New Player Questions

Welcome to our world! 

You might find this thread useful for inspiration https://answers.ea.com/t5/General-Discussion-Feedback/Share-Your-Newest-The-Sims-4-Creations-Here/m-p/11511696#M61947

When you're starting out you might find it helpful to download a build from the gallery when you're building and just familiarise yourself by giving it a makeover. That's what I usually say to my friends who start playing Sims.

I terms of bills, they're not toooo bad and if you have Eco Living you can use some of the energy saving gadgets. You can also purchase reward traits to reduce your bills. Just remember to pay them on the day you get them as the next morning power and water will start to be cut off.

If you want to make money the best way to supplement income is by planting flowers, etc. In a new save with low gardening skills a good way to do that is visit public lots just before 5am and wait until lilies and roses start to bloom as they generate a decent amount and are readily available in Willow Creek public lots such as behind the Blue Velvet/gym/museum. Harvest them and take them home. Plant a few of them and harvest them daily, if you immediately go into build mode as they bloom in your garden the flowers are worth more. Keep taking the plant into build mode and you will see the plant and flowers appear separately in your household inventory. Put the plant back in the ground, go back to live mode and repeat as many times as you can. At 6am they usually stop blooming until the next day. You'll find you've made quite a bit of cash as you sell the flowers from build mode. You can do that every day. As your skill increases you can graft and splice the plants to get more expensive flowers such as the expensive orchid, by splicing a Lily and a Snapdragon. Or if you have Cottage Living you can visit the market stalls and buy rarer harvestables to plant at home.

You can switch between lifetime aspirations to gather reward points as you go. The Curator aspiration is an easy one to start with. Collect flowers, break rocks you see on the ground, dig mud patches, fish, look for little logs with frogs. When you have found 2 frogs select them to breed and you can sell their offspring or keep breeding to expand the collection and find different species. You can sell what you find to make more money as well. Use the reward traits you can purchase to make life easier for your Sim.

When you spot a problem in your game you can pop on here, go to Bug Reports and take a look at the compiled list of reported issues. Or just ask a question on this page like you have just done.

Also, and I cannot stress this enough... always make a backup of your game and save regularly. Right now, with the ageing bug currently affecting the game you are safer going to Game Options and disabling the Ageing options. In Game Options also make sure you are linked to your EA account to make sure you get updates and Sims Delivery Express updates (SDX).

Enjoy!

@Khloe_Noelle 

So, I can't help you much with building; I have a niche and it's things with the words "tiny" or "cheap" in them! :D

I also don't know which packs, if any, you have, so ignore the suggestions that are for packs you don't have!

However, bills:

Bills are determined by your lot value, so if you're going to play legacy you're going to start out with a cheap lot, for the most part. If you have Eco Lifestyle, not following some Neighborhood Action Plans can increase your bills.

How to reduce bills:

1. Save up for the frugal reward trait in the Rewards Store.
2. If you have Eco Lifestyle, use Neighborhood Action Plans in your favor. For example, if you have green gardening you get a bill reduction if you have a bug house or bee box, for example.
3. Look for build items marked "bill reduction" (I think these are also Eco Lifestyle)
4. People recommend autolights. I would add have fewer appliances, if you can, and do the energy efficient upgrades if you can (is this Eco Lifestyle only?).
5. If you play off the grid, you have no utility bills. (You may or may not find this item extreme, lol.)
6. No, really, have every member of your household get the frugal reward store trait.
7. If you live in Henford-on-Bagley, completing the Country Caretaker aspiration will give you cheaper bills in Henford-on-Bagley. (Cottage Living)
8. There is currently a bug that power bills are higher in Mount Komorebi. Something to be aware of. (Snowy Escape)
9. If you have Tiny Living, one of the smaller lot type perks is half bills!

I agree with everything @simsplayer818 said. If you have City Living, the romance festival has high-end flowers that you can harvest and plant on your home lot for free and this is one of my favorite get rich quick schemes.  😉  If not, yeah, across from the Goths, behind Umbridge Manor, there's a great little garden (although you have to be in the area for the plants to grow and have to be there at 5am for them to bloom). There are also Lilies in the neighborhood if you look.

Also, I don't know what careers you were going to give your Sims but when I was new I was surprised to learn that writers, painters, and gardeners make big bucks in the Sims. You do need to skill up so your books/paintings aren't bad, but...

Also, if you have extra reward store points from aspiration hopping (which I think is forbidden in the legacy challenge, alas) free services is THE BOMB. Perhaps fulfilling wants will let you buy it. It doesn't look like much, but: free pizza, free food delivery, free maid, free butler, free gardener.....

I'd be no good if I couldn't hop around different Aspirations. I often start with a big house to get me the Mansion Baron Aspiration and use the points from that to give my Sims a Steel Bladder. I complete the other money one pretty quickly (I've gone blank on the name lol) and get them the Savant trait to boost their skills rate, usually along with the Night Owl trait too. I add the Curator Aspiration for most of my Sims as it's an easy way to get points so I can get the Incredibly Friendly Trait and with that it's pretty simple to do the Super Popular Aspiration quickly. I often chuck in some Fishing Aspiration and some of the pack based Aspirations that go with City Living (but mine is bugged so I can only do the first stage), Snowy Escape, Island Living, Outdoor and Jungle packs for Example. My completed Sims usually have the Seldom Sleepy trait and Forever Full. The Always Welcome trait is very handy too.

My City Living is bugged so travelling to the Romance Festival is pretty much off the table for me and the plants and fireworks are bugged for me too! But yes it is a really great place to get flowers, paintings if there's a good selection and a few snow globes from cardboard boxes lying around.

I'm a builder but I'm rubbish at explaining stuff. I had to produce little mini guide books for my friends and email them in volumes lol. Starting with volume one "Building your McMansion!"

You can also have great fun editing public lots. I like to add ponds and vending machines. With Seasons I add a few ice/roller rinks. I add food stalls too but you have to pay to hire a vendor, still when your Sim is craving a lobster roll what can you do!

I've never played legacy but I usually start out with a big household of family members from different generations or a large group of friends in a house share. I build a big family homestead or flat/house share. I then split out one Sim at a time into their own household and play them individually. They keep their ties to their family or old roomies. If I've created a solo Sim I often add a family member in CAS later to keep their family going. I end up with family networks through my worlds.

Oh, yeah, I almost never play single Sim households.

I love editing community lots, too. I've given all the gyms pools and basketball hoops, and put toddler things at all the parks (the giant toddler jungle gym from toddler stuff, for example).

And I've found I love the nature aspirations. Honestly, anything that gets me off my home lot. Otherwise I'd just never leave! and there's so much more outside my home lot!

Welcome to the simming community @Khloe_Noelle ! Glad to hear you are enjoying your time so far with TS4. I love this version of the game and get a lot of enjoyment out of it so it is great to hear that you are enjoying it too. 🙂 There are so many tips and tricks, too many to list, and I have personally have found a few websites that have helped me in how to learn and explore the game and play it to it's full potential. Not sure if I can list those websites here though so I'll cover a few things below that I hope will help you. 🙂

Live Mode

Best way to explore and learn about the game is to have your sims travel to different community lots & districts with in the worlds and interact with different sims. Don't be afraid to click on things, you won't break anything! 😉 If you have City Living the festivals are a great place to meet other sims and try different types of foods.  

Bills are something we can't escape even in the game and even though they are too high realistically, you can reduce them if you have the Eco Living pack which has energy saving objects that help lower your bills. 

For money you can get your sims to fish, click on any fishing sign in any world/district and then sell the fish from their inventory, they can write books via the computer and publish them via the mailbox which will give you some weekly royalties. If you write enough books your sim can get a pretty nice weekly pay packet which will hopefully cover your bills. I can see someone already mentioned gardening so I won't go into that. All I say is garden is a personal choice, I love it for my adult & elders sims but not so much for my young adults sims. 

Completing whims (which has now changed to wants/fears) is a great way to accumulate extra satisfaction points, as well as completing milestones in your sims aspirations. I like to have several aspirations going at the same time, as there is no limit and you don't lose progress if you swap to a different aspiration. 

Build Mode

Love love love build mode! One of many things that I love about TS4, the building and creating that we can do in game. 

Building & decorating takes practice, so start off small when building as I always find it's easier to add than subtract from a build. With decorating I like to have colour schemes through out my sims homes and try to have a general theme/feel to it. Like country or modern, or bright and colourful.

I mostly enjoy renovating existing EA lots that came with the worlds and I think this has helped me get better at building and decorating over the years. The gallery is a great place to find some amazing and very unique creations. If you are searching on the gallery, it helps to search by the actual lot name that you want to add to your game. Many players add this as a hashtag in their upload so it makes it easier to find something for that specific lot.

At the moment I can only think of two objects I cannot live without in my game. Incense stick/holders - these help with getting rid of negative moodlets and give your sim positive moodlets. A tea brewer - again, this is something that helps with negative/positive moodlets, but I also love tea in real life so it's only natural that my sims would have one of these too! 

Hope this has helped you in some way. 🙂

There is a lot to this game, especially if you have a few packs installed, and it can take time to fully explore everything. I do find for me that no gameplay session is ever the same and even after years of playing this game I am still discovering new things or something small that I never noticed before that makes me smile.

Here’s a few quick tips that I wished I knew when I started out:

1) don’t use high chairs for toddlers when they are mega hungry and you are trying to stop them being taken away. They are glitchy and I have heard of toddlers being taken away because people’s sims keep putting them in and out of the chair rather than just feeding him them. They can throw a tantrum in high chairs as well. I always just put food on counters or coffee tables for my toddlers now and then get them to grab a serving.

2) money fruit is awesome. Buy it from the aspiration rewards store. Once you have 4 money trees it becomes way easier for all future generations to deal with money.

3) having other sims mentor you makes skills go up super fast. Also be sure to make use of mood bonus when it comes to skill building (ie. be inspired when building the writing skill). Also parents helping kids build skills makes it faster too. Try do your homework with a parent too to get it done faster.

4) showers, the tea life personal brewer and incense are powerful for helping override moodlets that you don’t want and good at helping put your sim in an appropriate mood.

5) research snaglefluster drink and how to make it because it’s very good.

6) pay attention to your starting aspiration when you make a sim because it will give you a bonus trait for that sim. You can change the aspiration later but you can’t change the bonus trait.

7) their are several cool hidden worlds inside the main ones (willow creek has sylvan glade, oasis springs has the forgotten grotto, glimmerbrook has the magic realm and granite falls has the deep woods. Plus if you have get to work you can access an alien planet called sixam in a few different ways) where you can find cool stuff.

8) watching tv while you eat is great as it boosts fun and you can also learn skills at the same time (ie watching comedy channel will give you comedy skill and watching cooking channel can up your cooking skill)

9) singing or playing instruments in public can get you tips and be a good way to get extra cash if you have the right packs (I think you need either get famous or city living or both). You can also passively build singing skill everytime you shower by using the sing in the shower option.

10) keep babies in an area the kids and toddlers can’t get to because the kids and toddlers can start cooing or interacting with the baby and get in the way of the parent feeing it. I had a baby boy taken away because I couldn’t get the kids out of the way and their mum couldn’t feed him.

11) have your kids listen to music when doing homework because it stops them from losing fun and gets their fun up which avoids the tense moodlets

12) cheats are awesome for building. My favorites are bb.moveobjects on (which lets you really clutter up a build), bb.showhiddenobjects (which lets you find extra debug items to build with) and bb.showliveeditobjects (which lets you build with objects that were decorations made for the background enviorment in the world etc) look up a video on build cheats. James turner did a super good one:

13) watch sims content creators because they can help inspire you to build or help inspire gameplay. (lilsimsie, dicee, fake gamer girl and James turner are some of my favourites). I also have a YouTube channel you could watch if you wanna see my garbage video editing lol. I often do lots of building. XD

14.) there is an icon on your sims profile image that you can click when they are at work/school to make them work differently (there are options like “work hard”, “socialize with coworkers”, “take notes” and leave early which can affect your work performance, mood and needs)

15.) sims can be resurrected with a bunch of different methods

If you're into collectibles and different wall art (because I personally can never have enough different art) I usually add an observatory, a microscope and a rocket ship to an empty lot. I usually make it into a science park kind of affair. I know some players are having issues with rocket ship building but that's one bug I don't have. (It's a miracle, yay).

The benefit of having them on their own lot is that, well firstly they are enormous and only really fit in at the science lab otherwise. They look a bit weird in the back garden. Secondly you can spend as much time as you want using them to get collectibles. They all have items you can't get elsewhere, wall prints, creatures (dead or alive), rocks and even very rare plants. Plus if you have Get to Work it means you can visit Sixam with no time limit on how long you can stay there. If you don't have GTW you just take trips to space and complete different missions to get rewards. They can repeat, so try different options each time.

I usually take a tent or add everything I need to my science park for my Sim to get food, etc. If you've taken plant/fossil samples and have them in your inventory you can get beautiful prints with the microscope. I think it's all in the base game (except Sixam) and you need a good logic level to analyse samples. Using the Observatory builds your logic skill pretty fast without needing to do anything but sit there. As the day goes on, keep exiting and re-entering the Observatory as the options change depending on the time of day and some prints are only available from different times and viewing options.

It's one of my favourite parts of the gane and I use the collectibles for a lot of my retail lots. I created a poster shop with all of them and the city living posters based on the Athena shops I loved as a kid.

When I first started playing TS4 years ago and I'd add gallery builds to renovate, I'd see these prints on the wall and wonder where they came from till I figured out the Observatory.