I had been following this thread for almost a full year with my game unplayable, until last month it is finally working again. Thank you @CowsArrTasty for your detailed post that convinced me to keep troubleshooting, and everyone else who offered information!
First of all, I am playing on Xbox One, I have never downloaded anything from the public gallery, and never used any cheats. My Xbox has plenty of space available. When the error 22 first started in March 2020, I did all of the trouble shoots including power cycle, unplug, delete reserve space, delete game and reinstall, completely clear library, etc. None of those solutions worked. The only thing I was not willing to do was delete my lot and household because if that was necessary the game would not be worth fixing, haha!
Once Error 22 began, none of my games would save, and even without saving, just traveling to another lot would crash the game with a different error code. Forcing manual auto saves worked sometimes, and other times not, and I wasn't able to fully figure out why some were working and others weren't because I was running out of my precious saves to try and risk having them get deleted. I decided to start a brand new game with a new save, and immediately the game would not force autosave and crashed with error 22 on the first try. Every time Error 22 would appear, the dialogue box would suggest returning to the main menu. If I did use that button, I would be returned to the main menu but the audio of my household kept playing in the background, and the save I was previously on would be completely gone. However, if once Error 22 appeared I manually restarted the Xbox, then my save was still there when I rebooted, but still could not be saved.
I only play one single household with a family that also owns 2 retail properties, and I usually keep all the save slots full with this household’s progress. However, I was a little (a lot) obsessive when it came to creating and keeping TONS of custom paintings and photographs on my sims walls on their home lot and business lots. I was pretty stuck on not losing my lot and years of progress. I removed ALL of the paintings and photographs. I probably only needed to remove the ones that were created by my sim, but I removed the build mode purchased ones too just to be safe. Then, I uploaded the lot and my household to my library, and deleted everything else from my library - which was basically just dev game content since I had no custom downloads in there. I then deleted all my saves, deleted the reserve space, deleted the game, shut down the xbox, unplugged, plugged in, turned on, re-installed sims, started a new game, and used the only 2 things in my library - my one lot and one household (no paintings) - to start a new game. And woot woot my game is working and saving! I’m avoiding paintings and photographs all together so far.
THEN, I remembered something from a few months before the Error 22 started, around Winter 2019… I was playing on one of the retail lots (which I called the Art Gallery, hence the obsessive amount of paintings), and placing paintings from my sim’s inventory to the lot walls. I received an Error message - I can’t remember the exact words/number, but it was something along the lines of “This lot has reached the maximum number of paintings and photographs. Maximum #.” I think it was 125. I clicked ok, deleted a bunch (maybe 30ish), and then placed the rest of the ones from inventory without a problem. I told myself that I would just keep gradually adding paintings until I got the error code again, then delete more, etc. (dumb move, should have known better, lol). When I went to this lot to DELETE the paintings last month, and was counting the number of deleted ones, it was over 300, and the warning message had never re-appeared. Then I remembered that while researching Error 22, some people had mentioned that the way custom paintings and photographs were coded as objects in the game changed when the Gallery was brought to consoles in January 2020. Is it possible that when they changed the way paintings were programmed, they forgot to re-program the error message that lets you know when you have too many of them? It would make sense on my timeline. Maybe not the problem for everyone but it certainly was for me. I will spare you my heartbreak over having to play without custom capture paintings, but I am happy to have my game working again!
I should also mention that last month my Xbox disk reader crashed. I was originally playing on disk base game with expansions purchased digitally, and now I’m fully on the downloaded versions. I really don’t think this had any effect, but thought I would mention it as a variable.
Sorry for such a long post but I hope it helps others! Tagging @PoptartJuniper
