The Legacy Report – Sims 3 by ~texansky~

I’ve Done All I Can

I went through the process below to get a completely fresh installation of my The Sims 3 folder with store and custom content. Unfortunately, when I placed the past five saves of the Precious Joy Legacy into the game folder, every one of them got the pop-up that told me that items were missing and would be replaced.

So I decided to throw in the towel and play anyway. I made a little progress and should have a Generation 3.7 uploaded in the next few days. I am planning on resuming publishing on Fridays only for now, so check this Friday for a post.

Fun Fact: When you install Sims or Lots, the name of the associated Library file changes with each installation. Who knew?

If you are not interested in the meticulous details of my progress during this process, you can stop reading here.

~texansky~

CONTINUE READING AT YOUR OWN RISK!

Well folks, I spent the past twenty days hard at work. I made a new The Sims 3 folder and reinstalled all of the store content following my “ultimate reinstall worksheet”. I finished installing the last of the store content on September 4th. As soon as I was done, I zipped the folder and copied it to my laptop external drive, my desktop pc external drive, and a network drive on my hubby’s desktop pc. I’m not taking any chances. Since all of these locations are in our apartment, I may want to place a copy on a thumb drive and store it in our safe deposit box at the bank. Is that too much?

Once the store install was complete, I compiled a complete list of custom content by searching my laptop and external drive for Sims3Pack files, *.sim files, DCBackup and Library files. I probably had about 30 different save game folders on my external drive and my documents folder to sift through. I also had an older worksheet that listed quite a few of these items, complete with download links. Once I had a list on my new worksheet, I divided it into Worlds, CAS + Patterns, Buy-Build Objects, Sims, Households, and Residential and Community Lots. I put each Sims3Pack, DCBackup, Library file, and *.sim file into its individual folder under the appropriate category above.

I completed the collection of items I wanted to add back into my game and went through each, one at a time. I used a copy of The Sims 3 store install as a test folder. If the item was downloaded from the Exchange, I downloaded fresh copies from the Exchange. When I installed each, I saved copies of the Sims3Pack, *.sim, DCBackup, and Library files into the folder. All other previous files in the folder were placed into a backup folder created in that location.

For example, my Simself is named Cheri Nash, available on the Exchange. I made a folder named Nash Cheri in the Sims group and placed the downloaded Sims3Pack file in there. I installed her, resaved her in CAS with her stats to get a fresh Sims3Pack. Once I installed it in my test folder, I added the DCBackup files created, and added the Cheri Nash.sim file.

Cheri went into the custom Sims bin in CAS, so she didn’t have a library file and will not show up in my game library. I created a readme file that contains the name, creator name, description, and the stats of the Sim [human or occult type, birth sign, life stage, traits, likes, and lifetime wish]. I also included the upload date and URL, the Sims3Pack name, and the names of all the files created when the Sims3Pack was installed. Probably overkill, but I wanted to be thorough.

And just because I was going through every Sim I would be adding to my game, I took screenshots, cropped them to 1000×1000, shrank them to 270×270 [the perfect size to add to a Word document]. Each Sim was entered into the document and is listed in order by last name. and includes their stats [see above] under their picture. I also did this for Households I would be installing.

But I digress. Once I had all of the Sims, Households, and Lots sorted into folders with a current copy of their Sims3Pack file, I used the worksheet I created along the way for installing custom content to install each item into a fresh copy of The Sims 3 with store content. Fortunately, there were only 95 items in total.

I have quite a few more Sims and Lots in my folders that were not installed into my game, including nearly all of the forum Simmer created Sims from my Simselves game. I may introduce them into the game at a later date. At that time, I will use the steps above to download them from The Exchange, or recreate my creations from *.sim and Library files to make new Sims3Pack files. And of course, I will be using The Sims 3 Test folder for this as well.

When I finished installing the custom content yesterday, I created another zip file of The Sims 3 file and saved it as Store plus CC. This was also backed up to the external drives.

And during this I managed to consolidate a lot of Export files, Download files, Saves, and Screenshots from each folder into one location. The install files are in my custom content folder. I have 13.5 thousand files in the Game Files folder. There are a lot of save game files as well as a lot more screenshots. Once I gutted each game file of all of the important data, I deleted the game folder.

I am left with two folders – Create A World backup files and a stripped The Sims 3 game file with just my custom readme files for each folder to add to my game. Unfortunately, I was unable to locate the screenshots from my Praaven game, and I think I deleted my Medieval game folder so these are either not on my external drive or lost to the ether. I did locate the Praaven save game files. I was publishing my gameplay, so I have those images anyway.

Thanks to those who read this entire post! You were brave souls. I hope I didn’t bore you with the details.

Happy Simming!

~texansky~