Rotational Play - Documenting Your Game

I have such a poor memory that I cannot play my rotation without some sort of records, so I make a 'story' photo album for each household. I use LibreOffice Impress (the skinflint's version of PowerPoint lol) and add screenshots I have taken during play and then very brief written details of important events so that I can open a particular household story before loading them up to check what happened in the past. The beginning of each document has a page with their immediate family tree, a page of other family members and a picture of their house with their address details, then I go on to the 'story' and just add to it with each play session.

It gets more complicated when one household member marries another household member though, and I have to combine their stories!

A blog would probably work best. I use to use the Old Sims 4 forums to document my game play. But the new format doesn't lend itself to how my old documentation was structured, so I have given up on it.

CK213's TS4 Favorite Simming Moments [TS4: For Rent pg. 22] | EA Forums - 2157055

This new forum is just endless scrolling with no idea of how much content is really there and no way to jump around. I really want pages back. The old forum was built around how simmers socialize and tell stories. This new forum is more about EA wanting all gamers in one place so hopefully they will spend money on other games besides the game they normally play. Who cares how different these gamers are from each other and their unique cultures?

I also use Microsoft Excel spreadsheets to track information on my sims.

You Tube ? Sorta like you could have series. One main track, and then... Like spinoffs... Just basically a sim soap opera.

In this link thread there is a link to google sheets that list all the lots in the worlds, and helps you to keep a note of what households are in what lot. There is also a “ completion checklist” which may help you to mark off the skills, careers, aspirations etc that your sims have completed. Although these may not help you with your question of how simmers document their households gameplay, I thought that it may perhaps help you in some way 🙂A blog may be best for documenting gameplay.
A spreadsheet of every lot in TS4 | EA Forums - 1521988

I'm really interested to hear the suggestions you get. I play rotationally myself and the amount of sims I have is a bit exhausting sometimes. I don't follow a schedule either, I play who I please. I have been keeping a blog of my stories, but now I haven't felt like writing anything for a couple of years... I haven't had much inspiration. I wish I could get back writing!

https://simsimsere.wordpress.com/

I feel I came up with a pretty unique documenting system of tagging my sims in all the stories they appear and tagging the main families of the story as well. That allows me to find all the related stories with just one click. Wordpress also lets you to write a short paragraph under each tag so I utilized that as well. A fair warning though, last time I tried to update said paragraps the system was really glitchy and it was hard to get anything done.

I don't document my sims as I can pretty much remember their stories and there is enough in game information to know about them if I forget something, and I also take pictures quite often. Maybe you could keep track of them by household, to document main household events and stories and then a separate biography for each sim to document personal stuff and such. You could also create a database or spreadsheet to easily sort  and keep track of the sims in your game and their achievements.

Thanks for sharing how you administrate your game. It's interesting, as my own savew is 10 years old and I (try to) play all households which must count close to 800 sims by now. The biggest negative is that I need longest time span, and my sims age veeeery slowly. There are still a few elders in my game that were created as YA back in 2014.

I have several routines for keeping track on the progress.

Most important is a spreadsheet where I group households by world and hood. Each houseold has one line per sim, when they move or die I color their info gray. The first few columns include notes regarding to-do. When I start a new sims year, I will check for upcoming birthdays as well as who should try for a baby (using a dice to allow for a touch of faith). The good thing re spreadsheets is that I easily can add more pages with misc background info from my sim universe, like rules, schools, elections etc.

The spreadsheet tells the story of each lot/household. The individual info is mainly static, like DNA, preferences and family relations. I have another system online where I add bigger events to each sim's "life line" (example), there I also  can access their family trees. I programmed this online stuff in javascript, and in the past other simmers were interested in a copy, but the system has grown into a monster including way too many scripts and details to make sense to others. When starting I had no idea how much it would grow, and it's now too late for re-programming. There is also a "community section" helping me to keep track on community matters, combined with my blog.

I also keep some photos from households, but mainly formal photos (like a posing group photo including their family, or single sim portraits), not from their everyday life. I have created one folder per family and for some political/community groups, to easily navigate.

I have a different save game for each world — and I have all the worlds so quite a few save games now! I rotate through the saves in order, and try to take at least a few screenshots to document interesting or significant things that happened. I then write up what happened in that save game on a Tumblr blog I started about a year ago. I like it because I can post privately, so no one else ever gets to see it, which takes the pressure off me. Also it means I can upload my screenshots and then delete them from my Mac (they take up too much space). I think you can upload about 30 photos per post. I really like being able to look back and read the stories of what happened previous times I played particular households.

I have a 2-page Word blog on each main family that I play and also have a photo save file with the latest game update included from Manage Worlds for each of my played saves (I play one family per save).

I came back after this topic inspired me to make a blog post again! 😀

So... I said I used wordpress tags to track my characters, but it's not tags - it's actually categories. I also checked and editing them is now working fine, so I can really recommend this system if it's something that picks your interest.

Here are how the categories are edited in the "main editor" with some bits that I've written for my sims. There is a parent category (family) and sub categories (sims belonging to that family).

Here is how the categories look when being added to the posts. So basically I search for the correct family and then add sims that are present in the story and family name if I think that the post is crucial for a certain family. To make things easier, I don't move sims from one family to another when they marry.

Also here is how the categories show up in my blog. It would be ideal if I could have separate tag clouds for parent and sub categories, but AFAIK that's not possible. That's why all the families have "the", so at least they get grouped together.