thanks EA, the 8/3/22 patch broke my game

[Leeloo]

cannot load into any house hold made after the patch on august 3rd, which means i cannot make a new save, only households and saves made before the patch will let me in to play the game.

[Leeloo]

PROBLEM FIXED!
deleting the localthumbcache.package and re-updating my mods fixed the problem. so my guess would be the localthumbcache was corrupted by the update because i had already updated my mods for the latest version

[Lovyan]

Yeah, that sounds about right. A lot of people still fall into that trap of forgetting/not knowing that you should always delete that file after making any changes in the 'mods' folder.

[Lisa]

Yeah, but 'corrupted' isn't the right word, is it? A cache is a deposit of data for easier quicker reach for the program, and so the mod data is still accessible for the game if the cache is not deleted?

[Lovyan]

If you update a mod and don't delete the cache file, the cache still contains data pertaining to the previous version of that mod, which is a potential 'crash' scenario (since lookups into the cache data may return data from a now-incorrect lookup address, resulting in 'garbage').

[Lisa]

Ah, that's better!
Then would that be the same kind of 'crash' as the usual ill-fated 'decisions' players do when not removing their mods before updating the game? That is, not removing the not updated mod or the cache for it, can result in the same thing?

[Lovyan]

Essentially, yes. Mods 'inject' themselves into the base game code (latching into the game via known function/data addresses/identifiers), so if the game changes, the mods that latch anything that has changed may also need to change the 'latch point'. One of the big issues currently is that much of the base game has been entirely rewritten ('wants/fears' replacing 'whims', and 'non-legacy age calculation', being the two notable examples), so mods have to be refactored to account for that (often drastically).

[Lisa]

That was great! I wish I had points to give you a reward. :)

[Lovyan]

Just happy to try to make it a little more clear, rather than the usual 'because, reasons' response that non-techies often get. There's really a lot more to it, but modding (and indeed, coding in general) is a whole lot of complex logic and mathematics wrapped in an algebraic enigma...

[Lisa]

It's like poetry!
A hymn put into text - and now I'll link this thread to all who put the blame on EA for their own ineptitude! :P