Out, Damned Spot! Fixing Blue Lots After Using EIG

Once you've placed all of your roads and lots the next logical step is using Edit in Game to add the finishing touches to your world. Except something horrific happens once you save your EIG changes and go back to your world in Create A World. Suddenly you're looking at blue lots and the buildings look like poorly build card houses. Use EIG a couple of times and they look like flattened card houses. 

When I first started, the only advice I could find was to add a bit of terrain paint to each lot while playing the world "in game". And that does work, but it is so tedious and irritating to do and I couldn't see that being the only solution. People are creating worlds and uploading them for other people to use, who is going to download a custom world that they have to fix blue lots every time they start a new game? 

Convinced there had to be a better way I did many Google searches. Most of them lead me to very old forum posts that had nothing to do with Create a World or EIG but finally I found a single post on Aminova's Sims that provided the solution. In her post she doesn't reference blue lots specifically but she does mention corrupted LOD files which were mentioned in >this post< as the cause of blue lots. 

Make a Backup

Before doing anything else, track down your world file in your \Documents\Electronic Arts\The Sims 3 Create A World Tool\UserToolData\Worlds folder. Copy and paste to your Desktop so you have a back up. 

Open S3EP

Using S3EP, open your original world file, the one in your Documents\Electronic Arts\The Sims 3 Create A World Tool\UserToolData\Worlds folder. Sort by Tag and then by Name. This should put all of your unnamed _IMG files together. Select all of the _IMG files that have nothing in the Name column, right click and delete them. Yes, ALL of them. Aren't you glad you have your backup? Save and then close your world in S3EP.

Open CAW

Open your world in CAW again. 

Ta da! No more blue lots and the house of cards buildings are back to normal. Save in CAW and carry on. 

It sure beats fixing each lot one by one.