Sims 2 Super Collection
Mac OS

Hoping someone can steer me in the direction of an old thread or send over a solution. All I can find on my own is for Windows systems or the Ultimate Collection. My Sims 2 is either crashing, glitching, or just being a PITA. I noticed yesterday one of my toddler sims born at University was missing his memories. Didn't think much about it - kept playing & didn't notice anything else odd on any of my other families. Went in today and the game loaded up fine, but the neighborhood seemed to take forever to load (it got to like the 3rd "loading tile" and paused for 3 mins). Eventually got in, loaded my family, & noticed the toddler was missing it's memories. All adult sims & children had their memories intact. Raised everyone up to kids then jumped out to load the university which also took awhile to load. Didn't notice anything unusual until I graduated one of my sims who wanted his first kiss - odd since I knew he multiple dates already etc. Something is going on.

No new mods have been added to my game in months. I've been playing fine the last two weeks with no issues. I did add some houses with some CC earlier this week (maybe in the last 3 days?), but didn't notice anything unusual after adding them. Have played with my sims in the new houses as well. The last time I had this issue I uninstalled the entire game & reinstalled, then figured out it was two mods not playing nice with each other after everything was uninstalled (this was months ago). The mod causing the issue was removed & everything played like normal. I wouldn't think the CC in the houses would be creating any of these issues? I know it typically ends up being the mods.

Any thoughts/ideas/tips? Or maybe a thread I missed that I can check out? I would really like to try to avoid uninstalling & wiping everything all over again. This would be the second time I've gotten into like 3rd gen Pleasantview & had to restart (not counting all those times throughout the years of installing onto new laptops/computers lol).

Have you reached the file limit? Right click on your 'The Sims 2' folder and click 'Get Info' and see how many files there are. If you're beyond 10k then you've likely hit the file limit. It's also regardless of what OS you're on I'm pretty sure.

If so, there is a way to increase the maximum file limit but I have yet to try it out for myself (I plan to do so soon though).

Alternatively, have you ever checked your neighbourhood for corruption? Do you have access to a windows machine or Parallels? If so Hood Checker has become a lifesaver for me.

I actually just stumbled upon that thread & wondered if that could help with the issue. My max limit is the 10k, but it looks like I'm only showing 6k items. I'm not sure if I'm checking that correctly. Either way I'm going to attempt deleting a pre-made neighborhood I don't think I'll end up playing & see if that changes anything. Thank you for the suggestion! I kinda wondered if that might be the issue after reading the thread.

I did pull my downloads folder out & re-launched the game to see if anything changed. Still fairly slow neighborhood load times - bit faster than before, but the kids had completely wiped memories in the family I checked. I'm assuming it was some of the CC in the houses I just downloaded. Ugh.

No access to a windows computer to be able to check, but man is this making my miss my PC

Wiped memories sounds a lot like corruption to me, it's possibly linked to the file limit issue though also you never know with the game unfortunately.

Well... deleted a premade & re-loaded the game. Still having the same issue. All of the parents remember teaching their kids stuff, but all of the kids have 0 memories. It's now not just toddlers but also kids, teens, young adults back from university. Guess I'll need to try to actually increase the file limits & if there's on change - delete/reinstall time. Ugh. Was hoping to avoid that.

Don’t forget that it’s not just the Sims 2 folder with your hoods and CC that counts towards that limit, but also all the files in the Sims 2 Super Collection package. And anything else you have open will count towards the second maxfiles limit. 6K files might be okay, but I’d certainly be wary and think about increasing the limits at that point.

CC piggy-backing on your downloads is quite likely. The usual symptom of hitting the file limit is that random Sims or lots go missing from the hood you’re playing, but I guess a character file not saving properly is equally possible. And at that point you have a hood with inconsistent information between files, and it’s pretty much corrupted. At that point - unless it’s very minor indeed, and it sounds like your corruption is in creeping death mode - there’s pretty much no way of getting back to a clean state except to break out the backups. Alas.

That was kinda my fear. The last time this happened at least it was just two mods crashing so easy fix (even though I'd already uninstalled at that point). I'm afraid that's where I'm heading this time around too.

I have a test hood with a couple of throwaway families and empty lots that I dump anything new into and play around with, before I let it loose in a hood I actually care about. I don't even load a hood I care about while those files are in place unless I'm happy they're basically okay. On a Mac, I think that's almost essential. Even if the creator is careful and thinks they've done everything necessary to make it Base Game or Bon Voyage compatible, there are sometimes random flags that aren't set right, or shader issues that make things crash when you select them from the catalog. Sometimes there's stuff that looks like it should work that just... doesn't. I really wish that Aspyr had managed to negotiate with EA to just add Mansions & Gardens, for the game engine updates and code compatibility with Windows. Life would be so much simpler, even if we were still missing a couple of EPs.

Agreed though it's pretty easy of who to blame: EA. Fortunately the Mac version of the game is still supported.

Just tried to get past the file limit myself today and run into some issues. I posted my update on the main thread.