#I changed default and removed ccs when everything got corrupted and now I have a lot of lots and sim makeovers to redo

[dystopianam]

I'm cursing every single second since that day I decided to download those damn corruption-bomb ccs, restoring a months old (from that time) backup is hell

[digitalangels]

So, it's actually my first time playing The Sims 2 and i'm really liking so far, i'm having quite a tough time finding what stuff should I download to make the game better (and prettier). What mods/cc do you use to make the perfomance top notch? I'm currently going through resources from simblrs, but i'm trying to hold back so i don't break the game with too many things. (btw do you know how much GB you can have until the game gets laggy?)

Oh man this is pretty hard question for someone who has pretty much just winged it with same setup for years only adding on top of the pile and replacing files that got corrupted between computer transfers but well lessee... (this got really long so I’ll put the rest under read more)

For starters, protect your game from itself, this tutorial goes through quite few points, I recommend going through each step just in case. Most important is write protecting your game files though, that way you can’t break your installation.

Marasims has tutorial for how to get your game to recognize your graphics and fix pink flashing and crashing (might wanna go through it even if your game appears to be working now)

Get some essential mods! These are up to anyone’s preferences and you should choose what to install depending on the way you play really but the ones listed in the first post are good start, they basically are things that’ll keep the game from killing itself. I’d at least recommend FFS Director's Cut and Boiling Oil’s No Sim Loaded, they’ll help to keep your game safe and it does help the performance a little too when the game isn’t spawning hundreds of Sims in the background.

Get familiar with things you can do in your game that will cause it to explode and avoid doing them. Yeah, it’s old and crappily coded and many default functions will cause neighborhood/game corruption.

And that’s most important ones for making the game run and not break for starters. If it’s still not flashing pink at that point after few minutes of playing then let’s get to beautification:

For nicer looking Sims I’d start with default replacements, you can only have one per item in your game at once, but if you get bored/don’t like the one you chose just delete it and replace with another and it should just work without extra steps (do delete caches between though, the first tutorial linked mentions the three: accessory.cache, groups.cache, and cigen.package). Defaulting the game items alone gets you pretty far before you need to start introducing custom content.

Lighting mod can do a lot for the looks of your game, there are couple to choose from:

Gunmod’s Radiance

Hat’s edit of it

Spookymuffin’s

DreadPirate’s maxis match lighting mod. (I think this is what most people use nowadays)

Perhaps you’d like some additional face sliders if you create a lot of sims?

Choose if you’re going for more realistic or more maxis matchy game and try to build your downloads folder accordingly, doing so helps to limit the content and keep the look more cohesive.

If you want hairs you can probably find anything you might need from allthehairs.uk. Keep an eye on the listed polycounts, while your computer probably can display high poly hairs if it has actual graphics card it’s really not good idea to fill your game with hairs that have polycount over 10k-20k since those will cause lag and possibly ruin your graphics card.

Simscave updates (+updates archive) are good way to find new content to download, they get updated almost daily.

I honestly don’t build/decorate enough to have recommendations for buy/build category things, I just download houses and whatever nice items I see, throw everything that comes with them in and then cry because I have to clean out the things I don’t even need for anything. Talking of which: Never install sims2packs with the game’s installer, always use Clean Installer instead! 

If you’ve played Sims 3 and used to merge files in it for better performance you can do the same thing in Sims 2 too with SimPE, but: before you merge things together make absolutely sure you want to keep each and every single color you put in that file since if you delete one in game the game will delete the whole bundle. I believe merging does make the game read the files bit faster so it can be beneficial if you aren’t like me who’s constantly changing her mind about what I want in my game and what not. Here’s tutorial for how to do it.

Renaming files (and folders!) to remove special characters like [({%¤?~*})]+ etc and spaces should also help loading times, - and _ are fine though. Also make sure your file paths stay as short as possible with as few folders as possible since it helps loading times. So for example downloads\hair\male\newsea is fine but downloads\hairMaleNewsea would be better since it’s only one folder level to read instead of three.

As for what your computer can take without lagging, there’s really no number of files I can give you. I’ve read some people run their games fine with like 40GB of content, mine takes about 6 minutes to reach neighborhood with about 5GB of custom content but it runs without problems once I get in the game. Also just warning in advance: in CAS your makeup/accessory tab will pretty much lag if you install anything there, that’s just how it seems to be for whatever reason and there’s no way around it. High poly items cause more lag than lower poly items and files with bigger textures do so too.

I hope I’m not forgetting anything too important from the above, it’s really late and way past my bed time so I gotta just post this as is. If anyone else has any tips or other things to add please do!