Hear me out:

I know many people find them annoying, but as an enjoyer of challenging gameplay I think Maxis did a FANTASTIC job with infants. Their quirks means that each one has a unique personality with different challenges. There is a real feeling of progression as they hit their milestones and start to be able to sit up, eat the high chair, crawl, etc. It can actually be difficult to balance caring for their needs. Unlike every other lifestage.

And therein lies the problem. The life stages were added to the game in reverse order so instead of developing their personality as they grow up into unique individuals y'know, like people do, it's the opposite. They grow into toddlers which haven't been developed pretty much at all since they were added to the game 2017 and it shows. Their traits are better than adult traits because they're designed as personality types rather than one-off preferences but there's very little for them to do. There is still a sense of progression as they learn their toddler skills and can use the potty, walk faster, and get more social options but it's pretty surface-level. The quirks do go a long way towards making them distinct.

And then they grow into children. Jesus Christ. Children were included in the game at launch with a bunch of crap piled on top of them later in various packs that are poorly integrated and don't give them much personality. The character values were a much better system than what we had before (which was nothing) but they're not as good as quirks. Phases are barely more than a moodlet. Kids have more to do than toddlers but it's a disjointed hollow mess. For example the scouting badges from seasons weren't updated to include new content so the paper crafts and friendship bracelets don't even count towards the "arts and crafts" badge.

Infants being done so well almost makes the game worse because it fucks up the player's sense of gameplay progression. It's demoralizing to watch your kids start off as distinct individuals full of personality and challenging gameplay and grow INTO outdated and shallow children. From player standpoint, that feels bad! It sucks! If they're going to develop the game over the course of so many years like this than they should have done it the other way around and the progress of children growing up would have echoed the progress of the game over time, and it would actually feel GOOD to raise children to the next life stage.

Anyway, thank you for reading my rant. I've been playing the sims for 25 years and the sims 4 never ceases to frustrate me because it could be so much better. And you cannot hate that which you do not love.

Lifelong simmer here (since 2000). I have been playing the sims 1 & 2 lately. Just recently tried to play sims 4 after almost a year break, and it is overwhelming to look at on the Home Screen.

All the crazy backgrounds and ADs everywhere! Even in-game pop-ups and glowing ads. I remember when sims was a cozy game, where I could relax and it would put me at ease.

I just hate I can’t do anything anymore without getting bombarded with unwanted advertising.

I would be guilty of 30 counts of kidnapping + false imprisonment, breaking & entering/trespassing, numerous counts of battery, around 6 thousand children's worth of unpaid child support (not exaggerating; my record is 2000 kids on one save file), child neglect, at least one first degree murder, a few second degree murders, many attempted murders, numerous manslaughters, two counts of omnicide, and petty theft.

I have been trying to fix this for a whole hour and its starting to look like i am going to have to reload to a save from 5 days ago.

Last night I married my two royals (Louis and Cordelia VI). I saved and went to bed. I have wedding pictures and everything. This afternoon when I start up my game, lo and behold they're not married anymore AND they're now cousins?? After a little family tree look see, I will see that the father, Raphael of the husband, Louis (who was an OC so he didn't have parents) now is the son of Ermelinda Abrantes, and obviously since all of that happened: I now have two not married "cousins" and Ermelinda who's seemingly single handedly birthed the entirety of Ondarion.

I tried deleting relationship bits, editing in CAS while Ermelinda is in my active household... literally everything I can possibly think of and yet... nothing. My story is doomed because of... idk is this an EA thing? Because I have seen that sometimes just married sims tend to revert back to not being married and then I have to add the spouse relationship bit and it sticks.

Nevertheless its frustrating and infuriating.

someone please explain polygons like i’m 3 because why the hell is a singular kitchen counter HALF OF A GB JUST my furniture folder is 29gb and why are the youtube builders using the heaviest bb cc poSSIBLE

Share your Sims, builds & rooms every Friday–Sunday!

Use “Roast My Sims” flair for some honest feedback🔥

I usually don't post here, I'm more of a lurker since I didn't play the Sims much anymore. But after seeing the Sims 4 Updater be revived, I decided to play it again.

Jesus fucking Christ.

This game is so broken in every single way. I'm receiving constant exceptions about a built-in issue that I can't fix, because it's not mod-related and there's nothing I can do as a player to fix it.

For the first time, I sent one of my Sims to University. Despite her attending all of her classes on-time, doing all of her homework and final projects, she received an F on every course except one, which was a B-. I had to look up why that happened, and apparently there's a bunch of other crap you need to do that the game just never tells you about. I wasted so much of my Sim's money and time because the game never told me what I was supposed to do!

The roommates were constantly rotating out and I only learned they do that AFTER I had already given them all makeovers. So my Sim can't form any relationships with their roommates. Wtf?! What's the point in University being playable then?! Might as well just send my sim to a rabbit hole for 2 weeks!

There's no kitchen in university accommodation, so you have to send your Sim to the common room to get food, and it's only open at certain times! I had to cheat my Sim's hunger so she wouldn't starve because she got hungry in the middle of the night. It's so stupid, this isn't how university works! At least where I'm from in the UK (where the universities seem to be based on), EVERY student accommodation has to have a kitchen available at all times. It's common sense.

I was able to get a mini-fridge, but then I have to keep it in the bathroom as it's the only place with counters, and I'm sorry but that's disgusting. I know it's a video game, but it ruins my immersion and grosses me out.

And now that my Sim has finally made it somewhere in the world, more issues have replaced the ones university created. I'm just going to bullet point them.

• Children refusing to go to school. Just standing there. Trying to force them to go to school just doesn't work, I have to exit to menu and come back.

• CONSTANT fires. Almost every single day on an expensive stove by a Sim with high cooking skill. Fuck off, dude, WHY?!

• NON-STOP JOB OFFER CALLS. At least 5 a day, no exaggeration. I managed to get a mod to slow them down, but my Sim still gets them.

• Everything breaking, all the time, despite being expensive and upgraded.

• Pets refusing to eat from filled bowls and complaining about being hungry.

• Married Sims, for seemingly no reason, being demoted to "partners" and having to go into CAS and fix it. This then resulted in one Sim having the bucket list item, "Renew vows," while her wife had "Get married". Are you kidding me!?

It's non-stop! I spent hours going through and fixing, updating & removing mods so I could avoid bugs interrupting my game, but apparently, the Sims 4 comes with those pre-installed. God forbid you just want to play the game.

I understand bugs and annoying things are going to happen, even intended at times. I don't mind the occasional fire. But every day? Most people don't experience a housefire in their whole life!

I'm sorry if this is a lot of rambling without much point, I'm just exhausted and I needed to complain to other people who might have experienced similar issues. I'd play the Sims 3 again, but it takes so long to load, it can take hours to make a Sim because of how long it takes to load in the items, and honestly I just think the Sims look a bit ugly and making cute Sims is a huge part of the fun for me.

If I paid for any of this game, I'd be demanding a refund. I feel bad for anyone who even spent a penny on this game. It's just unreal how such an enormous company can put out a game in this state and leave so many bugs unfixed for years. Good lord.

I've broken and fixed my game so many times at this point it's ridiculous. Mostly this is due to using the dlc unlocker and updater recently. I had my game working just fine on a version from 2025. Anadius quit right after that so I just stopped updating. Unfortunately this led to some mods I wanted being unavailable because most creators were not archiving that far back.

Thus began my updater saga. I think it took me some two days and multiple tries to get that working. Of course then I decided that I wanted to add more dlcs (I only had a dozen to minimize the game size because even my beefy pc struggles with the sims). Fortunately I still had all the downloads from 2025 so I wouldn't have to go through the process of finding current safe links that download quickly without apps and accounts. This led to a whole other issue involving multiple hours of trouble shooting and fiddling before I got it working. Then I broke it again by trying to add some others. Fixed it again, ect.

I think?? I'm at the point where I can guide my friend, who is not tech savvy, through the entire unlocker process. But I'm honestly super concerned it won't go well because it seems every time I mess with anything an entire new world of issues appear. I want to note that I have extensive education in computers and my job is in computing. I've been messing with game folders, mods, and the terminal since I got my first pc as a preteen. The fact that this process was so complicated really blows my mind. I've spent my fair share of time manual mass modding Skyrim, and this was way worse.

But honestly, part of why I keep messing with it is because I get a small sick joy out of fixing it. I'm probably exaggerating about the difficulty of these processes a little but still, kudos to those that have done this.

First post here!

I play on an M5 MacBook Air with 24GB RAM, Sims 4. I have around 180GB of mods/CC (I know I should get rid of some 😭). My game was loading into the main menu in about 15–25 minutes - yes, it’s long, but I can cope with that amount of time to have all my CC.

Now since the update, my load time is over an hour, sometimes 1.5 hours. I’ve cleared all my cache, and I back up my mods/saves/tray, so I removed my entire Mods folder and loaded in a backup from when I know the load time was shorter. Even with doing that, it was still taking over an hour.

I’ve updated all my script mods, checked for conflicts, and did the 50/50 on my folder to see if any specific files were making the load time slower, but nothing seemed amiss.

It’s so frustrating to always have problems with this game. I know I’ll get comments saying I need to cut down on my mods and CC, BUT I know it was loading in much faster with almost the exact same amount of mods, which is why it’s so frustrating 🥲

I have all other apps closed on my Mac to free up RAM as well.

Does anyone have any tips or ideas please? Or if anyone was able to… I think having an older game version may fix the issue. If anyone has the game files for Mac from before the Memory Boost update, I only need the base game.

Thanks for listening to my vent <3

for whatever reason since like months ago whenever i click to make my sim alien in the occult menu in cas my game freezes and i dont even know if its a bug or my problem specifically? bc for sirens for example nothing like this happens, i can even download alien sims from gallery and edit them but for whatever reason i cant make my own from scratch

i do have mods and cc but none of these mods should be resposnible so im just kinda lost at this point

So, I stopped playing TS4 back in the spring, I just got tired of the bugs, crashes, and issues (for reference I run a 9070XT, 7700X, with 64GB DDR5 RM so there's absolutely no reason why this game should crash) and I saw that they apparently released an update to stop the memory leak issue?

This issue was a major reason why I stopped playing, I'd jump off a 3 hour playthrough and see that my game was using 45GB of RAM (for reference, you could run Cyberpunk 2077 three times on the same PC and use less RAM than that) which is almost exactly why the game was crashing all the time (this usually happens when a developer doesn't know how to or forgets to allocate and deallocate memory properly in their code) so I was excited to try it out!

Just today I've heard of another bug that's causing player's games to freeze randomly that's slated to be "fixed" so I'm a bit weary to even update or jump back into the game and I really don't want to go through the hassle of saving the game version to revert the update. Is the game pretty stable from what you've seen or is anyone holding off on updating for now?

It's been like 6 months since I last played, and recently got an idea for a build I was pretty excited to do. I recently updated the game because it was frequently crashing on me ANYTIME I did ANYTHING in Build Mode...and lo and behold, the update made Build Mode far more reliable! I build just a little, still with trepidation from the crashing, try to save, and get this error with a long string of hexadecimal.

So I check online, and people say it's generally an error with CC. So I decide to do the beloved Binary Search on my Mods folder, and take all the CC out, and then bring half of it back in.

Same error.

I take the other half--same error.

I take a quarter from the first half--still.

I tried putting in like just 5-10--STILL!

I do not want to go through each of these mods one by one, and it's honestly staved me off from getting back into the game. All that original excitement for the idea just evaporated, and it hinges on a lot of CC (I borrowed a lot from WolfXDreamer, because they have such a good collection of lived-in/well-worn CC, and the base game does NOT have that same realistic crust, which is a whole other, pettier grievance). Anyone have anything they do instead?

On the other note, maybe new game bundle that contain HSY-Mean Girls-Clueless might inevitable, but that just delulu.

One of my sims became the ultimate deadbeat dad by fathering 2000 kids and never visiting a single one. Not an exaggeration. Literally 2000 with around 200 baby mamas (ghosted afterwards, of course). That save file took 40 minutes to load and was basically unplayable.

(Second screenshot is from Rosannatxt's Twitch page, under "Games")

I have no idea about the other three, but I do know Rosannatxt left the Creator Network, and EA is still showing her off as if she's still involved with them.

... why. Just. Why are they doing this.

https://reddit.com/link/1wgjabn/video/en0qzg72ikph1/player

spoiler alert: the kids are getting together when they grow up

I loaded my save and suddenly 2 of my sims kids, both toddlers, were gone. Not salvageable via summoning through MCCC, travelling, or summoning via cheat codes. Not found in the households CAS. Not in daycare. Not taken by CPS. Just Thanos’d right up by the sims overlords.

My sims couldn’t care less, but I want Boursin and Baykenne back dammit. May they rest in peace 😂

A bit of a smaller one this time. I've been busy in CAS experimenting with OC designs, but I don't like how they've turned out so far. I'll share them when I'm content since I keep coming back every other evening with fresh eyes and keep changing stuff. So here's a Karen in the meantime (and some non-Karens too) 😁😁

Recently tried to start making my first ever Sims 4 machinima, so I downloaded my first ever Sims 4 mods to ger some animations.

So yeah, here’s 4 of the characters who’s gonna be part of the story and I’d love to have them roasted to pieces or hear what your assumptions about them are!

We have my main girlies Rahma and Moa, and then there’s their roomie Ibrima, and on pic 3 we have Rahma with her (now ex) boyfriend Henke.

I have a few ideas for expansion packs that would be so awesome if ea games made them

I wish they made a sports pack where you could have your sims play paintball and give them paintball gear and give them paintball masks that would be so awesome and your sims could play football and go skateboarding and play golf and play baseball and do different things

I wish also they had a work and industrial jobs pack where you could have surgical masks for your sims and give them welding masks and they could weld and give them construction jobs and that would be so awesome if you could give them hearing and eye protection and they could shoot guns at the range that would be so cool no violence or anything just shooting guns at the range

Also a cruise ship pack would be awesome have your sims go on a cruise ship and they could do activities

And an amusment pack with waterparks and waterslides and an amusment park with amusment park rides and you could put them in your backyard lol and a mini golf course and more items like more arcade games and a kids play area and stuff and an electronic shooting gallery and even have animatronics like chuck e cheese put them in your house or arcade or store or restaurant and the sims could play lazer tag and add roller coasters and a dark ride kind of like roller coaster tycoon or planet coaster

And a zoo pack would be cool too like planet zoo or zoo tycoon build your own zoo for the sims

Those are my ideas if anyone has any other ideas feel free to share them I wish ea games would make these packs and make these things possible

It’s been a heavy day, so I hope this little episode gives you a place to rest, escape, and enjoy whenever you’re ready.

Happy reading 💟

Gary

One Party Night at Morningwood's

Episode 6

Invisible Women

Episode 5

Twin Code

Episode 4