Basically, I noticed that the Traveler FAQ mentions sharing vacation worlds between saves by copying them from one save folder to another. That made me think of replacing a vacation world in a save folder with a symlink to one in another folder, so TS3 reads it when it tries to read the vacation world. Would that be possible, or are there technical issues I am unaware of? (I figure you would have to keep track of which family's on vacation in which save, and not travel to one that's being traveled to already, but I was wondering if there would be any other concerns.)

P.S. Has anyone else ever found a use for symlinks on Windows? I've found several, but given how obscure the functionality is, I was wondering what others had found. (Please inform me if discussions of things like that are too off-topic for this chatterbox.)

I'm not sure that the TravelDB file in GameSave1 is going to understand that the foreign world nhd file in GameSave2 is the one that it should be pulling information from and pushing it to if a symlink is used. Maybe it will work in that sense, but more importantly, when GameSave2 is played, its own TravelDB file will be pointing to the wrong sims as it's all done by hidden sim ID numbers and the IDs will then not match up correctly. So no, I don't see how nhds (and TravelDBs) can be actively shared between different game saves like that. Without that go-between functionality working as it needs to, the entire multi-world system will break down. This is also why you cannot have a game in which an already existing foreign nhd file is replaced with a new one and why TravelDBs themselves are not swappable; the TravelDB in the currently being played game will not understand the sudden change and that cousin you left in foreign Twinbrook will now be a kitten, a BoneHilda, or something other than who/what they once were.

Here is an example of where symlinks can be helpful in the world of TS3. Suppose you have your game saves in your TS3 folder in Documents on your current internal hard drive, it can be an HDD or an SSD, doesn't matter. You have excess RAM, more than 8 GB, to work with and wish to put elements of the game folder on a RAM Disk, but not the entire thing -- perhaps the five top level caches, the World Caches actually being used, and Thumbnails, to speed up performance. Symlinks could be used to redirect specific elements of the game folder without having to redirect the entire thing or (much more volatile) your entire Documents library. Elements that cache could similarly be symlinked to an SSD instead if the one that the player has to work with is too small to carry the entire user game folder or all of Documents.

There are plenty of other examples where symlinks would be useful outside of the game. Again one can redirect restricted subsets of Windows elements (like Documents, Roaming Profiles, Photos, Movies, etc.) without using full-blown redirection of the entire elements as the operating system already provides. Maybe HomeMovies 2016 really needs to reside on a different drive or volume because that was the 50th anniversary year of something or other and it's just too huge to be where everything else is, or it needs to be shared among other users a different way. Or one might want to sync a folder with Dropbox without the actual items being in the local Dropbox folder location, so a symlink can be used there instead. Can't say however that this is a feature that the average Windows user (if there were such a thing) is going to configure for use on a daily basis.

Ah, yeah, that's the kind of thing I wouldn't have ever thought of. Thanks for informing me.

The most interesting use of symlinks I've found was actually as a workaround for an issue I was having. Basically, for some reason, Morrowind wouldn't run if the executable was named Morrowind.exe. Naming it anything else made it work, but I was using a bunch of extenders and stuff which were looking specifically for Morrowind.exe. I wound up renaming the executable (to Morrowind2.exe) and making a symlink to it, which was named Morrowind.exe. That made it work.

Huh, that makes me think of renaming the Sims 3 launcher to something else and symlinking the original name to TS3W.ee, so I can bypass the launcher even while using Steam. Would that work?

Some Windows user I am, giving out advice like this and I've never even heard of Morrowind. Had to google it, was expecting to find some spectacularly useful utility or production tool that I should be using on a daily basis to get work done...oh. I see. Nevermind.

On your Steam question...maybe? But it sounds like that would arrange it so that the Launcher would never run. What if you need it on demand to install or uninstall something? I find it much more convenient to use a bypass right to a shortcut to TS3W.exe. The Steam client does not need to be running in order to launch the Steam version of the game. But then I'm not a big Steam user, TS3 is the only game I have on it, so maybe there is some benefit I'm missing to even using Steam to start things up? Besides my silly website profile telling me that I've only ever played TS3 twice and for a total of 20 minutes or something.