Sims 4 players report package mods and custom content disappearing after update

Sims 4 players woke up to missing houses, broken outfits and empty Mods folders after the March 17 update, and for some, the game would not even open until custom content was pulled out of the directory. The complaints quickly piled into a single EA Forums thread, where players described package-based mods failing to appear, black screens on launch and save files that suddenly felt unsafe to load.

The clearest pattern was not a single bad file. One player said the game only started after moving the entire Mods folder to the desktop, creating a fresh empty folder and launching without custom content. Another said the update tied to The Sims 4 Marketplace made all CC seem to disappear except for MCCC and a few other mods, even after restarting the PC and reintroducing files slowly. That kind of split behavior pointed to a load problem, not ordinary user error.

EA moved quickly. On March 18, the company posted a hotfix, “Custom Content is back on the menu!,” and said it resolved an issue where pack-specific custom content would not fully load and could trigger other CC to stop loading as well. EA also said all CC should now load and behave as expected after a full update, which matched the forum reports about only part of a Mods folder showing up in game.

The March 17 patch itself was a major change, not just a routine maintenance pass. EA introduced The Sims 4 Marketplace on PC and Mac, with a rollout to PlayStation and Xbox planned for the following months, and tied it to a new virtual currency called Moola. The same update included more than 60 quality-of-life fixes, which made the custom content failure feel even more disruptive because it landed inside a broader live-service overhaul.

EA followed again on March 23 with “Custom Content fix incoming!,” another sign the company was still chasing the issue after the first hotfix. That update also addressed a launch crash affecting 2% of players using specific types of custom content under certain circumstances, adding another layer to the same patch cycle.

For players still troubleshooting, the first checks are still the basics that matter most: make sure “Enable Custom Content and Mods” and “Script Mods Allowed” are turned on, and watch for OneDrive interference with the Mods folder. The reports suggest script mods did not fail in exactly the same way as package CC, with MCCC still showing for some players even when other files vanished. That split is the clearest sign yet that the problem hit package-based content hardest, and that a full, clean reload of the game mattered more than chasing one broken download at a time.