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Step 1: install your game through your respected platform.

Just follow the regular steps and install the game without adding any other stuff yet whatsoever.

(I personally have a legit copy of the Sims 3 on Steam. If you use another app and have any questions, I'll probably not be able to help you.)

Step 2: run the game once through the official launcher. Once you get to the main menu, you can quit again.

It is very important you run your game through the original launcher at least once after installing it. Not doing so can cause problems with programs like CC magic. You only need to do it the first time. After that, we'll be skipping the launcher entirely.

Step 3: Create a short cut of TS3W.exe on your desktop.

You'll be skipping the launcher from now on. This helps with performance and it starts up your game much faster. It is also important to do this because of DXVK.

You can find TS3W.exe in your bin folder. For me (Steam version) it's in this location: C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\The Sims 3\Game\Bin

Right click TS3W.exe, click 'show more options' and choose 'create a shortcut'. Place this shortcut on your desktop and Run Sims 3 from there from now on.

Step 4: Run the GPU Add-on Support patcher

You can find this patcher here. It is essential to run this because Sims will otherwise not recognize your graphics card unless it's over 10 years old. This patcher helps to get your GPU recognized.

The patcher will create a new Graphicsrules.sgr and new Graphicscards.sgr for you in your bin folder. After installing this, you can move the ones that have _old behind them somewhere else (or delete them).

P.S.: if you pirate your game you'll have to do this manually, there's guides online for it but since I have a legit copy I can't help you here.

Step 5: Install DXVK

Make sure you follow this guide by Nornite and do every single step. Don't skip anything!

I'd say DXVK is pretty essential nowadays, especially if you have a modern graphics card with 6GB of VRAM or higher. It'll greatly help to keep your game stable and can prevent a lot of crashes. The way Dxvk works, is that it loads textures through your VRAM instead of your RAM. Especially when you use a lot of CC or HD textures, this will make a huge difference for your RAM usage. Sims 3 can only use 4GB of RAM at once and will start crashing once you hit the 3GB mark in your task manager. With DXVK, you will use a lot less RAM and it'll take much longer for your game to reach this hard cap.

When not to install DXVK: if you have a shitty GPU (like an integrated graphics card on a laptop, or one with 4GB of VRAM or less).

Step 5: Start up the game

Use your new desktop shortcut that also has 'run as administrator' permissions now if you followed the DXVK guide properly.

Step 6: set up all your settings through the ingame options menu

The best graphics settings for you will highly depend on what computer you're using. But there are some things you should always turn off because they negatively affect performance. I will share my (relevant) settings with you (I use a custom UI so your screen style will look a little different from mine). Click on the images to enlarge them so you can read them:

Things of note about these settings:

I recommend you play in windowed mode, especially if you plan to use ReShade. Playing fullscreen is possible, but it does make Reshade presets behave differently in your game. I will include a step in this guide that you can follow to play windowed borderless. So, when you plan to do this: make sure you set the resolution to your display resolution.

Enable object hiding helps with performance. Advanced rendering is essential because otherwise your game looks like absolute shit.

Set your High Detail Lots to any value between 2 and 4. Don't go lower or higher, because you'll get rendering issues that lag out your game.

All other graphics settings can be set to your heart's desire. I'd say start with the highest settings and only go down if you notice your frames per second are bad.

Disable shop mode and lessons and fully disable memories or use this mod to severly limit them. Disable interactive loading screens as well. These are all performance eaters. Interactive loading screen also causes crashes. Memories also don't do anything for your sim, it's just a scrap book with no in-game effects.

Disable any online mode feature. This also lags out your game. Unless you really want to use these features it's best to just play fully offline.

Save your settings, close the game again.

Step 7: Install Sims 3 Settings Setter

This is the most recent magic genie that Sims 3 was blessed with. Especially combined with DXVK it is a life changer. Installing it is simple. You download the most recent version here and drop the .asi file in your bin. Also grab 'wininet.dll' from here and drop that one in your bin too.

Start up your game and load up a save. Once you're inside your save, you press 'insert' to open up the menu for Sims 3 Settings Setter. Go to the 'patches' tab and enable what you like. These are my enabled patches and they all work really well for me, but feel free to experiment with them to find your own performance sweet spot:

Only enable uncompressed textures if you have a GPU with at least 8gb of VRAM. My game will use over 6gb of VRAM easily with this enabled, so you've been warned.

Once you have everything you desire enabled, press 'file' in the top left corner and click 'save settings'.

Step 7.5: if you're playing windowed mode: go into the Other/QoL tab and enable 'Borderless Window'. Set it to 'Full Screen'.

Save your settings and close your game again. No need to save the game you entered for this unless you want to.

Step 8: Install Nraas Errortrap, MasterController and Overwatch

These 3 mods by Nraas are pretty much essential to keep your game from breaking down in the long run. You can download the mods here. Have you never installed a mod for Sims 3 before? Here's a guide (skip the part about Sims3pack and go straight to the part where it explains how to install .package mods).

That's it! You can now play The Sims 3 and it'll be as smooth and stable as it'll ever be. From here on, you can stock your game with more mods and CC (check out my mods masterlist!), or you can install Reshade (here's a guide).

Some important things to keep in mind while playing:

Clean up your game regularly. You can easily do this by using Regul Save Cleaner.

When you install a new mod or update/change Sims 3 Settings Setter, always restart and clear your caches.

Use CC Magic for installing CC, because it merges your files and this really helps with performance. Here's a handy guide on how to use it. Don't put your script mods in here, just your CC.

If you plan to travel to vacation destinations in the EP World Adventures, Nraas Traveler is a must to prevent most of the bugs and crashes that happen in this expansion.

Always keep in mind: mods and corrupt CC can still break your game, make it laggy or unplayable. Always be mindful of the mods you add, so you can always trace any issues you're having back to the mod causing it. I highly recommend not downloading a ton of mods in one session, but adding them step by step and see what they do to your games performance.

Use 'Reset the entire town' from Nraas MasterController at least every other sim week. It'll help clear up any lag that happens because of NPC sims getting themselves stuck routing or annoying stuff like that.

Invalid shader cache file - possible causes

Pine's post-processing mod called Custom Post Effects, or an edit by DreadPirate (if it's present in Downloads it may cause pink soup, without enabling the features)

Conflicting shader mods

Broken mods

Game crashed when shaders were being compiled

GPU driver-related issues

(It's not relevant for TS2 but I might as well mention that in modern games, a major game update or driver update can make older cache files obsolete and cause some issues until files get refreshed.)

⚠️Shader-specific issues usually summon pink soup faster than 'usual' memory issues, often as soon after you open the game. If you have a shader conflict going on, clearing cache won't do much until you remove culprit mods.

Let's say you removed the problematic mod, and the pink still lingers. You could wait it out. Well, you don't just "wait", you need to actually play for a while, let the driver identify invalid files and re-compile them. But it can be frustrating if you have a small window of time you'd like to spend taking screenshots. You can speed things up, and clear caches manually.

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You start by clearing .cache files in /Documents/ The Sims 2 folder, of course.

[ *if you use DXVK: clear dxvk shader cache in your TS2 game exe folder]

Clearing DX / GL shader caches:

Don't do this when the game is running.

Don't do this if you don't experience lingering pink - this is not a cure for random pink flashing

⚠️If you play many games, naturally this will affect them - games take longer to load when shaders are being compiled!

1. First, open NVIDIA Control Panel /Manage 3D Settings, take note of the current Shader Cache Size settings, then set the size to Disabled and restart your system*

*This is a 'proper' way, but sometimes I skip this step if I really don't want to restart PC.

2. Press Windows Key + R to open the Run box.

Type:

%LOCALAPPDATA%\NVIDIA\

..and press Enter.

3. Clean DX cache folders:

%LOCALAPPDATA%\NVIDIA\DXCache

%LOCALAPPDATA%low\NVIDIA\PerDriverVersion\DXCache

4. Clean OpenGL shader cache folder:

%LOCALAPPDATA%\NVIDIA\GLCache

Of course you could try to only clean DX cache (or GL cache, if you play with DXVK), that might work.

*You may wonder, why clean GL /or DX shader cache if TS2 game runs on DX / or Vulcan? Apparently, there could be some "spillovers" in all cache folders. And I did notice files being generated in DX cache folder when I run TS2 via DXVK.

5. Re-enable Shader Cache Size in NVIDIA Control Panel, if you disabled it. Set it to driver default, or whatever you set before (if you play 'AAA games', 10GB is the recommended GPU cache size. By default it's 4GB for most modern GPUs). Restart the system.

Tip: prevent automatic clean-up of shader caches. If you use automatic disc cleaning, exclude DX Cache folder.

6. Optional:

Windows DX shader cache might contain "corrupted" files. You can use windows "Disc Cleanup" feature, it includes windows DX cache folder.

Or you can do it manually, these should be at

%LOCALAPPDATA%\D3DSCache

Windows might also use secondary shader caches. On my system these are always empty though (AppData = a hidden folder):

\Windows\ServiceProfiles\LocalService\AppData\Local\DirectX\ShaderCache

\Windows\ServiceProfiles\LocalService\AppData\Local\Nvidia\ShaderCache

"CLEAN RUN":

When you run TS2 after clearing caches, play slow. Don't go straight to giant hood / large lots

Basically, prevent compiling shaders when your game is loading large (for TS2 standards) amounts of data, since it makes crashes more likely.

The biggest update is that the Café Lot Marker will now scan customers regularly and check if they're drinking coffee or eating food and if so, build customer loyalty if your café is a sim-owned business. This should make it much easier and faster to build your business rank up

(HINT: make sure you have THIS MOD to stop customers being absolutely ridiculous over plates being left on a table for 5 seconds before they get cleaned up, my goodness!)

The lot marker also now comes with some beautiful recolours by the very talented @kashmiresims:

Which are honestly SO GOOD, she knocked those out of the park!

I also did recolours of the lot marker frame in Annas colours and iCad's woods (Lazy swatch pics):

Because we love recolours 😍

Another large update has been made to the café displays, which can now be used also as regular OFB style displays much more successfully. Thanks to Aysarth (MTS creator) for the inspiration to do that.

Contents can now be toggled all for sale / not for sale using the sale tool:

And should hopefully be sold from and restocked with no major issues.

I also fixed a routing issue for group meals that were placed on the top shelf in one of the two-tile, 3 tier displays (Veranka's or Jinxx's for example) which sims couldn't grab. A single plate sure, but a group serving? Forget about it. #SillySims.

This involved tweaking another semiglobal BHAV (0x201C Eat - Grab a Plate) and thanks to @joplayingthesims we found a conflict with SimWardrobe's "No Free Lunch" mod, which solves a bug that I had no idea existed wherein on a community lot, sims could keep taking food from an empty group serving plate! lol. So that fix has been bundled into my mod, if you have SW's "No Free Food" mod you can delete it and just use the Cafe Mod files.

BETA testing also found a conflict with Midge's Cake Stand, so there is a comp patch included for that too.

There is now a new fix for Lamare / MogH's "Auto Put Away Leftovers" mod which stops sims from putting away food in a display case. Thanks to @lordcrumps for that shout! There are two versions included as per Lamare's original edits, check her post for more details.

All other existing comp patches have been updated and are included.

With all comp patches, these are only required if you have the original mods, and need to be loaded LAST, after both the original mod and my Cafe mod files.

Inside the Zip you will see:

Make sure you have the required globals or the mod will not work. The "Displays_Replacement version" are Veranka's 3t2 Bakery Display and JinxxSims's 4t2 Display with the same GUID as their original conversion, so will overwrite their file. If you'd like to use both their original conversion and my tweaked and modded version, choose the files within "Displays_StandaloneRepoVersion".

I've also included an updated standalone Simple Counter Decra Chill, created by the wonderful @morepopcorn. For that counter to not flash blue, you must have Poppy's original Simple Counter and BB's Nooks and Niches main file. See her post for more details.

In "CustomFoods_AddThese" you will find the resources required to update any CC foods in your game to work with the Café mod, and I updated the instructions from a notepad document to a shiny PDF with pictures included. Remember that any CC foods will not automatically work in a Café setting without being updated.

Otherwise, code has generally been tweaked a tidied up, but is more or less the same as before!

Let me know of any other conflicts that need solving, bugs, issues or problems, otherwise send me pics of your cafes!

Love, Tea xo

Mirror

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I always follow this tutorial when installing ts2 on Win10. I installed all the ep- and sps in order, but sometimes, even though I updated the basegame, it would say something like "the sims 2 pets might need a newer update" AFTER it said "your game is up to date", and if you click on OK or close the window, the ep/sp you installed will uninstall itself. To fix this, when you get the "the sims 2 pets might need a newer update" message, simply open task manager and force quit the updater and installer via task manager. Then they won't unistall themselves and you can continue installing the next ep/sp. Also, on my sister's pc with win11, I sometimes couldn't install some eps/sps. "Admin something" had blocked the installer from running, and nothing that I did worked. I solved it by opening commandpromt with admin properties (important!) and copy/pasting the location to the autorun.exe, with "cd: " in front. Example: cd: C:\Disk Images\disk1\AutoRun.exe (can't find the website from where I learned this (I'm not that familiar with commandpromt) so I can't take credit for this. But according to this reddit post, it seems that changing your pc's date to anything before 2020 is also an option if you don't want to bother with commandpromt.)

SimPE version 0.75.69.15 is clean and has no nudity (I'm pretty sure I downloaded it from here, and there's a "blur nudity" option under extra - preferences - simpe settings) but SimPE doesn't need to "install" and I could just drag the folder from my old disc to my new one (love that). The "out of memory" fix thread is here, and if you like me have trouble with SimPE "using files" even after you've clicked file - new (and therefore can't move/edit/delete said file), the solution is here (though it doesn't get rid of the problem completely, but still an improvement). You also want to double check that the paths to ts2 eps/sps in SimPE is correct, you can do that under "extra - preferences - system folders".

The Managed DirectX 9c you need can be found here, and the nvidia dds utilities has been saved by wayback here but also re-uploaded by osab here (and you can put anything when it asks for an "organization" during the installation, I wrote my name). Don't forget to make sure the path is correct in SimPE (under extra - preferences - simpe settings). Also, don't forget to check the "advance mode" under "extra - preferences - simpe settings" (otherwise you won't get the advanced options for the object workshop etc).

The file you should "lock" aka make read only is "objects.package" and it's located in C:\Program Files\EA GAMES\The Sims 2 *insert ep/sp here*\TSData\Res\Objects (not sure if you need to lock all or only the latest ep's one, but I made all read-only as a precaution. By all I do really mean all, the ones named objects1.package, objects2.package etc in ALL ep/sp folders).

Sims2RPC is a lot easier to install than I remember, and here is the no-cd-crack for M&G! Remember to delete the original one (or move it somewhere as a backup) and then drag/paste the no-cd-crack one, replacing it doesn't always work (or rather, I have trust issues with replacing files lol). Don't forget to apply the 4GB patch in RPC settings, or maybe it is automatically enabled? Can't remember. If you don't use RPC, here is the 4GB patch.

Graphics rule.sgr is the file you don't want to miss. It's located in C:\Program Files\EA GAMES\The Sims 2 Mansion and Garden Stuff\TSData\Res\Config. If you're using my list as a first time ts2 player, you can use graphics rules maker to fix it, or grab veronavillequiltingbee's file here. I remember editing this file by hand back in 2017 and feeling like I was unstoppable.

Don't forget to check if you have any files in C:\Program Files\EA GAMES\The Sims 2\TSData\Res\Catalog\Bins, the custom fences, fireplaces etc (installed with Scriptorium) are located in C:\Program Files\EA GAMES\The Sims 2\TSData\Res\Catalog\Scripts. As for RPC mods, C:\Program Files\EA GAMES\The Sims 2 Mansion and Garden Stuff\TSBin\mods. And if you have a custom wantTrees.package file (located in C:\Program Files\EA GAMES\The Sims 2 Mansion and Garden Stuff\TSData\Res\Wants), don't forget that one, or simply download it again.

Don't forget the CEP-extras in the program files! C:\Program Files\EA GAMES\The Sims 2\TSData\Res\Catalog\zCEP-EXTRA

If you have any custom loading screens, they are here: C:\Program Files\EA GAMES\The Sims 2\TSData\Res\UI

I added my graphics card to the "Video Cards.sgr" file back in 2017 (don't remember how I came to this conclusion but I remember doing it), it's located in C:\Program Files\EA GAMES\The Sims 2 Herrgård och trädgård Prylpaket (aka your latest ep)\TSData\Res\Config. Edit: I found this page, maybe I did it because of that? But apparently it's useless anyway so maybe don't bother.

Lighting mods + lighting edits (I never know if I install WLBF correctly hah..)

No intro tutorial.

Custom font tutorial.

Default video/computer games (or tv-shows defaults) are located in C:\Program Files\EA GAMES\The Sims 2 *insert ep/sp here*\TSData\Res\Movies.

Resolution and anti-alias fix. Before I installed reshade (and now have to use the game's anti-alias) I actually had anti-alias off in the game's settings, I used the option in nvidiaProfileInspector instead. I have a post with my settings here.

Nopke's shadow fix!

The clean no-npc-templates are here.

Homecrafter plus, Scriptorium, CEP (SimPE CEP-load-order-check) and Milkshape (+ UniMesh, UV-flipper, align normals) are programs you'll (me) want to install again.

WSO plug-ins for milkshape from T$R workshop are located here, but I also uploaded the files here if you don't want to bother.

How to edit the "string"-name in SimPE? See here!

And lastly, don't forget to grab the EA GAMES folder in documents!

I think that's all? I've re-read this list so many times now but if anything is wrong or unclear, let me know! Happy simming!!