tutorial Managing your mods folder properly.

[SouthernGorilla]

I've been promising a video on this topic for almost as long as I've been a member of the forum. Since that seems like it will never happen, I decided to write up a post to help folks out. I keep reading about folks with load times ranging up to almost twenty minutes, and there's no reason for that.

 

First, some background on what qualifies me to speak on the subject. This is important because what I'm posting here is in complete contradiction to the standard advice provided by the entire community since the dawn of the game. I'm not a hacker, programmer, or sysadmin. But I have been around computers since the days of green phosphor monitors and floppy discs. I also have 11 IT certs in my pocket. Plus, I'm a life-long tinkerer and hotrodder who enjoys making things work better than they do. So what I'm posting here is based on lots of research and experimentation.

 

This is how I run over 20,000 packages in my mods folder while keeping load times under ~3 minutes. And that's on a mid-tier PC.

 

For starters, and I cannot stress this enough, do not merge packages! I know this is the #1 recommendation of every single YouTuber and forum poster, but it is the worst thing you can do as far as managing CC. Merging stuff dumps it all into a black box. The first source of trouble you run into is that you no longer have any idea what you actually have. I cleaned up one friend's folder and she had seven copies of one particular piece. Overall, nearly a third of the items in her folder were duplicates. That was an extreme case, but even in my own folder I have found multiple duplicates because I had merged stuff and then downloaded it again later. The external programs available to find duplicates and conflicts can't detect duplicates inside merged packages. I don't know how the game handles duplicates. But the best case scenario, it's still a file the system has to spend time loading. Worst case scenario, duplicates cause glitches or lag.

 

The other big problem with merging is that it hides broken items. If you do a 50/50 search to find a broken item and the item turns out to be in a merged package then you will have to unmerge the package to remove the broken piece.

 

Along the same lines, don't waste your time with any of the "mod manager" programs available. Every one that I've seen obfuscates file names, maing it impossible to find files with other programs. They essentially act like a middleman between your mods folder and the game. That's how they let you turn mods off and on. These programs are entirely unnecessary anyway. But we'll get to that later.

 

So step one in the process of optimizing your mods folder is to unmerge any packages you have merged. This is the only way to find the junk hiding in your folder. Sorry, but I have no idea how to undo what those mod manager programs do.

 

Step two, install "Sims 4 Tray Importer". This is the single best program available for managing CC.  I'm not clear on the forum policy for linking to external sites, so I'm not providing a link here. But I trust that everybody reading this knows how to get programs from the internet.

 

Step three, getting rid of duplicates/conflicts.

Spoiler

With everything unmerged and S4TI installed, now you can find and remove duplicates and conflicting items. Under the "Tools" tab of S4TI you'll see "Find Conflicts". This opens another window with a big "Find" button on the top right. This doesn't usually take long. You'll get a list of everything that's a problem... and plenty of false positives. Just work your way down the list. Right click on an item to open a menu. "Show in folder" will take you directly to where the file is. Then you can Shift+Delete to erase it without filling up your recycle bin. Duplicates are easy enough, delete either one. I recommend clearing out all the duplicates, then clicking "Find" again. Duplicates also show up in the "Conflicts" section. So you'll have fewer conflicts when the duplicates are gone. Which is good, because conflicts can be messy. There will be false positives. For example, a tall door may show as conflicting with the shorter version. Obviously, that's safe to ignore. But I also can't find a way to get the program to ignore it. So that same conflict will be there every time you run the scan. You eventually get a sense of how many of these false positives you have and just look for new ones in the list. Annoying, but probably unavoidable. I don't have any tricks for this step. You have to use your judgement to decide if the conflict is real or not. Two default eyes would be a real conflict. But I doubt that sweater vest is really conflicting with the new sofa. I have somewhere around 100 "permanent" conflicts that show up every time I run the scan.

 

I use a lot of Powershell to manage my stuff. But I'm trying to keep this as simple as possible and I know not everybody is comfortable using a terminal. So I won't be discussing that here. It isn't essential, just immensely helpful for finding and moving files. If you are comfortable with Powershell, I doubt you need me to explain anything I do with it. If you don't use it, but would like to try it, I might be able to get you started. I'm a hack, though. You could probably learn more by searching the internet like I did.

 

Step four, slaughtering the sacred cow of folder organization.

Spoiler

Along with merging packages, there's another myth that's treated as gospel in the community... that you need to organize your CC into categories. This is a waste of time and hurts load times. But I need to be careful to explain exactly what I mean.

 

To start, I'm talking exclusively about ordinary CAS and BB items. Scripts, packages that actually modify the game, overrides, default items, and things that seem to break often should all be separated. I keep skintones and other skin details in one folder, eye-related CC in another, CAS sliders in another, and so on.  This really helps diagnose problems because I can simply move a folder if I think the problem is related to a specific category like this. But having a special folder just for hairs from a certain creator, along with similar folders for every other creator, and then folders for every other type of CC and all those other creators... I know many of you have hundreds of subfolders in your mods folder. And I know many of those subfolders have exactly one item in them. This is no bueno. Think of every subfolder as a dead-end street. Your PC has to drive down, gather everything in those folders, then turn around and drive back to the mods folder to get to the next subfolder and repeat the process. This does nothing but increase load times.

 

My ordinary CC is all in four folders:

1) "Dumpster"- This is where everything goes when I first download it.

2) "BatchFix"- When I use Sims 4 Studio to batch fix everything in "Dumpster", I move it here.

3) "Temp_S4S"- This is where I move a selection of stuff from "BatchFix" so I can open it in S4S to edit tags.

4) "EditedCC"- Once stuff is correctly tagged, it goes here. 

 

That's it. 20,000 items in four folders, set up like an assembly line.

 

The other subfolders for scripts and special CC are "tagged" for easy recognition:

 

Script folders begin with "SC_"

"SC_NPC"- for mods that effect NPC behavior

"SC_Visuals"- for mods that effect graphics, lighting, etc.

And more for other mod categories.

 

Then there's

"CAS_Sliders"

"CAS_Presets"

"CAS_Eyes"

For, well, sliders, presets, and eyes. I gave eyes a dedicated folder because I've had a lot of problems with them. Skin stuff also has a dedicated folder with the same tag.

 

Tagging folders like this keeps similar items grouped together without having to bury them in subfolders. Nothing in my mods folder is more than one layer deep. There are some other folders for specific mods that came with so much stuff it was simpler to keep them on their own rather than dump them in an existing folder. "Better BuildBuy" is one example.

 

I'm not putting this out there as the One True Way to set up your folder. Your exact requirements are probably different from mine. If you only have a few hundred items, it probably doesn't matter much how you set it up. But once you get to 1,000 items and beyond, the fewer subfolders you have, the better. If you find you have a lot of trouble from accessories, put them in a separate folder. If a different tag or different category makes more sense to you, use it. My examples here are just meant to illustrate the general idea.

 

Now that I've, hopefully, explained why you should move your CC to other folders, I want to share a trick to simplify the process. Of course, if you know Powershell you can move everything in a matter of minutes with a couple lines of code. But if you don't use the terminal, all is not lost.

 

Most folks don't know that you can tile windows in Windows. Open two Windows Explorer windows. Pick one and hit the WIndows key and the Left Arrow key at the same time. That will pin that window to the left side of the screen. When you do that, it should give you the option to select which window to pin to the right side of the screen. Just select the other Explorer window. If it doesn't give you the option, just pick the other window and hit "Windows+Right Arrow" and it will be pinned to the right. Now you can easily drag things from one side to the other to move them around.

 

It's also handy to pin some of your folders to the "Quick Access" bar on the left of the Explorer window. You can drag things directly to folders that are pinned there without having to to open another window for that folder.

 

Step five, eliminate the cruft.

Spoiler

Another thing people don't often think about is that your computer doesn't know what it's grabbing. It has to look at every single file in your mods folder to decide if it needs to be loaded. All those PNGs, JPGs, and OMGREADME!!!!!!!!! files are nothing but speedbumps, get rid of them. If you have a a mod that came with instructions, either text or picture, and you want to keep that, I recommend moving it up to the "The Sims 4" folder. I have a special folder there, "ModOptions", that I use to hold stuff like this. It also contains, as the name implies, optional bits for various mods. Some mods come with several versions and tell you to install only one. Rather than throwing the others away, I keep them in the TS4 folder in case I want to switch them out later.

 

With all the useless subfolders and junk files gone, you should already see a massive improvement in load times. But there's one more important step.

 

Step six, fixing file names.

Spoiler

It's commonly known in fields that handle a lot of data, and there are academic papers on the subject, but apparently CC creators have never heard that special characters in file names have a serious impact on processing speed. When you look at the files in your mods folder and see all those +*)(}-}[ characters... every one of those increases your load times. Fortunately, it's a relatively simple fix. Of course, if you know Powershell you can easily rename evrything in a few seconds with a simple script. For everyone else, there is a program, "Bulk Rename Utility" which also makes it pretty easy to rename thousands of files quickly.

 

When you first install and open BRU, it looks extremely intimidating. The good news is that most of the stuff on it doesn't need to be touched. And all the filters are numbered to show exactly what order they are performed. It can also show you a preview so you can make sure you aren't destroying file names. The manual for BRU is superb, and there are some tutorials available, so I won't try to explain it here. Plus, I haven't personally used it since I got my Powershell script working right... so I'd have to relearn how to use it myself.

 

The goal is to take all the files that look like this;

[El Magnifico] *Super* Awesomest (hair) ever.package

 

And turn them into this;

ElMagnificoSuperAwesomestHairEver.package

 

You really won't believe the difference that makes in load times.

 

You can do it all in one pass with BRU. I did it. It took a bit of research and tinkering, and I sure don't remember how now. But doing it in three passes isn't very time consuming.

 

 First, replace all the special characters with a simple space " ".

 

Then  set it convert the name to "title case". This capitalizes every word in the name, just like in a title or headline.

 

Lastly, remove all the spaces to turn it all into one "word".

 

This gives you a name which you can still easily read. And if you copy/paste it into your browser your search engine will still give you good results. But it doesn't have all the garbage slowing your machine down.

 

And that's it for getting your mods folder into professional shape. Next, I'll get into how to tweak your collection to further improve load times as well as to improve the in-game experience.

[SouthernGorilla]

This next bit is mostly for those who allow CC for random. And it probably won't be new information to anybody who has been doing this for a while. I'm adding it in the interest of being complete and because there may be the occasional neophyte who stumbles across this thread while trying to figure out why their game is so messed up.

 

The single most important tip I can offer here is to curate your CC. Every file you load is another tick on the clock during loading, another piece that can glitch the game. So don't add anything that doesn't make you want to rub yourself or that doesn't otherwise add value to your game.

 

Some examples:

 

Spoiler

Stud earrings are basically invisible during normal gameplay. If you aren't taking closeups of your Sims or doing detailed makeovers for whatever reason, why have them? Same with eyelashes, fingernails, and some skin details.

 

Do you really need seventeen different toothbrush holders? Clutter is probably the easiest place to start culling your collection.

 

Custom Sims often come with accessories you'll never use. I don't do poses, screenshots, or "realistic" gameplay. So I don't need watering cans, flashlights, or the iPhone 27.6 Super Mega Plus.

 

Even with big items like furniture, you might find yourself constantly using the same few pieces over and over. Why keep the things you've never used?

 

I've also found that accessories tend to break more often than other CC for some reason. So minimizing the number of trivial doodads in my game has been a priority for me.

 

To properly manage your CC, you'll need "Sims 4 Studio". I'm sure most people know S4S is essential for fixing tags and other CC issues. But one trick I haven't seen peope talk about is removing swatches from items to save space. You can really fine-tune your collection with this. Personally, I hate seeing real languages in the game. So I will go in and remove any swatches that have real names or logos on them. But you can get rid of any swatches you don't like. The space savings aren't huge, but it can add up.

 

How to remove broken/unwanted CC:

Spoiler

This works for either CAS or BB stuff. It's a tedious process, there is no magic wand that removes stuff for you.

 

I also do this in a new save just to minimize the risk of hurting one of my saves.

 

For CAS stuff, create a household, strip the Sim(s) bare on all outfits, and begin clicking through everything looking for stuff that's broken or that you just don't like. I have a household saved in my library for just this purpose. That way I can load a bare household with a couple clicks and don't have to go through stripping them every time. I gather stuff from questionable sources. So my last culling required four chicks just to handle all the full-body outfits I wanted to get rid of. I also loaded them down with an absurd number of useless accessories.

 

And don't skip items just because the thumbnail looks fine. Thumbnails lie. Click on everything. Yeah, it can take forever.

 

An important tip here- when you are clicking through your collection looking for broken/unwanted stuff, pay attention to the response time. When you click on something, it should switch over almost instantly. If you click on an item and it takes a second or three to appear on the Sim, be suspicious. Click on another item and then back to the slow one. Maybe try this a few times. If it always takes a second or three to appear, get rid of it. If it lags in CAS, I promise you it will lag in the game.

 

Once your household is loaded down with all the broken/unwanted stuff you can find, or that they can hold, save it to your library and exit the game without saving.

 

The process for BB is essentially the same. Build a bare room on an empty lot. Fill it with everything you don't want. Save the lot to your library. Exit the game. Lots are a bit easier than CAS because you can fit so much more stuff each round.

 

Once you have your lot/household saved, open Sims 4 Tray Importer. There's an icon on the left that vageuly looks like a stack of books, that opens your library. Now click on the household/lot you just saved and then click the "CC" tab on the top bar. Voila! There's a list of all the stuff you just threw away.

 

This is the easy part. The familiar shortcuts work here, so you can Crtl+A to select everything on the list, then right click to open the context menu. "Show in containing folder" will open every folder with all the files already selected. Pick a folder, Shift+Del to perma-kill everything, then Crtl+W to close that window and move on to the next folder. You can delete hundreds of items in seconds. Also, you can delete hundreds of items in seconds, so make sure you only select the stuff you want to delete when you're in the CC tab of S4TI. Scroll through and double-check that Ctrl+A didn't select traits, sliders, presets, or something else you didn't realize was there. This is also where good folder names can really help. If I do this and see it has opened one of my "SC_" script folders, or the slider folder, I will just close that window without deleting anything.

 

This will usually take multiple passes. Enjoy.

 

Critical!- Any time you mess with your mods, adding, removing, editing, anything- go into your "The Sims 4" folder and delete localthumbcache.package, onlinethumbnailcache (folder), and avatarcache.package. These can retain mod info and keep corrupting your game even after you've removed the mods. I actually try to make a habit of deleting these every time I finish playing the game.

 

Editing CC tags:

Spoiler

I have to bite my tongue here. This process has given me a level of disrespect for CC creators that rivals what I feel for politicians.

 

When you see cowboy boots in the swimwear category and random townies walking around with orange shirts, green hair, and purple pants... that isn't a game problem, it's a CC problem. Open a few items in Sims 4 Studio and you'll see what I mean. I don't know if it's incompetence or outright malevolence, but creators rarely tag things correctly. And, yes, this happens even with basegame stuff... because the devs aren't any better at this than the CC creators apparently.

 

Unfortunately, the only way to fix this is to manually edit all the tags yourself. This is another reason to curate your collection. Fewer items means fewer hours of editing tags.

 

The process is simple, just very time consuming. Go through CAS or BB just like you did to find broken/unwanted stuff in the previous section. But this time you are looking for stuff that isn't in the right category.

 

Let's say you start with hairs. Set the filter to pick long hairs. I guarantee you will see plenty of hairs that are short, or updos, under the "long" category. Add these to your household. Use S4TI to find all these hairs in their respective folders. But this time instead of deleting everything, drag it all to a dedicated "mis-tagged" folder like the "Temp_S4S" folder I use.

 

Now when you open S4S, you can navigate straight to that "mis-tagged" folder and start editing the tags to get things into the right category.

 

The bad news is that a lot of this is going to be subjective. It can be painful if you are OCD. Where do you draw the line between "short" and "medium" hair? Do you allow every hair to be in every outfit category? You can even do different tags on a per-swatch basis. So maybe the black and white swatches of a dress get tagged as "formal", but the pink and red swatches get tagged as "party". Just how detailed you get depends on your level of obsession.

 

The other bad news is that some of the tags are ill-defined, or not apparently relevant to every CC type. It's pretty easy to say cowboy boots do not belong in "swimwear". But what colors belong in the "spring" color palette? What skintones are "Asian"? And these choices matter.

 

On the bright side, anything that's mis-tagged in one category is probably mis-tagged in several. When you go through the "swimwear" category in CAS and load up everything that isn't swimwear, you are going to get plenty of items that are also tagged as formal, or cold weather, or career, despite not being suited for those categories at all. So you can actually fix a lot of problems in less time than you might think. It is still a frustrating grind. And you will absolutely wish ill upon creators when you find a hair with 50+ swatches all tagged as "blonde". And that will happen a lot. As well as finding items where every swatch is tagged with every possible color, or every palette. Another favorite of mine is items that are tagged as multiple part types... like jeans that are tagged as jeans/shorts/leggings or dresses that are tagged as both short and long. You will lose your faith in humanity while doing this.

 

It can take 30 minutes or more to edit tags on one item just because you have to go through every swatch, deciding what color it is, what palette, what outfit category. Hairs are the most complicated because it's hard to decide what the colors are. Especially when the colors of the hair don't really match any of the colors the game offers for hair. For example, the game doesn't have "blue" hair. It has "dark blue", but not "blue" or "light blue". And I don't know how you differentiate between "brown", "light brown", "warm brown", and "auburn". If the hair has 15 "brown" swatches... where do you put them? I frequently delete swatches just to simpify things. Clothing can be problematic as well. Items that have multiple colors, like embroidered patterns... how do you decide what colors to tag?

 

Honestly, I prefer to stay away from hairs that brag about "837 swatches! Twelve different ombres! Stripes! Polka dots! Free bagels!" because I know the tags are going to be a cluster. They'll never match hairs from other creators. And if I allow it for random (which, to me, is the whole point of having a massive collection) then I'm going to see townies with paisley hair because the game thinks it's actually auburn. If I could find creators that stuck with the Maxis colors for their alpha hair, I'd convert my collection asap.

 

What to do when something breaks the game:

Spoiler

Every so often, something happens that completely breaks the game. Either a massive glitch, like the recent issue with horses in the new EP, or even so far as preventing the game from launching. You may have heard of doing a "50/50" search to find the problem, but you might not have seen anybody talk about how to do this. So inc case it isn't self-evident to everyone, here's how a 50/50 search works.

 

1) Open your mods folder and your "The Sims 4" folder in tile mode like I described in the first post. I actually start by moving all the scripts and mods from "Mods" to "The Sims 4". In my case, that means just dragiing all my "SC_" folders from one to the other. Since these are the things that actually modify the game, they are the most likely culprit for any problems.

 

2) Once you have all your scripts/mods out of your mods folder, delete the avatarcache, onlinethumbnailcache, and localthumbcache from your "The Sims 4" folder, launch the game, and start a new save. I recommend using a new save because that is less likely to rely on system cache, which may have glitchy mod data stored in it still.

 

3) If the problem is still there, it wasn't your scripts. You can move them back to your mods folder.

 

4) The actual 50/50 process is exactly what it seems like, you take half your CC and move it out of your mods folder. This is really easy to do when you have the two tiled windows set up in Windows Explorer. This is also why having all your CC in one giant folder makes life simpler. Open "Mods" in one window and create a new folder in your "The Sims 4" folder to hold the stuff you're moving. This is so much simpler if you add numbers, because you will need multiple passes to find the problem. I use "Split_01", "Split_02", etc. 

 

5)  So now you should have your "Mods" folder open on one side of your screen and the new, empty folder you just created open on the other side. In your Mods folder, click the top item, then use the scrollbar on the rigt to scroll about halfway down, Shift+Click on an item in the middle there and you'll select everything between that item and the first one you clicked. Now you have half your CC selected, drag it to the empty folder. Simple, you just did your first sweep of a 50/50 search.

 

Repeat step #2

 

If the problem goes away, you know the bad CC is something in the "Split_01" (or whatever you called it) folder that you just filled. If the problem doesn't go away, you know the bad item is still in your mods folder. Either way, it's time for another split.

 

6a) If the problem went away and the bad item is in the first split folder, create a new split folder in your Mods folder. So I would have "Split_02" in my Mods folder right now.

6b) If the problem didn't go away and the bad item is still in your Mods folder, create a new split folder in "The Sims 4". So I would have "Split_02" in my TS4 folder right now.

 

Repeat step #5 and 6, drag half the stuff from the full folder to the new empty folder to see if the problem goes away or comes back.

 

And you simply keep repeating this process until you find the item(s) that are breaking the game. Even with 20,000 items it only takes me 10-12 swaps to narrow it down enough to sometimes guess which item it is. Worst case, 14 rounds narrows it down to exactly one item.

 

A couple things can trip you up here. First, don't think that just because a problem manifests in one place that it has to be related to that particular place. For example, I recently had an issue where the options to hire ranch hands, nannies, butlers, and all that, simply didn't appear in my menu. Of course, the first thing I suspected was some UI mod. But it turned out to be a mod that I had accidentally acquired during one of my coastal raids that had nothing to do with any of that stuff. It was just such a poorly designed, or maybe outdated, mod that in the process of adding its own stuff to the menu it blocked everything else. Another rcent glitch had my horses walking around on their hind legs, swinging their "arms" like a Sim in a warped horse suit. I forget which one, but it turned out to be a mod that had nothing to do with horses.

 

And don't think big problems only come from big, complicated scripts. The first time I had to do a 50/50 search was the most bizarre. It was a simple swimsuit bottom that completely prevented the game from launching. I would never have imagined a simple piece of CC could completely bork the game, but it can. I updated that swimsuit and it worked just fine.

 

Like I've said, I have over 20,000 packages in my mods folder. My game loads quickly and runs glitch-free. You can have the same, or even better,  with the info I've posted here.

 

If there's anything I've overlooked, or any clarification needed, please let me know. I'm just trying to do what I can to return the help I've received from the communityover the past few years.

Edited August 20, 2023 by SouthernGorilla
Adding the follow-up information promised in the first post.

[mcromance]

@SouthernGorilla nice overview. I do basically everything you do minus un-merging aitems that came as set from creator and changing the names.

 

I have a question about the name thing. If I were to leave spaces between words will it be as bad as all the special characters in names or more 'acceptable' for the computer?

Because I find the way of naming files withouth spaces hard to read (especially on my damn 1920 x 1080 resolution screen for 17" laptop screen that makes letters tiny).

It also makes it very hard for computer to find the file, if I look for single word that is included in that file name (like if I was to look for 'hair' in your example of ElMagnificoSuperAwesomestHairEver.package it would not show me the result (I had few cases of this happening and it's hard to locate those items then to get rid of them or update).

 

EDIT:

I checked it and computer does find the key word, if it's all starting from capital letters. Guess I confused it with when I had to seatch for all small letters name.

My bad.

Edited August 20, 2023 by mcromance

[SouthernGorilla]

1 hour ago, mcromance said:

@SouthernGorilla nice overview. I do basically everything you do minus un-merging aitems that came as set from creator and changing the names.

 

I have a question about the name thing. If I were to leave spaces between words will it be as bad as all the special characters in names or more 'acceptable' for the computer?

Because I find the way of naming files withouth spaces hard to read (especially on my damn 1920 x 1080 resolution screen for 17" laptop screen that makes letters tiny).

It also makes it very hard for computer to find the file, if I look for single word that is included in that file name (like if I was to look for 'hair' in your example of ElMagnificoSuperAwesomestHairEver.package it would not show me the result (I had few cases of this happening and it's hard to locate those items then to get rid of them or update).

 

EDIT:

I checked it and computer does find the key word, if it's all starting from capital letters. Guess I confused it with when I had to seatch for all small letters name.

My bad.

 

Leaving items merged that came as a set from a creator is perfectly fine. I forgot to clarify that in the first post. I meant to specify that I was talking about merging dozens of random files as is usually recommended. It makes sense that items in a set are likely to break at the same time if they break. So being bundled together could even simplify the process of removing them. 

 

If you need to space things out for readability, it's actually better to use underscores than spaces. So "El_Magnifico_Super_Awesomest_Hair_Ever.package". I'm not going to pretend to understand why this is. But that's what the research shows. I haven't tried this, so I can't say what the performance impact is. This can be accomplished easily with BRU by replacing all the spaces with underscores after you get rid of the other special characters.

[mcromance]

2 hours ago, SouthernGorilla said:

 

Leaving items merged that came as a set from a creator is perfectly fine. I forgot to clarify that in the first post. I meant to specify that I was talking about merging dozens of random files as is usually recommended. It makes sense that items in a set are likely to break at the same time if they break. So being bundled together could even simplify the process of removing them. 

 

If you need to space things out for readability, it's actually better to use underscores than spaces. So "El_Magnifico_Super_Awesomest_Hair_Ever.package". I'm not going to pretend to understand why this is. But that's what the research shows. I haven't tried this, so I can't say what the performance impact is. This can be accomplished easily with BRU by replacing all the spaces with underscores after you get rid of the other special characters.

 

Thanks for advice 

[vinceguldo]

Thanks for sharing your tips, can I ask you what do you think would have the greatest impact among the various steps you mentioned?

No way I'll be able to find the time to tackle them all..

[BadxKarma]

What about files that have [D1] then the name of the file... This was asked about a while back by someone here and it was never touched on to my knowledge yet. I tend to delete them from my game if I have the file that is identical to it and same exact thing. Not sure if it's updated or edited variant of the original file.

[mcromance]

7 hours ago, BadxKarma said:

What about files that have [D1] then the name of the file... This was asked about a while back by someone here and it was never touched on to my knowledge yet. I tend to delete them from my game if I have the file that is identical to it and same exact thing. Not sure if it's updated or edited variant of the original file.

 

If you use this mod: https://modthesims.info/d/663086/sims-4-mod-cc-manager-2021-by-gametimedev-beta-v1-1-0.html then it renames the duplicate files and adds the [D1] so it's easier to look for duplicated things (of same name) by filtering with the [D1].

[BadxKarma]

20 hours ago, mcromance said:

 

If you use this mod: https://modthesims.info/d/663086/sims-4-mod-cc-manager-2021-by-gametimedev-beta-v1-1-0.html then it renames the duplicate files and adds the [D1] so it's easier to look for duplicated things (of same name) by filtering with the [D1].

I use it only when needed too. I've downloaded sims from here that had [D1] and then always open S4TI and that's when I'll notice the dupes to my originial file. So I was just curious about it.

[poipo98]

how can install sim mod?

[SouthernGorilla]

On 8/22/2023 at 6:07 AM, vinceguldo said:

Thanks for sharing your tips, can I ask you what do you think would have the greatest impact among the various steps you mentioned?

No way I'll be able to find the time to tackle them all..

Tackling them all isn't hard. You don't have to do it all at once. That's actually why I ended up with the folder structure I described, so I could work on it bit by bit as the mood struck. But, to answer your exact question, I would have to say that getting rid of the subfolders and junk files would make the biggest impact. I don't have any research to point to to back that up. Just seems the most logical to me. That's also the quickest/easiest part of the process. Even if you don't know any Powershell, you can do a quick search online and figure out how to move files based on their extension. Then a single line of code will move every ".package" to your mods folder in a couple seconds. Delete the remaining empty subfolders and go about your day.

 

Obviously, getting rid of duplicates and broken stuff will make a difference. I just don't think it would be the biggest impact. Plus, that should be part of regular maintenance anyway.

[SouthernGorilla]

On 8/22/2023 at 12:17 PM, BadxKarma said:

What about files that have [D1] then the name of the file... This was asked about a while back by someone here and it was never touched on to my knowledge yet. I tend to delete them from my game if I have the file that is identical to it and same exact thing. Not sure if it's updated or edited variant of the original file.

Bulk Rename Utility can remove that. I used it to remove similar blocks when I first started using it. Since you want to remove one specific block instead of any random string enclosed by brackets you might be able to just put "[D1]" in the replace box rather than having to use the RegEx filter. I can't say for sure, haven't used BRU in months and my memory isn't what it used to be.