Error codes 12 and 13 along with crashing.

[newperson]

I have been receiving error code 13, almost from the beginning (about 2 weeks after I began playing).  I have had them with and without CC; with and without Awesomemod; playing for long periods of time, or short.  I've tried all the "voodoo" fixes and some worked...for a while.  I added memory, which seemed to help...for a while.  I don't remember when I began to get error code 12, but it seems just as random.  I had someone look at it and he surmised that it looks like a video leak.  There was a place in the logs in which, he said, it seemed like the game was trying to use the video card memory instead of system memory.  He also pointed out that, if this is indeed the problem, there would likely not be a fix for it because too much would have to be recoded.  The best I am able to do is to save about once an hour and shut the game and restart after two hours. Unfortunately, I sometimes get involved in the game and don't save or shut down in time, which brings on the inevitable error code (either 12 or 13). Saving more often than once an hour doesn't seem to help, and sometimes I get the error if I save too often!
I can only share what I've been told, as I just play.  I love mods and appreciate the people who create them, but have no such talents myself. 

[Lorea]

Prior to this happening, I noticed that the path finding AI of some sims are disabled. When I direct them to a door, they go straight to that direction and stop in front of a wall that is between the sim and the door. And visiting neighbors, the ring doorbell becomes inaccessible and only functional if you do it outside of the neighbor's lot. Succeeding in ringing the doorbell, the neighbor inside the house just keep doing what it has been doing ignoring the bell. I had similar experience two months before and it also ended up in an error 13 and then error 12.

Yes!! The same things happen to me since I got error 12s!

Edit:
I used s3rc, deleted derelict car, deleted duplicate sims, and the same happened as yesterday. I could save for the first time and I got error 12 during the second save so I had to quit without saving.. again..
I recognized that after first saving the size of the save file became as big as was before I compressed it with s3rc. I mean my saved file was 89MB, then I used s3rc and it became 70 MB. I started to play and after the first successful saving the save file became 89 MB again.. And the second saving gave me the error 12..
What more can I do? My game is unplayable in this way..
Please answer to my previous comment too.

[Kayanna]

I had error codes 12 and 13 until I followed the advice of Jordi and only Saved, not Save and Quit.  I also cleaned out my downloads and was fine for a week. Now unfortunately I have two layers of my Sunset Valley neighborhood, a blank one on top of the real one, with holes in the blank one where buildings would be. I have no idea how I fixed this when it happened to my Riverview Neighborhood. I'm playing in bootcamp Windows 7 on a newish MacBook Pro with 4 gig of memory and have tried emptying all my caches, shrinking my Saves folder, reducing downloads again, and will just keep fiddling until I find a solution.  At least I'm not facing error codes 12 and 13 anymore so I suppose that's progress.

[J. M. Pescado]

Something seems very wrong if your neighborhood is 89 MBs.

[Lorea]

Something seems very wrong if your neighborhood is 89 MBs.

How many MBs would be normal?

[tizerist]

Something seems very wrong if your neighborhood is 89 MBs.

Mine is also around this size. At least it was, until I cleansed my town of all but 5 sims.

[Steele]

Re-verified the bloated town issue with regards to Error 12. The Error is not based on sims or objects, removing everything on the neighborhood, the error does not go away. Resetworld or any command does not fix it. I suspect there is a corruption within the cache that causes the error 12.

Also having duplicate sims seems to make the error appear twice as fast. I may be mistaken but everytime I add Indie Stone or the NRaas Story Progression Driver, some family in the bin gets cloned into the game. I am aware of the immigration function of both mods and it is set not to immigrate. I make no claims, since I am not sure if this is just coincidental or some conflicts with other mods, in which I also use other mods along with it.

Oh, and using the S3RC my save file size has been reduced to 99.5 MB from 148MB just for information. No significant gameplay changes except for some hairs getting corrected from dead ancestral sims.

[Anonym]

My neighborhood is also even bigger than 89 MB's, so I think it's pretty common, at least among those of us who use mods.  Right now I'm actually at 93 MB's.  My use of the compressor did what others have reported:  It lowered the size of the save file only until I saved again.

With respect to Error 12 not being able to be squashed by Resetworld or other commands, that's hit or miss.  I can verify that sometimes simply moving to a different active lot, or having no active lot, and using the other more focused debug commands I've successfully saved after an Error 12, and other times that those haven't worked resetworld has allowed me to save after such an error.

On the other hand, just as often there's nothing I can do that will let me save after an Error 12, and one time I got an Error 12, did the other commands, got the same error, then out of desperation did a resetworld and at that point got a CTD when trying to save.

[Lorea]

Now I can't play at all. By now I get error 12 during every save. So I can't save my game ever. I tried those commands what you recommended but nothing worked.
I'm just.. distressed.

[Steele]

Yes, I tried the game without any CCs and nothing changed, I got error 12 during save too.. This error 12 problem started 1,5 week ago and I can't find the reason why. I put NoFootTappingOnWaitForClearRoute, AskIfSingleIsFriendly, NoStupidIdleFaces and OpportunityControl mods in my game last. And I deleted Makeyourselfathome, Morelifetimehappiness, Woohooer, LessHygienefromWatering, LessHygienefromWeeding, LessHygieneDecayandMorefunWeeding/Harvestin/Watering mods, but I can't remember exactly when.
And in the last days NoStupidIdleFaces and NoAutonomousGuitar mods stopped working for me.
Nowadays I made one more change, I play with FPS limiter, can it cause any trouble?
I didn't know about immovable graves If I find one I have to delete it?
If I can't solve this problem I reinstall the game, but maybe that won't help anything.

Are you selecting the same sim all those time you use the Simselector before the error 12 appear?

No, I use this mod instead od switch families in Town Editor. So I selected almost all sims, not the same always. But I use to play longer only with four families.

I haven't tried those mods. It seems these are not intrusive mods but I'm not sure if they are memory resident mods (sorry my programming and computer technology skills are outdated since the release of Pentium 1) Maybe reading the comments from these mods would give you ideas if you are experiencing the same problems with the mod as with other players who used it.

For unmovable graves, normally I nuke them with the Awesomemod and do the fixall command. Moving them into the mausoleum would be a more wiser choice since deleting it may not really remove possibilities that the sim becomes bugged or already bugged to begin with. It just removes the grave not the sim description. What I found is the Awesomemod's Destroyall... command does remove the sim descriptions, the NRaas SC sometimes does but not always in my case.

Prior to this happening, I noticed that the path finding AI of some sims are disabled. When I direct them to a door, they go straight to that direction and stop in front of a wall that is between the sim and the door. And visiting neighbors, the ring doorbell becomes inaccessible and only functional if you do it outside of the neighbor's lot. Succeeding in ringing the doorbell, the neighbor inside the house just keep doing what it has been doing ignoring the bell. I had similar experience two months before and it also ended up in an error 13 and then error 12.

Yes!! The same things happen to me since I got error 12s!

Edit:
I used s3rc, deleted derelict car, deleted duplicate sims, and the same happened as yesterday. I could save for the first time and I got error 12 during the second save so I had to quit without saving.. again..
I recognized that after first saving the size of the save file became as big as was before I compressed it with s3rc. I mean my saved file was 89MB, then I used s3rc and it became 70 MB. I started to play and after the first successful saving the save file became 89 MB again.. And the second saving gave me the error 12..
What more can I do? My game is unplayable in this way..
Please answer to my previous comment too.

I'm not yet sure what causes this problem. But after using the S3RC, there is no improvement for the Error problems. Yet there is a random interaction that causes it. What I can identify is that certain sims does not respond well with hacks and mods. Some sims go crazy when the sim selector is used. Some sims gets bugged when the NRaas SC is used, weird is that Eric Darling and the Remingtons from Riverview shows up on the NRaas SC list even when they are still in their graves and their skin tone is black.

I have been re-purging my town last night and observing. I have restored the non-S3RC'd save file to wait if someone can come up with a tomb respawner mod for deleted tombstones. I figured that even with an empty town the game still bugs and I want to verify if the problem lies with the dead sims that are still encoded within the save game.  What I believe is that I may have used a conflicting mod in the past or a CC that was bypassed by the game and saved.

While bloating up my neighborhood in the past week, I noted that some sims that are being shared online are bugged I'm sure they are missing some CCs (which I do not need) when I installed them, normally, they the missing CCs will default to EAxis defaults but instead they cause CTD and weird stuffs. So it may be that in my earlier gameplay, the CCs were not that many and probably still in development filled with bugs that somehow gets saved and just remained with each successive save or worse yet, it could have acquired more bugs along the course of normal gameplay, which is being prevalent and persistent now.

Now I can't play at all. By now I get error 12 during every save. So I can't save my game ever. I tried those commands what you recommended but nothing worked.
I'm just.. distressed.

I'm also having the same problem last night. I have started to purge the town and bit by bit to see what is causing it.

Just a recommendation, If you haven't tried to re-install the game and play your last save game vanilla (no update, no mods and no custom content and store items) now would be the best time to try.

[Anonym]

Now I can't play at all. By now I get error 12 during every save. So I can't save my game ever. I tried those commands what you recommended but nothing worked.
I'm just.. distressed.

Do something, anything, to change things up.  Put all the stuff you have that's saved in My Documents in a safe directory and your mods and CC from /Program Files in another safe directory, then reinstall the game-- for instance.  Once the game is reinstalled, put everything back in. 

If that doesn't work, take parts out selectively and see with what it will save and with what it won't.  If it won't save with something you really want, try getting a fresh copy.

Just keep changing things around until you get a version that has the CC you want that will save.  I'd start with a clean reinstall with the CC backed up so you can add it.

I guess it's possible to have a corrupted neighborhood/save file, which is the worst outcome, but chances are it isn't that and just the voodoo of changing stuff, even stuff that should have no bearing on anything, even game options or whatever, could give you a more stable combination.

If you have a corrupted neighborhood file, try saving all the famblys you care a lot about to the bin and starting a new game and reintroducing them.  Then use Twallan's supercomputer to resinstate lost family ties and romances that you want to get back.

[Steele]

Now I can't play at all. By now I get error 12 during every save. So I can't save my game ever. I tried those commands what you recommended but nothing worked.
I'm just.. distressed.

Do something, anything, to change things up.  Put all the stuff you have that's saved in My Documents in a safe directory and your mods and CC from /Program Files in another safe directory, then reinstall the game-- for instance.  Once the game is reinstalled, put everything back in.  

If that doesn't work, take parts out selectively and see with what it will save and with what it won't.  If it won't save with something you really want, try getting a fresh copy.

Just keep changing things around until you get a version that has the CC you want that will save.  I'd start with a clean reinstall with the CC backed up so you can add it.

I guess it's possible to have a corrupted neighborhood/save file, which is the worst outcome, but chances are it isn't that and just the voodoo of changing stuff, even stuff that should have no bearing on anything, even game options or whatever, could give you a more stable combination.

If you have a corrupted neighborhood file, try saving all the famblys you care a lot about to the bin and starting a new game and reintroducing them.  Then use Twallan's supercomputer to resinstate lost family ties and romances that you want to get back.

That's a good suggestion. Though a word of warning, messing with the family ties can also break the game. As there are rare instances that some sims are broken. But do keep an observant eye when experimenting on stuff, keep backups so you have a returning point to go back to.

Edit: I did try to re-instate lost and broken family ties and got really messed up with some broken sims. I ended up having a loop where the great grandchild became the parent of the great grandparent and loops back to a full circle, the type you find on a sci-fi time travel paradox movie. I have to reload an old save after that. I am not advising against modifying the family tree, just take precautions.

10/15 Update:
One thing I notice before getting an error 12, is that some sims does not go to work and keep getting demoted. Even if they are already established with high positions. There also some sims that are non player user imported sims/households to the town that does not go find a job. I'm not sure if they are stuck or corrupted since changing households to these sims seemed to take 2x-4x longer to load the houses than the ones that does not have problems. Even houses that are overstuffed and very large loads faster than these problematic households. I'm going to try a work pusher mod and see if the error 12 instance would be reduced.

[Lorea]

10/15 Update:
One thing I notice before getting an error 12, is that some sims does not go to work and keep getting demoted. Even if they are already established with high positions. There also some sims that are non player user imported sims/households to the town that does not go find a job. I'm not sure if they are stuck or corrupted since changing households to these sims seemed to take 2x-4x longer to load the houses than the ones that does not have problems. Even houses that are overstuffed and very large loads faster than these problematic households. I'm going to try a work pusher mod and see if the error 12 instance would be reduced.

It's the same in my game for a while.. maybe since I get error 12 every time. I noticed that non player sims just don't go work and children don't go to school, so I have to make them active and send them to work/school. All neighborhood is about to be failed or fired.

By the way I started to correspondence with EA tech support about this and ..uhh man! They are dumb! Just said me to delete all my files from Save folder. Wow! That's the solution! After a week they couldn't say me anything but reinstall my computer..
So I called them and a guy said me they know about this problem and they're making the repair and give us a patch within a month.
I don't beleive him.

[Steele]

It's the same in my game for a while.. maybe since I get error 12 every time. I noticed that non player sims just don't go work and children don't go to school, so I have to make them active and send them to work/school. All neighborhood is about to be failed or fired.

I believe these minor glitches are probably the cause of the error 12, maybe not at first but given enough time they stack up and clutter to your cache that prevents you from doing anything afterwards. I will be making a list of the glitches I noticed prior to error 12s later. So that we can help each other look for a trend.

Edit:
Below is a partial list of glitches that I noticed  prior to receiving an Error 12:
1. Pathfinding issues for certain (not all) houses/lots when visiting. Sims gets stuck on something in front of the front door. Doorbell could not be activated as if nobody is home. Sims inside the house act as no one is ringing the doorbell if doorbell function activated.
2. Work and School performance drops and non active sims somehow does not go to work just standing around the house. This bug is not observed from all sims only some. There are sims in the same household and only one of them does not go to work. Also some unemployed sims does not seek jobs. They bum around the house. (NRaas Career mod not used)
3. Immovable urn / tombstones in community and residential lots of non active sims. Tombs and urns failed to be moved to the mausoleum.
4. Ghost aging bug. With prior releases of AM, Ghosts that returned to the netherworld still gets aging messages.
5. Missing inventory. So far with playable ghosts, some of them is missing their tombstones in their inventory and lets them live forever as elders.
6. Stuck sims on community lots. Somehow AM's no community swarm seems to fix this problem most of the time. It's often observed with overstuffed town population. They still somehow swarm on the bistro or theater and still get stuck with the no community swarm settings on but only on rare occasion.
7. Townie bug. With the Unified billing on, some non active families cannot afford to pay for their houses with their income even if all their careers are maxed. And somehow in their townie state, they get lost or disappear from the homeless list and reappear sometime later unaged. Some loses traits other loses their body mesh (invisible sim bug).
8. Another townie bug. In some rare occasion the game generates incomplete townies. The game either clone missing townie sims or creates ones without traits or favorites and sometimes both cloned and no personality.
9. Another rare occurrence, the game bypasses AM's storymode controls and mixes up unrelated household members as it normally does. And sometimes it moves out families from the neighborhood. It was weird that with AM and IS installed, there was a mass move out of the town residents leaving only 3 small non active family in town, even townies moved out. That was the last time I used IS. (note that IS and AM had the no move out option turned on. But AM story driver was active, IS story driver inactive)
So far these is what I can remember, I'll be adding if I could remember some more or encounter new ones.  

Also as a trial, I will be testing on using first the "fixall" command every 2am game time as a temporary cleanup process much the same as the games 12am and 5am cleanup process and see if error 12s can be reduced. The next step will try "resetallwants" if fixall does not work.

Edit 10/16: Work pusher does not work on sims who aren't going to work. Resetsim does work on them. These sims somehow have path finding issues. I watched one sim leaving the house to go to the carpool, instead of riding the car, she went into the garage and got stuck there.

By the way I started to correspondence with EA tech support about this and ..uhh man! They are dumb! Just said me to delete all my files from Save folder. Wow! That's the solution! After a week they couldn't say me anything but reinstall my computer..
So I called them and a guy said me they know about this problem and they're making the repair and give us a patch within a month.
I don't beleive him.

Don't blame them, I'm very sure that they are just contracted telemarketers (call centers) that EA hired to do marketing and customer support and limited connection to EA itself. Basically they do not have any technical knowledge. They only have manuals and pre-made knowledge base answers provided to them for them to respond to customers. It may surprise you that some of them are as far as India or the Philippines. Worse yet the one answering your email may sometimes be a computer programmed to send out specific email responses based on keywords.

With regards to the patch, That's something you can believe him. Only the patch not exactly the repair part. Since World Adventures will be released next month there is really a patch included there though it may still be the v1.4 patch. Either way, error 12 and 13 will not be our only problem next month. Knowing the Sims 2 track record, we'll have new things to worry about. (Pray hard, cross all your fingers (including toes), knock on all the wooden things you see, and etc... that the last statement isn't true)

EDIT:
I posted this on the Official TS3 forums, I think this is the trend we'll be expecting from further expansions from the game:
This is the trend I see:
TS1 bug level : zero to minimal. The patches are few and rare for the whole series.
TS2 bug level : Minimal to Moderate. There are many bugs in every EP but they are still playable.
TS3 bug level : Moderate to Severe. Just the base game will foretell what to expect.
TS4 bug level : Probably unplayable.
I added the TS4 since there were some people who had nothing to do but speculate on something still far away and their ideas may be obsolete & forgotten in a couple of years or months.

EDIT 10/19
With stuck and work/school skipping bums, resetworld or resetsim does not always work. It seems they still skip work/school the next day. Also forcing them to go to work one household at a time is tedious but it works however, 1/3 of the way switching household to household also causes error 13s. I think something hardcored in the game that causes these bums to stop working to prevent error 13s, maybe an ingame failsafe. It is probably what's bypassing the NRaas Workpusher mod from working right. With the AM story driver the results are the same. Unemployed sims remains unemployed and employed non active sims just keep skipping work and losing jon performance. I tracked around 10/32 employed sims going to work, 31 sims are left unemployed, all kids skipping school.

[Steele]

My last post seems over bloated so I have to start on a new reply.

I tried again to push the non active sims to go to work and school. I found these following actions resulted into an Error 13.
1. Changing different households to set sims to find work and go to work. On the 15th house entered. Error 13 prevents the game from being saved further. I think objects in the inactive houses gets also saved into the cache when loaded into. And moving sims going to work and looking for work at the same instance causes somewhat an overload to the cache.

2. Once all households have been given jobs. With NRaas Workpusher active, the game freezes at 7am. Either there are too many sims that are expected to work at 8am as well as kids going to school. Or the stuck sims are still being pushed by the workpusher and refuses to go to work.

    Without the workpusher, the game continues but Error 13 will pop out when saved. Some sims still does not go to work.

[notyourbusiness]

I believe these minor glitches are probably the cause of the error 12, maybe not at first but given enough time they stack up and clutter to your cache that prevents you from doing anything afterwards.

Looks like error 12 doesn't require much to appear. I started a fresh game today. I could play for almost 2 sim days. During this my sim had done nothing but eat, take a bath, sleep and write a novel. I noticed that the save file kept increasing in size like mad. On my fourth save I got error 12.

[tizerist]

I am one of the only people to have hardly any patterns installed and have only had error 13 once. Make of that what you will, but I think there may be a connection.

The game really shouldn't be worrying about cacheing items in other households if indeed thats true.

Theres a saying "If a tree falls in a deserted woods, does it make a noise?"
In sims 3, it would appear yes it does. And the computer wheezes and coughs while it happens too.

[Steele]

I am one of the only people to have hardly any patterns installed and have only had error 13 once. Make of that what you will, but I think there may be a connection.

The game really shouldn't be worrying about cacheing items in other households if indeed thats true.

Theres a saying "If a tree falls in a deserted woods, does it make a noise?"
In sims 3, it would appear yes it does. And the computer wheezes and coughs while it happens too.

The game does not cache other house details if you don't interact with other households only sims and interactions, the game only loads the house shell not the interior during map view. Once you close up, more details gets loaded into the cache. Then entering the house will add more to cache. So changing into different households will bloat your cache.

My idea is if you play the game like sims 2 where you don't go anywhere but your current household and zoom out less, you have more playtime since only sim interactions and your current household gets loaded into the cache.

[J. M. Pescado]

EDIT:
I posted this on the Official TS3 forums, I think this is the trend we'll be expecting from further expansions from the game:
This is the trend I see:
TS1 bug level : zero to minimal. The patches are few and rare for the whole series.
TS2 bug level : Minimal to Moderate. There are many bugs in every EP but they are still playable.
TS3 bug level : Moderate to Severe. Just the base game will foretell what to expect.
TS4 bug level : Probably unplayable.
I added the TS4 since there were some people who had nothing to do but speculate on something still far away and their ideas may be obsolete & forgotten in a couple of years or months.

Let's be fair: TS3 is much less buggy than TS2 base. While it is true that it is possible to munge your neighborhood in various ways, much of this is due to third-party modification allowing you to poke the games in ways it was never designed to be poked. In TS2, every neighborhood was invariably faced with certain doom in the form of the "jump bug" triggered by data file bloatage, and this was an unavoidable and inevitable thing in ANY neighborhood, and REQUIRED a third party hack to repair. Which we made. TS3, there's the "error 12", but not everyone encounters this and it is not known what exactly you're doing to trigger it. Plus, the game didn't come with a "fuck up your game" button like the fiasco that was the lot bin.

[saltysugar]

I was getting error 13 non-stop, but managed to (so far) get rid of it. It wasn't due to saving infrequently (I saved every 2-5 minutes, a habit from the frequent TS2 crashes), and I had no success with deleting cache files, .BAD files, or changing a tree or other random action on a community lot. I also tried renaming my game, using backup files, and moving my active family to another lot. I didn't have an excessive amount of downloads or mods installed, nor much of a population, and I play with a legal copy. However, for over a month and a half, I was able to save only one time per game, and then never again.

This error may have occurred only after I significantly re-built a lot I had downloaded off of MTS. I was trying to expand the family's house, and had deleted most of the house they had been residing in, in order to rebuild on the same plot with their garden. I believe this is when error 13 began, but I can't be sure.

So yesterday, I used the TS3 Launcher and uninstalled every custom lot I had in the game (I kept all my hacks and other .package files, however), then started the game, saved my sim families to the library, as well as three community lots I built myself, and deleted the entire neighborhood. I began a new Riverside neighborhood, and built a brand new house on an empty lot. Then I played until 8 AM in the morning (only about ten hours straight), saving every 2-5 minutes, and not a single error occurred. I have not placed any of those custom community lots I'd built as of yet, but will try that out after a few more days of finally enjoying the game again.

I hope this helps someone out, as there seems to be a lot of suggestions out there, but barely any follow-ups on their implementation.

[Steele]

EDIT:
I posted this on the Official TS3 forums, I think this is the trend we'll be expecting from further expansions from the game:
This is the trend I see:
TS1 bug level : zero to minimal. The patches are few and rare for the whole series.
TS2 bug level : Minimal to Moderate. There are many bugs in every EP but they are still playable.
TS3 bug level : Moderate to Severe. Just the base game will foretell what to expect.
TS4 bug level : Probably unplayable.
I added the TS4 since there were some people who had nothing to do but speculate on something still far away and their ideas may be obsolete & forgotten in a couple of years or months.

Let's be fair: TS3 is much less buggy than TS2 base. While it is true that it is possible to munge your neighborhood in various ways, much of this is due to third-party modification allowing you to poke the games in ways it was never designed to be poked. In TS2, every neighborhood was invariably faced with certain doom in the form of the "jump bug" triggered by data file bloatage, and this was an unavoidable and inevitable thing in ANY neighborhood, and REQUIRED a third party hack to repair. Which we made. TS3, there's the "error 12", but not everyone encounters this and it is not known what exactly you're doing to trigger it. Plus, the game didn't come with a "fuck up your game" button like the fiasco that was the lot bin.

That's true. Based on what I gather less than 30% has been encountering this problem or probably even less. Also thanks for the reminder, I did forget about the Jump Bug problem that caused so much problems as well as others that MATY did solve. Those bugs did not have much impact on me since I never encountered them and was too busy cleaning out the crap and junk embedded within the sims2pack that got installed into my game. I appreciate the correction of my erroneous point of view.

I agree that it's really the player that triggers this not the game. I already solved my own error 12 and 13 problems a while back. I'm just screwing around with the game and figure out what's causing it and understand why methods that worked for me does not does not apply to others. (So I'm not asking for any help but just posting on what I have been observing and what I screw ups I made to cause it. Just try to establish a trend to understand what triggers this.)

EDIT 10/23
Just for additional information, there was a suggestion earlier that moving your household to a new neighborhood solved their error problem.

My experience it does temporary work unless you do something different (play styles, mods and all) the error will still come back.

Also, if the family you are exporting from the old hood to the new one has completed skill challenges, that sim may end up being corrupted but skill levels is retained. This is the list I saw that got altered during the export/import process:
1. Logic
         Grand Master your title will remain but the sims you've beaten and next challenger will be empty
         Celestial Explorer becomes cleared all celestial discoveries are erased.
         Teacher Extraordinaire will reflect hours taught but the inside data listing who your sim taught, # of hours taught and date taught is empty
         Skill Professor same as teacher extraordinaire
2. Writing
         Without the AM, I think all books written will be purged. Probably, what will remain is number of books and total royalties made.
3. Gardening
         Plantable opportunities gets reset. You cannot plant cheese, eggs, patty and steaks or order omni plant seed until you redo the opportunities
         Master Planter will become incomplete. Though the planting record history is intact, You have to keep replanting until you find the right seed to complete the challenge again.
4. Charisma
         Though very obvious, everything here will be reset to zero.
5. Guitar
         Compositions Known will be duplicated. All master tracks will become duplicate ordinary tracks. so if you have 20 ordinary tracks your master tracks will become 20 ordinary tracks. All master tracks erased
6. Collecting
         Awesomest Rock Collector in the Universe, your 100% analyzed rocks becomes 79% and this challenge becomes reset.

Any painting in the family inventory or sim inventory becomes riddler tiles
Certificates can sometimes loose the ownership links. Fishes (alive or mounted) also gets ownership link severed (My deathfish and shark became "store bought").

So basically you're importing errors to your new game.

[Steele]

Sorry for the added thread. My previous thread is getting bloated.

I'm just curious, for those experiencing the Error 12s and 13s.

A. When you encounter these errors do you ...
    1. Quit the game normally
    2. Use the task manager to prematurely terminate the game

B. After restarting your game, how many sim days or minutes playing do you start encountering the errors once more.

What I am trying to figure out when the refresh of the cache takes place. Is it during the initial loading of the game or is it during the unloading of the game from memory when you are quitting.

[Simsample]

Steele, I'm going to quote you from another thread:

I've been noticing that after some time, the game breaks ownership links for certain items. Like fishes (who caught the certain fish and fish weight, fish becomes "store bought"), it also has been happening to paintings (paintings become riddler tiles) and certificates. So far with books it has not yet occurred, perhaps the AM functionality for purchasing player written books at the bookstore keeps the link in check.

The certificates link gets broken that it does not have the "view" pie menu and becomes a mere functionless decorative.

For fishes it's easy to catch new ones and paintings is also replaceable (unless the painting is based on a happenstance event or a portrait and the subject sim is not anymore available to pose.)

This, and some of what you are saying caught my eye. The game definitely does not break ownership links after some time, in a 'normal' game. I have a generation 11 family who have certificates and paintings going back to generation 2, as well as fish caught by generation 2. They are all perfectly intact, with all ownerships working. Haven't paid any attention to the books, as I keep forgetting to take them when I move and haven't checked the library. What I'm trying to say is that all of this- the save errors, the riddler tiles, the lost ownership- seems to point to some underlying corruption, and I don't think you are going to repair it by 'cleaning up' your current savegame (it seems as though that's what you are doing?). From other tests that people have done it seems clear that people with these issues in game are having it re-occur in fresh hoods, so this means that it is probably re-occurring in your game too. We know what the symptoms are, we need to find out what is causing it- why only some computers, and stop it. I don't think there's any way you'll really repair corruption and stop it from worsening where it has already happened. So far my suspects are custom content as a cause, and also certain hardware (one user has the riddler tiles almost immediately in a vanilla game on a Mac, but install from the same disc to a PC and the game works fine).

[Steele]

Steele, I'm going to quote you from another thread:

I've been noticing that after some time, the game breaks ownership links for certain items. Like fishes (who caught the certain fish and fish weight, fish becomes "store bought"), it also has been happening to paintings (paintings become riddler tiles) and certificates. So far with books it has not yet occurred, perhaps the AM functionality for purchasing player written books at the bookstore keeps the link in check.

The certificates link gets broken that it does not have the "view" pie menu and becomes a mere functionless decorative.

For fishes it's easy to catch new ones and paintings is also replaceable (unless the painting is based on a happenstance event or a portrait and the subject sim is not anymore available to pose.)

This, and some of what you are saying caught my eye. The game definitely does not break ownership links after some time, in a 'normal' game. I have a generation 11 family who have certificates and paintings going back to generation 2, as well as fish caught by generation 2. They are all perfectly intact, with all ownerships working. Haven't paid any attention to the books, as I keep forgetting to take them when I move and haven't checked the library. What I'm trying to say is that all of this- the save errors, the riddler tiles, the lost ownership- seems to point to some underlying corruption, and I don't think you are going to repair it by 'cleaning up' your current savegame (it seems as though that's what you are doing?). From other tests that people have done it seems clear that people with these issues in game are having it re-occur in fresh hoods, so this means that it is probably re-occurring in your game too. We know what the symptoms are, we need to find out what is causing it- why only some computers, and stop it. I don't think there's any way you'll really repair corruption and stop it from worsening where it has already happened. So far my suspects are custom content as a cause, and also certain hardware (one user has the riddler tiles almost immediately in a vanilla game on a Mac, but install from the same disc to a PC and the game works fine).

On normal gameplay, it should not have any problems with the ownership breaks. In the case of The Sims, there is no such thing as normal gameplay generally since there's always custom content and the freeform method of the game anything is possible. It's also the same case as other freeform games like Morrowind, Oblivion and Fallout3.

Of course there will be some problems generated by the hardware itself but most of the bulk of the problem is always in the side of the user. Based on your last example with the Mac and the PC, It could be that there was a bad install that happened with the Mac or the Mac might not have enough free resources when the game was loaded. Really hard to tell unless there are more details involved.

What the user does abnormally & what the user adds is really the deciding factor in what happens to the game.

Most of the debug codes are marked experimental and as Pescado warned it must not be taken lightly as a quick fix but as a last resort. The breakage and corruptions in the game may also be attributed to some abuse of these experimental codes as well as some abnormal actions initiated by the user. As example, the user feels that a certain sim is stuck but in actuality behind the scenes, that sim is loading some data, the user gets impatient then types "resetsim" the loading is aborted halfway, though the sim may appear normal, the aborted load may possibly remain in memory and corrupt the said sim.

I'm not exactly cleaning out my save games but isolating potential sources. I'm removing what I think I can do without and see if that was causing the problem or not. Worse comes to worse. Even what I really want in the game is the source of the problem then it has to be removed and noted. Because it's really easy to just remove the whole game, re-install it and start a new game. But without knowing what I did that caused it, eventually I'll re-encounter the same predicament as before.

I have been poking around the savefile recently so far there are so much redundant sim descriptions linked around a certain sim. A corruption in one of the duplicate description may go unnoticed at first but it may start problems once accessed. There is a portion in the sim description that if improperly valued will prevent the save game to be loaded. However, with the other values the game will load normally but the effect is not visible during gameplay.

I still believe that the game has certain limitations in terms of cache size and set resource parameters allocated for the game to run. Also there is some belief that the game has a memory leak. So knowing this, I think the best way is try an minimize your gameplay, what you don't need, you remove. Keep removing until the desired result is achieved. There is no set answers since not everybody has the same machine specs. This is under the assumption that the game is newly loaded (so no error 12 or 13 encountered yet for that session).

One thing I learned. Once error 12 or 13 has appeared. It's best to reload the whole game. Don't force and bypass it. More bugs and problems will appear if you get lucky and bypass it. That is why I was asking at a previous post upon encountering the errors if the player quits normally or premature terminates the game. I found that premature termination can leave certain data in the cache and the errors will be easily be filled. This is just my experience. If this theory is correct then even starting with a new hood using the same cache the new hood could easily contract the problem that is retained in the cache.

EDIT
I've been looking into the genealogy records inside the save game and found some weird stuff. Sims removed from the neighborhood via "Therapture" and "Destroyalltownies" are not all destroyed some sims descriptions still remain within the save game. Also occupied lots that are moved around causes duplicate sims in the save game as well. My game has now 3 sets of Goths (Gunther, Cornelia and Mortimer), 4 Bella Bachelors and lots of other sims.

However, Sims that are purged by the EAxis default emmigration are not found within the list.

It could be that all these junk sim descriptions bloat up the save file size and possibly also clutters up the cache. So with a town that has lots of history behind it there is also lots of Sim Descriptions cluttering up space.

[Simsample]

On normal gameplay, it should not have any problems with the ownership breaks. In the case of The Sims, there is no such thing as normal gameplay generally since there's always custom content and the freeform method of the game anything is possible. It's also the same case as other freeform games like Morrowind, Oblivion and Fallout3.

I don't see how you are going to possibly get to the root of a problem unless you remove all of the unknown variables. In other words, I don't see how you are possibly going to find out what is causing these errors in your game whilst you are installing, removing and changing your savegame with custom content. In Sims 2 it was not uncommon for a mod or CC which was once thought acceptable to later be found to be damaging. For the case with the Mac, this was with a person knowledgeable in computing, who used two different computers and multiple installs to attempt to troubleshoot a persistent issue. This is one of only two cases I've seen where custom content was definitely not involved. It is frustrating to watch so many people on so many threads experiencing the same issues over and over, when the whole troubleshooting process could be expedited by eliminating some possible causes. The first and easiest to eliminate is custom content.