New Simmers, welcome! - Community’s tips & tricks to get started

I'll start! :) :

Building can be a bit scary at first. It takes some time to learn how to get the best of the game’s building tools so don’t get discouraged if your houses look like giant boxes or the roof is not quite how you were hoping for. Practice makes perfection!

Welcome, newcomers. Get out while you still can. End this chain of misery before it starts anew.

What are the things you wished you had known when you were getting started with The Sims?

• Honestly, you should probably just drop Sims 4 and go back to 2 and 3. I'm kidding, Sims 4 has a lot of great qualities. But I encourage you to also play old games, because they all offer different experiences. Sims 1 even lets you hatch and raise baby dragons.
  
• Don't buy any of the packs unless they're on sale. They're on sale often, and expansions are usually 50% off. Great deals, take advantage of them.
  
• This game can and will disappoint you, but it can still be a lot of fun. Work with what you have, and know that buying more packs won't necessarily make the game better.
  
• That said, buy Get Together. It's a great pack that can greatly influence and enhance your gameplay. It's almost a required pack.
  
• Ditto for Seasons.
  
• For fans of the occult, get Vampires. It's the best Game Pack, possibly the best Sims 4 pack altogether.
  
• Watch builders on YouTube. Vixella, lilsimsie, Urban Sims, etc. will give you a ton of ideas, tips and tricks on how to build. Building is one of the best aspects of the game.
  
• You can also just download houses and sims from the gallery, then edit them to your choosing.
  
• When you're comfortable with the game, there are a lot of challenges to keep things spicy: 100 Baby Challenges, Rags to Riches Challenges, Ask the Devs for Dragons Challenges, etc.
  

I've found the Gallery to be an invaluable source. I cannot build and have absolutely no desire to build. There are so many awesome builders in the community so I download all my lots and then make any necessary design changes to suit my purposes.
Plus I prefer to spend my time on live gameplay.

My favorite game feature would have to be toddlers. They're adorable and oh so realistic. ?

Since this thread expressly asked for tips on the Sims 4 all I'll say about the previous versions is that you can find information on them in other sections of the forum.

Have fun and as @EA_Mai said don't hesitate to ask questions. ?

I have a photo studio built on retail lot does anyone know how to get my photog sim moved in?

Hello :) Welcome to the forums!
You are invited to visit this thread and introduce yourself.
http://forums.thesims.com/en_US/discussion/817478/hello-come-and-introduce-yourself
Happy simming! :)

What I wish I have known when getting started is when you buy your first pack, know a little bit about them. There's some info about a pack in the main menu of the game, but you can also search on YouTube, this forums and other websites to see others' opinions. I didn't know anything about any packs when I started and end up regretting getting Cats and Dogs as my first pack. I felt like it didn't add much to the game with just it and the base game. I should've started with Seasons or City Living.

"Mrosarro;c-17444457" wrote:
I have a photo studio built on retail lot does anyone know how to get my photog sim moved in?

Hello @Mrosarro :) Your sim can’t have the photo studio as their own home. But they can still live at the photo studio, but need to own a home somewhere else. The home will be where their mail goes to and where kids come home from school. You can still live at the photo studio but will need to have the other home also.

Learn how sims age and how you want to play - start with one household, but check out if rotational play is for you. A rotation brings more variety, and it might also trig your stories in many ways. Understanding how sims ageing, career promotions, bills etc are affected by moving about vs staying on one lot is essential to plan a good routine.

Take your time to enjoy each addition. Getting many new packs added at once might be twice the fun, as some packs even get better when mixed. But the content might also be overwhelming, resulting in getting the feeling of not staying on top of it all. It takes a while to get familiar with new features, ie most packs offer objects with new functionality, more social interactions and some adjusted UI. Careers often bring new stuff at the higher levels, not taking the time to get there means you'll miss some of the fun.

Check out the buyable extra traits! Some might look pretty useless with the base game only, but with a few packs added, you'll see them in a new light.

Some packs might not add a lot of obvious content, you might think Seasons is just about weather. But it's not. It changes how you'll see each of your worlds and lots - it brings tons of visual variety to the game, and also challenges you to plan your events differently (who wants their garden wedding in Winter anyway?). Same with clubs system in Get Together, it can be used as a plain club system, but it's also very in handy for bringing sims together - like gathering relatives! Throwing a wedding allows your sim to only invite sims s/he already met, but with a club packed with relatives old Auntie will no longer be left out :)

Use the gallery if you don't want to build everything yourself, or create all sims. Anything you grab there can be modified by you now or later.

A couple of things I wish I had known when I started out:

1. The Pause Button is your friend! You can pause the game and then choose what you want your sims to do & in what order to do them. Use Pause often!
2. Some actions will multi-task, saving time in filling needs. For instance, they can eat and watch tv at the same time, filling the hunger & fun bars at the same time.
3. The game will only save your sim to the library when you create them. If you have any sims born in-game or you wish to use your skilled sim in a different save, be sure to save them to My Library in Your Gallery.
4. Save early - save often - use "save as" to make a backup of a particular time. You can make backups of all of your games by copying the folder "Saves" from your "The Sims 4" folder in Documents to a safe place like an external drive
5. Sims can die! If you only have one sim in your household and they die, the game will end. You cannot save a game while a sim is dying. You CAN exit without saving, which will mean you restart the game from the point you last saved. If that was 4 hours ago, you will be sad for a number of reasons. See Tip #4 :smile:
6. Try lots of things! For sure make your sim-self (doesn't everyone start out by making themselves in sim-form?), but once you've explored a few possibilities with your first sim, feel free to branch out. Some people really like creating stories around their sims, others like setting their own goals or playing towards in-game achievements, some like building, some like creating households and still others like doing challenges written by other people. The Sims is such an open-ended type of game the possibilities are almost limitless.

Have fun! That's really the most important part

Hello.

The best advise I could give is Shift- Control-C is your friend. MOTHERLODE .

Shift Click the sim for more options ... Make ALL HAPPY

Your Welcome.

Seesin8 (CC)