More Awesome Than You!

I have only the basegame, my patches are all up to date.

Recently, maybe three weeks ago, i've noticed that every once in a while my game would "temporarily" freeze. just the sims and the clock, usually "resetSim *" fixes it for a while and it starts back up. I was told that this was due to a stuck sim somewhere but they can't be getting stuck this often if i'm resetting them, first of all. and then i noticed when i wanted to send two of my sims off on a date to the bistro that i couldn't click the building. i went into edit town and wanted to build a new one altogether and i can't even place the building, even with moveobjects on. i also use a lot of custom content (and do use s3pe to combine my packages).

what is this? what should i do?

I'd suggest looking at your CC first.  You may have a buggy item in there, or you might simply have too much CC installed.

How much CC is too much?

I've got that it's the CC through my troubleshooting I'm trying to figure out which one of these buggers is the troubled sibling.
Is there any way to find what part of a combined .package file is the corrupt one?

Not really, or atleast no easy way. Did you keep backups of all the original CC like you should have? That would be the easiest route, then just make new combined packages. Also, cc shouldn't really be doing this, mods on the other hand will. You didn't combine mods did you? That's a no-no.

I do with my new laptop.
 I recently had to replace my old laptop and had only backed up the combined packages themselves and not the single package files, when I put everything back into it's place on my new computer it started this. I read through some previous threads and some other people seem to have a few problems like this too (Where it reloads a few certain packages too many times and can cause the freezes, apparently). But I'm not sure what's making the rabbitholes act so weird.

I may have combined a few modifications, but not any big-important-core-mods like Awesomemod, just slider hacks/no career outfits to work, little things. Is that bad as well? I'm still not completely used to The Sims 3 yet, it really baffles how much more complicated this game is compared to ts1 and ts2.

Right now I'm picking apart my packages, finding which ones cause the issue, and which ones are just fine.


Also: A huge thank-you to every/anyone who is trying to help me pick up after my giant mess.

Don't double-post.  Use the Edit button.

Combining mods is a huge no-no because mods -- whether core or not -- often have to be updated to a new version whenever you patch your game or install a new EP or SP.  If your mods are combined together into one archive, you can't update them without chucking the entire archive file and starting over.