Tell me about your big saves

My biggest save has 214 sims marked played and about twenty permanent townies, the rest I cull manually after each session. The game is not allowed to cull sims or relationships and relationship decay is set to 10% to ensure that the only changes that occur come from actual gameplay. Aging is off, I move the timeline along when it feels appropriate.

The story in this save revolves around the detective career sims and their extended families, to the point that whenever world-shattering events occur (like werewolves getting discovered, magic coming to the world or the first contact with Sixam), those events somehow are centered on the Detroit municipal police, central station. It's totally unrealistic, but that's just how things are.

Supporting characters fade in and out of the spotlight. I play a household intensely and then have them stay in the background for rl months. Sometimes I think I do not really play my sims, but the overall story of my city. I decide what event will happen next, and then I pick a family that fits this theme best.

I have a few little side saves (like my save for JTB, which I didn't really want in my main save), but I mostly play one large rotational save that has been ongoing since I started the game. I, too, play in a loose rotation; some households I play more frequently or for longer periods; sometimes it depends on my mood, sometimes it depends on what new gameplay I want to check out.

I couldn't tell you exactly how many households I have, but I'm usually hitting right around, or just under 200 played Sims. I try to keep 200 as the cap for performance, but there are some "background" sims that I move in and out of unplayed periodically, whenever I need room to have a baby, add a pet, etc. I've never had a problem with any of those being culled, as they are housed, have jobs, and have relationships with my played sims. (I also regularly cull the unplayed sims that are automatically generated.)

Someone pointed out to me a few years ago that the premades/townies for various worlds often have a hidden trait to indicate that they are a native of that world. (E.g., Sulani native, Henford native, etc.). So when I start a new pack, I go in and evict all of the premades, then add them to one household with maybe some townies, local sims from the gallery, or sims of my own creation, and I make sure that they already have (or I add) that hidden trait, before evicting them all again. That way, I can free up houses, while also improving my odds of having locals of my own choice wandering around, instead of just, like, Nancy and Katrina. However, sometimes I will also temporarily leave the premades in their original homes until I actually have a need to move in a different household.

While I don't play with most of the premades, I do at least occasionally check in on the classics, like the Goths and Landgraabs, and definitely give them jobs, update their houses, maybe add family or other relationships. For TS4, I had to add a Worthington family (frenemies of the Landgraabs), because I was surprised they haven't shown up yet, since they date back to at least TS2 in both lore and premades.

Usually I just wait for ideas for new households to come to me, based on new pack content, a name I heard that I thought was cool, old sims lore, etc. I'm not actually planning to create any new households for Growing Together, but I'm going to start creating families with several of my existing households that have been on hold for years. Oh, and not surprisingly, I play with aging off. Though with the new pack, I expect I will soon start using manual age-ups more frequently than I have so far.

I play only one save, the one that was started back in 2014. I'm amazed that it still works. And - without any way I can stop it, the population is growing - and that is *before* we get infants... Last time I looked there was nearly 600 sims. I think there might be 120 households, all actively played, but yup, some visited just quickly to adjust with careers and births etc.

I focus a lot on community building, and the more I add the better I understand how things should have been done differently in the past. So, there is always development. I have a kingdom ruled through 3 chambers, where of one has 21 politicians including a President and a VP. There are 5 years elections and currently 3 political parties. There is also nobility with a good range of dukes, counts and barons. When I realized my royal family had only lower ranked sims to mingle, I founded 2 more kingdoms, LOL, but those are mostly the royal family and hardly any stately system.

I like to make essential stuff available to the common sims, ie I use cc corkboards with stuff to hang on it, and I create new swatches to allow sims to decorate with anything from favorite party logo to signed card from their favorite actress or musician. Elders like to add a photo of the royal family, LOL. I also make CC to have tons of nice and formal family portraits on the manor's walls. The royal palace has tons, but other finer Houses often have a handful, too.

And I keep family trees and profile pages for all sims, many trees going back 6-7 generations. I actually played Sim Medieval just to learn a bit about their founders and how they looked :)

Half the fun for me is to plan and organize, and most of it is available on my TS4 site (tons more contents than you will ever want to see, LOL), plus my blog. I also have a local Newspaper online.

I have two saves currently and they are both SimLit stories. The big one is Under The Tartosan Sun and that one has 6 main characters and at least 15-20 secondary characters that pop in and out. The ladies in my profile picture, Londyn and Danielle are the stars of the show so to speak. They are my own creations. The other four are Summer and Liberty who have received makeovers and their fiancés who are my own creations. The secondary characters only include one or two premades the rest are my own. The other story Schemes & Dreams is just getting started so the cast is still growing. It's has more premades, mostly the celebrities, Judith, Brytani, Octavia, and Thorne. I gave Johnny Zest a radical makeover into a drag queen named Lady Mimi, who has turned into everybody's favorite character. The rest are almost entirely my own creations. Both stories still have quite a few of the premades still in them, but they're just background filler. Occasionally one will have a brief appearance but nothing more.

When I started both stories I intended for the sims to do their own thing and I would build storylines and dialogue from anything interesting they did that I thought I could work with. Both stories have turned into more of a situation where I come up with the storyline and then I direct the action to get the shots I want. That happened for a few different reasons, but the main reason was a lot of the main characters had careers that are part of the story but they're the type of careers that if I don't direct them to write a novel or accept an acting gig, nothing will ever happen. As I've gone on I've realized I can do something similar with the ones with rabbit hole careers. I build lots to look like and perform like their workplace. When the storyline calls for them to do something at work I send them to the lot I made and I act out their work scenes. Since they are technically unemployed I cheat them some money every sim week or two to simulate a paycheck. So they have their days free to do whatever they want when I'm off with one of the other households until I need them to 'work'. It's so much more fun to act out what I think is happening at work instead of them just disappearing for a few hours.

I'm not quite done reading everyone's entry yet but keep em coming, I love it (and for the person who said sorry about rambling: never be sorry when you talk about the things you love!)

Only one save for me since I started playing in early 2017, and yep, it's a big one. I made a second save about a year and a half ago, mostly to try out different versions of families and stories from the other one, but didn't get very far with it.

My main save is filled with all kinds of different sims, including my simself and sim versions of my friends and family, as well as characters from video games, novels, TV shows and movies, premades, etc. With roughly 340 played sims across over 100 households, you can probably imagine that I've tried out all ages, occults, and living conditions I could think of. The most boring world to me would be one where everybody is exactly like me. That being said, there are certain repeating patterns in my gameplay. For example, my sims tend to focus more on their hobbies and careers than social contacts and romance, and while I do play with families of varying sizes as well, most of the kids come straight out of CAS rather than being born in-game.

What defines my playstyle the most is probably the worlds, and how each has a different theme that is represented by the sims living there. In other words: I don't just move households wherever I want, but to a place where they actually fit in. The worlds themselves also follow certain rules. I have divided them into four different regions: The urban region with its capital San Myshuno, the country region with its capital Windenburg, the mountainous region with its capital Mt. Komorebi, and the desert region with its capital Del Sol Valley. I know that these distinctions only exist in my head, but they do influence the way I play. For example, if a sim from Windenburg wants to hit the gym, but there isn't one in their hometown, they visit the one in Brindleton Bay, another world within the country region, rather than the one in Oasis Springs, which is part of the desert region.

These are the themes of the individual worlds at the moment:

URBAN REGION


COUNTRY REGION


MOUNTAINOUS REGION


DESERT REGION


... Sorry for the lengthy post that probably includes way more information than anyone ever asked for. But I had a lot of time waiting for the EA App to finally work again.

"Ninoosim;d-1007095" wrote:
My favorite thing in the sims has always been playing with a big cast of characters, creating links between families. I like playing in a very loose rotation, always aging off, jumping from households to households as the mood strikes. Sometimes you wanna play a nice happy family, other times you need to play an unhinged old dude with his 16 cats, you feel me? A save always feels more special when you "know" everyone!

Sadly blogs and forums are dying and it's getting harder to find people who play like me. So please, tell me all about your world! What's your favorite families, how long have you played them, what's going on in their lives? Do you plan in advance and make their homes etc match your vision or do you make a household and go with the flow? At what point do you feel like a household's story is "finished" and you let them become a background character? Have you ever revived a background character because they were better suited for a new pack?

I've basically played with the same save from the very start. Like you, it's been a rotational (when I feel like it) game where I've just added more and more characters and people as I've needed them for my "main sims". Some of those additions became main sims.
There's been ideas in my head, but times when the game has never gone in the direction I have wanted to go. I always have visions for my sims and have never just played them to go with the flow....they're my "design for my world". LOL. I am the Creator.
I have too many favorite sims to list, right from Frank Miner who was created in 2014 all the way up to the current sims I am playing in 2023.

I would absolutely DIE if anything ever happened to this save.

And yes, I have revived a sim...(in this same save) and used her to serve another purpose in a different story line....they both co-exist.


Destiny is my gardener/collector sims who made all plants perfect.
https://i.imgur.com/kiSnDAu.png

Her "mold" in CAS became Ms Higganbotham when witches came out. She needed a few tweaks I just wanted a witch already adept at gardening and potions.

https://i.imgur.com/kRmkPXM.png

I have multiple save files, and different things going on, as well as similar things.
For my PC version, I have at least 8-10 save files, but each one just has one family. Those save files I plan for the one family to extend through the save file through generations.
My PS 4 version is a whole other animal. I have at least 6-7 at the moment, and the best way to describe it is insane. My biggest save file also serves as my test file. In it I was on a Frozen kick, so my Sims are Anna, Elsa, and Kristoff based on canon, AU, and other stuff all living together. I threw in some other Sims too to break up having just Sims based on Frozen. It is hilarious seeing my magic realm made up of nothing but Elsa Sims, though. I also plan to change the file through generations, for example, one family has a family I named one kid Hiccup, and another one Astrid, so I plan to change it up through generations.
Two other big save files I have are similar, I have normal Sims in both, but each one is filled up with Sims based on series I like. I like a series called Natsume's book of friends, and have my own version of the main character, as well as ones downloaded from the Gallery. I have more of a mixture of series I like in another save file.
One save file I am working on is loosely based off of Harry Potter. I have five families so far, but plan to add more. My main three are Ron, Harry, and Hermione as toddlers in their families. I am keeping Harry's parents alive, and have to leave the Ginny as an in-game born Sim, so there may end up being more Weasleys. My other two families are Harry and Ginny with their kids as teens, and Ron and Hermione with their kids as teens. Still working on the save file on and off.
I have another save file with three families so far. Two were a separate Elsa and Anna, who I had pursuing careers. I wanted to focus on careers, so they had one to themselves. I gave Elsa two teens, and Anna with two teens, and a child she had with Kristoff. I gave Elsa a boyfriend when I moved her out, and edited a kid for her. She and her boyfriend don't like each other, but love their daughter. They were put on the back burner, because I used the save file for a scenario, and the Sim I made for ended up getting with Clement Frost. So, once I am done with the scenario, those two will be the founders on an not so planned legacy.
I have another save file that I moved large families I created in CAS, and made them all neighbors. I wanted to experiment with looks, and wanted a place to put them, so I made a save file for them.
My last current save file is based on my Sims 2 game. I used to keep a list of the Sims I created for Sims 2, and made them again for Sims 4. I have most of the families I created for Sims 2 in there, and may add a bit more, or keep the population smaller for now.
I still plan to create some save files based on Avatar the last Airbender and Legend of Korra. As well as some other series I like. For my Avatar and Korra it may be generational like the series, or have Zuko and Mako the same age. It may be a mix of both. For series I like, I tend to create a save file dedicated just to them, however other series I like may be mixed into save files with normal Sims. I also don't want to fill up the entire save file since there isn't much room for the amount of Sims I want to include. In my first save file, almost every single available house is filled as well as houses I pulled from the Gallery. So, I have to plan my goals and save files going forward.

My favorite save will always be my Gilmore Girls save, one that I created several years ago. I watched the entire Gilmore Girls series and loved the characters. A favorite Game Changer of mine started a Gilmore Girls Let's Play series on her channel and I was hooked. I poured over the Gallery looking for the main buildings and homes from the series. It took me months to collect all the main characters, then set up the town to my liking. By the time I moved it to another desktop, I had 70 Sims living in two worlds. All 70 of them consisted of the main characters as well as some of the minor characters that I took a liking to and wove into the story. Whenever I sat down to play that save, I made sure I had at least four hours to spare because it was a very intense save to play. There was always something going on that required my attention. The festivals, the holidays, town meetings. I tried to play it as closely as I could to mimic the series. It now sits on a desktop that has a 32-bit system. So, it is considered a Legacy save. Forever frozen in time but safe should I ever want to play with it again. But how playing it again would work with the EA App I don't know. Someday I will probably look into it because I might want to go back there and visit.

These are my sims that I started playing in 2015. This is an old story, but it still continues to this very day.
I refused to have them get married and start families because we did not have toddlers and family game play at the time.


So they were pretty much Career/Party focused.


Olivia Banks is my main sim and everyone else is her friend or a friend of her friends.
I play them all and intertwine their lives


By the time we got toddlers and the packs I felt I needed, (Parenthood, Discover University, and High School Years) this group had grown to 24 sims. I felt it was time to start playing families.

Instead of matching them up, I decided to age them all down to toddlers in CAS and gave them parents.