Sims 3 restarts my computer? [ Edited ]

[NovaScotia1867]

Hi,

Today my Sims 3 game (Mac) keeps crashing my entire computer after playing it for about 10 minutes. I can load a saved game okay, but as soon as I start editing the town, it will suddenly freeze and my computer then has to restart due to running into a problem. I've restarted the game twice, and both times it's crashed.

What could be the cause? I've downloaded quite a lot of custom content, so could one of them be glitchy? The game was working fine up until now, as I hadn't been playing it for about four years.

My Mac is a MacBook Pro, mid or late 2013, with MacOS El Capitan installed.

Any tips will be appreciated!

[puzzlezaddict · Accepted solution]

@NovaScotia1867  Bad cc is certainly one possible cause of the crashes, but so is hitting the RAM limit.  Edit Town is more demanding than general gameplay (so is CAS), and your game has a hard limit of 2 GB RAM due to the way it was ported into mac OS.  It's easy to find out if this is the case—open the Activity Monitor and check how much memory the game is using.  You can hit cmd-enter to toggle between fullscreen and windowed mode.

https://bluebellflora.com/resetting-ram-during-gameplay/

If your RAM use is below 1.9 GB or so, even after ten minutes in Edit Town, then the next thing to try is a new save.  Do the same things that were crashing your computer still cause problems in a brand new world?  If not, then there might just be a problem with the particular save.  It happens.  One thing that helps is to delete the five cache files in your game folder.  For reference, they are:

CASPartCache.package

compositorCache.package

scriptCache.package

simCompositorCache.package

socialCache.package

There's not much else you can do about it in an unmodded game, except try a clean folder, which is also the best approach if you still see crashing in a new save.  Move your entire TS3 game folder out of Documents and onto your desktop, and a clean folder will spawn the next time you launch the game.  Play a new save for a bit, checking to make sure Edit Town and CAS work properly.  If so, you can try moving your existing saves into this folder from the old one.

If none of this helps, or you're not getting the results you'd like, please post back describing the results of these various troubleshooting steps.  It would also help to know the specs of your mac, as well as which packs you have installed.

gather mac specs:  https://answers.ea.com/t5/The-Sims-Mac/READ-FIRST-Sims-3-Mac-Help-Guides-and-Troubleshooting/m-p/475...

[puzzlezaddict · Accepted solution]

@NovaScotia1867  Bad cc is certainly one possible cause of the crashes, but so is hitting the RAM limit.  Edit Town is more demanding than general gameplay (so is CAS), and your game has a hard limit of 2 GB RAM due to the way it was ported into mac OS.  It's easy to find out if this is the case—open the Activity Monitor and check how much memory the game is using.  You can hit cmd-enter to toggle between fullscreen and windowed mode.

https://bluebellflora.com/resetting-ram-during-gameplay/

If your RAM use is below 1.9 GB or so, even after ten minutes in Edit Town, then the next thing to try is a new save.  Do the same things that were crashing your computer still cause problems in a brand new world?  If not, then there might just be a problem with the particular save.  It happens.  One thing that helps is to delete the five cache files in your game folder.  For reference, they are:

CASPartCache.package

compositorCache.package

scriptCache.package

simCompositorCache.package

socialCache.package

There's not much else you can do about it in an unmodded game, except try a clean folder, which is also the best approach if you still see crashing in a new save.  Move your entire TS3 game folder out of Documents and onto your desktop, and a clean folder will spawn the next time you launch the game.  Play a new save for a bit, checking to make sure Edit Town and CAS work properly.  If so, you can try moving your existing saves into this folder from the old one.

If none of this helps, or you're not getting the results you'd like, please post back describing the results of these various troubleshooting steps.  It would also help to know the specs of your mac, as well as which packs you have installed.

gather mac specs:  https://answers.ea.com/t5/The-Sims-Mac/READ-FIRST-Sims-3-Mac-Help-Guides-and-Troubleshooting/m-p/475...

[NovaScotia1867]

I think I've fixed the problem: I found a few temporary files in my Sims 3 folder that I thought were causing the crashes. I deleted them, emptied the Trash, opened the game... No crashing!

Thanks anyway!