When did my game of The Sims 3 go bad? I had few of the issues that plagued players after installing World Adventures. Basically because after three ‘vacations’ I stopped using WA. I think some issues started after Ambitions, but most of my game’s problems must have started after installing Late Night. My town was swamped with celebrities, vampires and cars. It was laggy, it did the stop-motion thing when I added some objects from LN to lots and simply was no fun to play within weeks. When I sought help on TS3 forums, I was accussed of using ‘bad mods’. My game was mod free, and custom content free, up to that point. It was the game itself that was at fault, and no one seemed to get it.

Then I read about Twallan’s mods: it helped with story progression and deleted some of the numous cars spawning in sims inventories. But I had been scared about breaking my game by installing mods. Until I realised: my game was already broken as it was. What could the mods possibly do to make to even worse? So I chose to install the three mods that promised to unobtrusively make The Sims 3 playable again: Story Progression, to regulate the town’s population and stories; Master Controler, to be able to edit sims easily; and Overwatch, to deal with stuck sims, too many cars and migration of sims to towns.

Playing the game for the first time after installing these life-saving mods was heavenly. I know, I know, that sounds over the top, but for the first time I felt both in control of my game and that the game could function without me controlling every aspect. It’s more than just editing weird-looking sims so they look less weird, or to be able to drag the need-bars to full without entering a cheat code. Sims go about their lives more normally. New babies are born, relationships form or end and sims move on their own.

What do the mods offer?

Overwatch regulates your game. It will allow you to chose ‘Clean up Vehicles’ – When enabled, abandoned vehicles around town are periodically deleted’, which is something that I use. It will also recover missing sims and toddlers, and do all sorts of clean ups in your game.

MasterController allows you to add sims to a household, for instance. Or switch to a sim, making it the active sim you play with. You can add babies to a household, without having to make sims Try for baby. You can even pick the gender of the baby. It’s also easy to use this to rename sims. This mod really puts you in control of your town and the story.

The StoryProgression mod enables a better story progression than the original game. Will your sims be allowed to break up or not, will they become celebrities, what kind of career will they be able to have? You decide what the game will allow to happen.

My game no longer lags or stutters. Cars are removed from inventories, lost sims are returned, stuff happens in my town! A mod did not break my game: it made it work better.