Goodbye Claire.

None of my sims has died since I started playing Sims4 last spring - hold on, one may have been killed in a kitchen fire. I quit without saving and didn't care that I'd lost over 2 hours of gaming. Also, I did kill off a few townies...

Back in my Sims 1 and 2 days, if a sim I really loved died unexpectedly, I'd stop the game and exit without saving. My favorites are not allowed to die. I play with aging off.

I would also stop and restart for other sims, but if a sim really seemed determined to die then I'd let them go, call them an id.iot, and continue on with that family. I had one house in Sims2 that I swear was cursed, the adults kept dying in stupid ways and no matter what I did, they'd just keep doing the same things and dying as a result. I restarted at least 3 times when the mother died of hunger (toddler and baby in the house - those kids'll get you every time). The rest of the family kept getting in front of the fridge, preventing her from getting food. I tried moving the fridge and even putting food in front of her and her family kept getting in the way. I gave up. Later the father went swimming. The rotten kids kept getting in front of the ladders, preventing his leaving the pool. I tried at least 4 times, telling the kids to go away - then the neighbor got in the pool... I finally gave up when he died again and the game told me the game was over because there were no adults left. I finally gave up on that family and deleted the House of Doom. I didn't build on that lot again!

The last legacy I played I was a little sad when my founder died, but everyone after had to go to make space for the next generation. Currently, I have found storyline appropriate ways for my favorites not to die. For example, of course my favorite spellcaster is going to figure out the immortality potion and share it with his bestie, so they won't die. I let mermaids be immortal as long as they're in Sulani; once they leave the island, I let them age. I'm only just getting into the second and third generation in a rotational save, so I haven't had to let go of too many sims yet. I found it was much easier to let go of them once I had played out all of my ideas for their story and moved on to their kids.

Plus tons of screenshots. Once I figured out pose player, I went back in to my tray files, popped my first generation into a photo/testing save, and took a few poses group shots of them to put around their kids' houses to keep their memory alive in game. I've seen some people make a museum for their legacy/NSB families, and I think I'm going to do that for a lot of my sims' achievements in this save.