Hey everyone! Maybe a lot of you will find kinda obvious this post, but.. i just wanna be sure of it. Im pretty sure that this post was made before (by another noob like me, of course) but as i said before, i just wanna be sure of it.
Im newbie on this modding thing (i usually play vanilla in most of the games, main reason is because i dont own a powerful pc and i really hate hackers on online games and i got that bad idea about the modding community since i was a child) and i just wanted to give it a try, specially if ive been playing TS3 since 2 or 3 years ago an i got pretty bored with the same things over and over...
Anyway, i just started looking on this page (like a couple of months, actually) without reading the consecuences of modding, and incredibly i didn't have any issues (just some lagging with a custom downloable map i found around here, i already solve the issue), i downloaded most of the nraas mods, some houses and a couple of worlds, always avoiding CC use. Just today i just wanted to try some sims created by you guys. And most of them has a lot of CC, so i really dont want to download a lot of textures and stuff, its so tedious. So that brings to my main issue: Is that really necesary to download the CC from a work? (Even if its using partial or full CC on it) and what happens if i dont do it and just run the download on my game?

If you have some advices for me, please be free to share, try to be the most clear to understand (im kinda potato head sometimes). Guides or links to another info pages will be welcomed and really apreciated! (Even if you need to explain fron the very basics about modding a game)
I wanna to thank you all, specially the CC Creators, you do all that job that makes my game experience really fun, i already expended 35+ hours weekly playing and looking for your content (between collegue and sleeping, of course). Dont think i dont appreciate your work when i say that i dont want to download all the CC, is just my pc is really not that powerful, and i dont wanna to overload it. (I know TS3 needs a really high-end PC, even for mods, but unfortunately i cant do anything about it. Telling me to quit the game isn't going to work haha)

Cheers friends!!!

I'm sure others will help you installing uploaded sims that have CC, since they have a lot of experience than me which I have no. Though I can help you by asking have you tried looking for Sims here that are cc-free? You should be able to find Sims that without CC if you use the search engine. Just letting you know in case you're not aware of it

Yeah, i actually have, but i couldnt find.. I use the search engine too but i dont find the "no cc" option (If it exist and i cant find, im really stupid haha) so thanks anyway!

TS3 does NOT need a high-end PC. It needed a higher-end one to run well in 2009 because it was an ambitious game for the time, but a decade later you don't need a modern high-end machine. I play on a machine that's "optimized" for TS2, meaning that it has some older hardware/software. It has a Core2Duo processor (State of the art...in 2009) and 8GB of RAM. I do have a fairly decent video card (a 4GB NVIDIA GTX 1050Ti), but otherwise I'm pretty far behind what most users here have. And guess what? I currently run the game with all EPs + Store content on maximum graphics settings (PLUS extra NVIDIA tweaks to further improve how the game looks. I have 220 mods, a fair amount of high-poly CC (hairs, mostly, because I can't stand EA hair). AND the other day I got ReShade (which is very graphics-intensive) running and created my own preset for it. I did take a bit of a framerate hit with ReShade, but it's definitely acceptable, and my game overall runs well, loads quickly, lagging only a little when I'm asking it to render a ton of stuff in a densely-built world.

Overall, the performance problems that TS3 has really has little to do with the player's computer specs (assuming that they have at least an average, modern machine) and lots to do with the fact that the game is, unfortunately, poorly coded in lots of ways. It also doesn't help that it's a 32-bit game where modern games are 64-bit. This means, basically, that it can only use a certain amount of RAM or else you'll find that you game won't save, if it doesn't crash outright. (The not saving because of this reason is called "Error 12," and you'll see lots of moaning about it. ) Beyond that, the game really doesn't run well without mods -- especially after you've been playing a world for a while -- so there's no reason at all to fear mods. With TS3, you kind of have to embrace mods, in fact. You mention you have NRAAS, and hopefully you have ErrorTrap and Overwatch from there because those are ones that run in the background in order to clean up a lot of EA's garbage. Hopefully while you were there, you saw and read this. If you didn't...Well, read that. It's an excellent place to start on your journey.

As for downloading stuff with CC. With lots, if you don't have the CC (or the EPs/SPs that the creator used), the game will just replace the stuff you don't have with stuff from the base game. So, lots might look bizarre, but at least you'll have the general structure, and you can go about deleting the nonsense and replacing it with stuff you have. With Sims...I could be wrong because I've never downloaded Sims, but I think the issue is mostly with custom sliders. I THINK if you don't have/install the sliders that the creator used, then the Sim won't work. I THINK that stuff like clothing/hair/makeup that you don't have would just be replaced with EA stuff, but I think you do need any custom sliders the creator used. I think. But like I said, I've never downloaded Sims, so if I'm wrong, someone will be along to correct me, I'm sure.

Awesome!!! Thanks, i didn't know those tips from nraas (i have overwatch, carrers, vector, traffic, woohooer errortrap and a couple more). I have a HP with intel core i7 and a AMD radeon r7 m340 and 16GB of ram, so yeah, i think maybe i pass the minimum haha
Is a shame that most of the issues are from the code, but anyway, thanks a lot for the tips and explanation!