reducing save file size on a mac
Extracting, cleaning, organizing and merging custom content
Compressing and decrapifying files
A main source of massive save files and long load/save times is the large number of SNAP resources generated in your game. Quite a lot of these snapshots are made for family trees, household portraits, etc. And since it has to read every one when you load your game up, your wait times get significantly worse the longer you play a save. Your game will generate new snapshots as needed, so it’s useful to delete them once in a while to avoid a bloated save file.
PC users can do this with Kuree’s really handy Save Cleaner tool, but this unfortunately doesn’t work in Mono, unlike some of the other tools I’ve mentioned previously. You can, however, do the same thing manually with s3pe.
Getting rid of the SNAP files is harmless, but backup everything just in case you screw up and delete something important.
Mono Mono [update: the latest Mono release doesn’t seem to play nice with s3pe. This is a direct download link to the version of Mono I can confirm as working] and X11 to run .exe files (Macs have shipped with X11 since 10.5; if you see X11 in Applications/Utilities then you don’t need to download this)
s3pe (the most recent versions of s3pe from simlogical will not work on Macs. This is a direct download link to the last non-.Net 4 version)
Type mono followed by a space, then drag and drop s3pe.exe onto the Terminal window. Press enter.
Open your save game in s3pe
Select Personal/Documents/Electronic Arts/The Sims 3/Saves/[SaveName].sims3/[SaveName].nhd
Select and delete SNAP resources
At the bottom of the window, tick the box for Tags and type SNAP in the Tags field. Press Set
Tick Filter Active to see only the SNAP resources [picture below]
Click the first one, hold shift, scroll down and click the last one
Wait until all the SNAPs are highlighted (This tends to take a couple minutes. If you’ve waited until your save file is quite bloated, you may want to do just twenty or so at a time so you can make sure that it hasn’t frozen up on you)
Select Resource>Deleted. This takes even longer than the previous step, so go do something else while the beach ball spins (note: pressing delete doesn’t do a damn thing—I think it’s a quirk of running it in Mono—so you have to delete them through this menu option)
When it’s done, you’ll see the SNAP resources struck through
You can verify that all the SNAPs are gone by opening the save game again and filtering to see only SNAPs; the window should be empty now
Your save game should be significantly smaller now. The one I used as a demonstration in the screenshot wasn’t large to begin with—about 65 MB—but was 40 MB after deleting the SNAPS. It really makes a difference in older save files that have grown to upwards of 150, 200 MB or more.
Be aware: you might see a bit of temporary lag when you load the save after doing this; your game is generating all the snapshots it actually needs.
germansingergirl
jbbartram-illu
titsay
janainaart
annaxmalina
baratheonpilled