As you may have noticed on the launch screen of the game, EA is warning us of a big Sims 4 patch coming tomorrow, and they're suggesting you remove all of your mods and custom content ahead of time and to not put it back until you check each one out for updates. While that would certainly work, it's a bit drastic, and if you play without the mods you've been using (no matter which mods), you are likely to lose any progress in custom careers, custom objects, and so on.

My General Approach to Patches

So, ahead of the patch, I have a couple of error-checking mods installed: Better Exceptions from Twisted Mexi and Tuning Error Notifier from Scumbumbo. They both do slightly different things.

Better Exceptions notices when runtime errors and exceptions occur and tries to provide some diagnostic information about what went wrong. Tuning Error Notifier scans the custom tuning in mods and makes notes about where it's structured incorrectly. So BE is an active monitor, and TEN is a passive scanner. BE can also do after patch checks that are similar to what TEN does, but I use all the things (including MC Command) to look for errors -- why not?

Once I get the patch installed, if the patch didn't automatically disable mods in Game preferences, it's a minor patch -- I just play the game. I still check for issues as below, however.

Then I turn mods and script mods back on and try to play the game. If BE notifies me of a bunch of exceptions in other people's mods, I have to decide whether to remove them (and potentially lose progress and custom objects) or just ignore the error until they release an update. It depends on whether the error gets in the way of playing. The UI Cheats mod breaks almost every major patch (it's the nature of UI mods), so that one often gets removed until they update it.

If it's my own mods causing the exceptions, I work on diagnosing and fixing the problem right away if I can. I also check with Tuning Error Notifier to see if it finds new errors. At this point, I usually know enough to post something here about whether patch updates are needed.

Tomorrow's Patch

Tomorrow I will be busy until late afternoon, so I won't be able to test my mods against the patch until around to 6 PM ET (USA) or so. I will try to post some sort of update that evening regarding the state of my mods and the patch.

So what should you do? It depends on how important the progress you've made with custom mods is to you, and how precious your save game is. There have been some mod-related errors that caused saved games to become corrupted, but they've been pretty rare. Often they are things you can ignore, other times just things that don't work.

If you notice any problems with the patch that seem related to my mods, please do the following:

• Look in your Sims 4 game folder, next to your Mods folder, and see if the game created a file name lastException.txt. There might be several that start with lastException, but the most current one is just name lastException.txt.

• If you can post the contents of that file with your error report, or if it's very long, email it to simsonianlibrary@gmail.com, it will help me diagnose the error much more quickly!

• Finally, if the errors you are getting cause the game to seem really screwed up -- DON'T SAVE! At least not until you get some mod updates or remove problematic ones.

Thanks again for your support and feedback!