If like many Simmers, you just can?t help yourself when it comes to custom content and mods for The Sims 4, you will know that it comes with some challenges.
Sometimes it’s the horrendous question mark over the face, generating some sort of crash test dummy android that haunts your nightmares. Sometimes it’s a complete game crash. Sometimes it’s a simple irritation of something conflicting or duplicating for whatever reason.
While there are players with organisation skills that would put Marie Kondo to shame, we are not those people.
Despite having the best intentions and all sorts of new year, new me resolutions to get those custom content folders under control? it’s just not going to happen.
Fortunately, there are people aware of those of us who suffer this fate and they are kind enough to create free bits of software to save our sanity.
We have previously looked at a way to find and delete broken or bad CC (you know, the question mark head stuff), but this little piece of kit is helpful for when you have downloaded something twice without even realising it and you cannot find it because you just throw everything into the folder like it’s that cupboard in your house where you put ?the things that I?ll deal with some other time?.
How to find duplicate CC or mods in The Sims 4
As you can see from the screenshot below (using TwistedMexi’s Better Build Buy mod for expanding the catalogue and organizing stuff, by the way), there’s a lot of stuff here – this only a small fraction of CC in our game.
Duplicate Sims 4 CC and conflicting mods can cause a whole bunch of problems, including a lagging game, things not working or a catastrophic game crash. But help is at hand.
Simply named Sims Mod Assistant, this nifty programme will help you identify issues with all sorts of mods and custom content, features include:
- Finds exact duplicates (copy-paste files with different names)
- Parses mod contents and looks for probable conflicts for:
- Catalog/Definition
- Skintone
- CAS
- Sliders
- Groups conflicting files into lists
- Shows visual relationship between conflicting files
- Supports quick open of specific mod in Sims4Studio
- Supports filtering, batch selection and moving selected mods to other directories
Here’s a screenshot to demonstrate how easy it is. For the purposes of this tutorial, we renamed and then redownloaded RVSN’s bunk bed sets (because we just so happened to be in the middle of a little write up for them).
You do not need to have The Sims 4 installed to use the tool. While having the game installed is obviously how most people will use it, not needing the installation is helpful if you have different machines for work and play and you want to use your work machine to organise some stuff.
You can download the Sims Mod Assistant from Mod The Sims. As ever, make sure you read the creator’s instructions for installation and use properly.