Okay so last night for the first time in my whole life I managed to get the sims 3 playing and with a few saves and crashes I managed to play the game properly, I played for nine hours straight ! Which for me is a long long time the only bummer is it crashed and I lost everything, all nine hours gone so I'll have to start again today so I was just wondering what's the longest time you've ever played?

Hi There KelCat94 .. I'm almost too embarrassed to admit to how long I've played .. 11 hours.
With regards to saving your game: instead of just "saving" do a Save As renaming the game with a date and time or something you will recognize. That way if the game crashes you have another recent copy to go back to.

You might want to consider installing the NRaas Saver Mod. It will remind you to save your game. See the Interactions under Documentation on the page I just linked to.

I've found anything over 3 to 4 hours and bad things can happen, especially Error 12's and the occasional CTD. Still, there's nothing to stop you from restarting after that time and playing another, if not several sessions in a row (tends to be when building for me when I'm on a roll). However, during that time, I Save As frequently, as I refuse to lose several hours of work when some unexpected glitch happens.

I've had the game running for well over 72 hours without incident before. But I suppose given that it was paused/minimized much of the time and I don't really play it for that many hours in a row means it doesn't count...

But yeah, 9 hours of continuous or almost continuous play without at least a Save As now and then I would never attempt.

Oops I think I must have written it wrong, I saved all the way through the nine hours but I got an error 12 and then it crashed and once I went back into it they were no saves haha super sadface, It seems I'm unable to have any mods or it won't even start up with crashing unfortunately

14-15 hours, with breaks for toilet and food, of course.

I think during my early days of Sims 3, I spent a whole day playing; it was a Saturday and I had nothing else to do so, so I spent it doing the sims.

That is why you need to do a Save As. Just doing a Save left you with nothing when the game blew up. Doing the Save As will provide you with the option to play your game from the last point you Saved As.

The Error 12 was your system running out of memory and after that many hours of play, depending on system specs Error 12's will happen. It is good practice to Save As quit and reload once in awhile when playing for a long time.

I hope you do not mind me asking/suggesting this: Is there a reason you are not playing with mods? There are several mods out there that will maintain a more stable game. Here are a few suggested NRaas by J4Ks (aka stevset at MTS) you might want to consider:
Overwatch has clean ups once a day (3 am) to get rid of unnecessary/obsolete object codes and recovers stuck Sims more better than the EA way. There are also a lot of silence checks the mod does, if certain things goes out of wack (corrupt outfit, stuck in aging, fixes genealogy, etc).
ErrorTrap also cleans up your saves of obsolete things when you load up your game. Catch any errors caused by the game core or any mods that runs on the background that otherwise goes silently by, it will produce ScriptErrors that you then can upload on our site for further examination.
Register solves the Service issue, where under EA default the game will stop filling up slots that requires them due to unavailability of Homeless Sim(Bars, Cash registers, Venue stages), Register will do this on command.
Traffic fixes a bug with endless uncontrollable making of Icecream/Food trucks or taxi's.
Traveler, when you like to travel between worlds, it has fixes that has a more reliable way to keep the internal data of a Sim intact when it travels.

If you are interested in downloading they can be found in the left hand column On This Page along with more detail and FAQ's.

Also these Tips For Better Game Performance might help you with some of your other issues.

When I lived in an apartment without central air (but had a window unit in my bedroom), I remember playing for about 12 hours on my laptop, pausing only to leave my tiny little bedroom for bathroom and water breaks. Didn't run into any save issues, but it was still early into the launch of the game so I think there was only one expansion and I had a handful of mods.

These days, when I play, I save after every "nightly" nrass overwatch run alerts me that x number of cars were cleaned up. But I usually don't play longer than 3 hours.

I've gone much longer than 9 hours, and I've not had it crash with... what? "Code 12" during a save in ages.

I recall following someone's recommendations on that... was it on the NRAAS page? It might have been here in the help groups.

I play this game too much. Not sure what I'll do if EA kills it. I donno. Maybe I'll see what's outside.

My prediction is a bunch of what will then be former TS3 players with very dark circles under our eyes, just sort of wandering about in a daze. Probably not worth it. Maybe something good will be on television by then?

About 10ish hours for me, I think (although I did break for food, drinks and bathroom stuff). I was able to save and quit without incident. I've got Errortrap, Overwatch, Traffic, Debug Enabler, Register, and Master Controller helping me keep the town clean, plus I delete cache files and clean out SNAP resources/unused photos in my game on a regular basis, have Memories disabled, have Featured Items set to read-only, and run on the lowest graphic settings. All the usual stuff.

(Note: if you have Seasons installed, Tempest is your friend for keeping the weather from being too lag-conducive.)

One thing I do notice: the computer has a real bad tendency to overheat when I play the game if I'm not using an extra cooling fan, so if I want to play for more than a half hour or so, I've got to keep the fan plugged in. I also tend to crash if I enter CAS while screen-sharing or streaming, and even if I'm not in CAS, the lag is pretty horrible (moreso with Skype's screen share, less so but still bad with XSplit). This has only gotten worse since I was force-updated to 1.69, so I don't really stream TS3 sessions anymore because I can't. Thanks, EA.

With how I usually play (only TS3, Notepad, and Pale Moon running), though, I can keep on trucking for a pretty long time.

I went outside a few times. Graphics are cool...but there is people.
I play a lot..many hours, sometimes all day. I haven't count..what gives? I continue my day with my game on pause..or I quit and then restart it a bit later on. Since my computer is not that good for it, I cannot leave the game on pause or minimise for too long...it might just never comes back...(sims 3 only) Since many are commenting on the Saves, well yes. I do Save as everytime, and generally just as the speed starts to go nuts because my sim got into bed. I pause..I save as. I don't really care if EA decide to kill it, I already have eveything from them. I could play for ever if i wanted to

I actually rarely close the game because at this point it takes ages to load anything up and corrupts pretty quickly.

Maybe 3 to 4 hours and then save.... I've accidentally played a little over 7 hours and got error 12.

15 hours maybe with plenty of pausing.

I don't use mods because my game refuses to load if I do which is sad because I miss story progression but I may try the ones you suggested just to see how it goes, going a little off topic here but does anyone have any idea why my sims would crash during CAS? like it literally crashes if I use cas, the mirror or the styling station sometimes if I'm quick I can manage to change clothes but not always and I was just wondering if anyone knew any solutions to this without opening a new thread.

Also wow, 16 hours that's awesome haha it never seems to get boring once you've gotten into it

ummm about 7 hours. I was addicted when i first got it. I got home at 4 and would stay up late because my mom fell asleep playing till 10:30 when my siblings made me

I'm with those playing 14 or 15 hours when I'm working on a house. I save regularly too. Those days are the best really, very productive.

I don't tell you how much time actually I spend ingame playing (It would be too embarrasing, rly), but my personal record of having game loaded constantly is more than a week. With saving, putting machine to sleep mode, reviving and so on. And it did not crashed. However, despise my machine is seriously outdated and HHD very slow for present standards (which was a reason to avoiding endless loading time) it's also kept under strict resource/security control.

Way too long Funny thing, i play a couple of months almost every day and in the weekends sometimes 10 to 11 hours . But then i stop playing for a couple of months. Not a super computer, a ton of Mods (Nraas is a lifesaver) and some lagging and freezing but still playable. I save a lot, also Save As. I stop playing so my pc don't overhead and always clear caches. Hardly any crashing.
A lot of hard work to play my favorite game, i really want a great powerfull high-end computer just to play the Sims smooth and download more mods.

Any tips? I'm in the Netherlands and i want to spent between the €800-€1100 (euro's)

Used to play for at least an hour most days, up until recently

Suddenly being a single dad with a 4 year old daughter changed that, so I barely play now

When I do though, it's enjoyable!

Edit: I do remember a certain session I had during the Late Night EP release, played literally all day... without saving... you can guess what happened...

I've skipped many nights of sleep for TS3...one time, I even skipped 2 in a row. That must've been more than 36 hours of playing with only small pauses inbetween. I've gotten more responsible, and I rarely ever play for longer than 3 hours a day. Some days (especially summer ones) I find myself playing for like 8 hours, but it doesn't get any more than that. I skipped a night a while ago, I hadn't done that in years.

When I'm writing short stories that aren't going to have a continuation and need to get photos, I frequently let the game run for days on end. Granted, I'm not trying to save progress at that point.