The Great Purge

[SouthernGorilla]

So... my wife and I got frustrated/annoyed with our CC. Which led me to deleting everything that wasn't specifically required by a script or a default replacement. Over 18,000 packages gone in the blink of an eye. It was kinda painful. I had spent hours fixing tags on thousands of those pieces. But it genuinely feels like the right move. We've already gotten the collection back up over 2,000 pieces. But we're much pickier about curating them first. And now that I know more about the tools available to me I can edit things more easily. The result, so far, is that we have much less goofiness in the game. No winter scarves showing up on formal outfits and that sort of thing. Just curious if this is something others do periodically.

[TheRealReverend]

I have thought about it, but never could bring myself to really do it. I just invested too much time finding and collecting all that stuff. Sure, I could pick out my absolute favorites and save them, but normally when I try that, I just can't decide what my favorites actually are and end up keeping 80 percent of my collection anyway. Most frequent during such endeavours are thoughts like: "Sure, I haven't use that EVER despite having it for years, but what if it's perfect for a hypothetical sim I might make some day?"

 

I would also never fix the tags on every single item. That must have been so much work! Personally, I find the tags mostly useless and try to ignore them as best as I can. What in the hell even is a "cold weather" eyeliner? For me there are just two categories in CAS: "Custom Content" and "Maxis Crap I Can't Get Rid Of".

[GreyMouse]

Oh, yeah. Every so often, I just delete my entire Mods folder and start all over again. Any more, I just keep it to an absolute minimum of what I really want in my game. Now I get to laugh at others when they cry about not being able to find what is fucking up their game.

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[Faolon]

I used sims 4 mod assistant to clear out dupes and stuff. First time I did that, I ended up deleting like a full gigs worth of stuff, iirc.

 

I've been thinking about getting rid of stuff I don't ever use. There's a ton of hair styles I downloaded, but never liked enough to use and thus never touched.

[SouthernGorilla]

5 hours ago, TheRealReverend said:

I have thought about it, but never could bring myself to really do it. I just invested too much time finding and collecting all that stuff. Sure, I could pick out my absolute favorites and save them, but normally when I try that, I just can't decide what my favorites actually are and end up keeping 80 percent of my collection anyway. Most frequent during such endeavours are thoughts like: "Sure, I haven't use that EVER despite having it for years, but what if it's perfect for a hypothetical sim I might make some day?"

 

I would also never fix the tags on every single item. That must have been so much work! Personally, I find the tags mostly useless and try to ignore them as best as I can. What in the hell even is a "cold weather" eyeliner? For me there are just two categories in CAS: "Custom Content" and "Maxis Crap I Can't Get Rid Of".

 

The trick with tags is understanding what they do to the game. The "cold weather" eyeliner doesn't make any sense in the real world. But in the game it means that particular eyeliner will show up on random sims with their cold weather outfits. So makeups should be tagged for every outfit, with the possible exceptions of sleep and swimwear. Well, I suppose some wouldn't really be considered "formal" or "everyday", but that's often a matter of personal taste. I wouldn't tag a fancy updo hair with "athletic" or a short hair with "cold weather" either, just a couple more examples of the difference tags can make. If you don't allow CC on random sims, the tags don't matter at all. But we like seeing townies dressed in everything. So it makes a huge difference in our game if a pair of cowboy boots are marked as "swimwear", which has actually happened. I've also seen winter scarves tagged as "formal" and high heels tagged as "athletic". Almost every piece of CC we've ever downloaded has been improperly tagged in some way. Going through with S4 Tray Importer and S4 Studio to fix everything made a huge difference. But I never even got half of ours fixed, we just had too much for me to catch up.

 

2 hours ago, GreyMouse said:

Oh, yeah. Every so often, I just delete my entire Mods folder and start all over again. Any more, I just keep it to an absolute minimum of what I really want in my game. Now I get to laugh at others when they cry about not being able to find what is fucking up their game.

?

I keep meaning to do a video on fixing CC. Finding broken stuff is too easy for people to just leave it as is. We had over 18,000 pieces with no lag, no glitches, and load times around two minutes. I've seen people with a tenth as much stuff complaining about all sorts of problems. Nuts, when we first started hoarding and hit 1,000 pieces our game was a mess. Once I quit following the standard advice shown in every video and forum thread about organizing CC and started doing things properly the problems went away. The game can handle more than people think it can as long as you do your part to help it out.

[SouthernGorilla]

13 minutes ago, Faolon said:

I used sims 4 mod assistant to clear out dupes and stuff. First time I did that, I ended up deleting like a full gigs worth of stuff, iirc.

 

I've been thinking about getting rid of stuff I don't ever use. There's a ton of hair styles I downloaded, but never liked enough to use and thus never touched.

I've found Sims 4 Tray Importer to be the best program available for cleansing CC. It will find duplicates and conflicts like other programs. But I find the interface much nicer to work with. And it's faster. But the big advantage of S4TI is that it lets you easily find and remove broken CC, either CAS or BB.

 

1) Create a new sim in CAS.

2) Load the sim up with all the broken CC you find in CAS.

3) Save the sim to your library and exit the game without saving.

4) Open S4TI, go to the library tab.

5) Click the sim you just created, then the "CC" tab.

6) Right there is a full list of all the broken CC you just found in CAS.

7) Right-click an item, it opens a menu that lets you either search for the item online so you can download an update or a missing mesh- or you can open the folder where the piece is and simply delete it.

 

I typically just select all the broken items at once, right-click, open file location. That opens every single piece at once and I can just shift-delete to erase them.

 

You can do the same with BB by building a blank room and stuffing it with all the junk you want to get rid of. The process is exactly the same as for CAS items.

 

S4TI lets you go through your CC and clear out hundreds of items in a matter of an hour or two.

 

The other thing I do with S4TI is load up a sim with all the stuff that's mis-tagged. Then when I open the CC folders for all the stuff instead of deleting it I grab it and move it to a "working" folder. Then I can open Sims 4 Studio and look in the "working" folder for all the stuff I need to fix.

[GreyMouse]

11 minutes ago, SouthernGorilla said:

I keep meaning to do a video on fixing CC. Finding broken stuff is too easy for people to just leave it as is. We had over 18,000 pieces with no lag, no glitches, and load times around two minutes. I've seen people with a tenth as much stuff complaining about all sorts of problems. Nuts, when we first started hoarding and hit 1,000 pieces our game was a mess. Once I quit following the standard advice shown in every video and forum thread about organizing CC and started doing things properly the problems went away. The game can handle more than people think it can as long as you do your part to help it out.

No, I get what you're saying. I know what you're saying about it being about the right organization so that the computer can do its job right. To be frank, even when I just dumped all of my CC into my Mods folder, I didn't have the problems that the vast majority of people whine about. I let the computer do its job but I do keep shit updated. I do keep it done now because i don't need it. 

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[SouthernGorilla]

On 11/17/2022 at 3:23 PM, GreyMouse said:

No, I get what you're saying. I know what you're saying about it being about the right organization so that the computer can do its job right. To be frank, even when I just dumped all of my CC into my Mods folder, I didn't have the problems that the vast majority of people whine about. I let the computer do its job but I do keep shit updated. I do keep it done now because i don't need it. 

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I actually had all my CC dumped in the mods folder as well. Believe it or not, that boosts performance. Navigating subfolders slows a computer down.

 

I still need my CC. Especially hairs. I can't stand the clay hairs.

[thatruth25]

Is there any way to select and remove CC that isn't actively on sims/a part of households? I've been meaning to do a purge like this as well, but I don't want to lose some of the households I haven't uploaded here yet

[SouthernGorilla]

20 hours ago, thatruth25 said:

Is there any way to select and remove CC that isn't actively on sims/a part of households? I've been meaning to do a purge like this as well, but I don't want to lose some of the households I haven't uploaded here yet

Save your households to the library, if you haven't already. Use the steps I outlined above for Sims 4 Tray Importer to find all the items they use. Instead of deleting those items, drag them out of your mods folder to isolate them. Once you have all their stuff safely hidden away, delete everything else. Then move your stuff back in. This still sometimes breaks outfits. Seems the game gets confused when you move CC around. But you'll still have the CC you need. You just may have to fix your sims a bit.