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Bored? How about A Sims 4 Social Study?
kremesch73
Posts: 10,474 Member
In rotational gameplay with a few rules?
Some people are well aware that I'm a rotational player. I've stated several times I've been one since S1. After playing the Sims 4 Room Challenge and participating in the Opposites Attract threads. I thought it might be fun to put forth a new game we can share. Hopefully with lots of Screenshots if you can.
Here's the idea
For your sims:
You start out with a colony of single sims in modest homes with varying traits and aspirations spread out across Willow Creek and Oasis Springs. The minimum number of Sims is 6 (just to offer an easy mode). The maximum number can be whatever you want it to be (There are 23 Aspirations in total if you're ambitious enough to try them all, or you can go by the job branches). The idea is to use Traits, Aspirations, and/or jobs/branches you don't normally use, but there are no set rules unless you want to use the few that I will outline in a 'Rules' Section. Feel free to use characters from your favourite novels, games, tv shows, movies et cetera, if that helps. You can also create your own personal cast if you choose.
For your homes:
You can build, use what's in the game, or download starter homes that your sims can afford to start out with. You are allowed to expand these homes as funds allow.
Each house must be played for at least one sim-week before switching to another, and each house must be played only once within a rotation. Hopefully I can clarify what this means a bit later.
Rules
The rules are simple and optional. If you chose to play by them, I simply recommend you follow them. Personally, it makes the game more interesting for me.
For the first week
Feel free to keep track of your sims however you like. Some ideas are: A spreadsheet, a notepad, use an iPad or an Adroid, whatever suits you.
What you can do:
What you must do:
What you can not do:
You are never allowed to control your sim while they're at a venue for the two days they must go--ever. The only exception to this rule is you are only allowed to make them greet a sim if they've never met them before and you are allowed to tell them to go home; nothing else. EDIT: Forgot to add that you are allowed to go there on any day you wish simply to skill or gain tips, et cetera, but these can not count towards the two days a sim-week where you don't control them. They must be additional to those two days.
After the first week and onward
Everything else is open-ended and none of these rules are set in stone. This is simply my own rule-set that I made for myself to conduct the type of social study I've always enjoyed conducting. Feel free to join me.
Onto my own hoods
I've had a jump start and am already onto Round 5 of my rotation, but anyone is free to join at any time and post screens of their progress and/or stories. I'd love to see what others are doing in their games.
I just wanted to play in a relaxed mode and age sims on my own. I may change this as time goes by. These are the settings I chose to go with:
My starter hoods started out with all 8x8 homes (an idea spurred by The Sims 4 Room Challenge). Here are my hoods when I started:
Here are the hoods after Round 4 (and onto Round 5) I also moved two lots around in Oasis Springs:
I've chosen to go with a cast that I've always loved to play with from one of my favourite games and its offshoots. I tried to keep male/female balanced as much as possilbe and started out with 26 sims:
This is how I keep track of their rotations:
This is how I keep track of their romances that have naturally developed:
And I chose to keep track of children since I started to get a bit lost after Round 4:
No one needs to keep charts like I do. I just happen to have that type of mindset, and I find that it makes things easier to track when I have a hood as full as I do. To each their own on this one. There are no rules on what you do or don't do. You only need to keep track of who you've played and who you'll play next.
I also zip my saves along with my spreadsheets and place them in a safe place after every household to ensure I don't lose any progress. Again: this is optional (though highly recommened).
Some people are well aware that I'm a rotational player. I've stated several times I've been one since S1. After playing the Sims 4 Room Challenge and participating in the Opposites Attract threads. I thought it might be fun to put forth a new game we can share. Hopefully with lots of Screenshots if you can.
Here's the idea
For your sims:
You start out with a colony of single sims in modest homes with varying traits and aspirations spread out across Willow Creek and Oasis Springs. The minimum number of Sims is 6 (just to offer an easy mode). The maximum number can be whatever you want it to be (There are 23 Aspirations in total if you're ambitious enough to try them all, or you can go by the job branches). The idea is to use Traits, Aspirations, and/or jobs/branches you don't normally use, but there are no set rules unless you want to use the few that I will outline in a 'Rules' Section. Feel free to use characters from your favourite novels, games, tv shows, movies et cetera, if that helps. You can also create your own personal cast if you choose.
For your homes:
You can build, use what's in the game, or download starter homes that your sims can afford to start out with. You are allowed to expand these homes as funds allow.
Each house must be played for at least one sim-week before switching to another, and each house must be played only once within a rotation. Hopefully I can clarify what this means a bit later.
Rules
The rules are simple and optional. If you chose to play by them, I simply recommend you follow them. Personally, it makes the game more interesting for me.
For the first week
Feel free to keep track of your sims however you like. Some ideas are: A spreadsheet, a notepad, use an iPad or an Adroid, whatever suits you.
What you can do:
- You can move your sim into a house they can afford and furnish without using money cheats.
- You can get your sim a job and direct them to skill, or you can start them working at home.
- You can greet sims your sim has never met. It is highly recommended to greet as many as you can.
- If your sim starts talking to someone, you can allow it to happen, but you can not guide the conversation in any way, shape, or form.
- You can invite sims in and initiate one non-romantic social interaction, and you can ask them to leave; nothing more for social interactions.
- You can guide your sim to tend to their needs and job requirements while a sim is visiting, but you can not make your sim build friendships. It must happen naturally.
- You can play with aging on at any level, or aging off. You can also change it at any time. It's your call.
- You can purchase/use rewards.
What you must do:
- You must send your sims to a venue at least twice a sim-week (It doesn't have to be for a whole day).
- You must play each household for one sim-week.
- You must play each household once per round.
What you can not do:
You are never allowed to control your sim while they're at a venue for the two days they must go--ever. The only exception to this rule is you are only allowed to make them greet a sim if they've never met them before and you are allowed to tell them to go home; nothing else. EDIT: Forgot to add that you are allowed to go there on any day you wish simply to skill or gain tips, et cetera, but these can not count towards the two days a sim-week where you don't control them. They must be additional to those two days.
- You are not allowed to initialize romantic interactions.
- You are not allowed to cheat or use mods that affect gameplay. Mods that are allowed are graphical mods or mods like getpopulation or reduced townie regen since they don't affect gameplay. CC is allowed. I don't use it, but feel free to go ahead and use it if you like. I will also allow the less breakage mod, but only the 30% one, and the realistic bills (both can be found at MTS and they're allowed because I agree that the breakage and taxes on bills are overly excessive--let's call the use of these as 'easy' mode).
After the first week and onward
- The same rule will always apply for venues. Sims must go twice a sim-week, and you are not allowed to control them while they're there. You are only allowed to greet sims that have never been met, and you are allowed to send them home. That's it—always. You can send them any other day to do whatever you please with them, but 2 days must be set aside where you resign your control over to them and take some time to learn about them. It doesn't have to be a full day. Anywhere from 1 sim-hour onward will do.
- You can now direct friendhsips with any sim that your sim has started a friendship with (anything in the green—low or high) from any previous week/rotation.
- You are only allowed to initialize romantic interactions once a romance bar has naturally reached 1/3 - 1/2 full. After that, do as you please with romances. Get engaged, marry, have children and then dump them, whatever turns your crank.
- You can move sims, expand their homes, have children, change jobs, change aspirations, impregnate other sims, and you can move them in together after the prior romance rule has been met.
Everything else is open-ended and none of these rules are set in stone. This is simply my own rule-set that I made for myself to conduct the type of social study I've always enjoyed conducting. Feel free to join me.
Onto my own hoods
I've had a jump start and am already onto Round 5 of my rotation, but anyone is free to join at any time and post screens of their progress and/or stories. I'd love to see what others are doing in their games.
I just wanted to play in a relaxed mode and age sims on my own. I may change this as time goes by. These are the settings I chose to go with:
My starter hoods started out with all 8x8 homes (an idea spurred by The Sims 4 Room Challenge). Here are my hoods when I started:
Here are the hoods after Round 4 (and onto Round 5) I also moved two lots around in Oasis Springs:
I've chosen to go with a cast that I've always loved to play with from one of my favourite games and its offshoots. I tried to keep male/female balanced as much as possilbe and started out with 26 sims:
This is how I keep track of their rotations:
This is how I keep track of their romances that have naturally developed:
And I chose to keep track of children since I started to get a bit lost after Round 4:
No one needs to keep charts like I do. I just happen to have that type of mindset, and I find that it makes things easier to track when I have a hood as full as I do. To each their own on this one. There are no rules on what you do or don't do. You only need to keep track of who you've played and who you'll play next.
I also zip my saves along with my spreadsheets and place them in a safe place after every household to ensure I don't lose any progress. Again: this is optional (though highly recommened).
Dissatisfied with Sims 4 and hoping for a better Sims 5
Post edited by kremesch73 on
21
Comments
I saw your post on this in another social experiment thread and thought it was a great idea. I have my own version of this that I'm playing and will share my screens and stuff in a little bit.
I'm really enjoying colonizing my world with these singles.
This sounds like a fun lil challenge though. I might give it a go when I've got time.
Lol. There's just nothing in the game that I could use so I had to make it up! I actually love Sephiroth as a Serial Romantic.
I think I clarified that you can send them as much as you want. I'll have to re-read what I posted. It's just that you have to send them on 2 days where you don't control them to see what happens. It's actually kind of fun. I really like to see who's made enemies, friends, and romances with whom on their own. Either way, if you're already playing rotationally, feel free to post some screens of your hoods and your gameplay.
I never copyrighted the spreadsheets or my gameplay. Feel free to steel whatever you want
Thanks I will use the spread sheets. I do not know how to post screenshots so I can't show them to you. I am in the process of starting a new game. I had to take all my sims out and make sure they had good looking bathing suits. I just do not like speedos and those other swimsuits that are not long enough. So, I had to take them all out and re-do them. There were some really bad clothing some of those sims had. I think I have some bad cc in my game also as some of my townies are running around in underwear, and I do not think I want my sims getting romantic with them so I have to get involved there.........So Your idea is intriguing and I will think on it. Thanks for the use of the charts what a great idea. Do you use excel? Or do you just make a graph in word?
I'm using Excel this time around because I'm using a few formulas and it's just easier for sorting and working with data, etc. I built a complex database with Access for S2 and I don't really want to go that route again. I decided I'd try to keep it simple this time and just use Excel. There are other alternatives, of course. Word would work, but formulas can't be used, and I'm a bit of a control freak when it comes to conditionally formatting my data
Nude sims would bug me too. My one sim that is goofy in this hood often shows up at another sims house in a hotdog suit. This is where I break my usual rule of inviting everyone in (which I didn't list in rules). Sorry. Hotdog suit? Yeah... You're not coming in. >.>
What I did was evict all the townies in my worlds, then I used up all the 20x15 and 20x30 lots to build 2 and 3 bedroom houses. I don't enjoy playing poor Sims so I do tend to bend the rules as far as their houses go (I use the free real estate cheat but don't go crazy since they have to pay those bills).
Then I made a list of all the traits and all the possible careers. There are 16 possibilities and 17 if you add a collector. Then I set out to create these Sims. I tried to make the traits conflicting (an evil Sim that is romantic, a mean Sim that is outgoing, etc).
I rotate houses every Sunday morning, when I first play a Sim? I send them to various lots and have them meet every Sim present. Then I send them home. I don't want them making friends or enemies, I just wanted the person in their panel. The idea is that they will pursue these relationships on their own when I'm not playing them. After the initial meetings, I will not help them with social interactions again. They're on their own.
I'm curious to see if Sims when left inactive will make romances and enemies, when I rotate back to them? I will play them the way the game has shown with their relationships.
Here are my Sims that I have colonized the world with...
These are the founding Sims:
Each career/branch has it's own house (I used up all the 20x15 and 20x30 lots). I also made a male/female for each branch.
Astronaut Career
-Space Ranger - Serenity - nerd brain / active, gloomy, genius
-Smuggler - Carter - nerd brain / geek, outgoing, bookworm
Criminal Career
-Boss - Kiley (remember her? That was the girl Edge found and romanced) Public enemy / romantic, evil, self-assured (I'm looking forward to this one because romantic and evil seem to contradict)
-Oracle - Ethan - chief of mischief / hot headed, mean, outgoing (again trying to give them contradicting traits)
Culinary Career
-Chef - Gino - neat, foodie, snob
-Mixologist - Chloe - foodie, clumsy, ambitious
Entertainer Career
-Musician - Minkz - music lover, glutton, outgoing
-Comedian - Hazel - childish, goofball, cheerful
Painter Career
-Master of the Real - Regan - good, clumsy, creative (she is the other townie I showed you guys)
-Patron of the Arts - Cale - good, creative, geek
Secret Agent Career
-Diamond Agent - Tabitha - outgoing, snob, active
-Villain - Edge - active, mean, genius (remember Edge, he has moved out to start the new world)
Tech Guru Career
-Start up - Anissa - genius, geek, clumsy
-eSport Gamer - Jasper - bookworm, geek, genius
Writer Career
-Author - Tony - bookworm, gloomy, romantic
-Journalist - Jackie - geek, childish, bookworm
Collector
Bennett - insane, loves the outdoors, lazy
Here are my worlds
I'm rather old school so I'm using a notebook. It is set up like this (I gave my builds the names of actual streets in the towns I think they resemble):
House 1 - 5 Knotty Pine Rd
Serenity Waldron
Traits: Active, gloomy, genius
Career: Astronaut - Space Ranger
Skills needed: Logic, fitness, rocket science
House 2 - 1 Esplanade Ave
Carter Pendleton
Traits: Geek, outgoing, bookworm
Career: Astronaut - Smuggler
Skills needed: Logic, fitness, rocket science, mischief, programming
And so on till I reached house 17.
Then another page, I did this:
Week 1 - Edge (he's a Sim that I moved over from @hmae123 challenge to colonize this world) MacDonald
-Traveled to - Cactus Rose bar, gym, park
-Re-established relationship with Kiley, girlfriend, has daughter together Haylee ***
-Got a job
Week 2 - Serenity
-Paid bills
-Built/upgraded rocket schip
-Traveled to gym, met Kiley and visited her home to check on the baby! ***
-Worked on skills
-Got a job
And so on....I'm just finishing week 2.
The *** are because Edge and Kiley had met in my other game and I wanted to re-establish their relationship. I helped that happen and it was hard work since he's mean and his always interaction is to be mean. He has no friends. I decided to have them try for baby because I was curious to see what would happen to their relationship and what the game would do with the child of Sims who are mean and evil.
When I sent Serenity to the gym, I saw Kiley there but she wasn't pregnant and there was no baby. Concerned, I checked the world manager and it showed her holding an infant. So, I made Serenity introduce herself to Kiley just so we could go check on that baby. It would defeat the whole purpose if the game had deleted her. Evidently, Kiley had either put the baby in her personal inventory or left it at home alone. That sort of annoyed me, TBH. I had Serenity care for the baby, I'm still waiting for the game to age it up (I thought it would do that on it's own?).
Images of the Sims next....
House 2
House 3
Kiley, I did change her traits a little. She was a townie I saw walking past and had to snag her because she was so pretty.
House 4
House 5
House 6
House 7
House 8
This is another townie I saw walking past in my other game and snagged her in CAS to use later.
House 10
House 11
House 12
Edge from when he was living with my other Sims in my other challenge.
House 13
House 14
House 15
House 16
House 17
Cool! I was hoping I hadn't strayed too far from the original challenge.
My take away was that we are supposed to be as hands off as possible when it comes to social interactions. See what they do on their own. I have 17 households, so that's 17 Sim weeks just to set everybody up. I'm hoping I'll start to see some drama in the second rotations through them.
I'm done setting up! LOL
Tomorrow, I will post some screens of Edge and Serenity and their first weeks.
Nope. Hands off only applies to the first week, and that's only for social interactions. This is how I played it. After the first week, you can control them all you want. The idea when I first started was to see what types of relationships the sims would start on their own, depending on their traits, and then take them over from there. I started this before the Opposites Attract thread, and I've had the romance rule in place since I started. I got this idea from the attractions I used to let guide my game in S2. The two days a week is something new for me. It's to encourage myself and other players to give their sims some free reign and to allow them or inspire them to try things they normally wouldn't try with their sims. None of it is written in stone though. I send my sims to venues far more than I thought I would after forcing myself to do those 2 days. Now, I find I really enjoy sending them out after learning the pros and cons to each venue.
The main idea is to basically learn about the game and to test our own limits of the ways we thought we preferred to play. I've basically learned that I can actually sit back and relax. I was a major control freak in S2, except for when it came to romances. Now I've learned that I can actually use a lot of the traits, aspirations, and jobs I purposefully avoided at the beginning, and I can also play in a way that I never would have fathomed I'd play to begin with.
I basically play each home differently. Some are more hands on than others, which is why I say the rules are only there for those who want to give themselves more of a challenge. They're just mental rules for me and they're really only there to allow my sims to guide me in knowing which other sims are worth their time from that point onward. Hence, the 'easy mode'
I have no Screens at the moment in this particular hood. Believe it or not, I don't normally take screens unless it's to join in on another thread, but I will start posting them from this point on when I start playing again. Should be tonight. This will hopefully shed some light on the openness of this type of playstyle once the mechanics have been figured out.
Yeah that one was amusing too. Although if you think about it, it's actually quite terrifying considering his personality. I feel like he'd be an 'if I can't have you no one will' kinda guy.
Well, every time he gets the whim to get a mate and then break up with them, he impregnates them and then dumps them. It was the 'serial' part of the aspiration that made me go, "hm..."
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I thought I read that the baby would be born on it's own and become a child on it's own in an inactive household? It's been 2 Sim weeks and it's still an infant. I'm not supposed to rotate back to that household yet but I'm afraid the game will delete that baby if I don't age it up.
My plan is to have one criminal mastermind in one town as the founder. They'll be in the boss branch of the criminal career.
In the evil town will be five single sims, they will not all be evil, but all of them will have either a hot headed, mean, insane or materlistic trait. I'll mix these negative traits with interacting combos on still deciding on.
The careers will be 1 astronaut/smuggler track, 2 criminals in the different branches, 1 will hack from home and just not work, a lazy sim and I'm not sure on the last one yet.
And the other town will have a good sim as its founder, the aspiration will be the wealth, because they'll need to rich to found their town. I'm waiting on the business career for this sim.
The other five sims will have a range of traits, but many will include, good, cheerful, and outgoing, they'll be mixed with conflicting traits like the evil town.
I'm still figuring out these careers.
I'll probably start putting it all together this weekend sometime.
I like that idea. I suspect Oasis Springs would be the evil town and Willow Creek will be the good one?
That's how I would do it. Actually, most of my mean ones are in Oasis Springs already—unplanned, really.
Are you playing with aging on or off? I've been playing with it off and no baby ages to child until I get to it. Haven't lost any yet. From what I understand, the game won't cull sims in homes. It culls the sims in the unplayed household bin, and ghosts too, I believe.
Yes Oasis springs just seems fitting for it for some reason. The only thing I'm doing differently that varies from yours is making the criminal boss a master of her career first, then I'm going to to doze the towns, and start the colony's and try and follow all rules youre doing with yhe rotations and the weekly outings, staying mostly hands off after that. I like the idea of already having a "criminal mastermind" in the game. Like the ultimate villion towering over the town as each sim establishes themselves.
I think I'm going to make many venues since I'll have so many empty lots. Maybe even an angry ambiance bar and of course a romance themed night club.
Lol. I wonder if it will wind up the way I'm imagining it. Angry brawls and everyone flirting...