The ALS-U is the upgrade of the existing Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory Advanced Light Source to a diffraction-limited soft x-ray light source. Here we present the lattice correction studies and commissioning simulations demonstrating that the proposed machine design can be expected to deliver the intended performance when realistic errors and perturbations are fully accounted for. Critical to this demonstration are the high-fidelity, realistic simulations of the beam-based alignment process (both in turn-by-turn mode during early commissioning and with stored beam) that are now made possible by the Toolkit for Simulated Commissioning. In addition to presenting a statistical performance analysis based on a large number of lattice error realizations, we also study the range of further improvements that can be obtained by fine-tuning the correction chain to individual error seeds, mimicking the approach one would follow once the machine is built.