New Save Plan: How do you, start fresh?

Godleyjeans

After seeing a tweet about one of the Sim Gurus always striping their world when they do a new save, it got me wondering about the rest of us, from fashion to day-to-day activities, I wanna know how you do your worlds.


Being autistic myself, I try various ways of treating my games from copying the guru's method and having the game generate completely fresh/non premade sims to keeping ALL the premade families and just going to town on blending bloodlines until everyone is a cousin of someone else.

Today I'm on my millionth new game (It never ends with the ideas and restarts) and doing a sorta mix of bloodlines/storytelling and letting the game do its thing. An example such as I delete any dupe families (Sims who look identical or like every game generated townie ever) and or sticking to storylines from Sims 2, bringing in the recreates Maxis did such as for the Smiths, Grunts, etc that you can download off the gallery, so a mesh of throwback and making space for new roles taken up by Families who are lazily added for filler factor.

It's hours of work deleting copies of sims and matchmaking some for instant story-telling but its worth it, especially the long run chapters (I saw one thread on here where a simmer had Cassandra Goth grow up and marry the blonde Curious brother, creating an adorable family and storyline that I've sought to take inspiration by), lots of it is just rehashing Sims 2 but at times, it's fun to mix things up.

Buuuut, that's just me.
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Comment below on how you do your restarts, is it a strip and rebuild situation? leave the game as is and let it tell the story? Bit of both or do you have your own method? I'm interested!

Jyotai

Well I've only done one save restart so far, so I don't have perspective of "this is how I usually do it".

I'm new to Sims 4. April sale on Steam got me back to Sims. I played Sims 1, and I owned Sims 2 and Urbz but can't recall even ever having installed them (I think that's due to my old PC dying at that point and me switching to Mac due to work, and only going back to PC in 2019 - but I thought the disc was dual format back then so I'm actually not sure why I bought but didn't play Sims 2 so many years ago).

Anyway...

I went into my old save and copied every lot that I had customized into my library, then put them into a new save. I then did the same with a few households I liked, and with most of the random townies.

Once I had that new save, I deleted all Maxis Sims from a copy of it - and that's my new game.

After playing the new save for a week, I found out I'd missed a few lots, and I'd put several of them in without having bb.moveitems on. So I had to put a lot of lots back in again; meaning that if I do this again my 'backup blank save' isn't actually any good.

My reasoning for this was that I like the custom lots I've been placing down and then tweaking to my tastes, and I like the random townies that I've been getting and slowly tweaking. But as for the Maxis sims, I had both no attachment to hem, but also felt weird anytime they got 'altered' by my game play. So having half the lots in the game taken up by sims that I feel some need to "preserve in a pristine state" was a large waste of potential. Clearing them out means every sim in the game is 'mine' and whatever happens to them is just whatever happens to them as a result of gameplay. Something I can live with as they're not "special".

QueenMercy

One thing I do whenever I make a new main save is delete premades I don’t like, and replace the Landraabs with a version where Johnny is also their son and stuff like a version of the Behrs with parents so there’s no grey portraits.

VeeDub

I have my own custom start save that I use when I want to start a "new" save these days. This includes builds and sims that I created (or that were born) in older saves and preserved in my library. I don't replace all of the original lots before I begin anew because not all of my saves are of the same type, so I don't always know in advance exactly everything I'll want and/or need before I play. As for pre-made sims, I sometimes keep a few but aged up enough that they won't be around too long. I've never liked most of them much in the first place, and I'm not fond of dealing with most of them now. Again. And again and... yeah, many repeat agains, lol.

GalacticGal

Gosh, this is going to sound boring, but my idea of a Fresh Start is to place an empty saves Folder into my game.

Now, when it comes to Restarts, of which I am the Queen, (she said with cheek) I keep copies of my families in My Library on the Gallery. I use MCCC among other mods. I detest the notion that while we're able to create an entire family in CAS, we can't set their skills. EA just an idea for the future, please let us set skills, even if it's randomized while in CAS. I have to use a mod for this. It's unconscionable to me that a set of parents (Adult) Sims have no skills. And their Teens and Child kids have none, as well. So, I will use MCCC to 'fix' this oversight, then put the family back in cas.fulleditmode and save them to My Library from there. I will mark them as SKL with or without an asterisk, so that I can find them at a glance. (Cuts down on the prep time, but only a bit.)

Then I will start a new save and either build them a lot, or select one I have in My Library. Then, since my main family is my Cantrell family, and the second kid is destined to become a famous Rock Star, I have to make certain there are venues in which he can strut his stuff, so to speak. This takes time. Newcrest is the default world for this. Eateries; lounges; karaoke bar; stages of both kinds — open-air or enclosed. I should really take the time to create a template town. (I've had to restart so many times, you would think this would already be done.) I just had to restart my RESTART, too. It helps that I have many of the needed venues in My Library so I just have to pop them in. It is still time-consuming, even so.

But, that's my gaming style.

Simmingal

Starting new save:

I press the start new game button

I create a sim (or get one from my library)
I put that sim on lot of choice

and i build them a house or grab one from my library/gallery

boom. all set ready to go.

but i build/edit and replace lots whenever I want and i play premade families when i feel like doing that and match premades to each other and my sims and whatever

add premades from ts2 edit the existing ones

only deleting the randomized annoyances once in a while and ignoring their existence completely rest of the time
(they do not have a role in my story)

i don't often restart though
I used to but i find this new playstyle of playing all sims weaving stories much more fun than starting blank or creating my own sims for everything

aaand there is still whole loads of sims to play before everyone is related to everyone cause well ive been playing this save maybe little over a year and I'm only on generation 3 so lmao

premades havent even started their families much yet

drama is just starting

just hoping this save doesn't break i could go on forever with it