T w e n t y S i d e d

This post has nothing to do with The Sims Overthinking. The save game is fine, the world is working…about as well as expected, nothing is broken or corrupted. This is fully a tangent due to a hyperfixation of mine over the last few weeks.

I should probably admit up front I do not play The Sims 4 as intended usually. I don’t even venture outside of build-mode very often, but I was feeling burnt out on building a few weeks ago after marathoning map-making using the Sims. I spent three weeks making fifty or so houses for a project, and even I was feeling the effects of too much building. I’ve been watching Let’s-Plays to sleep over the last two years, and my most recent fixation is the Super Sim Challenge This is starting to sound like I live breathe and snort Sims 4 content, but believe it or not this is my first watch through of a Sims-related let’s-play. My usual ‘sleepy time shows’ are RTGame playing Cities Skylines and Tropico 6. The Super Sim Challenge is where you make one Sim, and have them do…everything. Every milestone, every aspiration, every career, every skill. I don’t know why but I thought it sounded fun.

I was wrong but that is neither here nor there.  I made a couple and had them give me a baby, my future Super-Sim; Petra. Now, I didn’t think I’d be writing about Petra so I have very few screenshots, and none of the beginning of her life, so, c’est la vie, we will have to do without.

There are some milestones I will never be able to complete, but they’re not common. I do really have to choose between ‘be born in a hospital’ and ‘be born at home’ or ‘adopted’ because they’re all mutually exclusive, but I wanted to get as many as possible. As an infant you can only have 38 milestones (36 possible at once) so I decided to get all of the possible ones while she was a baby.

This is mostly things like ‘first baby food’, ‘learn to reach’, and ‘first bubble bath’. There are only three that you even have to leave your home for: first trip to park, first vacation, first visit to a family member’s house. Besides that there’s only one other outlier; survive seven days in a haunted house.

Seven days in a haunted house is mostly boring, the parents are flipping out because there’s hands coming up from the floor (not as cool as it sounds) and ghosts running around (who usually just do the dishes and chat). Petra wasn’t even aware it was happening, and babies can’t die, so that was just a waiting game. Park and vacation are both simple travels, but…visiting a family member’s house…

Sims don’t come pre-loaded with in game family, so her only family was her parents. I could have divorced the parents and have Petra visit the one that moved out, but I was vaguely attached to the couple, so instead I just…had them have another baby? The younger sister of Petra (randomizer-named Rosemary) was speedrun, grown, and moved out, so her still baby sister could visit…annnd, it didn’t work.

Annoying but fair, I did do something deranged. Fine, divorce is it. Dad is moved out (mom was a level 10 parent and could go into ‘super parent’ mode, I’m not losing the ability to feed and change my baby at once), and Petra is brought to dad’s new house to visit.

And, moment of truth…nothing. No milestone came. No check in the box. I spent an hour troubleshooting and…nope, no dice. That one’s just not going to work.

Petra ages to a toddler with one (well, three) missing milestones. That’s annoying.

Toddlerhood goes alright-ish. Her arms glitch out and wiggle when she gets a bath, but otherwise she does manage her major skill gains (no aspirations to reckon with yet, so that’s no problem.) But yet another milestone missed. She can’t ‘learn numbers’, the game won’t give the flashcard prompt, no matter how much I fight it. Did I mention this game came with a built-in debug-object button on every single interactable thing?

Yeah, you don’t have to put in any cheat or command, just shift-click on any object dead or alive (when it works) and you can reset it. Awful telling.

So Petra’s going to have a hard time in math class later, I guess. (I’m kidding, it has no bearing on anything if I wasn’t doing a challenge.)

Onto childhood, which went fantastic. Right? Wrong! For some reason she can’t get to the top level of the scouts after-school activity, and also, surprise! There’s a bug where children can’t quit activities. That’s fine! She can just do scouts as a teen! Wrong! Still broken! But now worse!

There are four teen aspirations and every single one has a level that can be irreparably broken and make it so you can’t continue.

‘Live Fast’ aspiration – She has to sneak out to a party where the invite is so rare there’s an entire forum thread dedicated just to figuring out how to trigger it. And no one’s figured it out. I turned off aging and played for 64 in-game weeks. That is sixteen years in the sims. That is 21 hours of gameplay. It never showed. I gave up. 

‘Admired Icon’ aspiration – She has to gain 250 followers on ‘Social Bunny’, which is one of four social medias in the game and the most broken. In my 21 hours of gameplay I managed 12 followers, and that was with min-maxing.

‘Goal Oriented’ aspiration – Your sim has to reach level three of an after school activity. But it can’t be babysitting, llama scouts, fast food employee, chess club, football, cheerleading, ect. It only works if you reach level three of…being a streamer. Managed that one after a long and frustrated Reddit thread read.

Drama Llama – The least broken; you have to declare an enemy of a school rival. The game explains it nowhere but the enemy is pre-selected and the goal only works if you declare it with the correct randomly chosen sim in your friends list.

And this is all just before adulthood. These are common bugs which I’m seeing in other let’s-plays of the game now that I’m looking.

If you were to buy every Sims 4 expansion pack (depending on the running sales of the day) your total can come out to over a thousand dollars. A thousand dollar game, which is more than borderline unplayable. If it wasn’t for forums of players with debugging commands in hand, I wouldn’t have even made it past my Sims childhood. Not even just for my challenge, but the fact your Sims can and will get stuck mid-pathing, and die of starvation while spinning helplessly at a grilled cheese. What the hell, EA?

Bay Jubilee Oldest child of Shamus Young. They/Them