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Test Subject
Original Poster
#1 Old 28th Sep 2017 at 6:05 AM

This user has the following games installed:

Sims 3, World Adventures, Ambitions, Late Night, Generations, Pets, Showtime, Supernatural, Seasons, University Life, Island Paradise, Into the Future
Default Frozen at second loading screen on one save file. (Yes, I have searched, read and implemented many known solutions. Still doesn't work.) Help!!
Hey everyone. I am a long time sim player and have not faced this issue before until about a week ago, but I see that it is a common one based off doing some google searches. I just want to iterate that I have tried many solutions offered and have yet to get my main household to load. It would be a great loss to me if there was absolutely no way to recover this save file.

First of all, I was playing the game fine about a week ago. I had put in a lot of progress on the last day I played, having my sims get engaged and the groom plan and attend his bachelor party. Upon getting to the party, I noticed my game was lagging very badly so I saved it in fear it might crash. It was about 2 am real time so I decided to log off anyway. Since then, every time I try to load this specific household, it will load to about 99%, music playing, font scrolling, but no progression beyond that second loading screen.

I googled possible solutions, with many saying I should move the "The Sims 3" folder to the desktop and see if the game would boot properly. I tried that, and it did work just like a new version of the game. Then it suggested to move one by one each folder from your original game into the new reset one. Before moving back in my custom content, I moved in ONLY my "saves" files and tested them. Immediately, the game wouldn't load or work even without custom content, leading me to believe it's my save file. I verified this by playing, loading, and switching between other towns. They all worked fine.

I read on about save files. It does not say anywhere it is "damaged", but I tried replacing my save files with the ".backup" version as suggested, but it STILL does not load. I further read about switching the .meta files, but in this household I had never traveled on any vacations within the World Adventures expansion pack.

I have even tried cleaning the save file in the case that it was "bloated" and it still no luck. Does anyone have any other suggestions??

I am using a Windows operations system and have every expansion pack (but not all the Stuff packs.) Let me know if more information is needed.
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Mad Poster
#2 Old 28th Sep 2017 at 6:35 AM
I'm afraid that a corrupt save file is often just that and there aren't always obvious indicators that corruption has crept in. Am I correct in understanding that you only have one backup save of this ongoing game, the automatically generated one, and that's it or is it the case that you have multiple other saves that are just further back in the timeline and you would rather not have to replay the engagement and bachelor party?

This may not be much help for today, but I would never dream of moving an ongoing game forward that I cared about without having many safe points to retreat to along the way, meaning lots of saves with slightly different names (numbers or dates on the end) should something like this ever happen. Even with the full arsenal of game protecting mods like those from NRaas, meaning Overwatch and ErrorTrap among others, the unexpected can and does sometimes happen.


Edit: The meta file swapout trick using a saved game that does load properly is still worth a try if you haven't attempted it yet, even if world travel was never an issue. It can't do any more harm than just not work.
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