All of my cc reappeared in the launcher under 'Installed', but now when I load the game it brings up 'New Game' and my current game is gone. I found my old DCCache files dated from 2020-2021 and tried to paste them into my current Cache folder. I don't usually back things up because I'm dumb (this will be changing going forward, dw), BUT I remembered that I would have a copy of my entire 'The Sims 3' folder on my USB when I got a new laptop and had to transfer everything. Freaked out, tried to recover them, I couldn't.

Okay, here's the story: I was trying to clean up my cache files as usual, accidentally deleted the files in my DCCache folder, then permanently deleted everything from my trash bin.

Hello! First time posting here, sad it's under these circumstances.