Sims 3 Keeps Freezing/Crashing on my Mac!

[iamlid5295]

Every thirty or so minutes, my Sims 3 game randomly freezes or crashes. Nothing that I am doing in the game causes the freeze or crash. It does one of two things: either it freezes so that the music is still playing and my mouse can move but nothing else is happening and I am forced to anually shut down my computer or the game simply crashes without any warning. I've heard some theories about why this might be happening, but someone please tell me what to do so I can continue playing without having to restart every thirty minutes! Thanks. 

[gaa17 · Accepted solution]

There is nothing you can do to completely avoid this.  It's always going to happen unless you play in extremely short time intervals, i.e. less than 30 minutes.  There are things you can do to extend your playing time before the crash happens.  

I'm not sure how much troubleshooting you've already tried, but here's some advice:

If you actually want to "play" the game as it's supposed to work, then get a PC or Bootcamp & Windows for your Mac. The game is not natively written for our systems (I have a mid-2009 Macbook Pro). As long as EA uses Cider, a "wrapper" for the game that enables Macs to play Windows games, it's going to crash with memory issues.

Do not follow EA game advisors' advice without taking into account that many times their advice is wrong for Mac users and can harm our systems. Just use common sense when it comes to their "advice."

Here are two good posts from the Sims 3 Mac forum that have a couple of useful "band-aids" to get the game to work temporarily:
-- http://forum.thesims3.com/jforum/posts/list/658546.page
-- http://forum.thesims3.com/jforum/posts/list/611723.page

Best of luck in your battle to play the Sims 3.

[gaa17 · Accepted solution]

There is nothing you can do to completely avoid this.  It's always going to happen unless you play in extremely short time intervals, i.e. less than 30 minutes.  There are things you can do to extend your playing time before the crash happens.  

I'm not sure how much troubleshooting you've already tried, but here's some advice:

If you actually want to "play" the game as it's supposed to work, then get a PC or Bootcamp & Windows for your Mac. The game is not natively written for our systems (I have a mid-2009 Macbook Pro). As long as EA uses Cider, a "wrapper" for the game that enables Macs to play Windows games, it's going to crash with memory issues.

Do not follow EA game advisors' advice without taking into account that many times their advice is wrong for Mac users and can harm our systems. Just use common sense when it comes to their "advice."

Here are two good posts from the Sims 3 Mac forum that have a couple of useful "band-aids" to get the game to work temporarily:
-- http://forum.thesims3.com/jforum/posts/list/658546.page
-- http://forum.thesims3.com/jforum/posts/list/611723.page

Best of luck in your battle to play the Sims 3.

[snipaguy568]

Hmm somehow i don't think that the game developers made the game so that if your game messes up, you have to just deal with it. there are sertain things you can do to fix this so your game won't mess up This is a direct link to a sims 3 superpatcher for the mac. US. http://llnet.thesims.cdn.ea.com/sims/u/f/sims3/mac/To-9010-1.55
.4.022001.tgz This patches all those nasty glitches so they wont happen. but if you don't live in the us you can look at all the countries here: http://forum.thesims3.com/jforum/posts/list/549552.page just coppy and paste the link to your search bar

Hope i could help!

Snipaguy

[alexasavannah]

Help my sims 3 pets will whenever I enter Create a Pet it will crash no matter what town or animal I have no cc

[roberta591]

alexasavannah - this post has been marked as solved - Please create a new topic with your problem. If your computer is a mac you may get more help in the mac technical discussion group at thesims3.com forums.

[donnalouise1395]

Cleaning up the memory on my Mac has made an incredible amount of difference! You can do this by typing 'purge' in the terminal (must have Xcode installed, came on your mac disk with the computer) otherwise, any memory boosting app.

[kjh000225]

@snipaguy568 hello! I just downloaded the patch from the link, I was wondering where I should be placing it, or do I just install it and it's good to go?
Thank you in advance! )

[puzzlezaddict]

@kjh000225  This thread is quite old and outdated.  Please start your own thread in the Mac section (here) describing your issue, and let us know whether you're running the 32-bit or the 64-bit version of Sims 3.