How to not get bored in The Sims 3/4?

@joaquito99 Oh, boy. I am up for this question! I also get easily bored if I just play one way, so I am continually challenging myself or finding new angles. I absolutely love the Sims, and part of why I love it is there are so many options...

If you are finding your Sims 4 a bit flat it is more my feeling that it CAN be played more simply, which works well for beginners and is preferred by many, but that is not all you can do. I will list just a few of the things that will 'spice up' your base game or your game play: (Please open 'spoiler tag' for my list of some things you can try to spice your game up a bit.)

• Purchase expansions. They can ad an incredible amount of interest and depth of possibilities for play, depending on the particular pack and what it adds. Some expansions even add careers, skills and a lot of interesting options.
• Enter challenges. On the forums you can find many threads with gameplay or build challenges that can be very challenging. This also provides potential for interaction with other players, etc.
• Collections. Many players love the challenge of completing collections.
• Careers. Play different careers.
• Change things up. I was surprised how much fun I had by downloading some households that others made that are talented in making interesting sims. I will tend to make mine more pleasant, and I run them in a rather 'Type A' manner. What about playing a slob in a household with /married to a neat sim? (A neat sim can be a handful also, as they are forever being uncomfortable with a mess. Or a Childish adult (like Clement Frost, who you will catch skipping around the house occasionally). A friend of mine said she played a clepto before and kept making them return the items. Anyway, there are some very interesting personality and interest combinations and career options. 
• Up your challenges in your households. If you play a large household, challenging career &/or financial goals, multiple households, out-of-household interaction/collection, etc. objectives it can increase your challenge level considerably.
• Buy / run a business.  This one overlaps the expansion suggestion. With Get To Work you gain careers plus you can go to work with some of them, and you can build/purchase/run a retail business. You can even sell goods that you make in the business, which increases the challenge also. (ie: Garden produce, food you cook/bake, paintings, items made on the Woodworking Table, etc. - you can sell most tings there, or items from build mode added to the store. With Dine Out you can eat out interactively or you can build/purchase and run/manage a restaurant. With Cats & Dogs you can build/purchase/run/be a vet at a veterinary clinic.
• Gardening challenges. This one overlaps the expansion suggestion also. With the Seasons Expansion you are able to add many features that switch things up, including weather, gardening seriously, joining the gardener (botanist or flower arranging/florist career) career.
• Expanding on the 'gardening challenges' suggestion... I like to have a cook & florist then have them also have a valuable garden and build a business for them where they sell the produce and cooked/baked goods in a retail store (through the Lice Cold Freezer customers can purchase directly from the freezer with no need to check them out) and make flower-arrangements to also sell in the store. (I have several stores set up to work this way in my gallery that you can download and use if yo udon't want to build one.)
• Build. Many gamers enjoy creating lots, rooms or households for uploading to the community gallery for others to download.
• Live differently.  Try starting off very poor or living as a homeless sim. Get Island Living and live off the grid. Forage for food/items to sell/ sing for tips, etc.

Anyway, this is just a beginning list. Many really cool options come with the various packs and expansions, though. That's just how Sims 4 is set up. The up side of this is that you can build your game as you can afford to add packs and you don't have to pay for feature you don't want to use. For instance, I gradually added packs and expansions in this way, and many of them I added when they went on sale (they cycle through putting various packs/expansions on sale and you can see if something is on sale when you start your game in Origin). I now own all of them, and I added them gradually in order of what featured things that I would enjoy most.

@joaquito99  I can see how playing the same way over and over would get boring pretty quickly.  In Sims 3, I have a few completely different styles of gameplay that I return to, with some variation, whenever I get bored with my existing game.  Here are some ideas:

I've started with a couple and gotten the woman pregnant with twins right away (the boombox follows her around for the first 24 hours blasting kids' music), and then another kid right after that.  It's chaos, and the fact that they have no money makes things almost impossible, but it's also a lot of fun.

On that note, I sometimes force encourage my sims to have a huge family, more even than the 8 sim household limit (mods are helpful), and let the kids each be and do something different.  It's also chaos, but there's always something to do, relationships to work on or different skills to build, plus the older kids can help with the younger ones.  I marry each kid off when I'm bored with them and keep the one or two I still want to play.

I sometimes make a single sim who... let's go with "romances"... half the town, and no matter how hard he works (he really doesn't), paying for all those kids is nearly impossible.  You can use mods to force child support, or just transfer money directly via mod or cheat.

I haven't done it, but some people like the homeless sim challenge, which is rags to riches but with an emphasis on the rags part.  Other people move out a child of their existing sims and give them almost nothing, so the process repeats with each generation.

With large families especially, it's fun to have a pack like Generations (for the interactions) or Seasons (for the festivals) to give the sims more activities to do together.  I also play on normal lifespan, or 1.5 x normal (modified in game options), so there's some sense of progression.  I'm almost never bored with all my sims by the time they die, that is, if I let them die the first time around.

As for getting bored with Sims 4... I can't help you there.  But I doubt anyone wants to hear my take on that game, so I'll leave it at that.

Thanks a lot!

Yes! I love The Sims but I get bored and I don't want to get bored! It's weird. I know. But I love the game and how worked-on it is. 

I'll give the family raising a shot.

@joaquito99, In addition to the fantatic suggestions that both @SheriGR & @puzzlezaddict have given you, I will just add a couple of my own for the future.

TS3:  Whenever I was bored with TS3, I would just make all kinds of patterns in all kinds of color combinations.  Or  I would try to find hard to find gems and butterflies🤓

TS4: I try to explore aspects of the game that I haven't tried before. I also experiment a lot , lately with mixing things like Aliens and Vampires in one family and seeing what happens to their children.  (The children are glitchy, but it is interesting.:eahigh_file: ) I even set the task of getting a male Vampire abducted by Aliens and becoming pregnant!🤨  Or sometimes I will play with Sims I don't like (Evil, hates children, serial romantics,) so that when I go back to my preferred Sims and playing style I will appreciate them more! ❤️

Please feel free to tell us how the new playing style you choose works out! 🥳 And if you think of any good suggestions for others, please include them! :eahigh_file:

Hi! I started a family in The Sims 3. I created a young adult woman and man, and made the guy a freelance painter and the girl is journalist. No children yet.

Kinda boring! It's getting monotonous. I have a few expansions like Seasons, Generations, University Life and Ambitions (and another one which I don't remember).

I find myself doing the same boring things. Making them make money with writing and paintings. I once made them go to the festivals that take place on the main park (Twinbrook) for summer or winter or whatever. It's quite boring. There are no sims in the park I mean very little. Everything gets boring and it's such a pity since it's a game that has marked my childhood.

Sincerely, if I would take just a single Sims game to my grave, but just a single one, it'd be Sims 2: Castaway. That had quite a storyline there. That was indeed fun and very addicting. 

If you could shine a light in me, it'd be great!

Kind regards, Joaquin.

@joaquito99,  I had the Sims2: Castaway on PS2!  Yes, I had a lot of fun with that game! 🥳 But my favorite would have to be The Sims 2 for the PC! TS2 really has the best gameplay and story features of all the versions of The Sims! ❤️

Did you try any of the suggestions that @SheriGR  and @puzzlezaddict  suggested!  @SheriGR is speaking more for TS4, but a lot of her suggestions could apply to TS3.  And @puzzlezaddict spoke specifically of TS3, so there should be something she suggested that you could try! 😇

Will try with the big family and let you know! 

Fantastic! :eahigh_file: We will love hearing about it!❤️  Happy Simming! 🥳

Try making a household of your favorite characters from other games, tv shows, etc. Or if you can, find some mods that can add a layer to gameplay, such as Sacrifial’s life’s drama mod.

@joaquito99 

Castaway was awesome! I wish they'd come out with a newer version and make so we can play on PCs too. I'm not much for gaming systems anymore though I still have my old timey Wii