Hello,
I have the NRaas Traveler mod, it is an amazing mod, it really helped me maintain my relationships while moving to a new town.

However, my save game has become so bloated that I can not move to another new town anymore (game crashes/freezes)

So, I was wondering, how can I "move" my relationship data and everything to a brand new save (a new save with the same family, i copied them to the library and everything)?

Thank you in advance!

I also tried NRaas Porter, but it gave me "Only one packed family was found, no need to unpack", can anybody please explain why? Sorry if its a stupid question btw.

Oh, Porter just port Sim families.

Just catching up here, but OP is receiving assistance from us at NRaas.

As far as I know, you can't merge saves. Traveling will bloat a game as more and more Sims and objects are added from each world. If one of the Nraas mods can help, I would love to know also, and maybe @Igazor knows something?

With NRaas Traveler, Overwatch, and ErrorTrap in play, the individual world data stays contained in the individual nhd files and the single TravelDB file. Sure the entire game save grows in size after a while but with care, save cleaning, and maintenance, not necessarily to the point where things become unplayable. My long-running game has 16 NRaas Traveler connected worlds in it, my sims travel like maniacs, and each save instance is currently weighing in at around 2.3 GB. The key though is that only the currently being simulated world among the group is ever loaded into RAM so the rest is just data that comes along for the ride and is there only if needed. Certainly none of my individual world nhd files within the save are that large as I take action if they ever go above 350 MB or so.

The other key is don't let more and more sims get added to each world without any being removed. Population control is important to keep an eye on.

@Igazor, population control is probably the biggest issue. I have the mods mentioned, and several more... Still, I can clean saves, and end up over 400 MB, and things slow to a grind, after enough travel.

I can confirm everything Igazor just said as my world population is heavily controlled. When you say 400 MB, are you saying the whole save folder is 400MB? Or you are referring to one individual NHD? As a global player, my world is connected to ... maybe a dozen off world including university and future world, the homeworld NHD is typically under 100MB after cleaning and can bloat to 250MB, which is when I would give it a good clean.

So for a while, each time I travel, my homeworld NHD will start loading longer and longer, from 15 mins until eventually 2 hours. This turned out to be a corruption in the original save that is carried on from my homeworld to my offworlds. So even when I deep clean my homeworld, I bring this corruption back when I travel. Right now I am in the process of cleaning each world, I've cleaned around 7-8 worlds now and my homeworld save is consistent at 5 min load time.

Save time corruption, not load time, is caused by "NRaas_ErrorTrap_Tuning_DisableDereferencing" which is a common file KW users have. This can bloat your save time up 2 hrs, 4hr,s infinity. Remove this file if you have it. I suspect it can also bloat your savefile size, if you are having that issue.

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So that's just the logistics of load/save time from corruption. When that is resolved, the game should run relatively fine even if your world is overbloated. At over 250 resident sims in a typical world and another 250+ service sims, you might start having error 12 issues. That is always more prevalent than how the game performs. However, a bulk of your world population comes from your dead sims in family trees. Family tree extends indefinitely the longer you play. Dead sims in family tree as well as travel world sims that you bring over are stored in "mini sims." They don't take up as much as regular sims, but imagine every resident and tourist in your town carrying a huge family tree data that extends for 5-6 generations. Again, you are likely to hit error 12 before any performance reduction.

I use to remove any dead sims 4 generations up, meaning my sims family tree only extends 4 generation to great grandparents. I do the same thing to every vacation world I travel to. However, this was before finding out about the corruption issue, so now I allow it to extend up to 5th or 6th generation and so far I haven't really seen any issues. But if you are concerned over such things here are some helpful tips.

Population Control:
If you are using KW, which I suspect you are, you should disable all nonKW pregnancy in the settings and use just the KW pregnancy and enable condom use, or they'll breed like rabbits. If you are running NRAAS SP, you also need to disable pregnancy in the SP setting both for the town and for active household.

If you are using KW, the NRAAS SP max population control won't work as it only deals with mod not creating more sims over a certain limit. This is why you must control it through KW.

Clearing family tree:
This might be a bit tedious. Using NRAAS MC, go to sims --> basic --> family tree --> homeworld --> dead (or minisim) --> select all.

Dead sims only become minisims if you delete their tombstone (and save, quite, reload once). I recommend this because if you want to keep some in your graveyard, then choosing minisim will not show those tombstones. When you go through the sim, right click on the icon. Dead sims typically have no interaction option, except the MC menu, which choose advanced and then total annihilation to delete that minisim.

In NRAAS MC, when you look at the minisims of the whole world, you'll see tourists mini-sims. Do not touch those. Altering those in your homeworld can cause corruption. If you wish to modify any offworld family trees etc... or population, do it at their location by traveling there.

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Anytime the loading/saving is too long or your NHD is too big, it is typically some sort of corruption. So I would probably focus on that. For the game to bloat that big just base on population is unlikely. However, I should mention that cross breeding between different worlds may also cause bloating. See, I don't think having too many mini sims is the real issue, but it is the family tree itself. The more complex it is, the more RAM it uses, save space it uses, etc... So when your sims are only breeding within the homeworld, the family tree stays with the homeworld. Tourist guests brings their family tree but they are still isolated only to their homeworld. But when you mix different worlds, you literally inject a 2ndary family tree into your homeworld family tree and that may not be a good idea. This can potentially explode exponentially.

If your game is suffering from long load time, save time, etc... you suspect some sort of deep corruption, start a brand new game and see if the save and load is short. This will confirm whether there are other issues. If a new game load and save is fast and clean, it means your original savegame is corrupt. This require a pain in the butt deep clean.

Save down any lots you want into the lot bin. Using NRAAS Porter, port your sims household out. Then start a brand new game of the same world of your old save (or use a totally different one, doesn't matter). Using NRAAS MC, terminate all resident sims, you may leave the service sims. Then replace all the lots with your lots before porting your sims back in. Save. This is your new cleaned homeworld. It should load and save relatively fast. (You will lose any family connection outside each household. This cannot be helped as the corruption was probably related to those family trees anyways.)

It is recommended that you do the same with your other offworlds before adding them back into your new cleaned save game. You can test it first if it is too tedious. Simply put the NHD of a world you want to travel into the save and load the game. Travel to the new world and save a "temp" save. Make sure the temp save is fast load/save. Then travel back to your homeworld and save a "temp 2." Quit and load temp 2, then save again, if the load/save is the same as before you traveled, that offworld is not corrupt and does not require any cleaning.

If a offworld requires cleaning, load the offworld as a new homeworld and save. Then replace the NHD with your offworld NHD from your old save. Clean the world and save, then you can place the cleaned NHD into your new homeworld save. For WA worlds, travel there and save your lots/sims through your old save. Then start any new game, save, and then travel to WA worlds to place your lots and sims. Save those games. Place those new WA NHD into your new clean homeworld save.

Not to hijack this thread, as it was about trying to merge saves, but... After cleaning, my biggest current save is 427 MB total, that includes 5 travel worlds and my homeworld (Moonlight Falls), which I understand to have it's own issues. I also delete the individual export packages... NOT TravelDB, when cleaning. Load time has never been the issue. Longest may be 10 mins, with HDD. My situation may be somewhat unique from most, regarding CC. Of the 7.22 GB in my mods folder, nearly 1.7 GB is loose test packages that I am working on and haven't made a decision whether to ever upload, continue working on, or scrap. A few MB of stuff I downloaded. Was close to 9 GB mods folder, but I cleaned up a couple months ago. Then there's the 3 GB of hair packages, merged into 3 packages. Might be more.

Do not use dereferencing, as I read (probably here) that it can cause some problem, not sure if it was with KW or no. Most of the KW warnings about Nraas mods are easy enough to work around and keep Nraas.

As for KW, I'm the same LadySmoks once on LL and now NSFW, so I am ungodly familiar with the angsts of that mod. Build 409 is not too bad. I do not use half of the "features" anyway.

Reality is that my style of play is simply not good, and counter to most of your suggestions. Aside from general population control (I use Nraas MC total annihilation to remove ungreeted Sims and strays, and Register to limit NPC's), my fun is meet and greet, make friends and customize every other Sim in every world (dress in my test garments). More than 200 saved Sims! Basically got bored with WA after so many years, and have a bunch of download worlds, with a few favorites.

So that is the whole "folder" with the NHD file of all the other worlds? If that is the case, that's quite normal. My current save folder with all the export packages and NHDs is 1.37GB. As Igazor detailed, this won't actually affect the game performance b/c in all those files, only the world you are currently playing ever gets loaded. In fact, since I run my user folder on a limited RAMdisk, I don't load the whole folder. I created a 2nd save folder with only my homeworld NHD, export, and traveldb. If I decide to travel somewhere, I simply copy the destination world NHD and export into this folder before I load the game. Upon returning home, I update the main 1.37GB save with my current save and then delete the destination files again.

I would suggest not deleting any of the export packages though, at best they desync the global aging in those various worlds, at worst it can create corruption.



Yeah I know who you are, I love your work. I read what happened on LL, what a drama. :D

Though I don't have as much CCs in my game, but in theory they shouldn't really affect game performance if the CCs are put on a SSD or RAMdisk. The random short read burst on SSD and especially RAMdisk is super fast compare to HDD. In HDD, yes that would actually cause exponential lag and performance decrease. This is compensated by merging packages, though what are the limitations I do not know as I've never really tried it.

Well, I really do wish there was some way I could help you improve your game performance. All I can really suggest is if there is corruption, don't be afraid to start anew. Also if you haven't tried unparking your cores or taking advantage of RAMdisk, I would give it a try.

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On the topic of the OP for any reader:

I think the information given here is related to the OP question concerning traveling, merging family trees etc... and what to expect.

I have never seen a save folder more than 500 MB before becoming unplayable. As said, I have HDD. I hate the graphics on the laptop that is SSD. I had it look good, but I think MS hit me with an update when I wasn't looking. I rarely take the game laptop online. I'm typing on a cheap Lenovo travel laptop now. ))) But, load time isn't an issue... 5 mins normal and 10 mins max on any save. I did the unpark thing a while ago. May have helped. Also running LD's smooth patch and Simler's mod. Everything helps, and as they tell on the pages, not a cure all... but help. My machine specs can easily handle TS3. Been thru that a long time ago with min specs, and well above them.

The litterally hundreds of packages can be an issue for HDD, but usually only load times, which again, aren't really a problem. Occasional CTD and the analyzer says memory issue, but the Sims config settings, I manually changed to 4 GB for every EP and SP, not just for The Sims 3. OY! I'm all disk with super patch. If the saves are getting corrupted, I have no clue what is causing it.

And thanks... Still making stuff, but lazy about ever uploading. Still haven't uploaded all of my old stuff to NSFW, and have about 20 or more new packages in test.

Are you talking about the LAA? That is no longer necessary after one of the patches. However, you can change the size of the simscompositorcache and compositorcache files, it might help a bit. EA standard world only sets one of them to like 125MB. But custom worlds should already be 500MB each. If your homeworld is EA world, it is likely the cache is only 125MB, you can manually set it to 500MB.

And if you have enough RAM, you can put both cache files and thumbnails on a RAMdisk, which is super helpful.

Again, this is old stuff, so you may already have looked over it. But in case you haven't.

https://modthesims.info/showthread.php?t=548125

Do not know what "LAA" is. The 2 caches were also done, but now not sure if done for all EP's and Sp's. I will have to take a longer look at that link. Thanks.

The LAA address is allowing Sims to use more than 2GB of RAM. In the olden days, this needs to be done manually by editing the executable. But newer patches already does this.

The cache thing does not need to be done in all EP. I think only the latest EP you installed, so for me it was ITF. You can check this easily by the size of the cache. I believe by default the compositor cache is 125MB. But if you modify the right file to 500MB, the cache will then be 500MB.

Custom worlds use "worldcache" and that by default is already 500MB. This thing can be played around, but from experience, over 500MB may actually slow down performance. However, it is most definitely advantageous to raise it from 125 to 500MB.