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How do you play The Sims 4?
Arzekial
Posts: 665 Member
I'm really curious as to how other people usually play their games because, there is no standard rule set. It's an open sandbox world and there are dozens of different ways to play.
What I do is normally start off with a single teenager with the game set on long lives and I headcanon that they are actually attending university rather than highschool. I like to get those special traits (good manners, responsible...) Needless to say, I can't wait for a University Expansion!
For financial support they'll usually write, paint, and garden because it's much more flexible than the part time jobs and earns far more money.
They'll finish up school and enter a career. After that they'll usually meet someone and eventually get married. I'll then get the spouse advanced a bit in a career if they aren't already, play through most their young adulthood then kick the family into (unplayed/not in world) and start a new household doing it all over again. Usually they'll have a few kids and be a happy family, but I've also seen them split up as I'm on to playing my next sim. Sometimes my new sim will meet the old ones I played and make friends with them, but I try not to force friendships or romances because, that's just seems too easy.
What do you guys do? Single character, single family, multiple households? Do you try something different each time you play?
What I do is normally start off with a single teenager with the game set on long lives and I headcanon that they are actually attending university rather than highschool. I like to get those special traits (good manners, responsible...) Needless to say, I can't wait for a University Expansion!
For financial support they'll usually write, paint, and garden because it's much more flexible than the part time jobs and earns far more money.
They'll finish up school and enter a career. After that they'll usually meet someone and eventually get married. I'll then get the spouse advanced a bit in a career if they aren't already, play through most their young adulthood then kick the family into (unplayed/not in world) and start a new household doing it all over again. Usually they'll have a few kids and be a happy family, but I've also seen them split up as I'm on to playing my next sim. Sometimes my new sim will meet the old ones I played and make friends with them, but I try not to force friendships or romances because, that's just seems too easy.
What do you guys do? Single character, single family, multiple households? Do you try something different each time you play?
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Then I pick the child I want to be my next main Sim and start a new story for them. When they are teens, sometimes I move them out on their own, sometimes my previous Sim dies. *shrug*
I always set out intending to play one family line for a long time, but I always end up getting bored with them and starting over by the fourth or fifth generation. Then I usually build for awhile before starting a new family line.
I usually start of with a female YA. In the past I had this obsession of a YA single mom and one child. They bought a house which was fitting into their budget, barely had enough to fully furnish their home and I worked their way up from there.
In TS4 I tried a few shots with single YA woman or roommates/friends living together, but it usually left me bored as I did not know what to do next. Then I realized I had to write a unique, detailed and lifelong story in my head. I came up with 3 doctor roommates living together and 2 of them should end up eventually. They would have a child who turned out to be gay and did not follow up his fathers order to become a doctor as well. It would just leave him disappointed. I basically had almost 2 generations planned out, so that worked. I am still playing with this family, but 4 generations away
Oh and I play realistic with routines for my sims. I have some rules set for myself and them and I pause A LOT! To make sure nothing goes weirdly wrong or sims stand around without a task.
I've also tried playing families for a long time. I think the toddlers are just too much chaos for me, haha.
- Multiple households in rotation.
- Each household focused around 1-2 themes (like cooking and restaurants, space and science, business and politics etc) and they do/learn/explore everything there is about it.
- A lot of headcanons, I want them to have personalities beyond traits, feelings beyond moodlets, motives beyond whims, I want stories beyond breeding.
- "Color-coding" my households and Sims - may seem weird, but each household and every Sim within it has a color theme, or a palette if you wish, which I use in all of their outfits and to some extent in interiors too - I put a lot of time and effort to it and really enjoy it ("color-coded" most of the premades too)
- Don't have kids unless I know exactly who I want them to be in future. All roles are planned.
- Have all my Sims befriend each other and stay in touch.
Every new gen is like a new single sim starting out with all the possibilities.
I guess the goal is to try and play every aspect of the game.
Sometimes - especially with small, one or two Sim households - I'll legitimately begin in a starter home, and work my way up... or not. I have one Sim, still single, who could afford any house in the game but prefers to remain in Nookstone - the teeny tiny starter lot in Oasis Springs - because it has all he needs, and he's got it set up just right. Or, with larger households, I'll let them play with FreeRealEstate and use a big home from the get-go. Grandma, grown son, and active teen don't need to all be living in each other's back pocket.
Occasionally, no available home will suit what I want to move a growing family or newlywed second generation heir into, and I'll build something suitable. Both my founding generation, with remaining kids, and my aged up heir and husband are currently in houses I built for them.
On game start, I'll pick a save, then a household within that save. Most of my play is driven by career requirements, Aspirations, and Whims, plus any relationships I want to cultivate or maintain. I am still in search of the right career for my heir, who is making do in the meantime as a self-employed composer, but needs a career with ranks so that he can reach the top of it, fulfilling a parent's Ambition. But I am in no particular hurry.
I don't let my Sims have children until and unless both potential parents share a "Try for Baby With..." whim. Once they happen, kids are the priority - maxing Toddler skills, developing Child skills and values, being A students, and achieving their initial Aspirations. Since by then the parents tend to be at or near the top of their careers and well skilled, it is easy to shift focus.
I tend not to do well with serial romance. I don't like to break up couples, and I don't like to move on from a relationship except for a clear upgrade, and a better romance is generally hard to find an upgrade from.
Sometimes, I cheat funds. Sometimes I haven't had to. There is a lean patch, early to mid-career, I find, where money gets tight. Past that money is absurdly easy.
Mostly, I let my Sims play determine their direction. My heir married Alexander Goth because he was the closest friend from childhood also from a good family. Sometimes I seed a neighborhood with romantic prospects instead, just for variety. Some households garden, some don't. Some have swimming pools, some don't. A lot is variable. Most of that is about what my Sims seem to want.
Whens starting a game I love to create couples based off movie characters. They never turn out to be anything like their movie prototypes but that's not the point, the point is to get yourself some good-looking sims without breaking too much sweat!
I'm a realistic player, which means that my sims have to brush their teeth, pay insurance, get haircuts and do a lot of other unnecessary things. I don't even allow them to travel to different worlds without using the plane or the train! And tickets cost a fortune. Also, before starting a game I think about how much money, what skills and what jobs will my sims start off with and cheat all of that in to make them more real and lively from the start. I find it very unrealistic that all sims start off with only 20 000 simoleons and no skills whatsoever.
My sims have a custom lifespan of 840 days. One year equals 84 sim days (I play with 21 day seasons) and equals 7 years of growth (basically if a sim is born in spring he'll be 7 years old next spring, and 14 the spring after that), so in total they live 70 sim years. That's pretty long, but I never get bored with my sims. I sign them up for classes, send off on a cruise to Disneyland, add more drama to their lives or simply switch to another family. And there's nothing wrong with having boring routined days once in a while.
Overall the plot, the story, and character growth are the main things I'm invested in when playing the sims. I play stories, not challenges. And it's fun.
Recently I created a sim who was a world traveller and archeologist, kind of a more realistic Indiana Jones. The idea was that he returned to Windenburg to win back Clara Bjergsen, after she abruptly ended their relationship (they had been childhood sweethearts) to marry Bjorn fifteen years ago.
That was my basic hook.
From there, I fleshed out the story in my head as I began to play.
I remember the first hours, creating a few random families, starting off the "Sanders family with Aiko", i had a basic understanding of the rules and traits after the tutorial which i abandoned because it wasn't instructive enough.
Anyway, i created a few more and settled on "Sandra Matthews" before i adjusted the character later on, started building my first house, "very basic house" on a 6x6 grid for one person. it is very doable. at the time she was an adult with not much time left on her clock and biological clock either. she is a loner writer and all she wanted to get a guy in for the night and then she can raise her child in peace, but she ended up with twins! it wasn't especially difficult on first glance, but i bailed before long as Sandra ended up becoming an elder. So i adjusted the character ater that.
Went through a few more households before settling on Tobias Lancaster and Ryan Jacklin in "Strange buddies", created two houses around these two, the twin small houses and later a pad for them. Tobias became a favorite of mine more or less right away and the chemistry he has with Summer Holiday makes her an ideal target every time for him on new playthroughs.
Pretty soon i had all these families and buildings, i may as well begin micromanaging Willow and Oasis, but it is more like a job than anything, it is very time consuming going through over 2 dozen families. after the 300 hour mark, i decided to try out MCCC and it really opened up the game, setting rules as they should be like they can be in the real world, everything except familial relations. it cut the micromanagement down completely and allowed me to focus on the families i want to.
i watched one family, the Bauers go from young adults to elders and death, i watched as liberty Lee who was long time married to Leroy Bauer leave the household as an elder unable to take the loss, i watched as her son refuse to take the Lewis surname and keep his Bauer name. i saw both twins die, Helen's husband Michael Bradstone whom i created as well due to a lack of suitable males at the time. it was tragic and engaging at the same time seeing all of it going off, and then the reaper turned the TV on and started watching it for a bit as the family were crying when Michael kicked the bucket right next to the reaper.
Never know what you will find until you take a look. then i changed the familial settings for romance, and got into a gross relationship in a Tormen household with a dozen babies needing feeding before long, i added a second sister and ended up with 18 babies. now that was a challenge, rotating around one young adult and three teens. it wasn't the worst part, that was still to come, looking after 18 toddlers.. it was absurd and more trouble than you'll ever see. after setting offspring limits to 6 and household size to 25.
Anyway, i'm just looking to find challenges at this point
My main save is an example of this, and pretty much every sim I post about on here is from that save (including the sim in my avi).
My other saves are legacies, playing with premade sims, or just doing whatever comes to mind. Recently I've been playing Vlad Straud's backstory (ft. the vampire sims from the Maxis gallery). I made him human and played out him being turned (by Elle DeVampiro, who he eventually betrayed) up to him becoming the Grand Master we know and love.
on occasion i might go from a toddler and get all skills to 3 and gain a happiness trait from it, advance as many skills as possible in child phase, including charisma and logic, make sure school grades are A with the tick. then do the same again in teenager and write books. This game has a habit of getting your characters interacting with each other when in the same room, it will slow down progress considerably. so i usually make the effort to create a seperate room that only your sim can access or move the teenager out and start up elsewhere.
My go to example for the forums is I have a Stardew Valley save. I've created nearly every character that appears in that game and they all have a life that is inspired by that game but conformed to what is possible in this game. So I'll give them jobs as close to what I think they might have. I'll dress them as I think they would dress. I'll look for or build or tweak houses that I see them residing in. I'll work toward the relationships I see them having and the goals they might (or might not) have.
Then I play in other ways. Sometimes I just play deviantly for a short session, sometimes I want to try out a new aspiration or something else from a new pack or even an old pack that I never got around to trying out so I make a character just to do that. I also sometimes try to do player made challenges or the ones I come up with or bend the rules for to guild my own play a bit. Sometimes I just want to test out how many ghost types I can make... or other things like that to amuse me and see what's possible.
Lately I took inspiration from the newest premades in IL... and now I have a rotational save game that is just about the all the premades that came with game.
I don't have a shortage of ways to play.
- Come up with a basic background and story line for my Sim.
- Create a young adult Sim on normal life span (no gender, trait or aspiration preference although certain traits are never picked).
- Bulldoze most if not all community lots and download one from the gallery.
- Delete pre made Sims from the neighborhoods.
- Download some 'townie' Sims from the gallery (young adults, teens and kids).
- Move Sim into a house (sometimes I build and sometimes I download the house).
- Find a career for the Sim and start building some skills (based on the story line I've created).
- Have them live there life, eventually meet a spouse and have kids.
- Have a family - normally somewhere between 1-5 kids depending on the Sims and their story line.
- Usually randomly pick the kids traits using Pinstars random trait generator. This way it is kind of like passing traits down to the kids.
- Once the kids have grown up - pick one of the kids and continue on.
I usually do this until I get bored of the family and then start a new save file. Usually play for a few generations at least. Also - sometimes I play rotationally - just depends what I feel like.
1) START WITH SINGLE SIM. Create a teen or young adult female and start building their friends through townies and premades, find a partner, advance in career, start a family. I'm too controlling to just play that sim, though, even though that's my initial intention, so I end up playing some of the other sims in her circle so that their lives can intersect with hers in a more realistic way. For example, one of her friends will throw a party and invite her, so then I have to go set up the party. Or I'll get two of the people in her friend group together romantically. Stuff like that. I end up playing multiple households, but she's still the main focus.
2) CHANGE AGES TO MATCH MY SIM. This was one of my favorite ways to play. I wanted to play a young adult female who moves from the small town of Willow Creek to the big city of San Myshuno, but it bugged me that my sims start with no friends and no parents to attend their wedding. So I gave her a family and started playing her one age group lower from what I wanted in my main storyline. I made her a teen in Willow Creek. Then I aged all the kids in Willow Creek to teen so that she'd have a peer group. Once she aged up, some of her friends also moved to San Myshuno and some stayed in the same neighborhood, like they would in real life, and she would come back to Willow Creek sometimes for visits with family and friends, or her high school friends would occasionally come visit her. It was nice to start the "young woman moves to the big city" storyline with my sim having a backstory and social relationships already in place.
3) WHOLE WORLD. Create a whole world of my own sims in a different era (what I'm doing now--1800s).
4) NON-STANDARD COMMUNITY LOTS. This goes with all other styles of playing, but I like to create different lots, often generic, for my sims to interact in. Some lots I've created are corporate offices, schools, after-school centers, a place for Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, an art store, a multi-store shopping center on a single lot, a masonic lodge, a church, and the one I'm currently working on--a bank.
Oh and I always cheat to provide them with housing I think is appropriate to their personality and financial status. Sometimes making a home look poor actually takes a lot of money, so I rarely try to build up money for housing or decor.
On EA forum Stories and Legacies board and on QueenOfMyshuno.tumblr.com
5) PHOTOS OF LIVES THAT NEVER HAPPENED. I'll start a family with parents that are already married and take wedding photos to hang on the wall as soon as their placed, usually setting up an empty room in the house with wedding props. Sometimes I'll change their hair so that it looks like a younger/different version of their current selves. I'll start my kids off as toddlers and take photos of them, then immediately age them up to child. That way, the sims in the family seem like they have a past as soon as they're brought into the game.
On EA forum Stories and Legacies board and on QueenOfMyshuno.tumblr.com
During isolation I decided to download it again with a lot of expansion packs as they were half price so this is my story so far
I thought I'd try something different now..first how cool is the gallery I used lots from different people and redone the whole neighbourhood's with brand new restaurants/nightclubs bars (I get good use out of all of them and change it up sometimes) and houses..I also moved a load of well known singers and rappers into del sol valley.
I always play aging off and then when I want a sim to age up because I have plans for them I give them a birthday party...
I created a single sim Beyonce she has worked her way up the acting and then music career all the while getting famous she made it to global superstar pretty quickly, and now she is top of the music career and has won some awards at the star accolades. I then decided to let her have 2 kids with a fellow celeb she had two boys...one is a young adult now I aged him from toddler using normal aging span and meanwhile beyonce also aged into an adult. She also now has a child who too was aged up in normal span..and attends school...so anyway I want to play a generation game now with the different sim generations from this family so at the moment her eldest son is studying a language and lit degree at uni almost finished his last term...which has taken me 5 sim weeks because of how I played it. He is then going to move out of dorms and into uni housing off campus, because I want him to get another degree in psychology so I can go ahead and pursue the detective career and have a head start. He also has a boyfriend who I plan to marry him too on a beach somewhere in salani I made a mint venue...just not yet..so as i said hes in his last term of his first degree so let's see where that takes me...I think I'm all out played with beyonce now until I want her to become an elder and eventually die (I just cant bring myself to kill beyonce) aha. And I know when I get reach my goals with her son, I have the other sim son to go ahead and sim with and any generations they bring into the game.