Are there certain things you do when starting a new game?

I change a few lots such as adding a spa to Oasis Springs or Willow Creek and most of the time I put a church somewhere as well. Usually I replace 2 of the Granite Falls lots with a spa and a bar, and search the gallery for something roughly appropriate to the theme of the game.

Delete Baby Ariel and fill in Newcrest with restaurants and bowling alleys. I also get rid of all of the retail lots in Magnolia Promade since I hate that feature and never use it.

Currently, I only have two separate game saves. My Cantrell family and my ancestral save. Both (when restarting, or starting anew) require that I do some set-up before any actual game play. It's quite a task that is wearying, and this last time around with the Cantrells (opted to reboot in a brand new save due to the patch and didn't wish to have a corruption issue) I placed their house and a few venues in other neighborhoods, as well. I haven't added the collateral families, yet, that I normally do. Focusing more on the potential spouse of my Global Superstar in the making. What I have done this time, was to start my game and add a new family before I enter the lot I wish to play. Then I use MCCC to give skills to the new Sims created in CAS. Makes no sense to me that an Adult wouldn't have any skills and yet their child is a teen, for instance. One day, I can only hope we'll have this option in CAS. But, for now, I'm grateful for the MCCC mod. My celebrity Sim just achieved his goal almost a week after his older brother aged up. So, I aged him up, too. Just yesterday, in fact. Now, I have to figure out if I'm going to wait until his two next younger siblings age up before I have him get hitched or not. Since I have adopted a slightly different play style in how he achieves his fame, this go around, I may just break-out of the marriage order of things, too. See? I can be unpredictable. ;)

As for the ancestral save, I set up household A (and this time I built a new abode for them) and then household B. Since having a household larger than 8 total Sims is tricky at best, I went ahead and added the future spouse of my 7th great-Aunt and when I aged her up to teen, moved her over there to make room for the younger siblings that have yet to be born. This after moving 7th great-uncles two and three to a place of their own, and my sixth great-grandfather along with his bride (eldest in household B) to begin their life together. Always before I move a family, I take the time to set up the next lot, which I have built already. It's not always practical to move with all of the furnishings, but I will mostly to keep the crops. Then I take what furnishings I want, and sell the rest. This also takes time.

Delete any premade sims I don't want, and add in lots that are not pre-built into the worlds (restaurants, spas, etc). And I also make sure to put the "Lost Garden of Healing" from Romantic Garden Stuff somewhere, since I like to use the Wishing Well occasionally, but I rarely want it on my home lot.

I don't start new games often. My last one though I replaced a lot of the maxis lots with versions of them that I have edited more to my liking.

"fullspiral;c-17206747" wrote:
I made a base template of the worlds that I start with so I don't have to set it all up again. Then I save it as....and name the save different from the template.

That's exactly what I do. I have all my favorite lots, some I've created, some from creators like Lilsimsie, all my favorite townies, everything's just so. Then I load it, do a save-as and play it without having to do all the setup first.

Depends on what mood I'm in, typically though I'll make the new main family play a bit then place a few builds and start makeovers of certain premades before setting up the calendar with my usual holidays.