Tell me about your big saves

I have 6 saves, and every one is themed. For example, one is dedicated to building, and another is dedicated to creating freaks and weirdos. I play 5 out of 6 of those saves in heavy rotation.

Gameplay; there are never any background stories (or families) in my games, my sims live for the moment. If I send a sim to my outdoor club in Windenburg in a blizzard, and people are dancing in the snow (and falling lol), that's the story. It's all about making my sims do funny stuff.

Oh, and as for big saves; I think I have a couple of them with over 50 households?

I have two main saves that I always come back to. One is a rotational play with all the pre-mades. My plan is eventually to have them ALL linked in the family tree as one big family. I like to put different household sims into uni together where they will develop their relationships and then they get together and have their kids after uni.

My favourite save is my Legacy save. I play each family member on a rotational basis. I am currently playing with grandchild 7/10 of the original founder. I play each family until each child has gone through uni and has got married and had their first child. It is getting longer and longer to play each family with each new pack that is released. Growing Together is going to make a massive difference to my game and I can see it taking even longer to play each rotation but I'm not complaining! There is a link to my legacy tree in my signiture.

I play mostly with premades and mixing them with each other
so for me its more about exploring them all in my own time
I've been playing this save about 3? years by now
and most of the households are only like on the first few children :lol:

I also aspire to build something of my own for every lot in the game while at it
so thats rather time consuming

as for stories i sometimes scheme beforehand
and sometimes i just feel like playing some family without particular goal
and as for when story is finished it really never is
unless the sim is dead they'll be on background chillin as i play other household

I don't really revive sims all that much
because i feel like by the time i kill them their purpose in the story is fulfilled
i don't want to do everything in the game with one family and all that

but i do have plans to maybe resurrect Emily Parcel when I get HSY
because she barely got to exist in my save
before she had the bad luck of meeting Olive Specter :lol:
and I do think I might make her teacher

My playstyle sounds very similar - I have one main save, a very loose rotation though I like to keep aging either normal or long. The aging progress is really slow though because I play thirty or more households. Ideally I'd like to build some history or add characteristics to each world and then the families living there would get to enjoy this rich environment. However I do sometimes have trouble tying the loose ends and also when sims die it can leave an empty spot. Like I had this cult kind of neighbourhood in Oasis Springs where the leader died and I haven't had clear idea how to build the community back up. Generally there's just a lot to keep up with, but I like to aim high despite the hit and miss success. I also just enjoy different kind of families, all sorts of occults and personalities. I have real trouble letting go of families. I think having the aging on makes it more difficult, I just want to be with them until the end. I've been writing blog stories from my save since 2015. There's so much going on that's not ending up in the blog, but at least I always have something to write about when an inspiration hits.

I have a few different saves, one specifically for my supernaturals, a legacy one and a couple of other random ones.

But my favourite one I am so connected with most of my sims. Started as a strict rotation fully planned out. But I found this a bit hard to maintain and I used to lose interest if I got to a household where I wasn't quite sure of a plan for them, or it was a bit boring getting them there.
So then I decided I would make it more relaxed. I choose at random, but I do have a notebook of ages and family links so that I make sure they are aged up in the right order etc.
And I go with the flow more, I recently found a household with a toddler and a baby in it, no parents so I had one of my sims take them in. Took a lot of figuring out and has completely thrown off my originals plans for them, but seems to have opened up the possibilities a bit more. I also think this could go so well with Growing Together, not too sure if the family dynamics will be relevant though as they aren't official children. :/
In this save I have:
A scientist girl who took in her little alien brother (who was a massive curveball in my game anyway) when her mum died and dad moved to the retirement home. Actually ended up working so well for her story.
A pro at flower arranging and has her own store she runs with her husband and has his son and adoptive daughter chat with the customers when they get back to school.
A 5 star celeb.
A wannabe criminal who married a guy, stole his money, slept around with other men and woman fathered twins who have disappeared (literally, they have pictures in his family tree but are completely gone from game and not aging either,) but he has semi learnt the error of his ways. He got a young girl pregnant and decided he didn't want to lose this child too so they are settling down together.
I had the 'perfect' nuclear family, the son has grown up wanting the same thing, they won the lottery, had twins themselves and now his wife isn't happy.. Not sure on where this one is going to go just yet...
I have a police man. An explorer...

I need to start planning the next generations starting points really.

Basically trying to get a bit of variety throughout the families in this save. Sorry for the rambling! :D

I created my Cantrell family for the mini-series in my siggie. So, Brianna being the O/C, Erik and her other siblings and parents were background characters created to fill out her own background. I used to play her in my games, to do what I wasn't able to do in the book. I've played them since Sims2, quite frankly. Erik became the Mayor of whatever neighborhood they were living in way back then. When we got a professional singer career in Sims3, I switched to Erik as the main star, if you will. He ended up living with his sister and her new husband, so I could continue to control him as he built his career. That way I could build Brianna's family, too. It took a great deal of effort for me, to let him move out. Finally the time was ready, but he had a disastrous love-life. He fell in love too quickly, without really getting to know the woman he chose to make his life-partner. Breaking things off before they walked down the aisle, usually. He finally married and they had a baby boy right away. She used to put the newborn out on the lawn, at night, in the rain. (She did this autonomously.)

When Sims4 came around I brought Erik back to be my Founder of the Pinstar Legacy Challenge. I discovered playing on normal was just too short. Erik died and then his wife died a few hours apart. I decided after I completed the challenge (when the first heir of generation ten was born) that I wanted to play him again. On LONG. Some of you have read my updates and know how often I've had to restart.

So, it's no surprise, I'm sure, that I have chosen Erik and his bride-to-be, to be the first of my Sims to play with Infants.

I also play a loose rotation, if you can even call it that. Particularly when I was playing my ancestral save. I have my favorites, that I don't like to leave, but if one of the other families was due to have another child, I would pop on over and using MCCC get that child started, or sometimes even born, if I left things too late. It's a bit more fun for me to do it that way, rather than a strict, house one, house two, house three, start again.

I don't play it a lot anymore but my Westbrook save is still one on my favorites. It's rotational but all households are descendants of my founding Sim, Emilia Westbrook and Paolo Rocca. It started out as the "I'm a Lover" Challenge but quickly became a rotational save. It was actually one of my first times playing rotational.

Like I said, I don't play it very often anymore. I got frustrated when I realize I had skipped generation 4's toddler pictures and lost all motivation. Until that point, I had every single lifestage of every single sim documented.

I dunno about big saves, but I've got some long lived ones.

The initial vampire save I did that was long term turned into one where the initial vampire served to sire the second which I then decided was my favorite and is 520some days old. I also have a variation of that save where she is stand alone and racking up quite the fortune as the night time shift crime leader... Oracle.

But that first save was unique in that the family won the lotto of a million simoleans and such.. Its getting fairly empty, that first save. That save, vampire retired from Oracle and went to scientists career, then dabbled in stuff... And had children as well, I dont really know how many, just that its been over 10 kids that have been grown up and moved/died/etc..

Similar with the second variable on that save, she's had a number of kids and they've grown and such...

Then there's my Yopson save. He started out in the detective career and had a cat. I eventually let the cat die or something as I started basically seeing how many kids I could get before it broke the game... Thus far, he has fathered 114 kids in total; about 5-10 have already died, and he has several grandkids somewhere in that game. I have taken the choice to export several of his offspring into my library. As far as I can tell, he's had 14 kids with an imported version of Lilith Pleasant and 2-6 children with many of the other females in that game. Even ended a couple papparazi this way.... Nosy things.

Depending on the update, I'm leaning toward Yopson settling down with Lilith Pleasant, maybe 130 kids isnt all that far off anymore...

My save file is all about world-building. It's a world where occults live out in the open and have their own, unique cultures. (Spellcasters have a school and a religious leader, Orcs live in tribes, many lots are built with "panic rooms" to accommodate werewolves, etc.) There are tons of long-running families, each with their own theme and place in society. There are tons of intricate societal rules and quirks I make my sims follow, unique holidays for each occult, and drama. Just recently, I capped off a plot that's been running for about 4~ IRL years, about an evil spellcaster who stays immortal by possessing the body of his descendants.

I play every family, but my main family are the Stellars. They're a spellcaster family who don't have a concrete theme compared to most families, since I like to change things up. But unlike most spellcasters, they're more willing to marry outside their life state. The current religious leader is one of their ancestors, and that's a whole bit of drama because he had to execute the current heir's dad for plot-related reasons, it's this whole thing.

I haven't played in my big rotational save in a long time, but I recently had an idea of how to get back to it (the story was running out and it was getting glitchy). I started it with four sims about to go through university: a brother/sister pair, then potential spouses for each of them. The potential spouses hit it off with each other, so the siblings found their own love interests. I also had an alien scientist to play through the active career. Then I made some mermaids to play with, discovered mods to flesh them out, and suddenly I had a couple of occult dynasties that were all up in each other's business. Gen 2 had a storyline where the alien scientist's daughter wanted help from the astronaut hero of strangerville and a spellcaster in being more normal; when they wouldn't, she cloned their wives to keep captive, then fed the real wives bad pufferfish. Gen 3 had a Romeo/Juliet storyline between the the spellcaster/astronaut's traumatized children. Spellcaster had been going to set up his son with the mermaid baby he had raised from infancy, but the son had other ideas.

Once Gen 3 got together, I ran out of steam on their stories. The story needed something like werewolves, but at the time those weren't anywhere near the roadmap. I didn't want to stop with those sims since I was so attached, but I didn't have any ideas for where to take them. I tend to set up an end goal for my sims, then roll with whatever the game gives me on the way. My stories have been way better for not sticking strictly to the script. If I had stuck to my original plan, I would have just had two cookie-cutter families living in the suburbs instead of three occult families building towards...something.

I'm not a huge builder, but I love taking photos. I just trawl through tumblr looking for suitable houses. This storyline actually happened across 3 saves. The first I just moved into a better, rebuilt save file very early on, no story explanation. MCCC settings got away from me, so I needed to move them again. I made an evil spellcaster to play the paranormal pack, and she was instantly attracted to my main spellcaster. So that made a convenient story was to justify suddenly dragging them all into a completely different reality. I tend to get the kids to play out new packs or make a new sim and work them into the main storyline.

I never intended to let any of them fade into background characters; I couldn't bear for them to age and die off unplayed. However, I recently had an idea for how to work in werewolves and a few favorite characters into a new variation on this main story. I've been making a lot of extra background characters in CAS while waiting for Growing Together to drop, and imported a extra families that I played for a short period before moving on. Once I update to infants, I'm going to get back into this with a new save for the favorites - new makeovers, new friends, new buildings. It's going to be fun.

My other save was a legacy, so I only cared about the one main family. I kept it separate because I didn't care about the background characters, and I knew it would bother me if any of my faves did weird things in the background.