[GUIDE] Playing The Sims 3 on a low-end PC

[JoshQ]

Update august 2019: fixed some links the rest seem to work and of course the info is still valid. Happy simming!

 

These are the steps I follow to optimize TS3. Honestly is nothing different to what other guides already show and also here on the SimLab.

 

My specs, expansions and CC installed:

 

 

• Dual core CPU at 2.8Ghz
• 4GB on RAM (finally upgraded from 3GB)
• Radeon 57xx with 1GB on VRAM
• 80GB second generation SSD (I have my user folder there, the rest is installed on a 500GB mechanical drive)
• Windows 7 64bits (fully updated and with several services put to manual to save some RAM)
• UPDATE: Recently installed Windows 10, details here

Packs/expansions installed:

• World Adventures
• High End Loft Stuff
• Ambitions
• Fast Lane
• Late Night
• Outdoor Living
• Generations
• Town Life
• Pets
• Master Suite
• Showtime
• Diesel
• Supernatural
• Seasons
• 70s/80s/90s
• University Life
• Island Paradise
• Into The Future

Custom content (CC) installed:

• 256 pieces of hair
• 99 accessories
• 95 makeup
• 90 core and script mods
• 84 eyebrows
• 80 furniture/build elements
• 60 sliders
• 1 skin (Ephemera fresh), 1 specular replacement (Kurasoberina), 1 alpha replacement (Buhudain)
• and don’t forget tons of shoes and clothes made/edited by me (and counting)

 

 

I’m playing on Sunset Island, a modification of Sunset Valley with lots of extra space including beaches, hidden islands and 4 diving lots. I added 3 stores, a fully equipped resort, one stadium (the robot one), 2 bars, 1 disco and a 60x60 mansion where my household of 14 sims lives. I play on windowed mode with borderless, and use Reshade to access to SMAA antialias and the sharpen effect.

 

UPDATE: “Downgraded” to SweetFX 1.5 because I don’t use all of Reshade’s functions (my GPU is just too weak)

 

My game runs at 34 FPS on average and takes 12 minutes to load entirely, it only lags when a sim gets stuck. According to Windows 7 it uses around 2.1 - 2.4GB of RAM.

 

FIRST STEPS

Patch your game to 1.67 using the super-patcher. I’ve read about how you need to install every expansion in order and patch it separately. I re-installed my game in 2013 and I’m sure I didn’t do it in order and only used the superpatch after installing the base game and at the very end, if my game is bugged (besides issues EAxis didn’t fix) I’ve never noticed it.

 

UPDATE: Re-installed everything, this time in chronological order (what a chore…). I installed the base game, updated to 1.67, and then every expansion/stuff pack, after that I tried to patch each one using TS3 Patch Downloader but it reported I had the latest versions so I just used the superpatch again and that was it. My game runs exactly the same as before.

 

Instead of using the game launcher I start the game directly by executing TS3W.exe, it’s located on [your game directory]/BASE/game/bin. I only use the launcher to install worlds and custom patterns and to download some patches for store content.

 

BASIC SETTINGS

Start the game and go to graphics settings, in my case I disable the “edge smoothing” option because my GPU slows to a crawl (hence why I use Reshade’s SMAA), I also reduce tree detail to medium and turn on “enable object hidding”. The rest is set on high.

On general settings I disable shop mode and usage sharing (my game also sits behind a firewall, not because of EA snooping, the telemetry the game sends is pretty basic, but because of this).

Also I disable memories completely because it bloats your save game and RAM, you can also use Nraas Mastercontroller to disable them.

 

All your settings reside on a file named “options.ini” located in My Documents/Electronic Arts/The Sims 3. It will reset when you upgrade your GPU drivers or when you install tools like GeDoSaTo, and even if you make a backup the game won’t recognize it, why? Because when it detects a change in your GPU it generates a new string on the “lastdevice” line, so what you have to do is to copy the value after the “=” and paste it on your backup, then the game will recognize all your prior options.

 

MINIMAL MODS REQUIRED

Nraas Errortrap and Overwatch.

 

MINIMAL MAINTENANCE

Clear your caches.  and defrag your HDD or installation folder (I use Defraggler for that).

 

ROUTING

If you’re going to play on worlds made by EA (specially those on World Adventures and Island Paradise) is recommended to download Ellacharmed fixes, those get rid of a lot of routing issues that will lag your game.

To reduce the routing annoyances even more use Nraa’s Register to control paparazzi/tourist population and to eliminate or reduce stray pets/horses.

 

I also use:

• Twoftmama’s Route Fix
• Bluegenjutsu’s No Foot Taping
• Bluegenjutsu’s Better Routing For Game Objects
• Bluegenjutsu’s Faster Elevator Moving (works pretty well on Bridgeport)

Those mods need registration before download but the whole forum is full of incredibly helpful mods so it’s worthy.

 

Schools can also become a lag magnet, haven’t tested it yet but this mod could be of help.

 

Sometimes is necessary to edit houses/lots to rearrange furniture that can cause stuck sims. Also you have to delete or block deserted lots like in Moonlight Falls that has several empty “parks” where sims spend CPU cycles doing absolutely nothing.

 

STORY PROGRESSION

Nraas StoryProgression is a very powerful mod and it can tax your PC so I just use the Career, Extra and Population modules, I use them to:

• Put a limit on population (90 sims in my case), because less sims=less routing issues=less lag
• Limit the number of households that can adopt a pet (and limit some potential for stuck dogs/cats/horses)
• Slow down romantic interactions that lead to marriage and babymaking (so the world grows slowly but steadily)
• Disable buggy jobs like ghostbuster and others like magician, singer and acrobat that sims uses to obstruct pathways and generate more lag
• Automatically clean piles of dirty clothes and garbage that block the way
• Limit the number of sims that can partake on autonomous events
• Manage homeless (including zombies)
• Many others based on preference, there are TONS of options thankfully the official site has good documentation and a friendly community you can ask for help

To decrease the impact on my PC I reduce the speed to “snail” under story progression/general options.

 

CAS

Via Nraas Mastercontroller I simplify the CAS menu entries by selecting “Show in compact form” under CAS Options. Then I use Kuree’s CASP Editor to hide unwanted hair, clothes, shoes, accessories from appearing, it can be a slow process but once you’re done you don’t have to repeat it (unless you lost the file it generates, create a backup).

 

When I download a CC without CAS thumbnail I open it on TSRWorkshop and create my own, even If it’s a simple one because otherwise the game will waste precious seconds trying to render a thumbnail the first time and if you have lots of CC it can get slow, also those thumbs are stored on:

• CASthumbnails.package
• DownloadsThumbnails.package
• ObjectThumbnails.package

Those are loaded into memory when needed but the game is infamous for having a crappy RAM management system, so the less bloat you load into RAM the better.

 

Every single time you modify your sim on CAS the game generates a new portrait that it’s stored as a SNAP inside a file with .nhd extension that is also inside your save folder. With time this file can increase and generate bloat because the game loads it directly on RAM, so if its larger than 100 megs is recommended to clean it using Kuree’s Save Cleaner or by opening the file with S3PE  and manually delete everything with the SNAP tag. This will also delete every sim and household portrait, but it will regenerate after a couple of minutes, don’t panic.

 

PACKAGES INSTEAD OF SIMS3PACKAGES

Make sure you have the folders and files required to support .packages.

 

In short, sims3packages can be mismanaged by the launcher and create problems, solution? Convert them to .packages using Sims3Pack Multi Installer, exceptions are worlds and patterns.

 

UPDATE: Instructions to install worlds without the launcher here (just haven’t tested it yet, proceed with caution)

 

Packages can be edited directly using S3PE so you can change categories, replace a texture or thumbnail, view the mesh and more. Another thing is you can organize them in several subfolders and change their name to have a better control.

The most important feature is that you can join several packages in one file that will help in reducing loading times and lag. You can have one big file per clothing/object category,

 

UPDATE: is recommended to leave core and script mods alone.

 

You can also compress .packages but in some cases the benefits are minimal, for example on the ImpHeels Compilation it went from 21 to 17Mb using Compressorizer Redux.

 

CC RELATED

In general the content created by the Sims 3 community is safe, for an extra layer of security you can check it using Delphy’s Dashboard.

 

In special cases I have to open a piece of custom clothing and clean some “extra” textures the creator included, when is one or two the impact is insignificant but I’ve seen clothes, even small earrings, with more than 10 textures included, worst, those textures belong to other garments and don’t have any reason to be there in the first place… I’m sure I’m also guilty of this but never at this level

 

My PC slows the moment I use a CC with 2k or 4k textures, no matter how small/simple it is and is very evident, this is purely anecdotal and probably caused by my low specs but if you suspect this could be happening to you you’ll need to extract the textures and reduce them to 1024x1024 using photoshop or any other graphic program that accepts the .dds format.

 

The game has problems processing packages with special characters on them ([*/-!), they will appear and work normally but to facilitate loading is better to rename them.

 

MISC

• Nraas Traffic disables limos and force inactive sims to use taxis instead of generating a car everytime they want to move, both can generate lag/bloat
• Nraas Portrait Panel is a better system to show portraits and is better coded so it liberates a little bit more resources
• From time to time I use Master Controller to clean inactive sims inventories (because they love to collect crap that just makes bloat)
• If you don’t want to scratch your installation disc, because newer ones force Origin on you, use Nraas NoCD
• When my game crashes (once every 2 months or so) I completely delete all the caches using Delphy’s Dashboard
• I save once a sim-day (after 3am when Storyprogression finish its cleaning process) otherwise there's a chance of a crash

THAT’S IT!

Again, this is what “I” do to make the game fairly playable on the piece of crap I have for computer. If you have more tips would like to hear them.

 

[Garkman]

Thanks a lot for the guide! It's very useful.

 

Do you happen to use KinkyWorld?

[JoshQ]

Thanks a lot for the guide! It's very useful.

 

Do you happen to use KinkyWorld?

 

Nope, I heard it conflicts with some Nraas mods and is a little bit CPU intensive (probably because all the features it has). If I need to test animations I use Passion instead.

[Garkman]

 

Thanks a lot for the guide! It's very useful.

 

Do you happen to use KinkyWorld?

 

Nope, I heard it conflicts with some Nraas mods and is a little bit CPU intensive (probably because all the features it has). If I need to test animations I use Passion instead.

 

 

The school feature is not compatible with Story Progression. There is a setting in SP called allow push to work which forces the sims to go to the school rabbit hole.

If you don't use the school KW is fully compatible with any NRAAS mod.

Anyways, thanks a lot for your guide, it helped me a lot and I use KW. Cheers!

[MaryJane]

Thanks for this guide Josh. I play sims 3 for a very long time now, but I didn't know some of these tips yet. The cleansaver is a life saver, haha! 

[bemis67]

"From time to time I use Master Controller to clean inactive sims inventories (because they love to collect crap that just makes bloat)"

 

 ^    If your system can handle it if you use Nraas Story Progression the Money Module will clean out their inventories and give them money in exchange of most items they collect if it's something that can be sold with the exception of their cars or bikes if they have any

[SimmyPooh]

Thanks for the good tips. I wasn't compketely sure wheather to use some of the cleanups or not until I read your suggestions.

I also want to add that defragmenting the game folders (I use Glary Utilities) speed up load times tremendously. There is a special right click menu just for that.

[JoshQ]

​​

"From time to time I use Master Controller to clean inactive sims inventories (because they love to collect crap that just makes bloat)"

 

 ^    If your system can handle it if you use Nraas Story Progression the Money Module will clean out their inventories and give them money in exchange of most items they collect if it's something that can be sold with the exception of their cars or bikes if they have any

You're right sadly my PC slows down with more than 3 StoryProgression modules, but on a normal PC should work without problems and help clean inventories.

​

Thanks for the good tips. I wasn't compketely sure wheather to use some of the cleanups or not until I read your suggestions.
I also want to add that defragmenting the game folders (I use Glary Utilities) speed up load times tremendously. There is a special right click menu just for that.

​How I forgot that? Defraggler allows you to do the same, is the one I use.

[JoshQ]

Windows 10

 

This is a separate section because one reason: I installed Windows 10 Education Edition. That allowed me to remove several components like Cortana, the App Store, Edge, etc that as far as I know are not possible or at least isn’t as easy to achieve on the Home and Pro versions, again I could be dead wrong.

 

The bottom line is that TS3 runs perfectly fine after enabling “Windows 7 Compability Mode” and updating the game to 1.67. Load times and framerate are exactly the same, the only difference is RAM use but I’m suspecting Windows 10 reports memory usage differently because I refuse to believe my game went to 1.7 from 2.4 gigs of RAM on Windows 7.

​​

Everything else: Cmar’s Meshtoolkit, s3pe, Delphy’s Dashboards work exactly the same after enabling .NET 3.x runtimes. Blender, TSRWorkshop, etc. also work well.

 

Don't forget to delete the caches.

[bemis67]

Windows 10

 

This is a separate section because one reason: I installed Windows 10 Education Edition. That allowed me to remove several components like Cortana, the App Store, Edge, etc that as far as I know are not possible or at least isn’t as easy to achieve on the Home and Pro versions, again I could be dead wrong.

 

The bottom line is that TS3 runs perfectly fine after enabling “Windows 7 Compability Mode” and updating the game to 1.67. Load times and framerate are exactly the same, the only difference is RAM use but I’m suspecting Windows 10 reports memory usage differently because I refuse to believe my game went to 1.7 from 2.4 gigs of RAM on Windows 7.

​​

Everything else: Cmar’s Meshtoolkit, s3pe, Delphy’s Dashboards work exactly the same after enabling .NET 3.x runtimes. Blender, TSRWorkshop, etc. also work well.

 

Don't forget to delete the caches.

 

That might be more accurate than you realize one of the problems with Win 7 is that it holds onto cached RAM when you load up the game or any other application it releases it but does so very slowly. Whereas Win 10 releases the cached RAM immediately after the game starts up or application starts running.

 

[Moonglade]

Thanks for this, JoshQ - really big help with my game, it has zapped my lag.  The biggest help for me was biting the bullet and merging everything in my Mods folder except for Passion, KW, no intro, nobuildsparkles, and several sex animations which might be updated by the creators.  I backed up **EVERYTHING** before I started, then I followed a youtube video guide to do this and now my game loads quickly and gameplay flies! 

 

 

 

 

 

 

xx

 

[JoshQ]

​Compressing CC is the quickiest way to upgrade performance and you made a backup that's even better.

[Blackbird2018]

Thank you, JoshQ for this post! My computer has similar specifications to yours and with the steps you mentioned, it's loading and playing much better. BTW congratulations on the CC's! Love them!

[JoshQ]

3 hours ago, Blackbird2018 said:

Thank you, JoshQ for this post! My computer has similar specifications to yours and with the steps you mentioned, it's loading and playing much better. BTW congratulations on the CC's! Love them!

Glad it helped

[kaycessdssdss]

On 22/01/2017 at 11:47 PM, JoshQ said:

“Downgraded” to SweetFX 1.5 because I don’t use all of Reshade’s functions (my GPU is just too weak)

 

Just now, kaycessdssdss said:

Does downloading that make ur game faster? and how do u add it to your game

 

[wapitawg]

I'm surprised your guide didn't mention the incredible CC Magic tool which merges all mods automatically and lets its users to delete cache as they please.

[JoshQ]

On 2/19/2018 at 2:27 PM, kaycessdssdss said:

Does downloading that make ur game faster? and how do u add it to your game

 

I used SweetFX's SMAA to replace the game antialiasing implementation, in that aspect it made my game faster, also SweetFX loads quicker than Reshade. You have to place SweetFX's files on your "bin" folder: [Folder where you instaled the game]\BASE\Game\Bin\

[JoshQ]

On 2/21/2018 at 3:22 AM, wapitawg said:

I'm surprised your guide didn't mention the incredible CC Magic tool which merges all mods automatically and lets its users to delete cache as they please.

well, I used it a couple of times and really tried to understand it, but I always ended organizing and joining my packages manually.

[wapitawg]

On 22.02.2018 at 5:53 AM, JoshQ said:

well, I used it a couple of times and really tried to understand it, but I always ended organizing and joining my packages manually.

IDK, for me there’s not much to understand. And there are a lot of tutorials around the web to help those who can’t. Doing stuff manually just takes too much time.

[TwilightStorm]

Another thing that I would like to add, is do not merge more than 3 packages that contain S3SA resources.

These files are script mods and those resources are dll files. 

If you merge in a DBC package more than 3 of them, the game doesn't load them.

[TwilightStorm]

On 3/2/2017 at 6:56 AM, JoshQ said:

Nope, I heard it conflicts with some Nraas mods and is a little bit CPU intensive (probably because all the features it has). If I need to test animations I use Passion instead.

Passion is here https://www.loverslab.com/topic/82485-passion-requires-patch-level-163/