MOONESTATE ♡

Last updated July 26, 2025.

Please be mindful that mods CAN conflict with eachother.

Please follow all creator's TOU.

Alright so, for anyone who doesn’t actually know about this because it was a few years ago now: the person who made/maintains the official Gshade is a petulant toddler who previously placed malware within a Gshade update (which anyone who uses it knows, if you want your Gshade to work again it HAS TO BE updated).

If you’re going to use Gshade instead of Reshade, use a fork that isn’t the official one – but frankly, I’d STRONGLY suggest Reshade instead, give its open source nature and the fact you can ignore updates for literally ever if you want and it’ll still function perfectly.

For a quick summary of what happened: Gshade was always infamous for having absurd amounts of updates, and as they became more excessive people started to complain about having to update almost every damn day. Someone got fed up and created a fork that would bypass the ‘you must update to use it’ bullshit. The catalyst was the petulant child literally dropping a couple ACTUALLY EMPTY updates just to piss people off further because of the complaints about the excessive updates. Just for the extra context of ‘he very much did bullshit like this even before the malware bomb’.

This turned into an arms race between him and the person maintaining the version that gave updates the middle finger, which eventually ended in him placing code that would ‘detect if someone was using a third-party non-official Gshade’ and forcibly shut down their entire PC. Not the program (which still would have been bad, mind you, but at least SOMEWHAT more reasonable), but your entire fucking PC. Anyone whose dealt with things that ‘detect third party software’ KNOWS that this shit always has false positives from some other ENTIRELY unrelated programs, and that’s exactly what happened.

The dev’s response to this was basically quadrupling down, with one quote from them being pretty much ‘I could have done something actually harmful, but I didn’t!’ (spoiler: forcibly shutting down a PC is harmful if you’re unlucky – that’s why ‘hold power button to force shutdown’ is a last resort, because you’re basically spinning a roulette wheel). So, ‘I’ll fuckin’ do it again!’ level of response to the concerns, basically.

There’s more bits to the story, but that’s the gist of it. Given the price of PC parts and PCs in general right now, unless you’re willing to risk that potential $2k on a replacement rig if baby has a tantrum again, I suggest folks ditch Gshade in favor of Reshade. The 'convenience' is not worth it.

Still pretty upsetting to watch however, bc these types games were supposed to be an escape from the $60-$80, lootbox and season pass laden, always online experiences that had poisoned the industry in recent years, but such hasn’t been the case of late.

Idk how, or why, or who’s at fault, but there was a weakness in this seemingly impenetrable wall, and the companies found it, and have every interest in exploiting it, and that kinda sucks, bc it really felt like the last thing that was truly pure in an industry they’d already squeezed a lot of the fun out of.

Gaming is a hobby for me, but like many other hobbies it’s definitely gotten to a point where it feels as if I’m being priced out of it. I’m happy some of y’all found a way to monetize it, even if just to keep priced in, and honestly who wouldn’t wanna get paid doing what they want to do rather than what they have to do, esp in this economy, but I’d be lying if I didn’t say I believe some parts of gaming should just be kept sacred from the involvement of money.

Reviving old, abandoned games through modding wasn’t just a hobby for some, it was protest against what the gaming industry had become, it was community, it was an opportunity for people to offer not only content, but also skills and information that would have otherwise cost them money to attain.

Thou shall not put any content behind a paywall, including Early Access.

Thou shall not host content on Curseforge.

Thou shall not host any content or links to content in such a way that endangers or puts at risk one another’s devices.

Thou shall not use AI to create content.

Thou shall not upload content to sites that require the disclosure of personal information in order to obtain said files.

Thou shall only respect reasonable Terms of Use (TOUs).

Thou shall work hard to rid themself of Same-Face Syndrome and the evil there of.

Thou shall appreciate their own gameplay aesthetics without putting down other styles whether they be Maxis Match, Alpha or Maxis Mix or some variation there of.

Thou shall back up their mods folder, screenshots, and savefiles.

Thou shall play offline until their mods are fully updated or are removed.

Most creators add special characters to their CC filenames as a way to identify their work and for easy filing in your Mods folder. Whilst they really do help to identify items they can also be the cause of slow loading in the game, particularly if you have a ton of CC/Mods.

Special characters are any characters in a filename that are not letters or numbers, like $, @, [, ], (, ), & and even a space. You could go through the filenames and manually change them but that could take forever if you have a bulging Mods folder. 

To solve this issue I created a little app using Automator that automatically removes the special characters for you. You simply drag the files and drop them on the app and the characters are instantly removed:

I’ve explained it in more depth on my site and also uploaded the app so any Mac user can use this for their files - https://bluebellflora.com/using-automator-to-remove-characters-from-sims-4-cc-filenames-on-a-mac/