As already posted in the eaxis sim forum, today I noticed a sharp increase in my savegame file size. it went from 10 Mb to 33 Mb from one day to another.

A simple comparison with notepad+ showed that the bloated file contains a lot of data that isn't in a the smaller one at all. For example there is a huge section of Buff and Motive Information (approx 20Mb worth of it), Word count of the string "buff" is 44 in the small and what I call "healthy" save file, in the bloated file there are 507250 ocurrences of that string.... (at least that is what notepad+ tells me, hard to believe).

My guess is that because a bug the savefile gets corrupted with memory data.

sincerely, bluey

I've been having this problem lately and trying everything I could think of and nothing is really fixing it. The saves do shove the jpeg files for memories into the saves but they are relatively small so they don't account for all that.

Things I've done:

- Removed all mods, screenshots, cache etc and actually took the whole /Documents/Electronic Arts/The Sims 4/ folder out. The game generates a new one then I just put one of my (bloated) save files back in.

- Moved to a new lot and bulldozed the old one with my main family.

- Cleared out the personal inventory, household inventory, bookcase inventory and refrigerator inventory.

- Deleted all memories for all sims who had any.

- Culled a bunch of sims I don't directly play.

- Deleted most of my plants (I had a lot)

Nothing is fixing it, though sometimes my file sizes are half what they normally are. I've ballooned up to 54MB but sometimes they'll save as 28MB instead. And nothing is missing and everything plays fine with those 28MB saves so clearly there's extra junk that's not needed.

I did notice a bunch of that buff stuff in the save file when browsing through it with a text or hex editor so I'm thinking you are right about that being memories just accumulating over time like crazy. I seem to recall this being an issue with TS2 at first years ago when that first came out.

I suspect that no one at EA really bothered to play this game long term to see what the effects were but I'm a bit (okay a lot :-P) of an addict and have several hundred hours in.

*Edit: I tried deleting the entire block the buff section from start to finish, which was about 2/3 of my save file, in a hex editor and unsurprisingly the game did not want to load it. Someone with more knowledge than me is going to have to come up with a proper cleaning program or process I'm afraid.

One thing I did notice is that the only save I had in the directory when I tried to load the edited buff-less save was just that one but the game autocreated a new savefile001 (autosave) that was the huge bloated size so I was wondering where that came from. Turns out it was pulling from the scratch folder and when I got rid of that it just made a 1k autosave for starting a new game from scratch.

At the moment, it doesn't look to me as that the games accumlates junk in the savegame file. It gets bigger of course, but then you store memories, plants, things you buy or dig out, all buildings into it, so that is normal.

The thing is: If you look closely at a "good" save file you notice a certain pattern. It's gibberish but still, there's some kind of structure. Compare that to a corrupted save file and you notice all that junk I mentioned, the tons of Buff_this and Buff_that lines etc.

So, it looks to me as if because of an unknown cause the game somtimes glitches while saving and therefore corrupts the file. That it is still able to load the file afterwards is a sure sign of very sloppy programming :p

My save game folder is huge already after only playing a few sims for a couple of days, this folder is set to explode at some point if it keeps growing so fast, it must be some kind of bug!