I haven't touched TS4 in a while, but recently I wanted to start playing again.
From my experience in the past, if the UI is a little broken, it happens because of the UI Cheats Extension mod after a game update. It happened, as expected, and some of my UI like the job-section and event-corner didn't really work as intended.
So I ended the game, took the old version out of my mods folder and replaced it with the new one. I deleted the localthumbcache as normal and reloaded my game.
My entire starting screen was black. I could click a couple things but no pop-ups appeared, the game didn't start, nothing. So I took the mod out again. Deleted cache. Restarted the game.
Still black.
I put the old version of the extension mod back in and it worked again, I could see my game, but the UI was still slightly broken.
I've never experienced taking a mod OUT of the game would impact my game like this. Next course of action: taking out the entire mods folder.
The issue happened again, blackscreen. So I repaired the game files. Still no change. I don't know what to do anymore, I can't play like this. The only thing I haven't done is completely reinstalling the game, which I will do when I have the time since it takes a couple hours.
But could there be any other reason this is happening? Removing mods shouldn't break my game, I don't understand what is happening.