@omglo they autonomously wanted to do something with empty desert plates as deco, and since I couldn't remove it, I nuked it and it was fixed.

Yes, I saw they're working on a pink-flash band-aid! While my hood no longer flashes pink, I still have crashes now and then (cannot rotate too much between families/empty lots in one gameplay)

@omglo regarding deleting object CCs to reduce memory overload, does it have more effect to delete meshes or just the unused recolors?

For buy items, remove recolors first, then remove the mesh (so you don't get orphan recolors/meshes hanging out - those can be irritating or difficult to find (Delphy's organizer can help with orphans, but hoenstly just make sure you get them).

For CAS items, either remove the entire set of recolors and mesh, or (if you've got them spread all over) remove all but one recolor, then the last recolor and mesh (so you're sure you got them all).

(If you want to keep any of the meshes/recolors, make sure to keep the mesh, of course).

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If anything uses larger textures than 1024x1024 (and isn't a giant neighborhood-related texture or skybox), that's probably the first thing you want to get rid of. TS2 doesn't seem to like those larger sizes (can be an issue with some TS3/TS4 conversions). Would also be skeptical to files if they seem larger in filesize than they should be, especially after compressing (if the main textures don't use DXT but the RAW formats, the files can be around 4 times the size. CAS files like that can crash Bodyshop if you try to make projects with them, so that's another reason to skip, or edit them). I'd think those can potentially be an issue for texture memory if you've got enough of them (but not sure since I haven't come across too many).

Crashing could potentially be from the workload, but it's difficult to say (Win10 seems unstable as it is). Things that cause the game to work a bit harder are already placed high-poly furniture and sims with high poly hairs/accessories/clothes, especially with large textures (potentially RAW format) - and lots of these on the same lot - plus things like weather, effects, overlays being overlaid onto sims (temperature/supernaturals/etc.), opening CAS or "change appearance"/"buy clothes", many sims and/or pets on the lot, walkbys coming and going, and anything else that requires "thinking time" running constantly in the background - all of these is in my experience more taxing on the computing than stuff hanging out unused in buy/build/CAS, at least until you open the menus and/or start placing it. The unused items you mostly notice when scrolling through the menus and when loading the game (and occasionally when the game throws a random crash at you).

I don't think you'd get pink-flashing just because of an unused chair with some recolors (but if you had 50 redundant items with several recolors each, tidying up stuff you don't use is a good idea, because in the long run it likely does help on pink-flashing and crashing to clean out stuff you never use, because there's less junk to deal with for the game).

@simmer22 thank you for the detailed explanation!
Do you know which tool can detect high-res textures? For CAS items, I recall I got an error message in Wardrobe Wrangler when the image size was too big.

If you open your Downloads folder and sort files by size, the largest files will almost always contain large (or uncompressed) textures.

I don't know if there's a tool that can detect texture size other than SimPE. Personally I just drag-drop files to SimPE if I need to know the actual size or other details. Usually, the mesh and a set of recolors will have the same size textures, so it's enough to check one or two. For CAS items it's nearly always, while objects can occasionally vary, but as long as the size of the files is roughly the same, the size of the texture tends to also be the same.

Small tip - uncompressed recolor files with one texture at 1024x1024 tend to be a little over 1 MB, while one texture at 512x512 is usually at around 300 kb. You'll usually see that same rough difference when compressing (4x difference, but it varies depending on the actual texture - some compress more than others depending on the level of detail). If files contain more than one texture, they'll be bigger accordingly (size depends whether they're compressed or not).

If the size is 2-4 MB or more, I'd probably check it in SimPE to see if it was a 2048x texture, epecially for clothes. Hairs can be big, because they often contain multiple textures (but would check those too - they often contain too many textures...)