Prevent Love Letters to Avoid Game Corruption

Arguably the most severe glitch in The Sims 3 that had not yet been consistently fixed in gamemods, is when an active household all of a sudden has their Sims be reset almost every time they choose "Get Mail" from their mailboxes, and the mailboxes would get continuously stuffed with unusable and unpayable bills and Omni Plant boxes, which are also very difficult to get rid off without e.g. NRaas Debug Enabler.

The "No Bills" lifetime reward doesn't fix it, and replacing the mailbox with Buydebug doesn't fix it. No consistent widely working fixes for it have been found (NRaas Overwatch was listed in 2012 as being able to replace the "Get Mail" interaction with a fixed one, but is not listed as such in 2025).

This overall situation left the glitch as a nightmare that made long-running savefiles near-unplayable...

...until now!

————————————————————————————————————————————————————

This gamemod aims to prevent love letters from spawning in the household's mailbox at all, which in turn seems to prevent and for the most part even revert the de facto savefile corruptions that are affected by the glitch.

And even for non-corrupted savefiles, it also prevents the notifications getting filled with all sorts of love letters from maybe a fifth of the town in the mailbox every day. By intention, the gamemod does however not prevent player Sims from manually sending love letters to NPC households (and it should on paper be able to continue to receive replies to those love letters too).

The gamemod modifies the following files in GameplayData.package:
• LoveLetter_0x98d77ba1404ef0b1
•• kChanceOfLoveLetterNormal: 10 → 0
•• kChanceOfLoveLetterInSpring: 20 → 0
•• kChanceOfLoveLetterOnSpringHoliday: 50 → 0
•• kLTRForHighRomanceTNS: 50 → 50000
• AttractionGift_0xa0de798497f159e1
•• GiftBuyCategories: kBuyCategoryDecor > F (A value that never matches anything)
•• GiftBuySubCategories: "kBuySubCategorySculptures, kBuySubCategoryPaintingsAndPosters, kBuySubCategoryPlants" > F
•• GiftBuySubCategories2: (Empty) > F
•• GiftBuyRoomSubCategories: kBuyRoomSubCategoryPaintingsAndPostersForGrownUps, kBuyRoomSubCategoryPlants > F
•• CanGiveRepeats: True > False
• AttractionNPCBehaviorController_0xc192d24b58f73168
•• kAttractionGiftLetterMaxChancePerDay: 10 > 0
•• kAttractionLTRThresholds: "-10, 50" > "99.9, 100.0"

——— Notes: ———
• It seems to remain possible to occasionally receive empty gift boxes, but they will not reset the Sim nor cause inventory spam. Purportedly those empty boxes involve an entirely separate glitch about University Life in-game blogs.
• Once this gamemod is in use, players must still remove any previously remaining corrupted mailbox items one last time before the gamemod truly takes effect, after which point no further corrupted mailbox items will occur.
• The gamemod was only tested with Patch 67; should very likely work with Patch 68 and 70 too. It should on paper also work with all patches from Patch 50 onwards. Patch 42-48 seems unlikely to work, but hardcore players could plausibly try that out.
• The mod is known to conflict with the following other mods:
•• More/Less Attraction Calls & Love Letters - 4 Flavors (but also makes its "Eliminated" version superfluous.)
•• Sims 3 Attraction System Overhaul (Specifically the MFC_RelationshipController file.)
•• Retuned Attraction System

——— Changelog: ———
• 29 April 2025: Replaced the page's main image in an attempt to get better colour contrast in the search results.
• 28 April 2025: Removed Seasons from the "Required EPs" list on this gamemod's page after I learned that love letters are possible for all players (including those without Seasons) with Patch 42 or later, despite many tuning values for love letters referring to Seasons features.