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STILL can’t settle to one game. Need a challenge or something to keep me focused??
NRowe
Posts: 7,896 Member
I know I’m not the only one who suffers from restartitis, but I am wondering if maybe I have the worst case on record...
I think I’ve made about a dozen households this year (read month) already.
I need a challenge or something to keep me focused. I am not certain if what I need is to just start with one Sim, or if family connections make them a little deeper. I have plenty of neighbourhood characters with houses ready to pop in from my gallery, but then I am tempted to see them as “my” Sim and be unhappy with them being out of my control...
I want to do things like black widow and double life and explore the various occult states. Just need to accept that one Sim can’t do everything, especially not all at once. Even deciding where to live is difficult.
Please help...
I think I’ve made about a dozen households this year (read month) already.
I need a challenge or something to keep me focused. I am not certain if what I need is to just start with one Sim, or if family connections make them a little deeper. I have plenty of neighbourhood characters with houses ready to pop in from my gallery, but then I am tempted to see them as “my” Sim and be unhappy with them being out of my control...
I want to do things like black widow and double life and explore the various occult states. Just need to accept that one Sim can’t do everything, especially not all at once. Even deciding where to live is difficult.
Please help...
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Comments
Hope this helps!
This is one amazing piece of advice. May i ask you how do you manage time so that you don't lose your other households while playing a new one? Do you stop aging for other households while keep aging on for the one you're playing at the moment?
However, early on in Sims 4's life I had a file that entertained me between 2-3 years. In it, I made a family of unrelated teens and used them to colonize and develop Newcrest. Designed all the buildings, families, etc. myself. Since, much more DLC has dropped that I could have used for all sorts of stuff (so much that it is hard for me to remember how I was able to entertain myself with so little except for how Sims 4 was still kind of new), so I bet another Newcrest world builder run would do the job well.
It resulted me to eventually have about 100 saves. I had to delete a lot of them. I ended up having about 30 saves, but now there are a lot more again. I haven't counted them recently but I suspect there are maybe about 60 saves currently. I've tried to put several households in same saves again and so far it seems to be working, except when I change the household everyone is missing work and/or school that day.
When I have started with my main family I created more families and watch over and help them in their career, so their children may be a marriage candidate. And then I needed the right buildings for the decade, I was unhappy with the modern design.
With the result that I now switch through all the families and building houses I need for this save, so I can't stick for too long on one family and get bored with them, and comes the next decade or war, so I can change the interior. I have always something to do in this save.
All the sims err'day
Hmm, I have never had anything change during my rotations, except sometimes body weight if I've played City Living. I always play with aging off and do not allow MCCC to make any progression changes with my Sims. Also I usually only change households at around 5 am. That keeps everyone on schedule for school and work. The part time baristas may still arrive a little late or hungry, but I only have one of those, so no big deal. I do set MCCC to minimize relationship decay.
@telmarina I play with aging off completely and will age up sims manually when I need to for a story. It does mean that some of my sims have aged up several life stages while their neighbors might stay stagnant forever. That’s the one struggle I’ve had playing this way - I would love to delve more into legacy/generational play at some point but feel like I would have to age up my entire world since all the stories are so connected, and that’s just a lot of maintenance that feels daunting to me. I kind of view my save as a giant WIP that gets tweaked constantly with new packs and new ideas. I just spend a lot of time editing my households and making interconnected stories, so I’m never eager to let aging ruin that hard work. Right now I’m playing a challenge where I will need to age a sim up through her entire life, so I’m playing her in a tangent save I made from my main save so I only play her in this save and I have my original main save still for playing my other households that won’t be affected by aging.
Maybe one day I will start trying to get a second generation from all the households I’ve made and make more interconnected stories that way, but for now, it is an ageless WIP.
Sorry for the long reply - I hope that answers your question.
It does. thank you
Besides being a restarter i also have another addiction: i can't play with aging off. I've tried, but i feel that i need this system, bigger-than-me, that controls global aging... it's weird, i can't explain...
I know some players do the aging on at New Years if you have seasons. That helps with you nonplayed sims to age along with yours
You could try playing with gameplay rules? Stuff that kinda aims towards giving your sims a little more life like assigning hobbies or jobs based on traits and stuff. The Kixg and pleasantsims have some rules, I'm sure there are others.
Not sure if you play on PC or console, but mods definitely help, too. There are some really amazing gameplay mods, icemunmun has a lot that you could almost simulate farming with new harvestables and a functioning chicken coop!
Something I'm going to try for myself is to have a save where either every generation or different families focus on each pack and just play through the expansions. There are some packs I haven't played through in a while and some I never fully experienced, so I'm hoping that going back will help me appreciate them more.
I made a Sims 4 Save File set 15 years into the future using the premade sims by giving them family trees, storylines and lore, fixed and added relationships, and more!
Check it out here! -> kookablarn.tumblr.com
I am the Queen of Restarts, however my restarts aren't focused on dumping one family and creating yet another one. No, I stick to the very same family. Sometimes, it's been a pack that came out, (such as Parenthood) wherein I thought, gee wouldn't it be fun to help them learn Values, before I go too far into their lives? Another restart again due to the same pack, was when I realized how very hard it is to instill Values when the Sims are teens. Restart and have those same teens start out a Child Sims. Other times, it's been experimenting with a mod. That proved disastrous. I even created two saves of the very same family, just in case the unthinkable happened. Which it did. Other times, it was a Patch that derailed things.
Still, another time I'd gotten my Global Superstar married and upon his becoming a father, somehow I got bored.
My advice. Take it nice and slow. Leave yourself a goal for the next gaming session and go from there. Always leave yourself something you wish to achieve when you save and then exit. (I never do the save and exit together.) I save, then choose exit. That way, you should have some incentive to take your Sims to the next step, as it were. Hope this helps.
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I like things like black widow challenges, asylum stuff ect. It plays into my need to be somewhat deviant in my game, so find one that plays into something you like to do in your game but maybe with a bit more structure.
Right now I'm playing One Month One World One Year by @Karababy52 and we are about to switch to a new world. If you want to jump in it might be a good time to do that if you have many packs. We are going to Windenburg next month, but it's even structured so you can chose another world if you don't have all the packs. Mostly it involves sharing a screenshot of your gameplay for every day of the year you play, your sim moves to a new world every real life month and has to complete the aspiration related to that world. How much or little you play is up to you. The main thing is to get a picture in daily (if you have problems with being sick or other life things you can play catch up). I think the best thing about this challenge is it's mostly a guide and people are playing their own way... but there is a nice sense of community and engagement about your gameplay.
... or look into another one that is just starting that way you get to know the others following it!
I've also played out TRADE OFF - TS4 GAME-PLAY CHALLENGE BY EQCREATIONS, the creator of that challenge did pass away but that was the first challenge I finished as is, mostly because it was pretty low pressure but still engaging. It involved basically having 2 sims with completely opposite traits live with each other... but you had to trade off and only play one of them a week, you couldn't control the other at that time, of course goals had to be met also.
I liked both of these challenges because they weren't too hard or pressured and I learned things about the game I might not otherwise play with.
I also suffer from restartitis. I find that I get new ideas and have to pursue them then my old save gets shelved for awhile. Personally I can't merge all of my saves because my ideas usually revolve around a theme that I like to use the whole save for... Like I have a Stardew Valley save that I rotate in, and I have a Horror Movie themed save that I add to and rotate in, and many more. I do go back them usually because I'm missing them or we get something new in the game that makes me think of a character I want to create or go back and play with in those saves or adds to a characters life and often get drawn right back in.
I don't play challenges, but I have come up with an idea on how to keep myself interested in the game.
I decided to split up my save files into different categories of what I want to do with the game.
I have one save file dedicated to recreating some Sims I created in Sims 2, and I am slowly bringing back a select few families I created. I plan to play it, and compare it to my Sims 2 to see if the same Sims get married in both versions, and what kind of families they end up with.
Two save files I have are a mixture of Sims I made for the game, and some character Sims I downloaded from the gallery. For example, I have a Sim I created living in the same town as a lord of the rings based Sim.
I created a save file dedicated to Frozen where I created Sims that are canon, semi-canon, AUs, and genderbent versions of the characters. For example, I have a Frozen family where Anna and Elsa's parents are still alive, and are grandparents to Anna's kids.
I have another save file I am starting for Harry Potter with the same kind of premise I did with the Frozen save file.
Since doing this, I have not deleted or restarted my game. It also keeps me entertained as well.
This is fantastic advice, and really helps contribute to the feeling not just of playing a family or a dynasty or a single Sim or whatever but actually building a living, breathing universe with its own characters, stories, and expanded lore like a Marvel Cinematic Universe for little computer people.
And remember this above all. Our Roman gods are watching. Make sure they are not ashamed!
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I don’t know for sure about putting all my characters straight into a single save, but I’ll keep the idea as a way to combat the restartitis going forward. Maybe I can even gradually introduce some of them...
The idea of the TradeOff looks very intriguing. I am also taking my time looking into some of the other specifics above.
Am starting to think that I may not have slowed down the aging quite enough. I generally set MCCC to a “one week equals two years” but I may make that “one week=one year”.
This is such good advice I have bookmarked the page
This is a thing I've struggled with, so I'm kinda telling myself this too. Like, its okay to restart, the beginning phase of a save is usually the most fun part. Getting bored of things is natural.
Yes, rotating thru a lot of households made it more interesting.
Another way I found to get interested in playing the game was to play a legacy, but each gen I focus on a new pack where I have to explore as much of it as I can.
Of couse, some packs you can't do that in one single generation like Get To Work, where if you play with a single sim you won't be able to have a retail as well as 3 active jobs at the same time, so you can play with multiple sims or explore some of the packs in multiple generations.
I had other saves before that, and I thought a way to delete those saves, while reintroducing the characters I've loved from this saves in my game. Sometimes I marry a premade sim from the world that came with the pack I'm playing or I marry one of the sims I created a long time ago and abandoned.
This is sound advice and almost exactly what I do since I love to play challenges. I have many, many saves from challenges I've completed or are in progress. I also have a couple custom save templates that I use which contain my own Sims from completed challenges or other gameplay saves. I put them in there to act as townies/NPCs or potential friends/spouses for the current Sim I'm playing in a new save.
It's so much fun seeing them from time to time. It makes me smile and gives a sense of nostalgia too remembering the fun I had playing with them. I love doing this because, as you've said, these Sims get to continue as an important part of your gameplay after you've finished playing with them for whatever they were originally intended.
I see nothing wrong with 'restarting' as many times as you want! A lot of the time I make a new Sim every time a new pack comes out just to explore the gameplay, or even more than one if I want to experiment/test out different ways to play with the gameplay in the pack. I have at least 4-6 saves just for EL and at least that many for DU and many other packs as well. If we were meant to play only one save ever, there wouldn't be an option to start another save in the game. At least that's how I feel about it.
Happy Simming!