Game Help:Sims 3 Delete Cache Files

	This article is written for The Sims 3. For the equivalent Sims 2 article, click here.

Refresh caches, indices, and thumbnails

These are temporary files that are saved by the game to make loading certain information faster. If these files have incorrect or corrupted data, it may prevent your game from loading. The game will regenerate fresh copies of these files each time it loads, so deleting them is perfectly safe, and it's normal for them to reappear.

When you delete any or all of these files, as their nature is to regenerate, the next time you load Launcher or the game may take a bit longer as all these files need to be refreshed. This is normal and is by design.

Do them in order as follows, one by one and then, test. If that doesn't work, carry on with the second, and then test, and so on.

Cache Files

• 
  To delete your cache files, navigate to The Sims 3 in DOCUMENTS folder.

  

• Inside, will be a number of cache files. Delete any or all of these files you have. Yes, they would be re-generated when you next start Launcher or the game, that is by design.
  

If you have installed or do activities related to	remove
CAS parts that appear in Create-A-Sim	CasPartCache.package
New objects that would appear in Buy/Build mode	compositorCache.package
Mods or Hacks	scriptCache.package
New Sims, default skins	simCompositorCache.package
Simport-related (maybe?) and other social data, if you use the wall to integrate with your MyPage on thesims3.com site	socialCache.package

Launcher files

These files appear to be some sort of index or cache repository for the Launcher. If it gets corrupted when Launcher or the game crashed, then the next time you try to start Launcher or load the game, they would either stall and never completely loads, or crash again.

Filename	Location
missingdeps.idx	\Documents\Electronic Arts\The Sims\DCCache
dcc.ent	\Documents\Electronic Arts\The Sims\DCCache
*.bin	\Documents\Electronic Arts\The Sims\Downloads \Documents\Electronic Arts\The Sims\SigsCache
Downloadedsims.index	\Documents\Electronic Arts\The Sims\SavedSims
*.*	\Documents\Electronic Arts\The Sims\IGACache

Thumbnails

• 
  To delete Thumbnails files, navigate to The Sims 3 in DOCUMENTS folder.
  

• If you installed a CAS-part or Buy/Build mode object, or anything that has a thumbnail picture, sometimes it is necessary to force the game to refresh its Thumbnails cache.
• One of the patches also introduced In-Game-Advertising to thesims3 Store, and so EA introduces the FeaturedItems folder.
• Delete ALL files inside these folders. They are like the caches above, and would be re-generated fresh if they are removed.

Filename	Location
*.package	\Documents\Electronic Arts\The Sims\Thumbnails
thumb_*.png	\Documents\Electronic Arts\The Sims\FeaturedItems

WorldCache

Optional, for Windows only - do NOT do this on a Mac.

• 
  To delete WorldCaches, look inside the WorldCaches folder (if you have one) and delete these files inside that folder.

Don't worry if you don't have a WorldCaches folder, or if it's empty - some people have WorldCaches and some don't - it just means that you do not have Riverview, other new worlds, or the new Create-a-World tool installed.

OS X users, please read this post on why this is a bad thing.