If you’ve been following The Sims Depot from way back, you may know that I had to put a Sims 3 Create a World WIP on the backburner for many reasons. One reason had to do with real life. The second reason had to do with the fact that Pottersville had started to glitch heavily, and I had no idea why or how it was happening, even though I’m an experienced worldbuilder who’s dealt with every glitch under the sun.
As it turned out, the cause of the glitches was so rare that it literally took me two years and several computer upgrades later to finally figure out what was going on. The journey–as hair pulling as it was–was so illuminating that I believe that it will be incredibly helpful to current and future worldbuilders. So, without further ado, let me explain what happened to Pottersville and what I discovered:
There’s a Bug That Causes Scripts in Your CAW WIP to Replicate Out of Control
Many Sims 3 CAW worldbuilders use mods to help enhance their worlds. What I learned is that there’s a potential bug caused when you use Master Controller’s “makesim” cheat to either populate your WIP or use it to tweak your world for some other reason before exporting. Keep in mind that the bug might not be intrinsic to Master Controller itself, but a piece of the puzzle. I say this because in all the years of worldbuilding, I never encountered this issue until 2020, and I’d always used the Porter cheat to populate my worlds without fail.
In any event, what happens is that once you create a sim using MC, this generates a “script action” in your WIP. Script actions are things you may have seen once in a while in live gameplay. You might see a little white box pop up on a lot that says something like “SHOULD NOT APPEAR IN GAME” or “missing object.”
Whenever a script gets generated in-game, they get flushed over time as you continue playing the game. However, if you generate them in Create a World, they don’t go away. They stay frozen in your WIP.
As if that wasn’t bad enough, it seems as if every time you edit your WIP, these scripts keep replicating like a virus. By the time you export your WIP, you may have thousands of these scripts in your world. They look harmless, because they’re invisible. However, they will break routing, sound and TVs even though no objects are bugged and you tested your routing to perfection. You can see what these scripts look like in the screenshot below, in the Master Controller menu:
To fix the problem, you will have to flush (delete) these script objects using Master Controller. Right now, I’m still trying to chase down which objects generate scripts and figure out how to avoid the problem. When I come up with more information, I’ll definitely post a warning for the benefit of worldbuilders, as well as a tutorial on how to flush objects. In the meantime, just know that Pottersville looks like it is back on track and should be released in the spring. Till then–
Happy Simming!
