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Lab Assistant
Original Poster
#1 Old 8th Sep 2021 at 1:17 PM

This user has the following games installed:

Sims 3, World Adventures, Ambitions, Late Night, Generations, Pets, Showtime, Supernatural, Seasons, University Life, Island Paradise, Into the Future
Default How to fix packages with faulty _KEY elements?
I have in the past days sorted through thousands and thousands of mods, to merge in CCMagic.

There's only one issue: In the _KEY element of each package the first entry is supposed to be referring to an XML file. Just the way the entries follow each other in s3pe.
If this is not the case, the _KEY element still contains references to the XML files, but not at the top of the list.
This however means CCMagic can not identify the file or its contents.

This wouldn't be an issue with one or two files where i could manually look into them to ID them, or with files with proper names that can lead to an ID of what is actually in there.
But it is a really big issue when i have hundreds of such files with Launcher generated names and i would have to check each manually in S3PE trying to make sense of the entries to see what's actually in them.

Additionally multiple of these files acting together causes a massive loading slowdown, so identifying what files contain would be crucial.

Is there any way to regenerate the _KEY element in an already perfectly working package?
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Lab Assistant
Original Poster
#2 Old 8th Sep 2021 at 2:16 PM
Or any way to make CCMagic read the files?
Top Secret Researcher
#3 Old 8th Sep 2021 at 3:40 PM
I've never used CC Magic - I just merge them with sp3e. It's very simple. https://lilahsims.tumblr.com/post/1...-for-the-sims-3 But anyway, if you are just wanting to know what each package is...you can use this thumbnail extractor to get image of the item. It works on both packages and sims3packs. I would suggest to make a new folder and just add a few packages at a time, then extract the thumbnail image. https://modthesims.info/t/494172

I'm not exactly sure if this is what you need but I've used the thumbnail extractor on some really old cc files to learn what each one is. For example, Lunasims files, which contain hundreds, if not thousands of packages and sims3packs all in spanish. It helped me find specific items instead of having to look at each one in sp3e and hope there is an icon or image. There is some cc without a thumbnail to extract but most do have one. And note that if you have both a package and a sims3pack of the same item in one folder the thumbnail extractor with generate 2 images - one for each.

Hope this helps and if not - I apologize for not understanding your question.
Lab Assistant
Original Poster
#4 Old 8th Sep 2021 at 10:46 PM
Quote: Originally posted by KatyFernlily
I've never used CC Magic - I just merge them with sp3e. It's very simple. https://lilahsims.tumblr.com/post/1...-for-the-sims-3 But anyway, if you are just wanting to know what each package is...you can use this thumbnail extractor to get image of the item. It works on both packages and sims3packs. I would suggest to make a new folder and just add a few packages at a time, then extract the thumbnail image. https://modthesims.info/t/494172

I'm not exactly sure if this is what you need but I've used the thumbnail extractor on some really old cc files to learn what each one is. For example, Lunasims files, which contain hundreds, if not thousands of packages and sims3packs all in spanish. It helped me find specific items instead of having to look at each one in sp3e and hope there is an icon or image. There is some cc without a thumbnail to extract but most do have one. And note that if you have both a package and a sims3pack of the same item in one folder the thumbnail extractor with generate 2 images - one for each.

Hope this helps and if not - I apologize for not understanding your question.


Well script files for example don't have thumbnails, nor do most of the files i checked actually. Very few of the things have thumbnails, the best i could get are the XML entries for most that i checked where i could search for a name. Sometimes not even those would help and i had to look if they had some sort of revealing texture files.
Sometimes not even that.
At least one of these non displayed files was literally just a single texture image of a nondescript building with no other files at all.
Only the fact that the package still had the title told me that it was a HD retexture of the airstrip venue.

In the meantime i actually went ahead and merged files in groups. XML and tuning files can be merged without an issue anyway, each overriding others if they affect the same thing. Script files did not load when merged so i put them separately again. There's apparently a few items that won't load with this configuration, but i have absolutely no idea how to track those down.
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