Hey all, I was wondering whether anyone has encountered anything like this situation before in their game. About a month or two ago I opened the launcher and it told me there was a new update available. I was surprised that EA would still be releasing patched for the Sims 3 at this point but accepted the update anyway, however, it immediately said it had completed the update without appearing to have downloaded/installed anything. I thought it was just a new glitch or something but now my launcher is completely empty and my game opens as if it's freshly installed without any of my saves of store/custom content. I've read people experiencing this when they've accidentally moved their EA folder but mine is still in my documents (mac) and all files are still present with none of my save files reading 'bad' or anything. Apologies if this has been answered a thousand times in bold capitals and I've managed to repeatedly miss it, but any advice/help would be greatly appreciated!

Sounds like you updated to Patch 1.69. Most folks are avoiding that patch. For more detail see Patch 1.69 Detail Here .

I am not on 1.69 and if you are now on that patch I believe you need to go into Origin to select the EPs to put into play.
Not sure about that but there are folks in here on 1.69 and will be able to better address your questions.

It was kind of hiding in the fine print, but as the OP is on a Mac, and this update was offered by the Launcher not by Origin, they cannot really be on Patch 1.69. The last game patch for Mac that was released was 1.67 in Jan 2014, coming up on three years ago now. If it all happened that quickly, it sounds like they picked up the store patches. Those are really small and tend to download instantly.

@RunDMC111 - What you have described can happen if your Mac has for some reason spawned a TS3 game folder other than the one in Documents that you are expecting it to use. Thus one with no content nor saves (mods, etc.) and until just then no store patches. The tricky thing, if this is what has happened, is finding out where this pesky new game folder that you don't want is.

But to confirm that the original game folder is being ignored, as it sounds like it is, do a right-click on a file in there called DeviceConfig.log and select Get Info. Does its modification date/time match the last time you attempted to launch the game? If you aren't sure, try to launch the game again. The modification date/time on that one file should change right away. If it doesn't, then that TS3 game folder is being ignored as suspected. While you're there, startup a new game in a new world (Sunset Valley, doesn't matter) and save it with a goofy name. You might try to do a Spotlight search on the goofy name save to see if that can help you locate an extraneous game folder.


Edit: Oh, and that noise you hear? It's the sound of hundreds of forum board readers running away from this thread in terror because we've mentioned Macs. Just ignore them, I usually do unless they would really like to learn about OS X or something.

@igazor ... DERP .. I completely missed that. Thank you.

No derps needed. I had to read the top post a couple of times myself before seeing that. What they have described can happen on Windows systems too, but for different reasons (permissions issues or the infamous Win 10 and OneDrive combo, for example).

The most likely location for this stray user folder on Macs is within the application folder. It should be recognisable by its all caps title and the long name. Something like ~USERNAME/MYDOCUMENTS/ELECTRONICARTS/THESIMS3. That's at least what I remember when this used to be a more frequent issue on Macs.

Sometimes they have been known to turn up inside the TS3 application OS X package (right-click to open) where all the Cider and Transgaming stuff is. Those are difficult to find for someone who doesn't know where to look, or doesn't know they can right-click on application package files to open them, because they aren't search indexed in there. This is where the mod framework used to go "the old way" before Patch 1.17, but this was before my time and I don't think the entire game folder was supposed to be in there buried quite that deep.