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New to TS4 Rotational play 2022; Anything unexpected to be aware of?
Stormkeep
Posts: 7,632 Member
I haven't really done rotational play since the era of TS2. In both TS3 and TS4 my play has consistently been to follow a legacy family and, generally, I'd just follow the legacy heir and leave any siblings (and parents) in the status of unplayed sims once they didn't live with the active household legacy heir.
In my current game, which I started over Christmas, I've chosen to actually follow parents, siblings, etc. such that I now have several different households marked as played. I also want to play a few of the other, un-related households in this game. Long story short, I'm at the point where it's clearly a pretty rotational game.
I've read a few guides and several old forum threads with tips on how to handle the playstyle in TS4, particularly in regards to aging and "big events" (like births, marriages, etc). I'm also worried there could be some unexpected things that it might help to be aware of ahead of time which none of those guides and older threads warned me about.
I know a lot of people here play rotationally so if there's any advice or cautionary tips anyone wants to share, I'd appreciate it.
In my current game, which I started over Christmas, I've chosen to actually follow parents, siblings, etc. such that I now have several different households marked as played. I also want to play a few of the other, un-related households in this game. Long story short, I'm at the point where it's clearly a pretty rotational game.
I've read a few guides and several old forum threads with tips on how to handle the playstyle in TS4, particularly in regards to aging and "big events" (like births, marriages, etc). I'm also worried there could be some unexpected things that it might help to be aware of ahead of time which none of those guides and older threads warned me about.
I know a lot of people here play rotationally so if there's any advice or cautionary tips anyone wants to share, I'd appreciate it.
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Comments
My first and biggest suggestion would be to have some sort of structure or schedule to when you rotate houses. This can be as rigid or loose as you want, but it will make some of the other quirks about TS4 easier to play around.
Aging is actually the easiest thing to control. Basically, you have 3 options in the gameplay settings: Aging Off (i.e. nobody ages, ever), Aging On (i.e. everybody ages, played or not) and Only Active Household (i.e. only the Sims you're currently playing will age). Option #3 is most likely going to be the one to choose; however, you also may want to switch the game to option #2 for a short period of time every so often, to let the townies age up as well. For example, I personally play each household for 7 Sim days in a set order, so every time I start a new rotation I leave aging on for everybody while I play through the first house. This way, the same child townie won't be friends with 3 consecutive generations of Sims.
Now here's where things get a bit tricky. While it is possible to pause aging when you switch houses, it is not possible to pause time. This is different than TS2; in TS2, when you switched houses your first house was left frozen exactly where you left off. In TS4, though, time will keep progressing in the save file. The following changes will continue to occur no matter which household you are playing:
1) Season progression, If you have Seasons installed, they will continue to change. It is entirely possible to leave a household in summer and return in winter.
2) Sick Pets This is definitely more in the "mild annoyance" category, but if you have pets on your lot, expect them to be sick when you return to the house. I'm not sure if this is a bug or a feature, honestly. I've actually started just purchasing a wellness treat out of the Debug items list so I don't have to start every lot with a trip to the vet.
3) Relationship changes. If your inactive Sims appear on community lots or are invited to an event by your active household, any relationship gain or loss that happens there will be reflected when you get back to playing them. However, it's also important to know that Sims will not get married, break up, or otherwise enter or leave committed relationships without your direct involvement. They just might be slightly better friends, or like each other a little bit less due to that argument at the party.
4) Skill Gain: The same way Sims' relationships will change while inactive, their skills will as well. If your inactive Sim appears and plays on a chess table while your active Sim is at the park, the inactive Sim will gain Logic skill in the process. (There's actually ways you can use this to your advantage; I personally make great use of the playdate system from Toddler Stuff to help all my toddlers max their skills.)
5)Gig Based Careers: For the most part, Sims who are in rabbit hole (Business, Entertainer, Criminal, etc) , active (Doctor, Detective, Scientist) , or work from home (Critic, Social Media, Gardening, etc.) careers will all continue to attend work when you are not playing them. They won't get promoted, but they will do enough to not get fired while you're away. However, the same cannot be said for gig-based careers like Acting or Home Decorator. If you schedule a gig for a Thursday, and switch houses on Wednesday, your Sim will miss the gig. It is still entirely possible to play these careers with a rotational save; you just have to be careful about when you're scheduling gigs. This is one reason why having a plan or structure to when you rotate is important; if you know when you're going to switch houses ahead of time, it helps you to better plan when you should or should not schedule gigs for your Sim.
6) Pregnancy This is a big one. If you rotate away from a house with a pregnant Sim, that pregnancy will still progress while your away, and the baby will be born without you there. The game will also randomly assign the baby a name, which may or may not be ok with you. (Personally, it was very much not ok with me because I theme all my Sims' names.) Fortunately, this is also pretty easy to manage with some planning. Just like with gigs, you want to be sure to time your Sims' pregnancies so the baby will be born before you rotate houses.
7)University This is the most annoying one. Basically, University in TS4 works like a combination of a rabbit hole and a work from home career. Your Sim will have rabbit hole classes to attend, but they will also have specific tasks like term papers and presentations like a work from home career. Your Sim obviously cannot do those when you're not playing them. Therefore, if you switch away from a Sim while they are in University, they will either have failed out or be on academic probation when you return. The only real way around this is to play through the entire term in one go, and don't enroll for another one until you come back. It took me two rotations to find a way to handle University in my game, and it's convoluted as all get out. I would highly encourage you to plan your rotational schedule around University if you intend to use it.
And that's it. Honestly, if you take the time to understand how the game works, most of these quirks are pretty easy to work around. Have fun with your new rotational save!
Manipulating the aging options is quite easy. I usually play with aging off or with aging the current household only. I let the aging bar fill up so siblings within the same age group aren't the "same age." If the age bar fills up I turn aging off until I'm ready to throw a birthday party.
With siblings living apart with families of their own, I have to remember to age them up in order lol. Just yesterday one of my sims turned into an elder after her baby brother because I forgot to age her up first.
As for elders, I turn aging on to let lived days accumulate or if I'm ready to let them pass on. Shortening the aging length if I'm in a hurry. Same thing with townies. Letting them pass on after some time to get new unplayed faces to edit.
As for pregnancies, I don't switch households until mom gives birth. So I can name the baby.
My plan is to always rotate on Fridays, in the evening, so I'm not worried about University. I learned with university if you start terms on Friday night (or any other day on the weekend), you can safely rotate away from them just before the term ends at 5:59 p.m. on the following Friday.
My biggest concerns with rotation were relationship changes and career issues, and you answered that in spades, more thoroughly than any of the guides and other forum/reddit threads I had read did. So thank you very much!
I kept a spreadsheet to keep track of things in TS2 when I did rotational, so I think I might want to do the same thing again in TS4.
Thank you for your tips as well, @lunaoddity. I think what I'm going to do is keep aging off for unplayed Sims except for when I play one specific household. If I keep my playtime with each household even as well, this should get the town to age with my Sims at an even rate. Played households I will always leave set to aging of active household only. I don't like having it just off entirely. A little time-pressure to get things accomplished adds some spice.
The Winters family Tree --- My Mods
I play 34 families
I have my aging settings as follows and I only click the Auto Age button once every cycle (I usually do it when I play the first of the 34 and then unclick it when I rotate to the next family). This is so they are aging too, some sort of story progression.
My season length is on the highest (so it doesn't go so quickly but you can likely decrease the season length based on the number of families you rotate).
I disabled NPC voting for ECO living (I dont like sims voting for NAPs while I'm off playing other families and then I come back and there's a bunch of craziness for that neighborhood that I never intended going on lol).
~*~*~~
MCCC - Your best friend if you have it. They have settings where you can pause pregnancies (this way your sim doesn't give birth until you return) and you can tweak townie relationship progression (where you can set townie relationships/pregnancy percentage/frequency etc. under MC Pregnancy). Fiddle with those settings and see what works for you. I have it so this is run once a week and you'll get notifications about what's going down.
Even with MCCC you may have to do some townie maintenance. The manage households "other households" can get kind of ugly at times. Maybe once every 3-4 cycles I go in there and start deleting families or making over townies. It's tedious but I find it necessary if you don't want a bunch of ugly townies all over the place (you need good marriage candidates LOL).
University - I have a mod that does instant application results (that way I'm not waiting the extra two days for certain sims and I can just enroll right away). It's optional so I can wait or I can just go on the computer and look right away lol.
I recently made a new rule that I'm going to do aging off (one week) for each sim enrolled in University. The university experience feels one week too long for my play style.
Aging off is good sometimes: When new packs are released and you want to explore them a bit - don't feel like you have to stick to rotational play. Usually I get as much fun out of each pack by turning aging off and then when I feel ready to playing rotational again then I resume my original settings.
Hope something helped!
I also agree with you regarding University being a tad long with default aging options. My solution was to add 7 more days to the young adult life stage (with MCCC). I'm pretty much guaranteed to send all of the Sims which I play through University....It is just too useful as a source of career advancement and skill ups not to (especially when combined with Carl's higher difficulty mod, which makes career advancement a lot harder).
The Winters family Tree --- My Mods
1. Aging off. This really helps freeze relationships, especially child/teen friendships and toddler years, for when you go off on an extended expedition in the jungle with a single Sim, decide to play Strangerville, spend way too long in Batuu with your favourite lightsabre wielders, or get caught up in family drama in another world. It's nice that they are exactly where you left them when you return. Kids age pretty fast compared to adults so it's hard to appreciate them if you are not spending much time in one household and they age up quick.
2. Start new saves with the Bheeda family in San Myshuno. Jesminder is pregnant and so you will miss the pregnancy if you don't start the new save with her.
3. Try to keep a variety of careers for the different Sims in your rotation so you always have a Sim to go to if you feel like playing an active career or just want to be a stay-at-home parent.
4. Try to keep a variety of Sims with different hobbies in your rotation so you have someone to go to if you want to garden, knit, spend time at the gym, or cook in a state of the art kitchen.
5. It's sometimes really fun to visit the family you just rotated away from with the new family you are playing.
6. Extend the seasons so you can enjoy them with a number of different households.
7. Pick new worlds and new neighborhoods often so you can enjoy a lot of variety in locations.
8. If you have that glitch where your pets are always sick when you switch lots and you have pets in every household, renovate the vet clinic so you love going there, whatever it takes, gourmet coffee, bowling alley in the basement, rooftop patio/bar, and give your pets wellness snacks before you rotate away, hopefully it helps.
9. If you're having a hard time deciding who to play next, ask yourself which world you haven't visited in a while and go there. If you can't pick a household, ask yourself which type of household you haven't you played recently, single Sim, couple, family with kids or pets, and choose that one.
10. If you have a main family and are rotating away from them and then rotating back, make sure you have a Sim water the house plants while you are away.
Relationship culling - your sims' relationships will decay over time and be culled. In my family rotational save, my original sim was always forgetting her sons/daughters-in-law to make room to remember the random person she met while I was playing someone else on a community lot. They don't forget parents, children, siblings or grandchildren but they do forget cousins and in-laws and I'm not sure about aunts/nephews. I now use MCCC to completely prevent culling and manually delete relationships that my sims pick up randomly that I'm not interested in keeping up.
Sentiments - When you rotate all sentiments will go away. I actually like this because it gets rid of the annoying ones with no work on my part, and the positive ones usually come back pretty quickly. One date will usually restore the romantic ones. I am still wondering if this is also true with Lifestyles because I don't have SE yet.
Eco Lifestyle - If you don't turn NAP voting by npcs off in the game settings, and your sims' neighborhoods don't have the max number of NAPs already enacted, they will vote in new ones while you are playing the other households. This can be a problem if say you have a household that lives near a park and they vote in free love and the next time you take one of your other families to the park there's people walking around naked. You can only remove them while playing the household that lives in that neighborhood. If you turn voting off you can still have your active sims vote, they just always get what they want because no one else votes so there's no challenge to it.
Oh, and don't bother having your sims do their homework or daily work tasks on the last day of your rotation because it won't count anyway, except for boosting responsibility if you have parenthood. It will show as not started when you rotate back. Also if you like to have your sims work from home, make sure they go in to work on their last workday before you rotate so they get their pay/advancement at the end of their shift. As you know if you play these jobs, work done at home doesn't get credited until the beginning of their next shift, and if you rotate away before that happens they just don't get it at all.
And I guess you might not want to have holidays scheduled on Fridays if you're going to rotate Friday evenings, or just ignore them or end them early, because if you rotate away while they are still going on you don't get any rewards.
Personally I have aging off except for the played household because I don't want them to have birthdays without me. On the other hand I let babies be born after I rotate all the time, and just change the name in CAS when they age up to toddler. So that kind of thing you just have to decide what your personal preferences are.
Shake dreams from your hair
My pretty child, my sweet one.
Choose the day and choose the sign of your day
The day's divinity....
The Ghost Song - Jim Morrison
The Winters family Tree --- My Mods
Ooooh that's a great idea!
Definitely this. I've gotten so used to playing with MCCC that I forgot the nightmare that is relationship culling. I've been using MCC since relationship culling ruined my save back in 2015.
I also use mods from LittleMsSam to turn off pet illnesses. Which is also a pain for rotational play.
I am sure they won't though, cos there are probably no loud voices crying about it on Twitter
My recommendation for initial exploration of a rotational save:
Turn aging off
Set Seasons to the longest setting
Turn NPC NAP voting off
Disable all decay - relationships and fame.
After you have a had good rotate round, then you can tweak to your taste.
I have always played the game 'rotationally' since I started playing. I don't have a method and I don't take notes. I literally follow whims of those of the sims and my own.
Sometimes I play a sim for weeks, sometimes half a sim hour or even just drop in and have a look. I find it all much easier to follow if you play according to the POV of the sims rather then the POV of households - after all, what household all want the same thing?
Allowing sims to move between households is very liberating
Shake dreams from your hair
My pretty child, my sweet one.
Choose the day and choose the sign of your day
The day's divinity....
The Ghost Song - Jim Morrison
Edit: I opened the config file in a text editor and changed it there... found it quicker that way. Still, if you answer, it will be useful for next time.
The Winters family Tree --- My Mods
Also re Uni, you can play other houses during some nights. While I play the 5 days term I will normally also play 1 or 2 other households, switching back and for. It's fine with a household where they won't need the full 24 hrs of a day, say an elder, or I can use the night to create some family photos/painting etc.
Good thing with rotation is that I can leave a house exhausted, they will be well rested until nxt time I stop by
Cheat when you need to! I play way too many houses, so I need to cheat some of their needs. If lots of fun or interesting stuff happens, I don't want to waste hours using the toilet etc. They don't all have a wedding party, and there were even kids growing up while alone at home, just because I had no time to stay with them more than a couple hours
I know that was not for me, but you can freeze fame level individually in game, no MCCC needed for that. Hold SHIFT and click a sim, choose "public image" and "freeze/unfreeze fame". Btw, I have UI Cheat Extension installed, maybe that's where I get this option from, not sure...
The Winters family Tree --- My Mods
Sorry for delayed response!
Fame Decay is at:
MCCC > MCCC Settings > Gameplay Settings > Motive Decay > Fame Decay Percent
Shake dreams from your hair
My pretty child, my sweet one.
Choose the day and choose the sign of your day
The day's divinity....
The Ghost Song - Jim Morrison
Oh sheez...what a bizarre place for it to be. I would expect only actual motive decay to be there so yep...I never clicked to go deeper into it. Thank you!
So I had my first Friday holiday in my game and I took your advice to heart. I switched households a little earlier (early afternoon) so that the household for which I wanted holiday credit had time for all of the holiday stuff.
It was kind of fun, actually, because I started with the household of my legacy founder and his wife, so in the morning they had their daughter, Abby, and her fiance over. The holiday was "Christmas Eve" and the active sims gave them presents, had lunch, etc.
Then in the afternoon I switched over to Abby's household and she and her fiance celebrated and enjoyed a quiet Christmas Eve at home together. It was kind of cool having the presents I had just given them be in their inventory waiting when I switched to them.
I'm really enjoying rotating around so far, and the various tips everyone here has shared with me have been very helpful.
The Winters family Tree --- My Mods
Good to hear you are enjoying it. I simply couldn't go back to any other way of playing. Even if you felt like playing just a single household again, all your previously played sims become background sims with a back story.
You have to do a little planning - for example, if you are playing a household with kids and you get them all to do their homework on a Sunday, you will need to be with that family before school on Monday and stay with them to until school completes to gain the benefit. Likewise with work prep etc.
To give me a little more breathing space, I have a mod that makes the school day finish at 2.00pm.
https://modthesims.info/d/657799/home-at-2-pm-for-teens-all-grades.html
I also move sims between households should I wish to micro manage scenes, events, etc. For example, a young adult leaves home to go to university/work/find themselves etc. I may move that sim back home for a Sunday afternoon.
I also do this with groups of friends out on the town etc. There are lots of scenarios where you can do this including being able to create special schools, businesses, etc.
The main difficulty I have found with moving sims between households is leaving a lot empty. I have created some house sitting sims for this or even invite a friend over. Other ways can be having things like live in room mates etc.
Creating a makeshift hotel with a couple of sims as owners works well for sims having a night/weekend out. Just let the owners do their thing according to the autonomy for some of that hotel/motel weirdness
Shake dreams from your hair
My pretty child, my sweet one.
Choose the day and choose the sign of your day
The day's divinity....
The Ghost Song - Jim Morrison
I can use that photographer Sim as a housesitter too!
The Winters family Tree --- My Mods
If you can you can use sims you have played to do stuff. I do have a photographer who is in the style influencer career. That sim is married so they can leave the household and join the household wherever they are needed.
The two interactions I use a lot for this is the friendly Ask To Join Household and the 'Add to Family' interaction with the UI cheats mods.
Shake dreams from your hair
My pretty child, my sweet one.
Choose the day and choose the sign of your day
The day's divinity....
The Ghost Song - Jim Morrison
I don't need testingcheats on to freeze fame. Which makes me wonder if it might be a feature of the UI Cheats mod after all...
It's not a feature of UI Cheats, I have that mod installed and only get the "Freeze Fame" option when testingcheats are on. Do you possibly have a mod that sets testing cheats on by default? Like MCCC has that as an option.
The Winters family Tree --- My Mods