Hey guys,
I wanted to share what I did when I was playing Sims 3 to make Island Paradise have less lag and be more playable. The things below are what I did and I had very little lag or issues with this expansion.
Go into edit town mode and do the following:
- Spanish resort – remove the fence around the trees in the middle of the pool. Sims are drawn to whatever is there and will lag trying to see it.
- Hobart’s – if you are not playing this lot then change it to “no-visitors” allowed or replace it. It is a laggy mess.
- Romantic houseboat – remove the palm trees blocking the road between it and the other houseboat, the trees cause a routing failure. The trees are located between the Port Primavera and Port Pescado
- Medina household – evict them and then place a fence around the top of the stairs but make sure they can still use the stairs. The little girl route fails trying to go to the ledge where the stairs are located. Remove their spiral staircase and the garage door. Put them back into their house.
- Ithaca household – evict them and remove all spiral staircases, they don’t need to use the upper floors and the stairs cause routing failures. Remove everything on the upper floors so they won’t want to visit them. You can remake the rec room into a bedroom. Put them back into their house.
- Collins household – evict them and remove the ladder going to the very top floor. Remove everything up there. I kept getting route failure notifications because of that ladder. Put them back into their house.
- Go to every houseboat that you are not playing and remove their steering wheels. I have seen NPCs moving their homes and getting stuck in unroutable channels causing massive lags. They don’t need to be moving their house boats.
- I highly suggest editing all houses and checking those spiral staircases, most of them are turned wrong and Sims can’t use them but keep trying and it causes routing failure lag.
Now go into live mode and do the following:
Use the cheat to discover all islands, this removes the clouds which is a known lag issue.
Use the NRAAS Master Controller mod to annihilate the Scott family (you can’t just delete them because they are hard coded into the game and will cause issues, they have to be completely removed using the mod). This family is bugged and then delete their houseboat so nobody moves into it. It is located at Port Perilous.
Use the NRAAS register mod to remove horses and wild animals from your world. The game loves to put multiple horses on houseboats. Obviously, this will cause routing issues. If there is a spot that is a routing nightmare (and there are several) then wild animals (strays) will find them and get stuck.
I did all of this and had very little lag other than the ones caused at 3am when everything resets or when the town is on the move (going to work, school, etc). The lag is no worse than it is in any other EA world.
Also, once you have finished doing all of this then you will want to save a copy of this world before you create your household. Move that copy to a folder called “Worlds” inside your EA folder but not the Sims 3 folder. Then whenever you want to play in IP, all you have to do is copy/paste this already fixed up world into your Sims 3 saves folder, rename the world (example would be AdamsIP if you are going to create a household named Adams). Launch the game and play straight away without having to make any changes.
I did this for all my TS3 worlds, created master worlds after I had fixed their issues and set them up the way I wanted. It saved a ton of hassle and time fixing the buggy worlds before playing.
Links to NRAAS Mods that will help improve your game play:
I have not played sims 3 in about 6 months because of the lag in IP and thats my favourite expansion! i printed all of the tips you have given and made about 75% of the changes and i am almost lag free, i can play my game with ease. Thank you so much, this helped me tremendously!
I’d more or less given up on IP, I’d found it almost impossible to play that world, so I shall certainly try your suggestions. Thanks.
The trees by the Romantic Houseboat can’t be removed as they are off the lot & not on it. I tried to remove them and they won’t delete.
Hi I’m coming from the future.
I have to say, I did few of the recommandations (Spanish resort, Romantic houseboat, Medina household, Ithaca household & Collins household) and I can already see a good difference, it is less laggy.
Thank you very much.