Sudden stuttering before every action

[PROFILE NAME]

from nothing, before every sim action the game stops for a second or two and then continues, saving also now takes like 1 minute, sometimes it freezes while saving and i have to close it with task manager... any suggestions please? worked just fine till now ;(

[HiFive]

It sounds like your saves are starting to get corrupted. If you are playing unmodded, there are many things you should know to do and not do to help keep the game from getting corrupted. The biggest fix for me was when I learned that most older games, from the Sims 3 era and earlier, were designed to run on 30 fps, because that was all most computers could do back then. I used the NVIDIA control panel to limit the fps to 30 for this and a bunch of my other older games and it has gotten rid of a LOT of "bugs" and visual issues for me. I have a gaming rig, so this was surprising to me. I no longer have to take as many precautions as I used to.

However, here are some tips from my earlier responses to this kind of problem:

LAG PREVENTION - WHAT I DO
(updated 10/27/2023)

After 3,600 hours on this game, I am still not using any mods to help the lag issues, but the game runs fairly smooth for me now. Here is what I've been doing, along with some things that others have tried.

First, I limited the fps for this game to 30, since that is apparently what the going rate was at the time this game was released. That has reduced the lag quite a bit for me, while also solving a lot of bugs that would always crop up over time for each family I played.

Turn off shop mode.
Turn off online notifications.
Don't run other things in the background while playing.
If you are playing in fullscreen mode, don't use the Alt+Tab feature.

Turn off memories. You will get an excessive number of them and they will bloat the game.

I use sequentially-numbered saves. (Always use the "Save As" button and use different names. Don't use the "Save" button.) Whenever my game seems to be getting buggy or has severe lagging, I try finding a save from before the problem started. Go into the game files and delete the excess saves after every play session. I leave about 5 or 6 of them, in case I notice any problems and need to go to an earlier save.

I make very frequent saves. Doing this helps a LOT. I don't know why, it just does.

I've learned to clear excess baggage out of my Sims' inventories on a regular basis. If you have a gardener, it's easy to get way too much stuff in your inventory, and this causes a lot of lagging, and subsequent bugs. Keep the count of those apples and limes below 100 each. Under 30 is much better, or even 12 or 8. Try to get to the point where you only have edibles of the same quality in each stack - like all Perfect apples, and all Perfect life fruit. The biggest lag I get is from too much produce or fish having too many different qualities.

Don't collect or buy too much scrap for your inventors. Acquire what you need, and use it, then get more. A max of about 200 units per inventor table or Sim inventory is best for my Sims.

I don't allow tons of fish either. I sell them all, or keep only the ones that are of the same quality for the best garden fertilizer.

Clear your sim's inventory as much as possible before travelling. This is very important, since travelling to other countries with a lot of stuff can easily create corrupted stuff in your game.

In general, the fewer details the game has to keep track of in your inventory, the better.

Don't go crazy with the fast-forward button. Using it too often can cause problems. These days, I don't initiate fast-forward at all, and only let the game do it when all of my sims are sleeping or working at the same time.

If one of your Sims gets really laggy, or yours or any other Sim gets stuck, use the reset function. Use Cntrl+Shift+C and type:

resetsim nameofyoursim (whatever that name is)

A more extreme measure for those with serious issues where the above steps are still not enough: Limit customizations as much as possible, i.e., just use whatever generic Sim/house/items the game has, and don't change the colors and patterns or build your own house, etc. This is what I had to do when I was working on a shrimp of a machine for a while.

There are 5 cache files that should be deleted every time you end a play session.

CASPartCache.package
compositorCache.package
scriptCache.package
SimCompositorCache.package
socialcache.package

This is safe to do for only these files. The game will create new ones when you play it again.

Here are some good guides with a lot more information:
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1131162350
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=279488894
If you want to get more than 5 or 6 expansions, it's probably necesssary to get the NRAAS mods, although I do have 7 expansions now and still don't use any mods and don't need to worry about a bunch of stuff in this list anymore since the fps was limited to 30.

And this is what someone else does:

I have found that having your GPU use v-sync and setting Reflections to Mirrors and water (NOT SUPERWATER), Edge Smoothing to medium and the rest to high refresh rate of 60 Hz caused the game to run much much smoother.

[HiFive]

These days I also use this script that a player wrote for us. It clears the 5 cache files mentioned above, but also clears some additional cache files that we usually don't mention because they are a lot more work to locate and clear. It will clear the appropriate cache just before it launches the game.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1853224297

[PROFILE NAME]

Thanks mate, managed to fix it and it seems to be running better than ever ;)

[HiFive]

Originally posted by PROFILE NAME:

Thanks mate, managed to fix it and it seems to be running better than ever ;)

Good to hear!

[Pyro6491]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XWVxfAFdK7I&t=183s this is what I use.