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
