Hey all,

I have long loved how creative and amazing the modders for the Sims 3 community are.

Unfortunately, I have now reached a point where I have so many mods that I use for Quality of Life that it's lagging/freezing my game consistently. It makes me sad because even after compacting all my CC, it's really the script/tuning mods that seem to be the issue.

I'm wondering how y'all handle the prospect of having too many mods, or if there's anything I might be missing in how to optimize it further.

To clarify, I'm playing 1.67 on Steam, and I have all expansion packs (except for Katy Perry Sweet Treats).

I've gone up and down the main Steam performance improvement guide, added the smooth patches, installed DXVK, and added Nraas Error Trap and Overwatch to the mix for help. I've tried a lot of different combinations of mods but I always end up either light on the mods I want to play with for performance sake (thus impacting my gameplay enjoyment), or heavy on the mods and also the lag/performance issues.

I guess I'm just feeling kind of sad and worried I may not be able to use more of the amazing mods here on this site, and I wonder how many mods y'all have been able to add before you started seeing issues.

Thank you so much!

I really doubt tuning mods are the issue unless maybe you tuned everything to fire every second? There's just no way "no autonomous ____", "lower wages", etc. could hurt performance. If you don't merge them, they can contribute to slow loading, but I don't think they'd impact performance even then.

The only mod I've ever had problems with was NRaas SP, which was why I got rid. Honestly, I think it's the only (working) mod I've heard people having performance issues with. (Still, lots of people run it fine.)

Are you sure it's general performance and not something broken (or just super laggy)? Like, try some 50/50 testing on a test world, assuming you get these issues in all gameplay and not just long saves or whatever (btw if it's only longer saves, considering you have Overwatch already for the worst, I would be looking at inventories: especially sims, but also chests and fridges).

Also, I'm not 100% sure about this, but I think compressing cc makes gameplay slower - because of the unpacking. It speeds up load times, though. Anyway, I don't do anything about that, and my game runs fine. I don't run all EPs/SPs any more, though. That's mainly for loading times with my cc, but there's some gameplay impact too. But I doubt you want to hear that!

Hey arinabean! Thank you for your reply! I have a few tuning mods, which I don't really think are the big issue. It's mostly the script mods, I think. I have quite a lot of them.... So I'll give the 50/50 testing a go and see what happens. I hadn't thought about the inventories, so that's something I could check too.

Recently, I was trying to play a legacy file on a custom world (it's not very old, I just started it like a week ago, so I ran a save cleaner on it and all that), so I don't think it's the file necessarily. I thought it might be the custom world, so I saved the family to the bin, and put them into Sunset Valley. It seemed okay until I started re-adding my mods. I don't use Nraas Story Progression because it makes my game unplayable. Although, I do run quite a few of the other Nraas mods, which were part of the mods I added back in, so maybe that's part of the issue.

If compressing the CC makes gameplay slower, I definitely don't want to do that! I play everything I have installed, and the biggest factor is the store stuff. So maybe I have to bite the bullet on trimming that stuff down. That will definitely take some time though.

And as for playing without certain EP/SPs, I still appreciate you mentioning it, because at the end of the day, I think I'm more hopeful for a miracle rather than face the truth that this is truly a 32-bit game that can't handle much hahaha

Anywho, thank you for the input!! I'll do some further testing and see if I can optimize any further.

As was mentioned before, compressing will add decompression time during gameplay, so I do not recommend doing it (This is very subjective, however. Some people swear by it), if lag is your main problem, but do merge them. Best by category or creator, depending on what you have, yaddayadda.
I don't do it for very specific reasons, so I have around 500 to 1000 single .package files floating around in my packages folder at any given time. I am running the game on an old dedicated 8 Gig Win 7 machine with all EPs enabled without having too many issues. And I run some pretty heavy duty script mods, effectively preventing me from using things like Errortrap or Overwatch.

Some things to consider for performance:

The game is 32 Bit, meaning it can never use more than 4 GB of RAM, so if you have any mods that increase texture size above 1024 or such, I would consider binning them or replacing them with the SD versions. If you have 200 sims running around with 2k or 4k clothing or skin textures, your game will die. Or use something like dxvk that allows for more VRAM usage. Use DXVK anyway. There is no reason not to.

Laggy maps will always be laggy, but you might find EllaCharmed's fixed routing versions for those.

Limit your FPS to 60 or whatever rate your screen runs. This game can actually stir fry a modern system by galloping away with up to 1k frames. With DXVK or smooth patches set up properly, it should already be limited to 60 FPS.

Reduce the amount of high detail lots in the game options to 1.

Turn off memories in game options.

Regularly delete all the files in your documents Electronic Arts\The Sims 3\DCBackup folder. Just do NOT delete the file ccmerged.package.

Keep those exports and downloads folders empty.

Be harsh on your CC and mods: If you don't use it or need it, don't keep it.

Regularly empty that screenshot folder or the game will start indexing the screenshots.

Regularly wipe the cache files in the Sims 3 documents main folder.

Delete the folder named \FeaturedItems in your Sims 3 documents folder and create a file in the root folder there in its place, named FeaturedItems and delete its extension, or the game will simply recreate the folder. You can as well just empty it and make the folder read-only. Both methods work fine.

Make it a habit to not use the launcher to install cc or for starting the game. Use Delphy's Pack Extractor to turn sims3pack files into package files, then add them to your packages or library folder, depending on what type of CC it is, and always start the game directly via its executable (TS3W.EXE), which you can find in the Game\Bin folder of the installation (not in documents). The launcher is useless and needlessly eats up 1 GB of RAM.

You can also unpack and "install" worlds that way. You just need to rename the resulting .package file into .world and whack it into GameData\Shared\NonPackaged\Worlds of your sims 3 installation folder.

If you need an easy guide on how to find unwanted or unused CC by InstanceId in order to remove it, this video is actually quite good in explaining how to do it. Typing it out would be a bit massive.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=exLsB2hyLVs


P. S.: A thing I completely forgot to mention... update your graphicscards. sgr and graphicsrules.sgr. You can get updated versions all over the place, for example here.
Or even better, make them yourself: https://www.nraas.net/community/graphics
Also, don't fall for stuff like the 4 GB patch and the like. Unless you are sitting on a prehistoric disc version of the game, it does nothing.