Hi,

I was playing this afternoon and noticed the ice cream truck. I haven't seen a ice cream truck in my game in a long time as I always shut it off via Traffic To make sure they were in fact shut off, I checked and the setting for ice cream trucks is set to 0.

Back in *April I installed a world that came with it's own NRAAS settings, which I put in my game. I'm now having problems with saving errors, more specifically Error 16. I've never had this problem before so I don't know if what I did back in April is making a mess of my game or not.

*For clarity, I took a break from playing back in April. The reason I'm noticing this problem now is because I started playing again last night.

Could using the settings from the world I installed while leaving all of my regular settings for all of the NRAAS mods I use cause saves to corrupt if that is actually what is happening? What is making this situation even more annoying / frustrating is the game will give me the error, but when I go into my saves folder, I'll have a 'normal' save, then there will be a save by the same number but ends with .bad. When I open the later of course there is nothing in it.

Beyond the saving problem, I'm not having any other issues. There are no graphical issues, stuttering, lag, ect... My game runs smooth as better. In hindsight, I suspect this whole situation could have been avoided if I had just taken the time to remove all of my NRAAS settings and plunked the new world game settings.

I'm already in the mindset that these particular saves are toast, but if there is a way to salvage them, can somebody please let me know how I should go about it? It isn't a big deal if they can't be fixed. I have nobody to blame but myself...

NRaas mod settings are stored within the saves themselves, so no, another save's settings shouldn't have any impact on your current save. However, this isn't true for all mods, with at least one adult-oriented example having the ability to corrupt an entire user folder.

What I'd suggest here is to reset Traffic to default, through its settings, save, quit, delete the cache files, reload, change the settings to what you want, save/quit/delete cache files/reload, and see whether the problem shows up again. If that doesn't help, repeat the process, except remove Traffic entirely and add it back.

For the Error 16, how large is the folder for this save? How large are the .nhd file for your homeworld and the TravelDB.package? Is OneDrive running on this computer? Do you use a third-party antivirus?

By 'it's own NRAAS settings' do you mean that you downloaded a save for the world that had settings applied or that you installed a package file with NRAAS tuning that came with the world?

As far as I know, there is no way for NRAAS content to be bundled into a sims3pack, so these are the only two ways for a world to 'come with' NRAAS settings. In the former, those will only apply to the save. In the latter, defaults in the original mod will be overridden globally- in this case you would want to find and remove it.

All of that considered, Error 16 is a save size issue and likely unrelated.
You could use Regul Save Cleaner on the earliest working backup to try and make it a more reasonable size. If you've visited many worlds in this save, consider deleting the packages within your save for the ones you don't intend to return to. And lastly, make sure you are using 'Save As' instead of 'Save'.

By 'it's own NRAAS settings' do you mean that you downloaded a save for the world that had settings applied or that you installed a package file with NRAAS tuning that came with the world?

Yes, that is what I meant.

Details:

Disc install- Game is patched to 1.67. My game is installed on the computer I bought about a week or so ago. My game doesn't go online, I do have / use Photoshop and Lightroom. Adobe yells at me once in awhile to log in, but otherwise, the system stays offline.

The only anti-virus program on it is Windows Defender which comes pre-installed with a off the shelf system. I don't know if this matters, but it is Windows 11. I used the Alder Lake Patch from Lazy Dutchess as the system has a 13th gen Intel processor.

Before installing my game, I uninstalled all of Microsoft's bloatware and OneDrive. I've read repeatedly that OneDrive causes problems, so I got rid of it. I used a program called Revo Uninstaller to remove everything.

No adult mods. I use mods from here, MTS, a couple from Burnt Waffles ( for lighting and sky) a mod I made to keep aliens out of my game,Then there are mods like No camera drift, a mod for CAS background; that kind of stuff.

I did try using Regul Save Cleaner yesterday. I don't know how big the following files were prior.

Folder size: 154 MB
Last save: 31.4 MB
.nhd 30.7 MB
TravelDB: 473 KB

I have cleared all cache files, but haven't touched anything else. I wanted to try to figure out what was going on before I started fiddling with things. I will try to reset Traffic and go through that whole process to see if anything changes. If it doesn't, I will take it out, clear, restart, ect..

I always use Save As. As a reminder to save, I use Saver which is set to 'remind me' every half hour.

If I've missed anything, let me know.

EDIT: I'm not going to be under foot all day, I'm just doing stuff.

I ran Revo again. It showed a bunch of registry keys and other things that were left behind from the OneDrive uninstall. I've deleted all of those so now when I do a search for OneDrive, the only thing that comes up is a thing telling me to do a internet search.

Just for the giggles, I'm going to take all of my saves out, open Island Paradise ( it is the first world on my world list) and play for a bit / save often if I can) just to see what happens. Doing so won't fix the problem or tell me what the problem is, but I'm curious to see what happens.

EDIT 2: My experiment was a epic fail. I'm way more annoyed with this whole thing than I should be.

I cleared all caches before I started.

I played Island Paradise for 15 minutes; saved every 5 minutes. I got the Error 16 on the third save. I shut the game down, cleared caches and started again. I once again saved every 5 minutes and was only allowed to save twice.

Every time I start my game, I keep getting a message from the Microsoft App store if I should use " MS Gaming Overlay Link Pop-ups" to open my game. Could this be the problem?

EDIT 3:

There is a thread over on the EA HQ forums regarding this very issue. In that thread there is mention of updating Windows 11 with patch number KB5020044. Since it was either try the patch or get on the phone to see what it would cost me to have my system rolled back to Windows 10, I decided I've nothing to lose by trying the patch.

My game has been running for over a half hour, I'm still saving every 5 minutes and there hasn't been a issue. I can't promise this will work for everybody, but hopefully it will be useful to somebody...