In this troubleshooting tutorial video, I'll show how to fix the "A serious error has occurred" problem in The Sims 3. This is a very frequent problem that affects several The Sims 3 players ("simmers") because there is an incompatibility between The Sims 3 saving function and OneDrive. The Sims 3 save games are usually locally stored in "Documents", which is the same folder OneDrive "pulls from" to save the files to the cloud. OneDrive generally moves these files to a different folder, and in this process, the game fails to recognize the files and also in some cases the files can become corrupted due to these incompatibilities. <br /><br />These incompatibilities can generate problems such as "A serious error has ocurred while loading [name of the Sims 3 world]", and also "error code 16", which are bugs usually specifically related to save game files of The Sims 3. Unfortunately, due to the severity of these problems, their presence very often indicates that the save game files have already been corrupted, and are probably unusable. While there are online guides providing ways to attempt to recover and restore these corrupted save files, in this video I will focus on preventhis these problems in the future. While this method will protect your future save files, unfortunately it will not be able to restore already corrupted and already lost save files. <br /><br />This is a quite complex tutorial video, there are multiple steps in this video. I divided it into chapters to make it a bit more organized. <br /><br />00:00 Warnings and Information <br />00:55 Backup Your The Sims 3 Saves <br />01:22 How to Fix the OneDrive Problem With Sims 3 Saves <br />02:10 If You Decide to Uninstall OneDrive <br />02:30 Moving the Save Files Back to Documents <br />02:40 Explanation: Saves May Be Corrupted <br />03:00 Avoiding File Corruption in the Future <br />03:20 What to Do If Save Files Are Corruputed <br />03:49 How to Protect Future Sims 3 Save Files From Becoming Corrupted <br /><br />1. Back up your "Electronic Arts" folder <br />(It is possible that they are already corrupted, due to OneDrive and due to the saving method) <br />2. Click "OneDrive" <br />3. Click the "Engine Wheel" - Click "Settings" <br />In the video, I show the navigation to do these steps. <br />4. Click "Manage Backup" <br />5. Turn off OneDrive for "Documents" folder (or uninstall OneDrive) <br />6. Restore your "Electronic Arts" folder to "Documents" <br />(There is the possibility that the save files are corrupted and lost. If this is the case, delete the "Electronic Arts" folder and start over in the game) <br />7. Use the "Save As" button to save instead of "Save", to avoid corrupting save files in the future [You need to use "Save" for the first time, in order for the "Save As" button to appear in the future. After this, always use "Save As"]
