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Smooth Game

For Sims 3 achieving a smoothly running game can be quite demanding.

Here are some tips.

• I use 3-booter to load it. This stops the game running at stupid frames a second, and potentially burning out your graphics card! Mine showed 200 FPS at times. No human eye can see as fast as that.
• DO NOT use Origin! It slowed my game down MASSIVELY. For me, not using it meant I had to totally uninstall and reinstall, and STOP at patch 1.67. Do NOT install patch 1.69, as all it seems to do is enable Origin.
• NEVER ‘Save’. ALWAYS ‘Save as’. Saving overwrites your last save, and if something causes your save to become corrupt, you will lose EVERYTHING. Using ‘Save as’ ensures that each time you save, a new save folder is created. if for some reason your most recent ‘save as’ is corrupted, the last backup should be roughly around the same spot. you’ll lose hours of work, rather than months of work! You can get a mod that reminds you to "Save as" from NRaas, or use AM's config. You will need to clean out some of the Save folders from time to time to avoid bloat.
• Back up your .sim files and home lots, not just your save files. Put them in a folder outside of your TS3 folder. Upload them to a file sharing service biweekly (or more, depending how much you play). That way if for some reason your computer dies or needs to be wiped, you’ll have a recent save of your current families stored in the cloud. Also, if you upload a S3P of your family’s current lot, you may be able to salvage some cc, or at the very least, the structure of their home. Backing up the library file might also be a good idea.
• Convert anything that you can to package files. When you download CC in a Sims3Pack format, separate what can and cannot be converted into separate folders.
• Use Delphy’s S3P multi-extractor. Convert anything and everything except lots, worlds and counters/patterns (because they may break your game!).
• DO NOT CONVERT COUNTERS OR PATTERNS to package files. Extracting counters may lead to some bugs and extracting (some!) patterns leads to the “materializing materials” error in CASt.
• “Quarantine” new cc! Put my new cc into a folder named “toxic” or "test" or "Careful" or whatever suits your style. Whatever you call it, the process is the same. If you are able to play without any issues, for a couple of loads, THEN move the cc from “toxic” into the general CC population and repeat as you add new cc. If for some reason your game won’t start, move the‘toxic’ folder out and start troubleshooting. You could also just sort your cc folder by “last added”, but if you move your CC folder around a lot (I do sometimes move the subfolders in and out of my game folders) the dates will not always be correct and it may be harder to find the offending cc.
• Use Delphy’s Dashboard to find corrupted CC, duplicates and conflicts.
• Depending on your computer's specs, some worlds may be just too big, or too heavily built or populated to play comfortably. Find out what size plays well. I find with a large world, turning off snow helps!
• A LOT of trees in a world can cause problems. Forested worlds seem to give me trouble.
• NRAAS mods: I usually use Master Controller, ErrorTrap, Overwatch and Register.
• AwesomeMod.

Credits: #riskywoohoo, #Simmery and other hijinks, #MATY, #Neighbourhood99 and many many more.