Stuck in a Sims Rut

I am playing out a scenario inspired by Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children.
It has a bunch of alternative life stage sims that I have been raising from toddlers: Alien, Vampire, custom cat sims, a girl that attracts ghosts (Haunted lot trait). The cat sims attract cats (cat hangout lot trait).

This has been an interesting scenario.
It's been fun setting it all up, and I have been writing up all kinds of ideas to play out, but even with this, I have run out of steam for the game. Nothing interesting happens without me instigating it. I am just going through the motions of keeping up needs, skills, and taking pictures to make up stories.

So, I am taking a Skyrim break until the next TS4 pack comes out. >:)

This happens to a lot of people. Honestly, I find nothing wrong with it.
Maybe try to narrow down the type of sims you like play. Are you a rotational player that rotates at a specific time, are you a rotational player that really doesn't care and you rotate when you get bored. What if you never play that family again? Move them out of the house and mark them as unplayed and use them as townies. Or leave them there for just in case purposes. Along these same lines are you family player? Do enjoy raising children? Do you prefer teens over children? Are you the type of player that likes single sims, aging off, lots of girl/boyfriends and drama? Do you need/want lots of different gameplay in one save? Perhaps you're a mods type of person MCCC is your thing? Hate needs? Disable them.

Maybe you need a basic timeline or outline for the sims you're playing. Perhaps set up some specific goals for your sims. Then work through them. Turn aging off and perhaps get them to the top of their career, start a club, master a couple aspirations. Maybe the single parent home is your thing. Struggling parent making ends meet with rowdy children. Too much money cheat...money x will also subtract money from your sims account.

Use other peoples challenges but do them all in the same save.

Or simply use discipline and make yourself play a household for a total 1 real life week before making a new family. Challenge yourself to see how far you can get.

omg i love that movie! that does sound like a great way to make things interesting :)

@SikoahGrace wow these are all great ideas! ty so much! And yeah i'm the type of rotational players that gets bored easily. and i do love raising children but not 5 at a time ( my sims had twins and then triplets) because then it just becomes a hassle. some days i wish i wasnt aware of cheats lol. because in a family of 7 and all their needs are low i could easily fill them. same with low money/ lights turned off. i could just motherlode. but you're right in circumstances like those it would probably be best to discipline myself maybe have a family thats barely making ends meet, or make tv/video game characters into sims etc. all great ideas! :blush:

Welcome to the club!

I found some cc for the medieval time zone, that would actually work for my 18th century Sims. That inspired me to go back several saves (I have a rotational save that I do the Save As, and name it, so that a) the file is less likely to get corrupted and b) this allows me to go back a save, or two, or several if things go very badly, rather than start from scratch. This particular Sim family are my sixth great-grandparents. The other two households in the "rotation" are their parents, my seventh great-grandparents on that branch. As you can imagine, starting all over again, which I have done too many times, grows tiresome. This was a better way to go back and capture what I missed. You many need to root around and find that object, costume, hair style, etc. that will inspire your game play.

Hmm...

For me it varies. Sometimes I play this game like it is the only game in the world and I am lucky to get a golden copy of it. Sometimes I play a little bit of this one evening and then head over to Dragon Age the next one. Then I go on a break for a bit until I start missing it again.

If it has been a long time with no drive to play the game then I usually try to go for a break. If it is more of a stutter then perhaps shaking things up. You got some good examples above.

Build something.
I am a lousy builder, no talent in that department. Sometimes I am still interested in building a bit, then I make an entire save with the intent of making the perfect lot with a specific purpose. Sometimes, seldom, I build something from scratch but often I get one as a base from the Gallery and then let a single sim or family work at getting this lot perfect and make a story out of it. I built a library from scratch and let two generations of sims make. They wrote books for it and I added items slowly after they got more money. A few days while using the lot as a working library and then making it generic again to fix things, add things and slowly make it better.

My story was that there were a family of book-loving sims living on the Island in Windenburg who slowly built a wonderful library. I have placed that build in every save after it was finished and it will probably be a year before I even start building something new again.

I like doing challenges and building. I haven't been much into playing sims from life to death, I don't like it when they die so I always play with aging turned off.

This week I started a new Rags to Riches family (probably my 4th or 5th) but with just one sim and I planned on collecting every crystal, fossil, relic and treasure and putting them in a museum. I got the idea from Thesimsupply actually but it has been so fun. OH, and I didn't use any walls to make her house. I moved her in on the island in Windenburg where the Bluffs are and removed every other house there so it's kind of like a deserted island and her house is made out of those parasols that came with Jungle Adventure, almost as if she got shipwrecked :D

Do you have Get Together? You could set up a story where there are two rival clubs who are always challenging each other to fights. Give them the same hangout lot and make a club activity being mean to the other club, and a forbidden activity being flirty or nice to the other club. Start a gathering on the lot with one club and, when the other club hopefully shows up too, watch heck break loose... and then try to make two of them secretly fall in love anyway at risk of getting kicked out of the club! Just one idea. :)

If you have a lot of or all of the packs, try going back and revisiting some of the older ones. I found when I was getting bored that I had forgotten stuff from the older packs (and I mean big features, like the entire retail system or clubs system). So maybe going back and trying something that you haven't done in a while, or something different altogether.

Also, I find doing challenges fun and helpful to get out of a rut too. Personally I like having a goal to work towards and get bored when things become too easy or lack direction. At the moment I'm doing my own take on the Build Newcrest challenge where I have to rebuild all the worlds, not just Newcrest, and I've set goals for each generation to fulfill an aspiration as well as some other things related to that aspiration (and of course, building something). I find there's enough to do in each generation that I'm always working towards something, but it's also not unachievable.

Another thing you could do is focus on the sims whims for a while. Sometimes they can take your game in directions you hadn't really planned on and make things a bit more interesting again.