Sims 3 Family Won't Load/Custom Content

[actress4433]

I've been playing the Sims 3 on my new Windows 10 laptop for about a month and a half now - and it's only brought up this loading business today. I open my main family (I have put a *-ton of effort into the town; recreating families, buildings houses, installing community lots) and it brings up the 'click to find' screen. The loading bar would almost fully load before pausing and freezing like that, but the interactive screen would still move on. I thought that maybe it was the interactive screen or the amount of files on my laptop, so I turned off the interactive loading screen and cleared a majority of my files onto a USB. 

Still not loading.

I've seen people with the same problem being told to do a 'factory reset' or whatever. My main issue here is that I have a LOT of custom content in this game - enough that if I were to fix the file in any way, if I deleted all of my custom content, the whole town and 90% of the families within would be absolutely ruined, not to mention a lot of my other games would also be severely affected. Almost every sim I've created in that one game file has at least five custom content items on them, not to mention the furniture in the houses and some custom community lots and pet skins.

I have six games installed (base game, pets, university, seasons, town life and supernatural) and my game is up to date if that helps. If it's just a spacial issue, I'm more than willing to chuck my download files and such onto a USB.

Is there any way I can salvage my save file without having to sacrifice my custom content? And if there is a solution, I politely ask that you dumb it down as much as you can. I'm a total techie noob when it comes to this stuff, haha.

Thanks in advance everyone!!  

[crinrict]

Hi,

the first step is to find out if it IS in fact your custom content that's causing the issue.

To do so, you backup your whole user folder and then move it to the desktop (DO NOT DELETE ANYTHING)

Your save game will now be gone anyways since you removed it from your user folder. 

Start a new game and see if it loads. If it does, copy back your save game and see if that loads now (make sure you keep a copy in your backup folder)

If it still loads, custom content is the culprit and you need to find out which one.

Start with the one you've last added and remove that.

Here's instructions on how to go about finding what cc is borked: http://modthesims.info/wiki.php?title=Game_Help:Finding_Problem_Custom_Content

It could also be simply an issue of too much custom content

[actress4433]

I can back it up by putting the Sims game folders onto a USB, right? It seems I only have one family that still loads, but only that one. I can't even start a new game without it pausing just before the end.