How d'you begin your game?

Now I normally do challenges but whenever I start a game with no idea what I will be doing, I always just create one character and see where it goes from there. I like to mix it up where I live but normally I will get a big log and start a small house so I don't have to worry about moving later. I hate having to unload furniture.

I usually start with a couple who are engaged and place them in a cheap house that they can afford without cheats. They get married immediately (+50 moodlet for 2 full days really helps them learn skills quickly) and then the wife gets pregnant. Then the husband gets a job (that way no days off to get "settled in" after marriage) or starts a craft; if the wife is going to have a career, she'll wait until the baby is born because she'll actually get an extra day or two of work instead of time off. What can I say, I like the challenge of having no money, only one income and a baby on the way. Oh, and someone plants a small garden to get things started.

Occasionally I start with a single sim who wants to be a writer or fisherman, but I find it lonely and sometimes frustrating to try to get a career like that off the ground while also making friends. It's only fun later, when the sim has enough money coming in to stop worrying.

I've started with empty worlds and set up a few basic community lots before moving my first settlers into town.I will slowly add more population to the town over time and even have them breed as they become settled into the town enough to be able to take care of a child.I'm playing it very heavily Modded and use a Modded story progression so I play TS2's rotational ply with my town and story progression is set up to run like the TS2 version.

The most recent thing I did was start with seven unrelated sims, haha. Two sets of couples came out of that, and one married someone I added in specifically for him. The other two are single to this day.

I'm not 100% sure what you mean by "house or nothing." I usually start with an empty lot, and design the house myself.

Through adding people in manually and my sims having tons of kids, by the time I get bored with a save I'll usually have at least half of the world populated solely by sims I've caused the creation of, in one way or another.

I don't really have a preferred way to start a save. I mix it up to whatever interests me at the time, and whether I'm doing a challenge or not.

Most of the time I start with a single sim created in CAS and have them meet a love interest (often at university), but occasionally I start with a steady couple. It all depends on what I want to do with that game.

Usually I start my sims in a starter house, but I've done the rags to riches thing (staring my sim on an empty lot with no money), and I've had a sim couple start on an empty lot and immediately enroll in university to make money and later moving into a nice home once they've graduated.

I'll customize worlds before I use them, but I don't make over an entire neighborhood.

Single sim and money cheat down to zero. Even doing it that way, the game unfortunately is not all that challenging. I usually don't like dealing with children as they are even more annoying and less productive than adult sims. Sometimes i'll limit myself as to how I can make money, what I need to do before I can invite someone to live with me(it's highly unrealistic that someone would just move onto an empty lot with you), and don't accept any outside funds(people moving in). I basically play the same way in 3 and 4. 3 can be tougher with seasons as you need to get a home before winter.

At the risk of boring everyone to tears who has heard this all before, I was kind of a latecomer to TS3 and started my first game towards the end of 2011 with the base game, one EP, and one SP (no mods yet). It was not a very notable beginning, a single sim of my own design starting out in Sunset Valley in a modest home in what seemed like would be a challenging career, the Military. I made a lot of mistakes as a player back then as I was really just learning how to play, but managed to recover from all of them.

The thing is, no one ever told me that you were supposed to start over every so often, so I never did. That's still the same game I am playing today, over six years later, and that first sim is the great great (etc.) granddaddy of them all. I really have to load up a very early copy of this game one of these days and have sculptures made of my founder and his partner. All I have now are some horrible paintings of them that the grandkids made, some even more horrible blurry screenshots, and lots of stories to talk about when the family gets together. :)

Ahh man, I remember my very first time with The Sims 3. After how I watched videos of Vargskelethor (Joel from Vinesauce) playing The Sims 3, I thought "This looks like a blast, I wanna play!".

One day (over a year ago), My sister purchased the Xbox 360 version of The Sims 3. She played it for several moments and decided that she hates it. A few months later, near Thanksgiving, She moved out and left her copy as well as her Xbox behind. I decided "Well, Let's give this a shot."

I made two Sims, Myself and the Second Doctor from that good old British show Doctor Who. And with those two, I played out a absolutely amazing Harlequin romance-type love story. They soon got married and had two children; Alistair and Leela. All was going well when my sister decided she wants her Xbox back. Don't panic, She did give me a spare Xbox she had and let me keep TS3. So I immediately started over. I had to rush their relationship. OH! And there was a bit of a mishap when trying to remake those kids. I accidentally let my female Sim watch KidZone while pregnant. So they had twin boys Alistair and Benton. They did have a daughter too but her name was Victoria.

Then one night, After watching British sitcoms on PBS, I decided "Let's make a household full of my favorite TV show characters!" and made Sims of Mr. Humphries from Are You Being Served?, Arnold Rimmer from Red Dwarf, and Illya Kuryakin from The Man from U.N.C.L.E. and added my Second Doctor Sim to the household. And thus, The Smegheads household was born. It was great. Everyone hated Rimmer at first, Humphries got married to a female townie and had a daughter, Humphries' wife actually became a successful author, and everything went well. Then the game started freezing when I try to save it. By then, I thought "Well I enjoyed the console version, Let's get the PC version!"

Just this June, After saving up my allowance plus a week of preparing my computer for it and begging my mother to order it for me, I finally got The Sims 3 Starter Pack for the PC. I did stumble upon a problem while installing; I got a "invalid code" error trying to get it on my Origin. After calling EA's customer support and talking to a VERY nice lady, The Sims 3 was added to my Origin library and I was in business. I recreated all of the Smegheads albeit made them look better than their console version counterparts and added a fifth member; Robin Gibb from the Bee Gees.

Now several months, Installations of a EP and a SP, and many long sessions later, I have a household to be proud of. With three Sims having accomplished their lifetime wishes, One of my Sims married to a Sim of myself (see my avatar) with two beautiful children, and one Sim who was married to a Sim I made that I randomly put in my town but divorced on amicable terms but has a great military career, Everything's all hunky-dory in the Smegheads-verse. I'm already planning a second generation for my two Sims' little family. I also wanna do a second Smegheads household. ;)

My Sim-making, house-building, and house-furnishing skills have also improved since then as well, Kinda impressive if you ask me.

I always start with a single young adult female sim. I don't cheat any money, I even prefer starting out with absolutely nothing or only a really basic house. Then I usually spend a day getting to know the people around town, while I wait for collectibles to spawn into the map. The next day I spend on gathering stuff, I just love scanning through the entire world to find animals, minerals and plants. It also helps me to get to know my way around the new world I'm playing (I hardly ever play the same world twice within a short time). Once my sim has enough money to give herself a roof over her head, I find her a job (usually self employed) and a spouse. I work on their lifetime wishes and on completing their jobs and once I have enough money for a nursery, I let them have children. What I love most about sims is playing multiple generations and to see how all the family trees develop themselves! But yeah that's how the start of my game looks like most of the time unless I play a special challenge.

It depends on the heir, I always start with a kid of my sim and move to the next generation. There’s one constant: I always build their house first. I used to take all the money earned with me and a lot of convenient items in inventories of parents, but nowadays I prefer them to start from scratch financially (except for my current heir because she lives in an apartment building and I figured she didn’t have to pay for the other households in there; she started living in one part of the building with cheap furniture).