High school years

If it weren't for my mod that allows me to select which students show up at High school, I would not bother.
The reason I was excited about high school years when I first heard about it was I thought I would have more time to have my teens meet and be friends with my other teens in the various worlds.

So imagine my disappointment when the game began spawning generic townies, or sims from the pack instead of using my other sims.
The mod helped a lot, so I will most likely go to school with my sim. I am not sure if I will bother with prom though. Time is too short to actually enjoy it. It's been a while since I've played the sims. I hope the mod creator is keeping it up to date.

I guess playing only one family with a teen it doesn't matter much to me which teens show up. I downloaded several families with teens from the Gallery just to add to the teen pool already in my game. It was kinda fun to show up and see which teens arrived that day.

I always follow my teen sims to high school. I'm still having fun with the pack in multiple saves. It helps me a lot if I makeover the other teens at school so they fit certain roles and makeover their homes also so it's more interesting for my sims to hang out and make friends. I have them form clubs each with different teens so they have easy ways to meet each other and hang out wherever.

Tons of questions re this pack - I added numbers to make it easier to comment on just a few :)

I can't decide whether I should get the HSY pack on the current sale - only 38%, but maybe it takes forever getting to 50% ... but - I want the world, but the pack comes with a few features I don't really fancy that much. So, I wonder how badly those features will affect my existing households and game outside of Copperdale.

1. Not to happy with micro playing like shaving and growing hair or whatever (my sims hardly cook food because their day is to short anyway). We got a teaser with a patch, causing CAS to randomly giving females a hairy chest. I need to fix that in CAS, but if the pack tries to add body hair to most of my in game sims, I'd go crazy. Is there a toggle off, or is it not as bad as I think? From a video I got the impression that sims "get a chance" to grow facial or body hair and that it can be toggled off individually. That sounds like a massive job thinking of my 640 sims, but if only a few get affected, maybe his is a smaller problem that I think?

2. I'm not very interested in playing all the personal/sexual/preferences which the game got lots of content for over the past couple years. My save is more traditional and will stay that way (I just don't want all RL aspects in my game). I think most of this came with HSY, but I might be wrong. Will this pack cause the game to spawn NPCs to be males with female body frame and vice versa, or will it still be up to the simmer to decide these things as desired in CAS?

3. Having crushes might be cute if it happens rarely, but from what I read in the past crushes got out of control, including parents asking to be their child's BFF or even their prom date. Were these things addressed?

4. I will probably not be a busy Social Bunny user. Will it still cause tons of popups re when others posting something for my sim to read? Was it fine tuned to have less impact than it had at release? Some cell phone (too many) idle animations were patched to base game already, so maybe I already got the major share of it... I just worry for getting tons of popups from a service that I don't plan to use.

5. I already made some high schools in my game (requires some pretending, but I'm fine with that), will I be able to replace some of them, or is the feature restricted to this Copperdale or to just one high school per save?

6. Do students have a private room at high school (boarding)? Or do they travel every day?

7. I read that the sports arena behind the school is quite restricted. I've seen cheer leaders practice there, but that is most likely programmed animations linked to their group meeting. Is it possible to walk on the grass, or to run courses when going there alone? Or is the entire ground inaccessible?

8. I will probably not follow my teens to school beyond testing it (and maybe I'll like it enough to follow some of my future teens occasionally). Will a student's grade be negatively affected by not being "followed" to school? Will a D student now risk being expelled? And can A students achieve "early graduation" even if they are not followed to school? Or will that be just like before, sending students off to school and outcome mainly depending on how well prepared they were?

9. Can cheer leading be a freetime interest even if I don't follow teens to school, and can it be performed outside Copperdale (either practicing or performance)? Can my Oasis Springs teen join another local teen to practice cheer leading? I assume you can win something if your cheer leading group does well, but how much time would that take? I mean, playing on rotation my teen could probably gain fun from it, but there might not be enough time to ever reach the top. Is cheer leading restricted to Teen lifestage?

10. I will not play those Influencers designing new trendy outfits etc. It looks like a NPC is involved with it, so I wonder if the trendy outfits can be ignored at all? Will NPCs walk around in silly outfits if the NPC influencer succeeds? How will it affect my game?

11. Pictures from the photo booth - what can you do with them? Is it mainly about new "crazy" teen animations? Are they too small to go on the wall? Can they be added to the postcard corkboard?

Haha, sounds like I'm far far off the target group for this pack, which explains why it is the only EP I did not yet purchase. I think I will like the world, the pillow fight and photo boot seems good, plus I like the chance of getting expelled or graduate early. And, I can always use a proper high school for story telling.

I really like the pack, though there’s still a lot of it I haven’t explored thoroughly. Your questions have made me realise how much I don’t know as I can’t answer at all for most of them and I’m not sure about the rest. All I can say is that for me it’s given a lot more depth to teens and made their life stage a whole lot more interesting. I like the way it gives opportunities for teens to meet other teens and to hang out together. Copperdale is beautiful too.

With regard to Social Bunny popups, I only get an occasional one telling me that a lot of things have happened there lately. Those don’t bother me. Most of my sims don’t use it, mainly only my teens. But a lot more annoying are the regular popups for ThriftTea and for the after-school activities (though I can’t remember how often they appear). I’m not sure why we have to keep being told about these, like with the Henford fairs and Mt Komorebi festivals.

"FreddyFox1234;c-18321409" wrote:
I really like the pack, though there’s still a lot of it I haven’t explored thoroughly. Your questions have made me realise how much I don’t know as I can’t answer at all for most of them and I’m not sure about the rest. All I can say is that for me it’s given a lot more depth to teens and made their life stage a whole lot more interesting. I like the way it gives opportunities for teens to meet other teens and to hang out together. Copperdale is beautiful too.

With regard to Social Bunny popups, I only get an occasional one telling me that a lot of things have happened there lately. Those don’t bother me. Most of my sims don’t use it, mainly only my teens. But a lot more annoying are the regular popups for ThriftTea and for the after-school activities (though I can’t remember how often they appear). I’m not sure why we have to keep being told about these, like with the Henford fairs and Mt Komorebi festivals.

Thanks! Yes, it feels a bit weird to get notified of a festival in Mt Komorebi (Japan) if you play a family in Henford-on-Bagley (England). I would much prefer those events to list in the calendar, that should be enough. Popups for a festival taking place in the world that I'm currently playing, would be fine though.

Re teens, do you feel their life stage is improved also when you do not follow them to high school? Or will most of it connect to Copperdale?

@Simmerville

1. Unfortunately body hair grow can only be toggled in CAS individually. But I havent had any of my played female sims grow chest hair, seems to be more of a NPC problem where some get generated with that.

2. Havent seen any generated NPCs that where like females with male frame or the other way arround, most sims will still generate as the default setting, meaning they go both ways and you can decide how to approach them.

3. Dont know about the crushes, but there is a setting to turn of autonomous relationships, hich is what the prom invites and asking to be bf/gf/besty falls under, its in the pack settings.

4. They definately use more phone idles since HSY, but social bunny isnt a problem you can turn it off in the sims phone.

5. Just one highschoolin copperdake

6. Nope, not a boarding school.

7. You can go there, it is where the cheerleading and football events take place, but other than that it is pretty useless tbh, unfortunately the track is not like the hiking tracks in mt.k so sims wont autonomously follow it when running.

8. If you dont follow them, than it works just like without the pack

9. You can cheer anywhere where you placed a cheer mat, either solo or in a group depending on the mats size.
I believe the cheerleading team can only be joined by teens, but anyone can cheer on those mats.
Yes, you can join any after school activity without having to follow your teens.

10. They seem to mostly wear those outfits when on a thrift store lot.

11. Idk, they are pretty small, havent done much with the photobooth tbh

The body hair drives me crazy only because it takes so much longer to make a sim in CAS. I would have preferred to have a default of no body hair/hair growth than the way they decided to do it. All of my previously made sims have to go back into CAS to change it. Wish they started Sims out without all the accessories, makeup and outfits like in the previous sims games so when we make a new sim we can start from scratch and make them the way we want, without having to remove a ton of things.

I still very much follow my teens to school. One of the first things I did to improve my experience was replace the school that came with the pack. I also use a mod that makes it so all classmates are sims from my played households, which helps with immersion. I enjoy seeing what my sims are doing when I'm not controlling them. For example, as a classmate, my rebel teen was seriously insulting the principal and teachers. Then when I went to play his household I saw that he has a terrible relationship with all faculty members.

Before this pack playing with teens mostly involved getting them to hangout together at public venues after school. Having the added aspect of following the teenage drama to school has been such a bonus.

Don't get me wrong, this pack is my favorite when it comes to CAS (it includes one of my favorite hairs in the whole entire game) and Build Mode (lots of pretty and colorful stuff) but when it comes to the actual gameplay itself...not so much. The active school days are repetitive and there's not much to do in the high school itself other than attending class and eating lunch. Prom...I don't even understand why prom is so frequent anyways and I feel like we should have more control of scheduling prom instead of it happening on a fixed day every week.