SimSweep v2.20.0 - Patch Day Mode Got a Brain Upgrade

It's been about a week since I posted here. If you're in the Discord you've already seen all of this since updates get posted there the second they go live, but for everyone else here's the catch-up.

First off, if you updated your game recently, the latest EA hotfix hasn't fully fixed everything from the recent patch. You should still expect some weirdness with mods and CC if you update. Patch Day Mode is there to help you figure out what's working and what isn't, which brings me to what's new.

Patch Day Mode used to work at a pretty broad level. When the game updated, it would see something like "the interactions module changed" and flag every single mod that touches anything in interactions. Problem is, that module has hundreds of files in it. If EA only changed one specific file and your mod doesn't even use that file, you'd still get flagged. Not super helpful.

Now SimSweep tracks every individual file inside the game's Python archives and compares them one by one after an update. So instead of "interactions changed, good luck," it's more like "interactions/social/super_interaction.pyc changed, and here are the 3 mods that actually use it." Way more precise, way less noise.

The other big one is mod-to-mod dependency tracking. A lot of script mods are built on frameworks made by other creators. If a game update breaks that framework, every mod that depends on it is also going to stop working, but SimSweep had no way to know that before. Now it maps out which modules each script mod provides and which ones it imports from other mods. So if a framework breaks, everything that depends on it gets flagged automatically.

You can also mark mods as working or broken way easier now. Before you had to right-click a file in Browse to find that option. Now when you double-click any file to open the preview, there are Working and Broken buttons right in the action bar at the bottom. Much more obvious.

I also pulled out the auto-backup system that was running during patch day. It was backing up your script mods before a game update, but restoring old scripts after an API change doesn't actually fix anything. The game changed its code, so the old scripts would just crash the same way. The Restore Scripts button is gone too since it was suggesting something that doesn't work.

A lot of the patch day intelligence couldn't really be tested properly until an actual game patch dropped, since you need real before-and-after data to validate everything. Now that we've had a patch to work with, future updates should be caught even more accurately. If something seems off with how mods are getting flagged, let me know so I can tune it.

There were also a bunch of updates between 2.19.0 and now that I won't go through individually, but the highlights: text readability got improved across all 31 themes, high contrast mode was added for accessibility, a ton of Build/Buy sorting bugs were fixed (kitchen islands, wall coverings, bathroom decor all getting sorted correctly now), the community mod status system is faster and uses less bandwidth, and the CC catalog data pipeline is in place for the CC Hub coming later.

If you're not on SimSweep yet: https://simsweep.com/download

Bugs or questions, use the bug report inside SimSweep or hit me up in the Discord. Have a great rest of your week <3