Sims 3 64 bit keeps crashing

[CatCrackerz]

For the first two weeks or so of playing the sims 3 64 bit version, I had no problems with the game lagging or crashing. However, lately it has been crashing more and more, with today seeing a total of 7 crashes.I was looking to try to find what I was doing that would cause the crash, and I couldn't come up with any pattern. Sometimes, my game would lag, and the rainbow loading scroll would come up, but then I would be able to play the game until I decided to quit. Other times, I would boot up the game, and it would run perfectly smoothly until five minutes later it would crash when I would try to tell my sim to sleep or make pancakes. I have all the expansion packs installed and high end loft stuff. The household I'm playing with has two sims (a fairy and a witch), two cats, and a dog. I'm playing in Moonlight Falls. At first, I thought that it was the pets causing the problem, but I have had them the entire time with no problems before a few days ago. My MacBook is currently running Catalina 10.15.6, it has a 2.3Ghz intel core i7 processor, 16gb ram, intel iris plus 1536mb graphics card, and over 200gb still available. From my understanding, these specs are even above the recommended ones for the metal version. The crash reports I've gotten are quite lengthly, so I don't think I can copy and paste it here. My game is mod and cc free (frankly, because I don't know how to install them for the sims 3), and I am open to any suggestions as to what I can do. The one thing that I have noticed is that my game can stay on without crashing for a long time if I leave it paused, but then if I try to play it will crash within ten minutes with no lag beforehand warning me. Any thoughts?

[puzzlezaddict]

@CatCrackerz  The issue might in fact be the pets, although it's difficult to be sure.  Plenty of players with hardware similar to yours have been unable to use the Pets EP without crashing, but that's not a universal experience.

Since you could originally play fine with pets, the animals themselves may not be the issue, but perhaps something else going on in the world, for example a pack of wild horses spawning somewhere inconvenient or a baby animal getting stuck.  Inactive households will adopt pets too, and those can cause problems even if your own sims' pets are fine.

If you're willing to use mods, I can recommend some to try, although I can't promise they'll help without knowing the exact cause of the crashes.  If you don't want to use them, try disabling all the pet-related options you can find within the game settings.

It's also a good idea to delete the five cache files in Documents > Electronic Arts > The Sims 3 every time you get a crash.  (The files should be deleted regularly anyway.)  For reference, they are:

• CASPartCache.package
• compositorCache.package
• scriptCache.package
• simCompositorCache.package
• socialCache.package

If there are any files in the CurrentGame folder, delete those as well.  That folder should always be empty unless you actually have a save loaded.

[CatCrackerz]

I'm open to using mods in my game, although from what I've seen the process is a bit more involved than the sims 4. 

[puzzlezaddict]

@CatCrackerz  It's more involved, but still fairly straightforward.  Here's a guide, if you're curious:

https://modthesims.info/wiki.php?title=Game_Help:TS3_System_Requirements

In your position, I'd start with NRaas ErrorTrap, Overwatch, MasterController, and Register.  The first two do their own cleanup without any need for user input; MC does nothing unless you use it to issue a command; Register controls the role sim population, which includes stray animals.  Overwatch also has the option to shut down the neighborhood pet adoption feature, where an inactive household is selected to host randomly generated puppies or kittens.  This feature can easily break, so I'd recommend disabling it.

With Register, you can disable strays and wild animals, which I'd try doing too, at least for now.  If it stops the crashing, great, that's a solution that doesn't affect your sims' ability to have pets.

[CatCrackerz]

I installed those mods and turned off strays and wild animals. My game would lag whenever one of the mods caught an error, but it didn't crash until I started turning my camera after I turned it into full screen mode (only 10 minutes after I opened the world). is there any known problem with using fullscreen instead of windowed?

For reference, I originally thought that there was no correlation between the crashing and if it had it fullscreen or windowed. for the first few weeks of playing the game, I played it in fullscreen with the 4:3 aspect ratio, and recently got it to a 16:10 aspect ratio. Could that also be part of the problem?

[puzzlezaddict]

@CatCrackerz  When you're playing in fullscreen mode, using an aspect ratio supported by your screen, either its native resolution or a supported scaled res, should give slightly better performance than other options.  However, if you were using the default 1024x768 res, that involves many fewer pixels than whatever higher res you're using now.  Fewer pixels means less work for the graphics card, which can mean less crashing if the graphics rendering is the underlying issue.

Windowed resolution can improve performance, or at least decrease the rate of crashing, although it doesn't always.  Two of the reasons it can help are the lower resolution it often involves and the fact that an unsupported resolution doesn't matter anymore: playing at a 4:3 aspect ratio wouldn't matter because the system doesn't need to resize the game window.

If you'd like to test, try using one of the reduced 16:10 resolutions and see how it goes.  Without knowing your exact model Mac, I can't check that they're all supported, but at least most of them should be.

[CatCrackerz]

@puzzlezaddict I was able to play a bit more before the game crashed. This time, I noticed something. When I first loaded up the game, Rainflower Ivy had an error, and the game caught that. Then he kept having constant errors. Then Helen Hall started having a lot of errors. In about ten minutes, I was getting about 5 notifications every second about a sim error, and then my game crashed. No lagging or anything, but there were a lot of error messages. I don't know what this means for my game, if it's a corrupted save or something, but I figured it was important. I tried looking up what this all meant, since I am new to mods, so any ideas?

[puzzlezaddict]

@CatCrackerz  As much as I'd like to help, I don't have any particular skill for reading scripterrors, so I'd suggest you post on the NRaas site.  You'll have to make an account, but then you can upload the scripterrors (in Documents > Electronic Arts > The Sims 3) by dragging and dropping the files into a post.  The people there should be able to tell you what the errors mean, and hopefully what interventions might help.

[toyotacamri98]

Hi

So I am playing Sims 3 64 bit mac version and I am having a lot of problems with it. 

Every single time that I play I can't go in the fast modes because it will almost immediately freeze afterwards and after about 2 to 3 minutes of playing very cautiously the game freezes and that rainbow circle comes up and I have to force quit to the game. I will also note that my computer never heats up when I am playing it and I've heard thats not normal. I uninstalled all of my packs but that didn't do anything. I delete all of the cache files and everything in my current game folder. I use the Catalina and I'm not sure what to do.

[puzzlezaddict]

@toyotacamri98  Please attach your deviceconfig.log to a post; it's in Documents > Electronic Arts > The Sims 3.  (You'll need to manually open the folders; the file won't show up in a search.)  You can delete your user and computer names, about 25 lines down, but there's nothing else in that file that can identify you.

And let me know whether you currently have any packs installed, and which world(s) you've been playing in.