The Sims 4 For Rent – Renovated townhouses available soon!

3 Georgian Townhouses – 5 floors, small garden, balconies, possible roof terraces, very exclusive. Available early December 2023.

EA App finally coming to Mac

How disappointing although of course inevitable. Today EA announced that the EA App will be arriving on macOS soon. In what must have been a fun news item to write, given that barely any of it is actually true, EA proudly stated “…it’s the best place for you to experience EA’s incredible games, services and content.” and “…you can ensure that your games are ready to play when you are”. You can read all about how unstable and buggy EA App is for Windows users over on the EA App bug forum here. Yes I know Origin isn’t much better but since the launch of EA App we’ve had it considerably better than Windows users (apart from the September 2023 patch).

A small flavour of what we most probably have to look forward to:

Horse Ranch Pack will not install

Individual Pack download issues

Kit showing as unowned after purchase

Horse Ranch Pack installed but not present in game

Hopefully these issues, which seem to pop up frequently in EA App, are also down to the hell-hole that is Windows and maybe our lovely macOS will run the app a whole lot smoother. But I really don’t hold out much hope….. If you want to read further, EA_Kent (don’t shoot the messenger) posted some further details over at Answers HQ in this general info and FAQ post.

Sims 4 worlds duplicating in a non-modded vanilla game

An issue that has regularly cropped up when users install a new pack is the world duplicating in the World Select screen.

This can be Mod related, specifically Mods that create duplicate worlds of course, but can also happen in a non-modded game. I found a cause earlier and managed to reproduce multiple times. Whilst downloading and installing the Horse Ranch Pack on one of my Macs I decided to launch the game. I received the usual pop-up warning that it may affect the game but chose to ignore it. The game launched ok and I loaded up my save to check something unrelated. I quit the game without saving, I figured that would be a good idea as the pack was installing in the background and it would avoid any potential corruption.

I loaded up the game again and resumed my save. I clicked to go to the world map and saw two Chestnut Ridge worlds (EP14). I immediately quit without saving and trashed the Horse Ranch pack. I then loaded Origin and did a game repair for good measure (can never hurt), then downloaded and installed Horse Ranch again, this time making sure not to load the game whilst it was downloading and installing. That fixed it, no duplicate world.

I quit my game and decided to test it a little further by trashing the High School Years pack (EP12) then launching Origin and loading the game whilst High School Years was re-downloading and installing in the background. This time I had the Game Data Incomplete error message but the game loaded fine into San Myshuno (EP03). I quit the game, again without saving, and waited for Origin to finish installing EP12. I then reloaded and sure enough, there were two Chestnut Ridges in the World Select screen again. I was expecting duplicate Copperdale worlds (EP12) but good to get the same result. I quit, trashed the EP14 folder then re-installed it, everything good again. I then repeated this exercise a couple more times and each time the EP14 world was duplicated.

So if this happens to you, immediately quit without saving then trash the pack folder that contains the duplicate world. You can find the pack folder in the Sims 4 Packs folder which will be in the same location as your base game is installed to, by default this is the User Applications folder:

And never, ever, launch your game whilst packs are downloading and installing in the background, ever!

For further info see Crinrict’s blog post here. She goes into more detail about what to do if you have inadvertently saved your game and how to fix it, and references the EA App for windows users.