Missing the magic ingredient?

Maybe it's okay to enjoy not sticking with the same save/Sims. Do what you enjoy!

For me, I enjoy making all of the households relate to each other in some way. Friendships, marriages, coworkers, et cetera, are all meaningful to me. I love it when the world feels interconnected.

For some reason, the Strangerville pack was what ended up making just another household become my main household. It was a really fun back story for me: A sweet guy from a place equivalent to the midwest ends up being forced by an agency equivalent to the CIA or something to have a female secret agent live with him so she can investigate the Strangerville mystery. There was something about having them work on the mystery together that made me fall in love with this household. And I enjoyed having to make changes to his simple little house to accommodate the new member. Then I ended up creating his extended family: parents, grandparents, cousins, and second cousins. The game's little surprises helped me bond with this family too: When he thought he'd have one child, he had triplets, and then he got abducted and had twins. Then I had his father move in with them, which was interesting too.

I hope something I've written helps you.

I think it's a problem stemming from the game's low difficulty and lack of challenge.

I'll use careers as an example. Moving up in careers from level 1 to the top is easier than in other games in the franchise because it only involves skill grinding as opposed to also having to make friends like in previous games. At launch, getting a promotion involved a list of unique challenges for each job level, which was fun and made it more worthwhile to consider playing the game on long lifespan or with aging off to wack away at a career with the same sim or set the lifespan to short for an extra challenge. It was the most interesting implementation of the job promotion system yet, and I personally really enjoyed it. It added depth to the game and kept coming back to the same sim or playing through all of the different careers in a rotation or through a succession of generations from getting repetitive.

After the update that came out before "Get to Work" released, however, the difficulty of both careers and aspirations was severely nerfed to their current state. This was due to complaints from some players that progression was too hard for them when playing on normal and short lifespans. This not only made careers excessively easy to progress through, but also made every single normal career exactly the same since now the only thing that you need to do to progress is hit the required skill levels and go to work regularly, making every level very samey and repetitive. With the challenge gone, careers have become much more shallow than previous games and less interesting and fun to play through.

Basically, it's the super-easy difficulty and the over-emphasis on accessibility in this TS4's gameplay that is a major factor in causing players to get bored and either quit or go save file hopping. Challenge and a sense of discovery help players feel more invested in a game. When a game has neither, it's hard for players to stay invested for long. So, the only thing I can suggest is looking for mods that restore the difficulty of the careers and aspirations or add more challenging gameplay elements and see if that helps.

Definitely food for thought here.
@Rouenpucelle, relationship could be very important. Occasionally my Sims had a single parent thrown in the mix, usually as an afterthought of sorts (e.g. to justify a teenager prepping for University). I am now thinking about how to create some family for a Sim without (necessarily) sacrificing the small household which can be micromanaged...
When Sims do seem to come from nowhere, I guess it's easy for their backstories to be superficial/lost/lack depth once in the game.

@SimsLovinLycan You make a strong point also. Sometimes I get over this by using the GTW careers, or something that can be done at home like freelancing, social media etc. I find they add some depth and challenge to the careers. I guess an argument can be made that even those become repetitive rather quickly...
My Sims are admittedly terrible at making friends. I realise now that I don't have them socialize in realistic ways. A big element which is missing is co-workers, friends, active acquaintances, family connections etc...



Maybe the missing element is relationships ?? :| But how do I fix that?

The best advice I could give is slow it down.

Not only literally (slowing down time with MCCC, super long lifespan or aging off), but in gameplay aswell. With more time on your hands, you don't play to have rich top of their career sims, you play for the little things.


ZOOM IN ! Stop watching the action from afar, get in your sims' face and enjoy ambient sounds.


Find tiny ways to make sims stand out/more real. Let them pick hobbies with no further goal of money, just for the sake of it. Maybe that painter sim is trying to find their own style, so instead of clicking random painting categories, you try to stick to one that particular sim would paint. Most skills could become hobbies on their own. One my teen sims was really into photography and one wall of her room was covered in pictures taken over (real life) months of gameplay. She met a lot of people through it.

Don't focus on skilling or getting promotions. Once I've found a (ideally low) career rank that fit my sim, I lock them into it with MCCC. Their job is that one rank, not the entire career, if one sim is a paralegal, then they're a paralegal, there's no miraculously getting promoted to judge.
I also don't magicaly sell things in the inventory, so money stays relevant. I have to stick to a budget, it's a lot more interesting.



Pay special attention to the environment you play in. Turn your houses into homes, go for lived-in rather than picture perfect. If your sim work from home, don't treat tasks like a checklist to complete without a thought, make it an event. I have a few lots built for work at home careers like conservationist, to enhance gameplay. Work at home doesn't have to mean never leave your house.

Make community lots interesting visually and thematically ! I.E UBrite commons, but remade as a café-théâtre. If you like the set you play in, gameplay feels ... more.
Think about what would be interesting and meaningful rather than "easy", and set it up. Tired of your sims baking their own wedding cake when some don't even like to cook ? Have a sim with the Fresh Chef trait bake all kinds available, and put them for sale in a cute wedding themed retail shop. Now picking a cake for the wedding is more eventful than cooking pasta.



If you play rotationally, try to get the families linked one way or another. Maybe they're friends and they hang out together, or they're coworkers and they hate each other, maybe their kids have playdates.
I have a club for all teens from households I play, they don't all know each other but sometimes one of them will throw a huge party and I'll watch them develop friendships on their own. Actually I make clubs for everything, like siblings/cousins in different households getting together to play cards, former roommates that try to awkwardly keep in touch, or children having make-believe adventures.


Even rotationally not two households of mine play alike, be it by their hobbies, budget, lifestyle, jobs, schedule, or goals in life. When I'm bored with one, I just switch to a different family, because maybe I didn't want to play the lone grumpy author with 3 dogs in a lighthouse today, but next week he'll be exactly what calls to me.

I do understand I have multiple saves with themes and sometimes I don't play them until something new comes in a pack that makes me say yes! It fits their character just right for the sims anyway....That's happening right now for me I'm all involved in playing and revamping a themed save... actually 2 of them. So then I play that save for awhile, sometimes rotating through characters and changing up their lives, looks and stories thanks to a new pack that really made me want to get in those households. It snowballs then for me and new ideas come or old ideas can be completed and or added in.
Usually I move on to a new save if a new pack comes and it really won't affect my currently played saves... or I even start new saves and stories.
I have found that I go back to older saves most when I have a real fondness for the characters... That's why I use it often as an ongoing fanfiction in the sims universe more often than not. I'm fond of them both because I made them and I'm also fond of that character that I got from other media or created myself.

I try not to feel strange about the way play I realize it's my own way and as long as it's enjoyable to me that's all that counts. I get tired of playing all the games I own from time to time including this one. I just do something else until it's sim time again.

Really I think that magic ingredient is a creative spark and you have it... you just burn out a little when you hit the daily grind maybe. Rotating helps or just doing something else that isn't sims if it comes right down to it. It refreshes eventually so my advise is to not throw out anything you made with great passion.

Some good general advice there @happyopi. I didn’t know MCCC can stop a career! Is it part of the career package or cheats or...
I was playing custom age spans which had two years (approx) to a Sim week. I didn’t find it too bad. Then when University came along, that was going to take the equivalent of six years minimum (more like eight) and that just didn’t seem quite right at first glance. I experimented briefly with a custom age span much more like long, where a Sim week was a year. But too much seemed to happen too fast. My Sims were YA and doing well in uni and careers respectively and barely halfway through their twenties..
I’m looking at going back to my original span.


@Hermitgirl. I’ve nearly reconciled that I like to come up with new characters and spend my Simming time as I do. However I really, really would like to play out more of the stories I make up in my head and as mentioned above, Sims get better with longer playtime...
Luckily for me, most of my houses and characters are saved on the Gallery (as backup) so I have access to many of my old creations. I honestly haven’t got so attached to someones story that I’ve felt the need to keep the save itself.

Maybe I need to pull some of them out and make them related somehow (as suggested in various posts above). Only thing becomes my tendency to micromanage, which becomes harder the more Sims you introduce. I’ve even been considering a control only one Sim sort of challenge (ISBI or asylum I think) with the basic idea that if I see what they can do on their own, I’ll be freer with my Sims. I haven’t braved that experiment, yet..

"NRowe;c-17546838" wrote:
Some good general advice there @happyopi. I didn’t know MCCC can stop a career! Is it part of the career package or cheats or...

I don't have MCCC installed right now to check so I looked it up:

Freeze Career flag:

In the Sim Flags menu, there is an option on Sims older than Teens to Freeze Career.

For NPC Sims, this flag will bypass the EA core functionality that reassigns an NPC Sim to different jobs. Whatever their current job is, they will keep that job. This prevents them leaving the job either by quitting or retiring. Note that if you flag an NPC Sim that has no job, the core processes will never give them a job so they will always be unemployed.
For active Sims, the flag just stops their career progression. They will neither gain nor lose progression in their career level as long as they have the flag.

Thanks @happyopi :)

For me it works to play in short lifespan. Trying to live sim's lifes and achieve whatever i decide them to achieve in a small lifespan is challenging. And it makes my generations develop faster. That way i don't get bored with the same sims.