Favorite Mods?

I use a ton of mods, but lately I'm in love with Lumpinou's ones.
Woohoo Wellness & Pregnancy Ovehaul — adds such things as pregnancy preferences (your sim can have an unwanted pregnancy even if they're not a child hater), risky woohoo, paternity testing, realistic reactions to teen pregnancies, artificial insemination and surrogacy, and adoption overhaul.
I haven't tested everything yet – my sims are boring and have no drama in their lives lol, but I've adopted a kid through this mod. And it's so much better than what we have in game! You have to ask your partner if they agree to an adoption. Then you receive a visit from an adoption agent, who can decline your request if you don't have enough money and living space to have a child.
And if you adopt a baby or a toddler, they won't know that they were adopted and you can reveal it later. And teens can go and contact their biological parents if they want to (I think a parent gets picked up randomly, I've got a notification that my sim's bio father is Rohan Elderberry (Britechester townie).

First Impressions — adds sentiments when sims meet each other, a useful tool to decide who I want my sim to be friends with. :)

Road to Romance — adds more options to romance menu, such as “talk about life together”, “make future plans”, “enthuse about your kids”. Finally my spouses can talk about serious matters and not only flirt.

@Jyotai I have ShowSimInfo and Island Living, and the mod works fine for me and doesn't throw LEs.

I use way too many mods to list, so I'll just name my indispensable ones, including a few I haven't seen mentioned:

MCCC by Deaderpool

Better Weather Variety by Peterskywalker at Mod the Sims. Finally the weather in Willow Creek is actually like Louisiana weather!

Meaningful Stories by Roburky.

Sac's Slow Dancing mod

Scarlet SimCity Loans. My sims have to take out a mortgage to buy a house!

Srsly's Complete Cooking Overhaul

Have Some Personality Please! and Socialization is Fun by Polarbearsims.

Lots and lots of mods by LittleMsSam and Bienchen. Lots of other mods too, but these are my favorites.

"FatTribble23;c-17896797" wrote:
@Jyotai I have ShowSimInfo and Island Living, and the mod works fine for me and doesn't throw LEs.

Good to know. Before I added the mod I read a lot of threads about it breaking, and I had thought that was the common theme among people who couldn't run it. If you're able to run it, then if I do hit a break at that point, I'll look deeper. Island Living is 2-3 "purchases away" on my wishlist (I want University more, but it has bad reviews, so still deciding).

As others have mentioned, my absolute essential mod (without which I wouldn't play at all other than for testing purposes) is MCCC. Others that I consider nearly as essential are many of LittleMsSam's and Bienchen's mods (too many from both to list individually, lol), and TwistedMexi's AllCheats.

Less essential ones but high on my fun and/or quality-of-life list:
Sacrificial's Romance mods (including Slow Dancing and Skygaze)
Wiggler's DisableAutomaticFameQuirks (because I consider some of the quirks to be stupid)
Several by Zero
Several career mods by various authors
And some NSFW stuff I can't mention by name due to forum rules.

DisableDebugSunray is the only mod I use. I got it after I moved a family's home and realised two things. First, all of the lagging I was having in the first home was suddenly gone. Second, I had an obscene number of sunrays (from EL) in the family's inventory.

It was as if the green footprint just continually added more and more sunrays. This mod lets me continue to play with eco footprints on, but does not have the sunrays in green neighbourhoods.

If you have EL and you have issues with lag, I 100% recommend it.

I'm still experimenting with mods but so far these are the ones I'm not planning on removing any time soon (if ever).

WhimOverhaul by Bienchen83. Essential for me. Vanilla whims are a complete dud for they even stopped doing anything with them. This mod adds a tons of whims and makes them actually relevant to a sim's personality/mood. No more "buy some random object" whims.
MCCC by Deaderpool. Nraas Master Controller (+ StoryProgression) for TS3 is a must for me and this is similar to that. I like being able to tweak little things and make the game a bit more challenging and interesting.
Vampires Can Kill by Zero. I really love the whole "risk vs reward" element this brings to vampire gameplay. Especially with my main vampire who has the Insatiable Thirst weakness and who used to just Compel for Deep Drink all willy-nilly (minus family members) but now that there's an actual chance of it killing the victim, he's making more conscious decisions on his hunting habits. Of course, the mod also allows you to just play a bloodthirsty vampire who deliberately chooses the deadly options. Really liking it all.
Meaningful Stories by Roburky. Never liked how the Emotions system makes most of the sims act in the same bipolar way with not much of their core personality showing. This one makes the system feel way more organic and actually gives the emotions meaning. No more yo-yoing between different moods like crazy.

//EDIT forgot this one:
Parenhood hard mode by Kuttoe. Especially because I'm playing with long lifespan it's WAY too easy to maximize character values, in fact Manners and Responsibility tend to do that on their own without active input from me. This mod makes it so that the kids start at random values in the red. I'm liking it. I actually want some sims to be irresponsible and ill-mannered instead of them all acting like Mr/Mrs Perfect.

I use a bunch but there are three I probably just wouldn’t even play without.

MCCC for all the reasons others have said.

And then Wonderful Whims for its attraction system, combined with The Chemistry System by thepancake1. With these two together, I imagine that the chemistry system is like emotional/friendship chemistry since it applies to all Sims including family members and children. Then the WW attraction system has to do with romantic attraction. With these two enabled together, it makes looking for a partner so much harder and more fun. My sim might see someone they think is the hottest ever but once they start interacting they have terrible interpersonal chemistry. I won’t keep two Sims together long term unless there is a decent amount of both attraction and chemistry.

MC Command Center by Deaderpool
Most anything by LittleMsSam
I just started using UI Cheats