I'm having to do a reboot for my game. A whole new one, which unfortunately, I'm becoming pretty familiar with. I found an opportunity to clean out my Downloads folder and rework it so there's not as many subfolders. And then... I run into the folder I dread, "Numerical Number Files". I have a ton of these things. I didn't exactly keep track of which downloads they belong to, and now I'm stuck with all these number files, such as "8a2676c09ae9310b446fe2540391a570_0001.package". Does anyone know if this will harm my game if I delete these? I know that somewhere I did find what these files were and that they were somehow attached to downloads but cannot remember what they said about it harming the game if they were deleted.

I already read through custom content before writing this post up, like I'm supposed to, and I looked online, but found nothing to help me out.

That's what happens when you install houses or sims without the clean installer. If you delete them, you'll delete some piece of CC that you installed with something. Up to you if you want to.

Personally I will check these files with SimPE to see what they are. Clean Installer can also help you figure out what the files are (thumbnail and file description).

They tend to be recolors of some sort, sometimes walls, floors or groundcovers, and occasionally meshes - but they can also be mailbox or trashcan recolors, which very often attach themselves to lots if the uploader has some sort of buyable trashcan/mailbox file set in their game (sometimes you get those modded files too, if they've been placed in the Downloads folder).

There's one type of random-numbered files you may not want to remove, though. If you install or make sims, the sim files have a structure that looks like this: "5455cb4d_126fdf44.package" (8 digits + _ + 8 digits).

I would open them in SimPE. You should be able to identify most/all of them, and decide whether you actually want to keep them.
You can then rename the ones you keep!

Delete them if you don't mind CC disappearing, but you might actually want them.

Open in SimPE and check the Texture file picture and maybe the MMAT for the mesh name and the GMDC preview picture. |
Then rename the file so you know what it is.