More Awesome Than You!

I recently had to reinstall and I thought a fresh game might solve some of the mysterious problems I've been having.

Most disturbing is the constant balding of my sims which comes and goes since HELS. Usually clearing my caches works fine but since I've reinstalled its a mess! The icons for all my custom hairs are bald in CAS, sometimes they actually work on sims sometimes not. No amount of tinkering has fixed this. I can put them in the mods folder directly or I can decrapify and merge together and its all the same.

I'm sorry but does anyone have any suggestions?

Could it be because when I patched it only updated to the latest one, and the baldness and other bugs solved in previous patches are not fixed? I'm having trouble finding old patches for macs.  :-\

The bug is inconsistent. All you can do is dump the four cache files and boot the game. If it is still borked? Try again. Working? Don't touch the cache files again unless necessary. I can assure you that the files -do- work on macs as I am using them, but sometimes I have to dump caches three to five times to get it working right.

Phew thanks,

do your icons in CAS get borked too? It could be because I had to update in the reinstall and am using the testing version of awesome? or it has nothing to do with that either?

Try deleting your CASThumbnails.package at My Documents\Electronic Arts\The Sims 3\Thumbnails

The game will regenerate them - hopefully, correctly.

@ Silent Dreamer

I wonder what you do or have that I don't because this does not work for me properly, unless you mean that you flush the cache files EVERY play session. Because even if I can eventually make hairs and custom meshes show up, the next time I load the game they're gone again.
And I come to think now that it is not entirely a caching problem but more related to the way the game is forced to read the content of the Packages folder within the Cider environment, because a few days ago I replaced Supercomputer with a newer version (i.e. I let the Finder replace the file), did only clear the script cache and the content suddenly showed up nevertheless - for one session only, though. The same happened when I replaced a .dbc file with a newer one after that.
So, I guess I will have to get one of those Newsea hairs that are now at TSR as sims3packs and see under what conditions they show up.

In the past, sims3packs hairs have usually worked for me, even when packages don't. I don't know why, but it's specifically connected to custom hair in package format.

As far as the caches go, I've seen this thrown around as advice elsewhere, and it doesn't always work. It's random: sometimes the game will read the files, sometimes it won't. I have literally deleted the caches and restarted the game six times in a row and finally given up, and never once did the hair show up. Other times, it will work fine 2-3 times in a row before not showing up again. I suspect not even EA knows what they're doing to break it (which is hardly anything new) since they had it fixed prior to this patch.