Simulation Lag From The Social Bunny App—Are You Affected?

If you have the High School Years EP and notice that The Sims 4 is lagging a lot, you might have the Social Bunny Simulation Lag bug. Luckily, there’s a fix!

It’s never fun when your games slow down, and The Sims 4 is a common victim of this. Between aging hardware, more and more content from DLC and base game updates, CC and Mods, and the fact that the game engine was a mess from the get-go, there are a number of reasons why your game may be slowing down.

This issue is called Simulation Lag and the phrase specifically refers to lagging in The Sims games. A very noticeable example of Simulation Lag that most of us are familiar with is how with the Dine Out Game Pack, going out to eat with sims used to take hours and hours in-game. Not only is it unrealistic, but it takes away a lot of fun from playing while you sit there waiting for your game to lurch along as your sim’s needs plummet.

Lately it seems that there’s a new issue with Simulation Lag that has popped up for some players, and this time social media might actually be to blame. If you have the High School Years Expansion you’re no doubt familiar with the Social Bunny phone app. This is The Sims 4’s version of popular social media apps where sims can make posts, react to others’ content, send messages, and more.

How Is Social Bunny Causing Simulation Lag?

Like most games, there are a number of processes that are run in the background whenever you play The Sims 4. In the case of Social Bunny, what’s happening is that as more and more sims spawn into your world they are added to the pool of Social Bunny users with checks running every in-game hour over which sims are posting to it, even if they’re sims you’re not playing with. As you can imagine, with the game growing bigger and bigger there are more and more sims that exist so more and more checks needing to be run.

Another way to picture it is to imagine that you have to walk down a hallway to get to your destination. Initially it might just be you and a few other people, but as more people start using the hallway to get to their destinations it becomes more and more crowded. Over time that hallway will get so crowded that you can’t get through it as quickly anymore, and eventually the traffic will grow congested to the point that it takes significantly longer to get across the hallway.

The “Fix Social Bunny Simulation Lag” Mod

Legendary modder Turbodriver recently discovered that Social Bunny was causing his simulation lag issues and made a mod to fix it which he has kindly shared with the community. The mod purges sims from Social Bunny who aren’t actually on or using the app, effectively removing some of the crowd from “the hallway” so things flow better. This should noticeably reduce issues while maintaining the functionality of Social Bunny for those sims who do use it.

More on SNOOTYSIMS: Obviously the “Fix Social Bunny Simulation Lag Mod” is only going to help if you have High School Years, but what if you don’t have the EP and are still experiencing lagging issues? Try these tips!

Conclusion

If Simulation Lag has got you down recently, there may be an adorable pink bunny to blame. Luckily we have the Fix Social Bunny Simulation Lag Mod so sims can keep on socializing without slowing their lives down to a crawl, allowing you to get back to playing instead of waiting around. Even if you’ve never used mods before you should consider giving it a try if not for any other reason than to rule out whether or not Social Bunny is the problem.

Have you experienced major Simulation Lag recently? Does Turbodriver’s mod help your game perform better? Let us know in the comments below and visit us on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, Tumblr, and/or TikTok for more Sims content! Happy (and speedy) simming!