Clean Saves with S4Studio – Basics

Introduction

Data and errors accumulate over the course of a savegame’s life. Some of these can be cleaned up by directly editing the save file with Sims 4 Studio (S4Studio). Some of my blog posts contain such instructions. I’ve compiled the most important basics in this posts so the individual blog post don’t become too long.

Loading of Savegames

Save files are actually nothing more than renamed package files which you can open with S4Studio. Package files are packages with many individual resources that S4Studio can display.

Start S4Studio, click on My Projects and navigate to your save file. Make sure that you have selected Sims 4 Save as the file type so that the files are shown.

Under Windows, you can also link the .save extension to S4Studio and then open the file by double-clicking on it.

Main Window

Once opened, you will see a number of individual resources listed on the left and the content of the selected resource on the right. This view is also referred to as the main window going forward.

The following resource types exist

• Save Game Data: Main resource with information about the savegame.
• Zone Object Data: This is the data for the individual lots. Among other details, they contain information on which objects are located on a lot.
• Save Game Thumbnail: Thumbnail images of households and lots.
• Phone Photo Thumbnail: These are the photos that your Sims take either by camera or phone. The resources are usually on the large side and if you have a lot of them, your save will become very large.
• Household Description: No clue, maybe these resources have something to do with residential rental buildings.
• Unknown Resources: 00000012, 00000013, 00000015: S4Studio cannot resolve these resources. I don’t know what the content is, but they seem to belong in some form to the Zone Object Data resources (same InstanceID)

The resources contain a lot of data that cannot be identified without further information. Most of them are not important for these instructions.

Editing of Resources

Resources are always edited in the same way. You should only adjust the values if you know what they mean. These instructions are limited to the two resource types: Zone Object Data and Save Game Data.

In the main window, you can add, duplicate, delete or batch import or export resources.To do this, select the resource you want to manipulate and press the corresponding button.

The only button that is important in my instructions is the delete button.

Once you have selected a resource, information will appear on the right-hand side. Some of them have additional details that you can view using Edit Items…

Saving

Changes can be saved either via the main menu (File – Save/Save as) or in the bottom right-hand corner. The advantage of saving as is that you create an additional backup. Make sure that the file type ends with .save and not .package, otherwise the save will not be recognized by the game.

If you have edited additional details, you must also save these individually. You do this in the respective window by clicking on the Save button there.

Zone Object Data

There is one Zone Object Data per lot. For residential rental houses and apartments, there is one resource per apartment/rental unit. The objects/building structures are only assigned to one of these resources (master). The instanceID of the individual properties is different for each savegame. To find out which Zone Object Data belongs to which lot, check Save Game Data.

Records and Objects are the two important elements. Records contains the building structures and terrain information while objects contains all objects present on the property. Records is somewhat difficult to decipher and it seems that S4Studio cannot read all of them.

The objects are important for various tutorials. Each object has various information that appears on the right when you click on a specific object on the left side.
Depending on what you want to fix, different information is important, so I will not go into further details here.

Save Game Data

The Save Game Data resource contains a lot of information. I will limit this guide to the most important ones. Some entries appear more than once. Always select these at the top level. It is best to collapse all subgroups except SaveGameData

Below you will find a brief description of the most important entries. Of particular interest are the IDs, which are required in many places to create references. Unfortunately, it is not possible to filter or search for IDs in S4Studio, so everything has to be compared manually. Most of the IDs are generated per savegame.

Households

Contains information about all households in the game. It contains information about the IDs of the household and the Sims, various trackers and, for example, the contents of the household inventory.

Neighborhoods

Different from naming conventions, neighborhoods refer to the worlds. You will find all worlds listed here. Some of the worlds are somewhat cryptic (Office Site) or even empty. Office Site refers to the properties of the Get To Work careers. The empty entries are Sixam and ???

neighborhood_id is the ID of the world and street_data contains global information about the actual neighborhoods (which are then consistently referred to as world). All lots and their global information are listed under lots.

Sims

Here you will find a list of all Sims. In addition to various trackers, there’s information about age, the Sim’s inventory and the IDs of the Sim and the associated household.

Streets

Contains information about the area in a world that is located outside the lots. There is one OpenStreetsData entry per neighborhood that has been loaded at least once. Interestingly, the world_ID of the neighborhood is the only ID that is the same in every savegame.

The probably most important entry here is objects. You will find a list of temporary objects that are located in the respective neighborhoods. For example, you will find current market stalls or festival decorations and other things that are cleaned up by the game from time to time.

Zones

Zones lists all the lots. Since the world_ID (aka neighborhood) is part of the zone name, you can easily filter the list by a specific neighborhood. Simply enter the number in the filter field.

You can find a list of all numbers here (in brackets): Neighborhoods.

56CC2A65 for example is the number of the spice market.

After selecting an entry, the associated information appears on the right. The zone_ID is important, as this is the ID that you need to enter in the main window filter to find the associated Zone Object Data resource.

master_zone_object_data_id is required for residential rental houses, dorms, apartments and penthouses. It indicates the respective master zone. Former residential rentals also seem to have this entry, but this may be a bug.