Category Archives: The Sims 4

TS4-related content.

What? A video after almost a decade?!

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I know, right? What’s the deal?

Basically, my dear nerdy husband got another 3D printer (or two) and somehow out of that deal I got a new gaming headset that I probably didn’t need but looks cool. So, I was like, eh, maybe I’ll try recording the occasional play session and throw it up on that old dusty YouTube channel I have now that we have it premium through a family plan because our son likes to have it ad-free. Fair warning, I haven’t done this since Get Together came out. I’m far, far from a practiced content creator and it shows, so watch at your own risk of being bored and laughing at my ineptitude!

Here’s me sharing a rather unpolished (har har) session of firing up my game with Crystal Creations installed for the first time after EA’s disastrous string of recent patches, using my Super Wainwrights save. This isn’t a comprehensive playthrough, though. Just my very first impressions of the pack.

Despite the rambliness and randomness, I had fun with it, so I might do more of it in the future. It’s a fun way to show off things in game that I’m enthused about but are too tedious to blog about with screen captures and write ups. I haven’t decided if I’ll do that with the historical save I mentioned in the video, which is a Decades-ish challenge. I say Decades-ish as it’s mostly the Sims 4 Decades challenge, but with my own tweaks to the rules. I also like the idea of just doing videos of gameplay snippets from other saves here and there for fun, like when I try out aspects of gameplay I haven’t done a lot with before or in a while, or try out new mods or whatever. I’ll see.

I’m open to thoughts and suggestions. I always love feedback, but I make no promises, because I’m easily distracted, as evidenced by the unfinished projects I already have. At any rate, if you watched this, thanks, and I hope you enjoyed it!

Update Time

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Oof! It’s been a while, huh?

First, the good news. I haven’t given up or vanished or anything. I’ve just been busy and not posting.

Also, even though I didn’t post about it before or afterward, I did a third year of NaNoWriMo with a 50k wordcount marathon of Wainwrights and Wrongs. And I completed it! Just under the wire, somehow, some way, as I was extremely busy and it was like a roller coaster, but I did it.

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Status Update

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Here’s the post I mentioned in my story notes that was coming.  First off, I’m sorry for the long hiatuses between updates as of late.  I’ve been quite busy offline, and when I have been at my computer to mess with Sims, it hasn’t been to write.  The good news is that I got a new laptop not long ago.  While my old one wasn’t exactly bad as far as stats go, it was slowly dying, with at first 2, then 3 out of 4 USB ports unusable, and then it started making funny noises.  Not to mention how roasty-toasty it would get running TS3.  I know a laptop getting hot running TS3 is just a regular Tuesday, but it was an old laptop anyway. So, given its other issues, I finally bit the bullet and took my husband’s (who would have the TS3 computer whiz trait if he was a sim) advice and got a new one.  He, wonderful human being that he is, set it all up for me.  That is, everything but my Sims games.  That, he said, was all on me.  Fair enough, I know the games and EA’s, er, we’ll call them quirks, better than he does, being the longtime simmer of the two of us.

TS4 was easy-peasy to reinstall and transfer to the new machine.  No issues there.

TS3 … oh my.  First of all, I did not have Windows 11 on the old machine.

Okay, stop laughing, those of you who know what this means, thinking you can just hit “play” on TS3 on a Windows 11 machine from the EA app for the first time.

Suffice it to say there were a lot of forbidden words snarled out that day trying to deal with that launcher issue for the first time, and that was before I tried the mammoth task of reinstalling any of my metric shit-ton of store content.  I had just wanted to make sure the game and expansions worked.  Oh, silly me.

But eventually that got straightened out.  Some helpful Discord channels pointed me in the right direction of how I could even get TS3 to work reasonably well, perhaps better than it did before.  But it involved downloading and converting all my legitimately owned store content to package files, which was not a fast process at all.  Because, like I said, I have a lot.

On the bright side, my Brilliant Minds save now loads in about 6-7 minutes instead of 15, so, yay!  It appears stable, but admittedly, I haven’t had time to playtest it for more than a few minutes.

After all that, I reinstalled The Sims Medieval and got it working, too, with all my old saves intact.  That had a patch mod that simply fixed the launcher issue, so that made it easy.  There was also one for TS3, but my saves are so twitchy for that, that I decided to just use the cumbersome workaround that disables the extra CPUs it can’t use temporarily.  Which is annoying, but not potentially save-breaking.

Which brings me to my various games’ gameplay and saves.

I was burned out by a lot of the stress and spent some time just building in TS4.  I renovated a few of the City Living apartments a while back because I wanted them nicer in my saves, yet still affordable for a few sims out of CAS, and ended up sharing them on the gallery after playtesting them.  I’m far from an expert builder or decorator or anything, but I was happy with how they turned out.

I’ll put the pictures and the rest under a read more cut from here on out.

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