Crash When Saving After Building [FIX/WORK AROUND]

While sitting around with the families over the last day I had a lot of time to work on my dream house in game - which turned into a lot of crashes. That turned into doing a bit of digging, testing, digging some more testing some more, giving up, digging some more and finally finding a work around.

If the offset shown when your game crashes is 0x00b38c7A or 0x00737C7A then it's caused by a bug in the build mode for Seasons [yep, it's Seasons specific]. The crash happens when writing the index to the world file (useless knowledge for most - I'm still digging into what exactly it is that is causing it).  Here are two workarounds that I have found:

NOTE: I haven't had an issue building on lots where my sims have been living, so I'm not sure if the first method mentioned below is a viable solution for those who are trying to build where sims are currently living. [Maybe move them out temporarily if you can't?]

- Not Tech Savvy -
Build your house however you like. When finished, do NOT save your game. Go into Edit Town mode and save your house to the library. Save your game. If it crashes, go back into the game, back into Edit Town. Bulldoze the lot you were working on, then place a copy of your completed house on the lot. You can now save.

- Tech Savvy -
NOTE: Your sims WILL lose information using this method. Lifetime Rewards/traits/skills/items/etc that are Seasons specific will be removed from your save game. I do not recommend using this method unless you simply don't care about the Seasons specific stuff - I am only posting it as an alternative to the above. If you are NOT "tech savvy" (or even if you are) and you follow this method anyway I will not entertain any complaints about missing stats or a messed up registry - this is your warning.

Back up your HKLM\Software\Sims\Seasons key. Delete said key. Build as much as you like. Save your game. Restore registry key.




DO NOT POST ANY QUESTIONS OR PROBLEMS IN THIS TOPIC. INSTEAD, PLEASE OPEN A NEW TOPIC IN THE APPROPRIATE FORUM-SECTION, EITHER "THE SIMS 3 DOWNLOADS SUPPORT" OR "THE SIMS 3 IN-GAME SUPPORT"! THANK-YOU-NOTES CAN BE POSTED IN THE SECTION WITH THE SAME NAME.

Note that any and all questions posted under this thread, will be deleted without any explanation or advance warning. We have the Forum sections dedicated to Support purposes, for a reason.

In my experience, it is a Seasons specific bug - that's why option #2 works. If you remove the registry keys, the game doesn't know that Seasons exists - so essentially you "uninstalled" Seasons. If someone has this issue without having Seasons I'd love to hear about it though. It also doesn't happen -every- time you build in Seasons, sometimes everything works sometimes it doesn't. I only have issues when using a specific type of tool (the tool that builds walls, fences, pools, foundations, platforms, etc - it's the tool with the circle on top of a long line, not sure what it's called) - so that might be a point of interest to look into. I'm also still not 100% certain if it's crashing while saving the index information in the .nhd file (which is just a dbpf file) - if it is just missing the index portion of the file a tool might be able to be be built to fix those saves, but it'd have to come from someone who has a lot more knowledge on the dbpf files than I do.

Thanks so much for posting this! I was going nuts and on the verge of rage quitting my game.

I've been having this exact problem too, thanks for this!

Do you think EA also knows about this issue?

Hallo, I've also the same problem and seasons installed, and also a problem with the dresser it stops the game with a lovely desktop return when I try to put new clothes but this is another story. I'll may post about it lately if I don't succeed to find a solution.
By the way thanks to share this I think I will install again all but seasons. Bored of this add.