemed to be somewhat stuck near the entrace. She wouldn’t give her the madal and end the party like she was supposed to.

Okay now what? *the lightbulb has just lit up in my head* I’m going to delete the City Hall! And so I did! Of course, I saved a copy to my Houses Bin and deleted the venue. Then I placed it back. No crazy medal honors ever since, thank God. I just wish I thought of that sooner!

Finally, I managed to fix my game (well, I’m in the middle of the process)! Like I said a few days ago, it’s started going very slow and even crash. That’s never happened to me before. And you perhaps don’t know what slow means. When at the max speed, one minute in the game took about 6 seconds to pass in real life. That’s really hell slow!

The strange thing was that it was only happening in Live Mode. I thought that maybe because I installed Ambitions it’s not working well. So I was slowly messing around with my custom content, compressing it but nothing seemed to help. I set the preferences to lowest. Note that they were always on the highest and the game worked well. Even that didn’t help.

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Thanks a lot for your feedback, guys! It’s really helped me to decide how to organize my downloads. In the end, I’ve decided to organize by the type of custom content. I try to avoid having too many folders as I don’t like browsing custom content through so many sub-folders. I kept the original folder organized by artists, though. Maybe I change my mind later, who knows, but hopefully this will work well for me.

I also packed the .sims3package files with Sims 3 Package Editor. It has reduced the size to half, which is really cool. Now I only have abou 350 MB of downloads and the loading is a little faster. My game keeps lagging a lot, though. My computer isn’t the fastest, it also seems I have some sort of malware that keeps my CPU busy. I’m planning to re-install Windows and all my games again, even though I really hate to. The game even crashed once when there was a strike in front of the City Hall–too many Sims on one place is a bad thing for my game right now. When I’m in the Build or Buy Mode, it runs very smooth. Too bad I forgot to save my game. Grrr. I was just playing for Agyness Crumplebottom and reconstructed her house. I can start from the scratch now. But it’s not that bad, I’m sure I’ll get everything done again pretty fast.

My question is: What did you do last time you played the game?

Maybe you’ve already read my problem regarding lost traits after patching the game. All Sims in the neighborhoods I played basically lost their traits. If I knew it happened only to Sims in neghborhoods I played, I think I would not play World Adventures at all. Because when the new patch was released and the issue was fixed, I relized I wasn’t in Egypt and Sims there didn’t lose their traits.

I really don’t know if that’s a good thing or a bad thing. It’s good because at least something is working, bad because I could save more traits if I knew this earlier.

Nevertheless, I’m slowly getting all traits back. I have done the whole Sunset Valley, visited one lot from another to use enabletestingcheats true, SHIFT-click the active Sims and add their previous traits I found here. Took a while but it was definitely worth it.

The problem is that you can’t add traits to non-active Sims. And it’s a tiny little problem, because as far as I know, there are a few NPCs in the ‘hoods (like burglars and maids, they don’t actually live anywhere, or at least I didn’t find them anywhere). Another problem is that (I think, I’m not 100 per cent sure right now) that you can’t play the the Sims in China, France or Egypt.

One of the ways would be to add them to your family, which is possible with enabletestingcheats true, but then I couldn’t get the Sims back to their houses. So, I’m pretty much lost here.

Do you have any ideas how to solve this? Is there any mod for adding/editing traits of non-active Sims? I searched MTS but no luck so far…

I’m in a need for few answers that some of you might know. I’m playing for the Wollfs now and Thornton is in the business career. I made him to become a partner of the business building in the center of Sunset Valley. The thing is I’ve never figured out one thing: how do a Sim who is already a partner of some building make other Sims to become partners? (Duh, I can’t explain what I mean clearly, I hope you know what I mean.) Even when the game is loading there is a tip saying that Sims can earn more money if they find new partners (but they should chose wisely, because some like to slack.) So, any ideas?

Another thing that’s bothering me is that I have no idea how to invite friends to come  to a trip with my Sims. When I use the phone, I can always just take other family members with me, but no friends. At first I thought they needed to be best friends or good friends, but it doesn’t seem to work, either. This option was in TS2 and I think even in TS1, so I suppose I’m looking at the wrong place or something.

Oh and I wanted to ask you about traits for Sims in the Sunset Valley since they lost them when I updated the game with one of the latest patches (and it’s so annoying! Sims with no traits, it makes no sense…). I found a site where all Sims in Sunset Valley are listed, so now I can add their traits with cheats again. It’s going to take a while, but it’s better than nothing… Just in case you were interested.