What to do if Your Game Slows Down (Clean Up Your Game)

[Odie]

Ok, great!

[Esther1981]

I have 3 separate sim folders, each named something different, and I just went through all of them deleting what was said in the first post, so here's hoping my night of Seasons doesn't get ruined by lag!! 

[Odie]

Good luck with that! I hope you can enjoy your game!

[NeonAngel]

RockinRobin you are my HERO!!! After weeks of trying to solve my choppy and pausing game it was fixed in 2 seconds because of you!! I deleted the files in my DCbackup folder and  wow. The game was like I had never seen it. It was such a pleasure to play. The crashing and error codes stopped too.

thanks a million

[HannahsPineapple]

I've just cleaned out my DCBackup file and I deleted everything, silly me. I didn't read the comment to not deleted the ccmerged.package and now I can't find it.. will this affect my game?  I've looked through my trashed, searched everywhere to see if I can get it back but I can't find it? I do have the worlds offered by the sims 3 store with the premium content, will this be a problem?

[Anushka]

I've just cleaned out my DCBackup file and I deleted everything, silly me. I didn't read the comment to not deleted the ccmerged.package and now I can't find it.. will this affect my game?  I've looked through my trashed, searched everywhere to see if I can get it back but I can't find it? I do have the worlds offered by the sims 3 store with the premium content, will this be a problem?

It is a cashe file and it will recreate the file next time you load the game. You can also try right click in folder and look for "undo delete" option after you delete something by mistake.
Store items and premium items should not be lost no matter what you do, you can always redownload them from your account and install them again

[zwasserm]

Hey all,

Thanks so much for putting together this thread.  I deleted the four cache files and my game began to run more smoothly, although my loading/saving still takes several minutes.  The reason I didn't delete the contents of the DCBackup folder is because there was nothing in it except for the ccmerged one we aren't supposed to delete.  Another interesting thing is that all four of those files were less than 200 bytes each, that's bytes, not MB or KB, just B.  Are your files a similar size? Anyone else have an empty DCBackup folder?

Thanks!

[jen2912]

My game has slowed and every few minutes will stop and then start again.  It has been like this since i installed 70 80 90 stuff.  It may be I need more RAM as i only have 2GB. I am getting it upgraded next week to 5/6GB.  Should this work?

[mald1983]

So happy someone found this info! I had nearly 2k items in my dcbackup! Holy cow! No wonder my game was slow!

I also found a file called "Saves" and realized it was every save I've ever done. So, if you have some old games in there that you no longer play or that you deleted in game, they can be deleted as well. They're saved by the. name you gave them, and the dates of your last save for the game is next to it. Just be sure to check for your recent games (should be at the top).

[Nuka]

Hello, my game was specially slow when my sim worked as architectural designer, when I tryed to build in neighbour's houses. Now it works fine, I did this:
- deleted (in the folder documents/electronic arts/sims3) the cache files (CASPartCache, compositorCache, simCompositorCache, scriptCache), and socialcache (I have just read this can make me lose active achievements )
- deleted every file in documents/electronic arts/sims 3/thumbnails (all the files in "thumbnails" folder),
and the same in the folder "worldcaches".
- deleted all the files in DCBackup and restarted the computer (I havent's any premium contents).
- I still repeat this steps from time to time.

After some minutes playing it was slow again, so I did this:

- renamed the folder "The sims 3" in Documents/electronic arts and renamed it The sims 3 Backup
- started the game (so the folder "The sims 3" was created again)
- then I closed the game and copied the save game I was playing from "the sims 3 backup/saves" to "the sims 3/saves" , a map that I created with worldtool (and reinstalled it with the launcher), the sims I created to the corresponding folder (savedsims), and the mods I was using.

Now my game works fine! I hope it helps someone, and I hope I explained it adequately in english because that's not my language.

[Swirl-Girl]

One good way to make sure you don't delete anything critical is to do it with the game running. I play with the game not in full-screen mode, which makes it easy.

[lawlietismine25]

I know I'm kinda "late to the party" here, but this is something that I just noticed. I deleted the ccmerged file because I didn't know I wasn't supposed to, but after I started a new game, it was there in the DCBackup folder like it was supposed to be. O.o

[Angélique]

I know I'm kinda "late to the party" here, but this is something that I just noticed. I deleted the ccmerged file because I didn't know I wasn't supposed to, but after I started a new game, it was there in the DCBackup folder like it was supposed to be. O.o

Yes, that's correct, it's recreated when you load the game, but that's not going to do you, or anyone else, any good, because the new file is just a useless empty shell. It's only 1 kB in size, the proper ccmerged file is around 6 kB. So if you want your Store Premium Content to work the way it's supposed to, do not delete the ccmerged.package file!

Read more about it here.

Edit to add, the size of the ccmerged.package file will of course vary. The more premium content you install, the bigger it gets. The 6 kB above was referring to the size of my own ccmerged file when I made this post.

[Snufflesxx]

I made the mistake of deleting my ccmerged.package file but I managed to find it in my recycling bin. Will my premium content work again if I replace the new ccmerged.package file with the old one from the recycling bin?

[fortheloveofcake]

I want to say no... I could be wrong but something is telling me I did this exact thing in the past and it did not work. I had to uninstall and reinstall premium content.