Hello,

I have a question about merging CC, what items can you merge and what items can't you merge?

For example I want to download some CC cars and I am just wondering if I can merge them or not.

I know you shouldn't merge patterns, or mods.

Thank you

I honestly would not consider merging anything that I've not used regularly in the game for at least a month. If you decide that for whatever reason you don't like it, it doesn't suit your game as well as you thought it would, it's causing trouble, or you just have too much CC and need to get rid of some of the items you use less often, it's a lot easier to just pull a single package out of the Mods folder.

But cars should be safe to merge.

I have merged all clothing and hairs except for store items, which I'm given to understand shouldn't be merged. But as Ghost says, make sure they work and that you really want them first. I discovered that a couple of the hairs I'd merged didn't work quite right. Fortunately I'd kept back ups of all the original packages so I was able to re-do the merging and miss out the faulty ones. I'd advise you to keep backups of everything too.

Thank you both for your replies

Ok, I have a related question: which sims3pack items should not be converted into packages?
AFAIK, patterns belong in this category, as well as kitchen sets, because if converted, counters and cabinets can become buggy and won't allign.
Anything else?

Worlds, of course, shouldn't be converted into packages.

For merging packages, you can merge your Nraas mods - if you have them - except for ErrorTrap and... one other I can't recall right now. I believe it was Story Progression? Those have to be their own files. Just, as Elynda said, keep a back-up of the separate files. It's much easier to just re-merge a new merged package with the items you don't want to use anymore than to un-merge the package and re-merge from that.

You can convert worlds if you want to, it just takes a few extra steps: TS3 Installing Worlds Without The Launcher
Note: after extracting the STBL files, you need to include them in a .package, otherwise the game won't read them.

This is helpful if you want to grab certain items that come with a world without having the world or everything in it as well. Otherwise there isn't a specific benefit to it, from what I've seen.

Also, remember that ALL of the NRAAS mods are still being updated. This means that you will regularly be updating your combined mods package if you merge them.

Whoever wrote the instructions for converting store worlds made one mistake, though: you should never use decrapify.exe if you legally own the world, especially not if you have used the world or any of its content in an already existing save.

I have found it is trial and error with patterns. I convert everything to packages that I can, but have found that some patterns have to stay as packs to work.

On the patterns though, there are a few helpful tuts to fix the error. It's actually a really stupid thing that makes it crash and hate sims3packs>packages... which is just a space somewhere in the code: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TrJFNZ6vut8

Is it okay to merge pose packages?

So I know this is old, but I found this thread on Google when searching to see if I could merge Fresh-Prince's car package files. I did it and the few I merged were showing up in game, HOWEVER , when I went to merge more cars, I noticed that there were many _XML lines in SP3E that were crossed out. They all had the same Type (0x73E93EEB) Group (0x00000000) and Instance (0x0000000000000000).

When they're crossed out like that, only one will be kept and the others will be deleted when you save the package. These XMLs contain part of the item Description and Reskeys, so you probably want them to remain intact for each car. So unless someone has some more information for me, I would suggest that you do not merge car files, or only merge a few and check to see if any lines are being overwritten.

I merge the cars, and everything works fine.

Okay awesome, if nothing at all seems to be wrong when you merged them, then that's exactly what I wanted to hear. I'll merge them again when I have a chance. Maybe those _XML lines are all redundant info from importing the different packs. Thanks for responding! :D