A beginner's guide to effectively managing your mods folder

[SouthernGorilla]

I call this a beginner's guide but it may be helpful to long-time players as well. It's just easier to start with a small folder and keep the process going as the folder grows rather than trying to play catch-up after you've got a few thousand items in the folder.

 

First, a bit of heresy:

1) Forget everything you've watched or read about organizing the folder. It's all a waste of time. The game doesn't run smoother if all your hairs are in one folder by themselves or if you have individual folders for every creator. If anything, all these folders will increase loading time because your system has to follow a unique path to each folder to load all the items.

Having all these folders also doesn't really make it easier to find problem items. When you see a broken item in-game you don't get a file name to look up. Unless the thumbnail has a clear logo, you have no idea where to look for it. If there is a way to get the file name from a broken item then there's also no need for a bunch of folders since you can just search for that file.

If you have already created a bunch of folders and having them puts you at ease, no worries. I'm not some zealot out to convert everyone to the One True Way of dealing with CC. I'm just trying to save folks some stress and energy by passing along some things I've learned the hard way. And there may still be some useful information for you when I start showing how to deal with broken and mis-tagged CC. 

 

2) Do not randomly merge packages. So many videos and blog posts talk about merging as the Big Trick to speeding up load times. But it's actually one of the biggest mistakes you can make if you want to keep maintenance simple. The only way to fix a broken package that has been merged with others is to first unmerge everything. Since you can't predict what might break with the next update you're really rolling the dice by bundling a bunch of random stuff together.

The other big problem with randomly merging stuff is that you can easily forget what is in the bundle. That makes it far too easy to download duplicate items. As far as I'm aware, none of the duplicate finder programs will find duplicates within merged packages. I have found as many as seven copies of an item in folders people have shared with me. They thought they were organizing things by merging as many as a hundred packages into one package named, and I'm not kidding, "whatever".

The only time to merge packages is when you have multiple packages that share a mesh or otherwise have some close relation. For example, I got a set of terrain paints from one creator. Merging them all into a single package makes sense because they are essentially one package to begin with. It's very unlikely one of them will break without all of them breaking. You might do the same with wallpapers, maybe plants, that sort of thing. But you definitely would not want to merge the contents of a styled room into a single package. 

 

If you're curious about my qualifications for writing this, I currently have over 54GB of CC installed, that's 13,626 packages, and it doesn't take an absurd amount of time to load my game. I also have hardly any broken content and rarely see any glitching. My game runs far smoother now than it did when I first started collecting CC precisely because I've learned to manage it fairly well.

 

Now, on to the meat of the issue.

 

Tools you'll need:

 

Bulk Rename Utility

 

The single biggest problem with load times is probably the file names. There have been serious academic papers written on the subject. File names with special characters, anything other than letters and numbers, significantly slow down computers. CC creators clearly have not read these papers. File names are full of special characters meant to highlight the creator's name and make their file stand out. All it actually does is make your game load slower. Bulk Rename Utility makes it easy to get rid of all these superfluous characters and speed up your load times. If you set the "case" to capitalize the first letter after each replaced character you end up with a "camel case" file name that is easy for you to read, still contains all the identifying information you might need, and won't slow your computer down. I admit, I haven't used it in a while because I've built Powershell scripts that go a bit further. But there are easy tutorials to help you figure out how to make BRU work for you. I started by running it in a separate folder with a handful of packages just to test it. Then I ran it on the full mods folder once I knew what settings I wanted.

 

Even if you have an organizational system you are happy with and plan to ignore everything I put in this thread, I HIGHLY recommend still using BRU to fix the file names. It really does make a difference.

 

 

Sims 4 Studio

 

I'm guessing most folks already know about this program. This won't really help manage your mods folder. But it is pretty much the only way to manage how the mods show up in the game. This is what you need to stop cowboy boots from showing up in swimwear and slinky party dresses from showing up in cold weather. It also lets you merge packages and, I believe, combine recolors with the originals so that the recolor just becomes swatches on the original. We'll get into detail about how to use this in a later post. I'm trying to keep this more of an introductory post. And I won't be going into detail about all the features of S4S, only what we need to organize our mods.

This is also another point against merging packages. If you have shoes and dresses and couches and sex toys all bundled in one package it becomes impossible to use S4S easily. When you hit "apply to all swatches" on a tag it will apply it to all swatches on every item in the bundle. So if you have just twenty items in the bundle and they each have just half a dozen swatches you now have to go through 120 swatches individually setting all the tags. Conversely, this could be used as a shortcut if you did it right. Say you wanted to fix the tags on fifty hairs. Merge them into a single package, set the tags the way you want them, then unmerge them again. Doing it once instead of fifty times could be a huge time saver. Wish I'd thought of that before now.

 

 

Sims 4 Tray Importer

 

This is probably the best tool it seems hardly anyone knows about. It makes it so easy to find duplicates and broken CC it's almost effortless. Again, even if you don't plan to change your organization system you owe it to yourself to install this program.

 

 

I'd also highly recommend learning a little Powershell, assuming you're on Windows. I'm guessing you could do plenty with Bash on Linux or whatever Apple uses. But knowing how to manipulate files via the terminal opens up so many possibilities. There's a script, for example, that will go through all the subdirectories in a folder, move all the files to the parent folder, then delete all the empty subdirectories. You can write a single, short line that will delete all the txt, jpg, and other useless files that so many creators bundle with their CC. You can do all this with the file explorer, it just takes so much more time.

 

 

Folder Structure:

 

Going back to the heresy I posted at the beginning, the folder structure I use is dead simple. There are only four main folders inside my mods folder;

 

"Testing"- This is where I put new mods that I worry might be problematic. I may also put older mods here if I want to isolate them. The idea is that I can load this folder with a handful of suspect content and move the whole folder out of the mods folder. Or when I download new stuff I don't have to hunt for it if it is broken, I know it will be in this folder.

 

"Working"- Sims 4 Studio searches your entire mods folder and all the subdirectories. So I'll put 20-50 items in this folder and when I open S4S I'll know exactly which items I'm dealing with. Then when I'm done fixing all the tags I know exactly where all the fixed files are rather than having to try and remember which ones I did. 

 

"Scripts"- I isolate all the scripts, and any associated packages, in this folder. It just makes them easier to find.

 

"Overrides/Defaults"- Another self-explanatory name. Anything that's meant to be a default or an override goes here so I can keep better tabs on what I have. Since there isn't much in here, I also keep my WW animations here.

 

The only other functional folders are the ones I move CC to after fixing the tags in S4S. I can't just dump it back into the mods pile, obviously, so I decided to create folders simply based on the month and year the CC was run through S4S. But I'm thinking of changing this to simply having a "fixed" folder where I dump everything since I haven't really noticed that the age of CC makes a huge difference.

 

There are other folders, but they are "temp" folders I created to do 50/50 searches for CC that was breaking the game. I'm just too lazy to move everything out of them and delete them.

 

I think I'll stop there for now. Most of what I want to explain would probably best be done in video. So I'll have to do that in the next day or two after work. Let me know if there's something in particular I should focus on or some question I should try to answer. I try to make my videos as concise as possible, so I might leave stuff out if I don't know someone could use it.

[SouthernGorilla]

Tried recording a video today and could not get audio working. Video recorded just fine, but only got static on the audio. Don't know if the mic on my headset is busted or if there's some internal problem with my rig. It's a new build in an old case, so there could be wiring problems I didn't notice when I built it. I'll have to buy a new mic to see if that's the problem. 

[pihwht]

3 hours ago, SouthernGorilla said:

Tried recording a video today and could not get audio working. Video recorded just fine, but only got static on the audio. Don't know if the mic on my headset is busted or if there's some internal problem with my rig. It's a new build in an old case, so there could be wiring problems I didn't notice when I built it. I'll have to buy a new mic to see if that's the problem. 

Best of luck. Hate things like that. Shiver.

[SouthernGorilla]

14 hours ago, pihwht said:

Best of luck. Hate things like that. Shiver.

Amen. On the bright side, I don't really need the front input jack or the headset mic. So it won't be devastating if either is broken. Having a half-decent USB mic will be an upgrade.

[SouthernGorilla]

I promise I'll get the actual tutorial up as soon as I get audio working. But I wanted to add my launch time information so people can compare how their system runs to how mine runs to see if there's any real difference with the cleaning I do.

 

My rig is a Ryzen 5 3600 with an RX 580, not exactly a monster, not exactly a potato. The game and OS are both on SSDs.

After another "shopping" binge today I'm up to 14,401 packages in my mods folder. That's the actual package count, not just the count of everything in the folder. And all those packages are active.

 

If you'd like, you can open a terminal in your mods folder and paste this text in. This will give you the exact count of every file extension in your folder, including all subfolders.

Get-ChildItem -Recurse -File | group Extension -NoElement  | sort Count -Descending

 

This is what I get:

Count Name
----- ----
14401 .package
   18 .ts4script
    6 .dat
    2 .html
    2 .pyo
    2 .txt
    1
    1 .7z
    1 .cfg
    1 .NFO

Clearly I have a few stray files to take care of still. No idea how an archive file ended up there or what an "NFO" file even is.

 

From the time I hit the launcher to the time my sim was walking to her favorite yoga mat was 2 minutes 5 seconds. I don't know what the typical time is for 10-15,000 mods to load, but I have read people with far less saying they had time to go make a cup of coffee while they waited for their game to load. Obviously you can't directly compare unless, maybe, you happen to run the same hardware. But if you're waiting 10-20 minutes like I've seen some people claim, chances are tidying up your mods folder like I have will make a huge difference.

[SouthernGorilla]

Finally got the technical issues sorted. Recorded 105 minutes of content today. No script, so I rambled a bit... okay, a lot. Was going to break it into multiple videos, but I really hate that when I'm trying to find the bit of info I need buried somewhere in a twelve-video playlist. Still, I think I need to edit it down a good bit before I release it into the wild. Or not. Y'all tell me if you'd work your way through an hour and forty-five minutes of me chatting. I do cover a lot of ground, it's not just me talking about the weather or apologizing for my neighbor mowing the lawn. I go from how I set up my Mods folder to how I quickly find and remove broken content (or stuff I just don't want) to how to stop things from showing up in the wrong categories in CAS. 

[pihwht]

I'd watch it, but I usually do long videos in sections: 15 minutes here, 30 minutes there. Sounds interesting.

[SouthernGorilla]

48 minutes ago, pihwht said:

I'd watch it, but I usually do long videos in sections: 15 minutes here, 30 minutes there. Sounds interesting.

I'll work on editing it then. I can definitely cut it down some without losing anything of value. 

[firetiger138]

On 1/19/2022 at 2:11 PM, SouthernGorilla said:

Bulk Rename Utility makes it easy to get rid of all these superfluous characters and speed up your load times.

Thanks for the tip! Is this safe for everything in the mods folder? I’m not worried about renaming straightforward cc, but what about mods with multiple files, or which use cc? Do mods rely on file names to find things?

 

(I’d guess they use something coded into the file itself, not the file name, but I tend to play it safe. So I’ll leave mods alone until I get around to testing this myself, or hear back from someone who actually understands this stuff lol)

 

Oh and thanks also for the tip about merging, bulk editing, and then unmerging! That will be a huge time saver!

[_cindy]

Please provide a link to your video.  I searched for you on You Tube, but did not find you.

 

Thank you for the guide.  Looks like very good advice.