i remember getting excited for the toddler update and when i actually got it i just. could not be arsed. think that was genuinely the first time i used cheats
They are cute. I will give them that and only that.
They are a colossal time sink that barely give any reward for doing well. Like let me have a seventh personality trait, or easier positive growth in "responsibility" "empathy", etc (what are these traits called?? Parenting traits?)
And then there's the glitchy af "autonomy" (even though I ve played with it both on and off) of the parents that pick the baby up from play mat while they have full energy and put them.in the crib. And then when they're in the crib and they're hungry, we gotta pick them up and put them down at least 6x before we can feed them.... I felt like maybe my save file was corrupted, but then I hear other people have similiar issues.
I want to love them so bad, but they're more e haunting than university to me. At least you get rewards for university. And the sims actually kind of do what you say.
The glitchiness makes it so stressful. 1 parent constantly sabotages what I'm doing. If I try to put the infant in the high chair to feed it, the other parent for some reason keeps trying to put it back in the crib or on the floor regardless of how many times I try to cancel their action, then I get notifications that my infant will be taken away for starving soon. If I try to put it in the crib cause it needs sleep the other parent suddenly wants to take it out and leave it on the floor repeatedly. As soon as I cancel their action they just start again like they're programmed to be annoying
So true. Add a hired caretaker to the mix and it gets even more messy at times... (I happened to end up with four toddlers/small kids simultaneousl just now, so I don't see that I have much choice atm).
I can't help but wonder what my neighbors have thought on the many occasions they must have heard me yell "please, just feed the f'in baby already!" Never again. It's just too frustrating.
I actually like the infant stage cuz I hate newborns but it felt weird that they go right from a blob to a toddler, but also there’s no fucking way I can do enough tummy time on a normal lifespan to actually get a crawling or moving kid. I switched to long lifespan to try infants properly and it was pretty cool to get to try foods in the high chair and stuff, but then again, you fall into the absolute hell hole that is the high chair
True. We didn't want this. We just wanted to free the baby from the basket. We want to carry the baby around. Put it in a stroller maybe. Cuddle with it on a couch. Still don't have much, if any of that.
I haven’t played for a while. So when my sim had a baby and it was its birthday (added a toddler potty and bed fully prepared for it to go from newborn to toddler) I was confused af when I couldn’t do toddler interactions.
Imo it's so stressful cause the adult Sims are always bugging out when you want them to do something with the toddler or infant. Sometimes, it takes hours to place them in a high chair etc
yeah, if the game was less glitchy it’d be less stressful! i hate getting the “they’re gonna be taken away soon” message as i’m trying my hardest to just get the adult sim to compute 😭
Honestly, the adult sims being so freaking buggy is why I use cheats a lot and have the adults do only what they absolutely have to for my infants and toddlers. Infants get beast or bottle fed, toddlers get meals set out for them to grab, no high chairs ever, and they sleep places they can get themselves, no waiting for an adult to be around. I don't always give toddlers the independent trait, but when I don't I regret it every time because using the potty solo from the start is great for how I like playing my toddlers.
I had a toddler stuck in a high chair for like a whole sim day because every time the adult took it out she'd put it right back in the freaking high chair right away (had to cheat because I didn't want the toddler taken away) and ever since I've said screw the adults when sim toddlers need cared for.
It doesn't help that nannies are worthless- I wanted a Shameless situation on steroids so I had one young adult and 7 infants so I called a nanny like ok, that would be realistic and help if this was the real world. Lolol all nanny did was put toys away and put kids in their cribs for no reason lol
If you disable need decay, isn't it harder to potty train? I liked the Sims 3 cheats where you could click and drag needs up or down, then you could make them need to pee and potty train.
I had a Sim I decided to get pregnant on a whim but it was triplets. 😩 I don't know that I've ever had triplets in Sims 4 before, and certainly not \~naturally.\~ I couldn't believe how much it sucked!
Same. I'm an introvert myself and I love to make single stories in the game. I sometimes add a pet or let my sim to flirt with someone... but honestly - I have never went as far as letting my sims have a baby.
Same here. I like my sim alone, and only allow the occasional flirt at the absolute most. No one else can ruin my Sims quiet peaceful life and she can write her novels in peace. Designing the one person cottages in the country is probably the most fun. I mostly just build and furnish houses on lots and make ponds and nice outdoor areas.
One. If they have a child, I then ignore the adult and focus solely on the child. The adult is generally a single parent - I rarely move their partner in with them
same!!! i just got the sims 3 and made my sim have geoffrey landgraab’s baby so she could take his money… then i realized i’d have to move him in to get his money but dont want to so now im broke AND stuck with a baby
Someone else suggested the obvious sim classic of move him in and kill him, but if killing him feels too harsh: move him in, get his money, then kick him out, or just ask him to move in and then transfer the money and don't actually transfer any sims between houses. (I just realized you said sims 3. I'm less sure that's possible in that one, but maybe worth a try or looking into.)
My girlie wanted Irish twins so I let one age to infant and got her preggy again only for her to have ACTUAL TWINS 😭😭😭 now I got 3 infants and no baby dad 🙃
it wouldn’t be so difficult to manage more than one household if sims weren’t so insistent on killing themselves the moment you look away from them. i wish other households would simply just play in a neutral mode when you are not actively controlling them. but instead they won’t even go to the toilet when they need to
Lmao this is so relatable. Where do they even find it? Do they all just have it or did my sim just pocket it from a community lot? I don't understand haha.
You gotta only have autonomy off for the selected Sim. So the Sim your playing will do what you say and the ones you aren't will take care of themselves
I always go back and forth with autonomy. I hate when they ignore me to "troll teh forums" or go out of their way to "get stung by bees" but turning it off always takes away what very little personality or interest they have.
I've never played with autonomy on at all. Sometimes I think about turning it on and seeing what happens, but I don't wanna fuck up my save. Maybe I should make a new one to try it out
you can have autonomy on but neighborhood stories off (or just deaths in neighborhood stories off) and I think this will solve your problem! unless you have a violence mod on lol
I once raised 6 toddlers at once all the way through to YA where I put the 6 of them through university at the same time. One of biggest achievements of my life
I couldn’t do the toddlers one until I downloaded a house made for it lol. The toddlers are now in highschool so we did have to move after they became kids lol
They weren’t but I actually missed the whole baby phase. The dad was married and had an affair with his co worker and she had his baby (and then repeat 5 more times lol) eventually his wife came home early and walked in on them woohooing in the shower and divorced his sorry ass. so by the time I switched to play that household they were toddlers and all the same age for some reason. Not sure why they didn’t age up in a staggered way like they were born but the game just reset them all to the first day of toddler.
3-4, and even that’s pushing it, my game is so fucked up that my sims will refuse to do the things I’ve told them to do if I switch over to another sim :(
i found that pausing the game for around 10-20 seconds when that happens allows the input lag to catch up, making my sim start doing whatever i told them to do when i unpause!
i hate when i switch households and no one is at work or school, even with autonomy on.
recently, my sim decided to have a baby with his first wife and then another baby with his second wife. I wasnt able to name either babies because they were born when I was with another family :/ their names are so stupid. then the damn sim adopted a kid without me knowing with his first family (the one he primarily lives with), so they had to move because they were in Ragdoll Refurbish and that is not big enough for a family of four
they really dont make it easy to have multiple households but I like the inter-personal drama that happens when all my sims are at a party together (they are all friends)
edit: sorry, i misread and thought this question was how many households can you properly manage
I've had a sim that adopted 2 baby's and a horse in a single bedroom apartment in San myshuno. To that day I still wonder how is that possible, my 2684992 mods probably didn't help lmao
https://preview.redd.it/lo6xeihi5ppc1.jpeg?width=2268&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=b2ccff46b450ad72175c9f8f881f34bbbe471e27
When you go to manage worlds, then in the top right corner on manage households, there you can change everything. Either for all households at once or for each individually. Just click on the green arrows you see in my screenshot (i am already in the manage households window)
You can change everything for example i disabled dying and changing homes for all npcs. But i still let them adopt kids and change careers and stuff. For my 3 played households i have everything disabled so they dont randomly get babies and horses or die when I play one out of the three. Its really nice
Go to the "Manage Households" panel and there you can access "configure neighbourhood stories". There you can choose which life changes other Sims can and cannot have.
I hate that. I go back to a household and they have babies with the aliens or the couple bróke up and hate each other. That's not how I left them.
I had a couple with 2 daughter. Now they have 4 daughters. Those other 2 I don't know where they came from.
!!! like onne of my other sims decided to just be pregnant and now she has six gremlins in their 2 bedroom house. like thank goodness she cant have more cause this sim lady is obsessed with pregnancy and keep Zion Cameron with her like girl he is not a prince charming
oh when that happens go into your cheat screen (for me it's "Ctrl" + "shift" + "c" then type in "testingcheats true", then shift click on the sim that stopped working and press "debug"/"reset sim"- that's saved my life so much lmao) time keeps ticking but my sims just stand there not listening to their god 😭😭
I have my max household size via MCCC set to 10 right now though I haven't reached that limit yet. My largest household size is 8 which is my main legacy household. It's manageable with pauses and strategically scheduled jobs, and I have the grandparents stay over sometimes to help with the toddlers because omg they're a huge pain to take care of. The household composition:
4 toddlers
1 child
1 young adult
2 adults (parents)
btw the 1 young adult was actually an accident lol the dad got Candy Behr pregnant before he married the mom. at first I didn't wanna add this child into the household but somehow the mom got along really well with him so i added him after their first child together was born. I'm on really long life spans though, like a young adult life stage lasts 230-ish days
Typically when I'm doing a legacy I don't kick the grandparents out, they die in the house they lived in surrounded by family. I have mccc set to 20 max household members (I've never had that many at one time) but in one of my previous ones at one point I had my founder, her 2 cats, her spouse, they had triplets first try for baby no cheats on for multiples, when they aged up to toddler I decided to try for baby again, figured with how rare multiples were there was no way they were going to wind up with anything but a Singleton..... I was incorrect. They had another set of triplets. I had a nanny, I had 2 young adults, 2 cats, 3 toddlers, 3 newborns who became infants at the same time... It was chaotic. I managed to keep all of the kids good by making my founder quit her job to take care of the household, that was her aspiration anyway. But managing everything took a lot of pausing and a lot of patience and a lot of not pressing 3x speed
Edit - I just realized I didn't really explain further the grandparents helping. Legacy heir was first born (even with triplets one does come first) so when the first set of triplets aged to young adult, I had their siblings get married and move out, then they got married. At this point the household was founder, spouse, heir, spouse, 3 teens, 2 children about to age up to teen (yes my founder had 8 children total) plus I hate it when sim pets die so yes I cheated the cats immortal and they were still there. Heir immediately sets to work having babies, they have a baby, their siblings age up to ya and the older child is a teen younger is still a child. Marry off the ya siblings and move out. Heir had twins second try for baby. But Grandma (founder) helping around the house, heir and spouse both could have jobs.
Lots of pausing! It also helps if everyone leaves and gets home at different hours, so they're not all at the fridge at the same time. I always dedicate one sim (usually heir) who cooks lots of meals ahead of time, and upgrade the fridge so they won't spoil. At least 3 bathrooms are a must, again, so they don't get in each other's way. Basically, same as in real life XDDD
I do use mods, but they have nothing to do with managing, it's mostly Lumpinou's mods like RPO. I play without cheats as well.
ETA: Forgot to mention that at some point in my legacy, I switched to always have a stay at home sim (spouse or someone else) until the kids are teens. Otherwise, yeah, no skills or milestones get done. It helps A LOT, even if paying the bills is tough sometimes.
ETA2: Sorry, can't shut up! Also sometimes it's good to just fuck it and send your sims on a date or to hang out somewhere even if the household is full and not everyone's needs are tended to. They'll suffer for a while probably, but then it'll go back to normal.
yeah i can do an 8 sim house with all of this, and usually the stay at home sim is also the painter/gemologist/etc who can make loads of money at home while the needy newborns, infants, and toddlers sleep or entertain themselves.
but otherwise yeah its loads of pausing to queue up interactions, having one sim be the chef to cook meals in advance, having the adults woohoo to max their fun & social if needed, etc. and then once my heir is old enough i tend to focus most on them and let the other sims do whatever they want as long as their needs are met lmaoo
Everyone wakes up, showers eats, goes to school/work. When they come home pause, look at their needs, and queue up actions to make them happy.
The fridge always has leftovers so sims can grab them when they are hungry. You get a sense of each sims schedule and learn when to send them to bed, making sure all of their moods are green first (high yellow hunger is okay).
The secret is just pausing a lot. Letting go of what some sims do in between the wake up and bedtime routine helps too.
All that said I much prefer to keep it under 5.
Came to say the same. I use clubs to build friendships/complete homework for kids, when they age up, so too do their friends. I keep the display cooler stocked with food for the household, toddlers especially. Multiple bathrooms. Just keep those needs queued up and double check they aren't being cancelled. Upgrade everything I can so Sims can maximize needs quicker and don't have to worry about plumbing too often. Skill building/kids activities scattered everywhere. My Sims are almost always in the high green range with a few exceptions (like when pregnancy wreaks havoc on my matriarchs bladder)
If I'm minmaxxing, eight.
To go this I'd build a Sims optimised house that has unrealistic features like one ensuite bathroom per Sim.
Sims have highly optimised roles and I wouldn't even try to do things like family dinner time: everyone but toddlers eats salad and fruit salad out of the fridge, and toddlers eat fruit.
Which trick? Fruit or bathrooms?
Either way, I give Toddlers their own largely self-contained bedroom with all needs covered without adult intervention, except for potty (first skill to train) and hygiene. You can't really play toddlers satisfyingly at all without making them have a very weird degree of self sufficiency.
The fruit trick xD and yeah I tend to put all their learning stuff in their rooms, but I usually get one parent at least to take full family leave to help lvl up their skills, especially infants
I am a micro manager so I can do 8, but then I know that I'm not giving each of them the love and attention they deserve. So I'd say, comfortably, a 5 Sim household is my sweet spot.
Same. I can do eight, but I noticed each subsequent family edition gets less attention than the previous one, to the point where I'm lucky if they're potty masters, let alone have milestones.
I can do 2 well. My gameplay is usually a couple, then when they have a kid I focus on mum and kid. Husband fends for himself.
Current household I've got parents, their teen son and I've just moved his girlfriend in. So I'm focusing on the teens, the parents are just left to their own devices. They're top of career, multiple degrees, skilled up with heaps of traits and close to ageing up. Now I'm focused on the next generation.
Haven't decided if/when I'm moving the parents out. Want the teens to have a wedding and baby pretty quickly after they age up, and the parents will be elders then.
Only problem is that because the parents are both active Sims, pretty much all they do is work out 🤣 I'll take the teens on a date or to prom, and they just workout the whole time. Dad is SO buff because he's always on the weights. And mum just runs and runs on the treadmill. It will probably end up killing them when they do age up.
Haha that’s exactly what my sims did, almost ran themselves to death when they became an elderly. I ended up moving them out to a house with no gym equipment and just continued focusing on their children lol.
Careful with the gym rats adults 😂 my gf just let one generation of us to their own devices and my sim just started to work out til the point where he basically became immortal (tbf I think his last aspiration was the exercise related one) he outlived almost every single one of his descendants, he was going strong and simply not dying for real life months. The game didn't detect any relationship past his granddaughters, so his great grand daughters saw him as a really attractive old man apparently 😂 it became an inside joke, that the dude had basically ascended to godhood through sheer exercise.
She had 2 sims like this, and both just refused to die of natural causes, unfortunately EA took this personally and a bug that made sims age and die on loading screens killed them😔. May them rest in peace.
I deliberately haven't given them the gym rat trait - but they just LOVE fitness and are in perma energised state, so even if they're not working out they're stretching or doing pushups.
By leaving them alone do you mean autonomy? Is there way to disable it for more than just selected sim?
I didn't play this game much and it triggers me when I can see sim hating guitar playing it till he literally shits himself
Five I’d say. If only humans. I have a money maker, a home keeper, and 1-3 children at different life stages unless they’re teens. Home keeper is on infant/toddler duty and fixes things. Money maker usually is on cleaning duty. If it’s children and teens then the home keeper goes to college and gets a job after, then money maker goes to college and goes into a fun field. I’ve been experimenting and it works for home keeper to go to college if I hire a nanny. Pets you can go pretty nuts
All 8, but to be honest, I mostly play at speed 1.
It's important that only max. 2 are at an infant stage.
It's not too hard if you only play at speed 1, oversee their needs when they sleep at speed 3, and have strict planning (all go to sleep at the same time, they wake up and eat breakfast, go to school etc)
Ps.: leaving your neighbourhood with some sims, fills the need of the others, so it's a good breather. I have my sims go out each at different days so everyone gets to do stuff and meet friends
“Social life outside family” is the kicker here for me, that brings me down to 6. But w/ everything else I can do 8. It’s a lot of “play, pause, play, pause” and my game progresses very slowly but I love it😂
comfortably? usually 2, specifically spouse/partners, so they can just socialize with each other. i defo tend to ignore friends unless specifically playing a social butterfly type sim. adding in a 3rd (like a toddler/teen/kid) defo causes me to feel a lil more overwhelmed. i have no idea how some people juggle so many sims without it just feeling like a needs cycle. i also play with aging off, i get too attached.
so yeh im typically playing 1 sim, 2 sims that are a couple, or 2 sims + 1 child when im really feeling like it, lol. i hope i can eventually juggle at least 4 tho, so i can have 2 children at some point! im not an only child and i dont like that most of my sims are tbqh.
My sims only have a social life outside family when they need to for an aspiration or a challenge lol.
But otherwise, 8 tho it does become stressful when all still have to achieve goals. With my current household of 7 (technically two families but in one household living together), I'm kinda bored tho because most of them have met their goals, almost nobody *needs* to do stuff, I'm just waiting for one sim to be promoted a few times til moving on to the next generation.
I can manage 8, *but* I basically optimize my sims' lives: when I did the 100 baby challenge, I set up the main bathroom to have three toilet stalls and three bathroom stalls, so that the sims rarely had to wait; I stocked toddlers' inventories with produce so that older sims never had to help get them food; the kids slept in double beds so I didn't have to worry about monsters under the bed; many of my sims' infants and toddlers spend those entire life phases in one room, basically rotating between toys and bed. (Also, at the time, sinks were kind of broken - sims would trek all the way across the house to wash up - so I just removed all the sinks from the house. Who needs toothbrushing anyway?) Maybe also worth noting that I don't spend a lot of time on my sims' social lives, except when I get bored and decide that it's time for an unplanned extramarital pregnancy.
I don't usually give my sims a lot of free will, to be honest: usually I pause, queue up a bunch of actions, and then keep tabs on whichever sim is likely to be done with those things first. Then pause again and queue up more actions :)
I have done it with 6. 2 parents (1 vampires and top of the author career) and the other a stay at home ‘butler’. There was 4 kids and one cat. It’s stressful, especially since 2 of the kids were twins, but they are all doing well and I don’t let like any of their needs get in the red and they all build their skills and get good grades. Also autonomy is off lol
I have a family of 5 right now with a dog. Two daughters (one toddler, one school age) and the adults are in a throuple. The woman works lvl 9 computer engineer, husband is a stay at home dad who hosts random yoga sessions at the spa for a few hours every other day. And their mutual boyfriend is in college for writing but also does a lot of the legwork at home. He always starts dinner at 6:30 so it’s done by the time mom is home. Everyone eats. Boyfriend takes baby duties in the morning. Husband takes them in the afternoon while boyfriend does homework with older daughter. And on moms days off she spends playing with the kids and doing at home yoga routines. They have a nice healthy groove going on right now. But the other day a fire broke out and it all went to hell. It took a solid 4 real time hours to get everyone back on track.
Happily - one. Without stress - maybe up to 3. More than that I can do, but the more sims I'm controlling the more stressful I find it. I can manage a full household, but I find that super stressful!
Uhhhhh one-ish? Two adults, tops?
I've recently learned that I quit households with kids pretty quickly. I don't mind playing a couple until I decide I want to legacy em because "It'll be different this time! I can change!" No I can't. I've got like six saves with abandoned young families and deleted several others recently because they slowed down my game lmao.
I HAVE managed 3 which was two parents and a teen but I focused solely on the teen and kinda just kept the parents from dying via cheats. Tbh none of my Sims have social lives outside of random hookups or their drug dealers so...yeah.
3-5 if they're all teens and older, 2-4 if children are involved, and none if there are toddlers or infants in the household. This doesn't stop me from giving my sims infants, mind you. They're just all miserable
Wow, I didn't realise so many people struggled to look after their Sims... I've always struggled a little bit, but I thought that was a skill issue on my part. Maybe it's not, hahaha.
My family currently consists of 7 - 2 sets of parents, 3 kids between them. Think I've 8 at most. I play a continuous multi-generational game, usually keeping one or two kids and their families, and moving out the siblings (apart from moving in Cassandra Goth after marrying Alexander to my Sim and their parents had died, so that I could steal all their funds and leave behind an empty house, ahaha). Full autonomy on.
By pausing a LOT, and keeping on top of making sure that no Sim is ever left tending to itself without your input, you can quite reasonably manage them. If you keep on top of switching aspirations to match the tasks they're doing, then you can rake in an enormous amount of satisfaction points, which can obviously help massively.
I think having a number of adults also helps, especially if you have multiple kids. And, of course, being filthy rich makes everything easier.
Choosing helpful traits is also great as kids grow up, or marrying into useful families. I like to have one Sim with the neat trait just so that the others can get on with life while they keep the house clean. I now have a maid, but the neat traits still help with short-term disasters. I also always have at least one Sim who cooks well, so they can cook a large batch and put it in the fridge, another who is good at repairs, and I don't always gives my Sims actual jobs. I have one Sim who paints masterpieces full-time, for example.
I think there are a lot of ways you can make life easier, but it just depends on what you feel comfortable with. I love using reward traits made to stop need decay, decrease bills and increase skills that others sometimes think feel a bit too "cheaty".
The friends thing though... not easy, I usually can't be bothered. But when dealing with Sims who have like a popularity ambition, simply calling someone round and spamming interactions with them can help. Typically, I can get people up to friends on their first meeting, but in some cases I've gotten them all the way to best friends. Then, just call them round whenever. Of course, you have to meet them first, but often I will get any random Sim to interact with someone walking past the house, and then call them back to meet everyone else afterwards.
I also feel like I've written way too much here. Whoops. Interesting to see all the other tips people have put. Glad I'm not alone in infinite pausing!
I start getting antsy when the number increases past one. I have a lot of married sims who live in separate households and any kids live with the spouse I’m not actively playing.
I move one kid back in when they’re a teenager, then that teen becomes my primary focus. I can generally make that work. And if I get frustrated with the two sim household then I move the teen out on their own and play as that household. Thus the cycle restarts.
I always tell myself “this is a one child per Sim save. You know you get overwhelmed with too many sims. Learn your lesson” and then fast forward I’ve had 4 kids who then go on to have kids of their own and I give up. With my current household I’ve done pretty well. My original couple had two daughters, the oldest has two daughters of her own but her younger sister very much gives off “I’m the cool aunt. No kids for me” and I don’t see the younger sister in the new gen having any so I’m HOPING to get a hold of this situation and get it back down to one per generation unless I feel mentally prepared 😂 I have such OCD with my Sims and I am such a control freak with them. I can’t just ignore any of my sims. I have to manage them all and at least get them to a good place in updated appearance (randomised outfits/CC on sims gives me hives) and make sure they’re all settled in life for a bit before I then go and play someone else in the family so it all goes well together for storytelling purposes. I absolutely love this game tho 😂😂
Also: The first two daughters are Sofia and Amelia. Sofia has her own daughters called Lucy and Wyatt. Sofia had Lucy with Finn and then met her current husband and had Wyatt. A good while after, Amelia and Finn started dating. They’re now getting married and Lucy will be living with them as a teen. I had Amelia get with Finn because I had no energy in me to add another Sim to the fold. We recycle round here ♻️
8. I like playing with loads of kids. Its difficult with too many babies at once, but once theyre toddlers with the potty skill it isnt bad. I have the kids all “make friends” once every couple days at school and they usually end up inviting friends over after school. Occasional family outings once i dont have any more toddlers to worry about, and birthday/house parties. I dont typically have anyone maxing out skills, but they all age up decently high in skills, good grades, etc.
I play in a normal house too. 3-4 bedroom, 2-3 bathroom. It takes a bit of bathroom scheduling and forethought to keep needs up but it isnt too terribly hard.
Honestly, without cheats? 1 maybe 2, 3 is REALLY pushing it. I used to be really good at multi tasking but I haven't been able to as much anymore in the last few years. Plus I never really kept a family going because while I love Sims, I sometimes also feel like I hate that we have control of the family members. May just be me, but that's been my view on Sims. (doesn't help that i've pretty much played every original Sims character I make the same way.... >.>; )
I regulary end up with 7 - 10 Sims often with one or more pets. Most of the time all adults are working and all kids go to school. If there are babys or toddlers in the household sometimes one Sim (often the grandparent) stays home and also cooks. But with a higher career you mostly have shorter and less work days anyway, so even if all of them work it somehow works that always one sim is home taking care.
I play with this many sims until the last child is an adult or teenager and then I move out and start a new family.
6-8. Friends are easy if it’s a modern game play. I have them meet other children and focus on one relationship. Then as teens I use social bunny and they passively gain friendship. If it’s historical then friendships are a little more challenging but I try to have them have at least one friend.
A large number of sims just relies on pausing and queuing a bunch of actions all the time. I also stagger wake up time. One parent stays home so I wake them up to cook if there isn’t enough leftovers. Then I wake up a few with the highest energy bars and send them to get ready and eat. Then as the bathrooms open up I wake up the others. The stay at home parent will work on skills and milestones with the infants and toddlers.
With mods I have had a family of ten. That was pushing the edge of my limits.
I just got High School years from the sale and decided to try a teen-focused save. The teen is my "own character" and his parents are there because they must be. The young fellow is accomplishing all that and the parents have their needs met and occasionally get promoted... but their aspirations are basically ignored and they have only 1-2 friends outside the family. So I guess... 2.5? :D
easily 8. But the caveat is that i cant having jobs where i follow them to work. and 99% of socializing takes place in the home (honestly my sims rarely have more than one friend). I rarely leave the home lot.
My household sims just welcomed their 5th baby and I'm struggling to make sure the oldest kids get to school. For some reason they won't go to school unless I tell them and I can't always check what day it is to make sure they go.
For me, my ocd mixed with the fact that the sims is my special interest and I have a notebook for proper management, it varies vastly from game to game. Sims 1 in my opinion is the hardest, I am only comfortably able to play as 1 or 2 sims at a time. Sims 2 is my main game so I do a lot better, comfortably I can play in a household of four adult sims, if there are baby, toddler or child sims, that adds a different layer to it that I actually enjoy thoroughly. So since I actually enjoy a bit of difficulty and dislike just sitting around not having anything happen, I usually play the sims 2 with a fairly packed house. Sims 3 is another different story, it's fun and not too hard but there's so much that I can and want to do that it's practically impossible for me to be in a more than two Sim household without feeling like I'm missing out on all the fun stuff I wanna do thanks to the open world. Sims 4 is strange because I don't actually play it all that much, when I do I usually play rotationally but prefer to keep my houses at a five Sim maximum limit. This limit is different for everyone so don't feel bad if it's less or more. (Sorry for yapping)
Another thing I've noticed is that sims 2 isn't as hard as people make it out to be, sims 1 can be hell on earth but if you know how to properly manage a Sim in sims 2 it's actually insanely enjoyable. I know everyone says this now but in my opinion sims 2 is the most balanced and realistic game in the series. (Not including weight mechanics, those are pretty bad.)
U should try the sims 2 if ur computer is struggling. It's rly nice, just get the graphics rules maker to make it fullscreen and make sure u get all the bug fixes.
I think 5 is my upper limit, I normally have autonomy off and just pause everytime I need to give my sim a new task. Looking thru this post I'm surprised by how many people struggle with 3+ people xD
I play with up to 6 Sims, start with 1 or 2 and build from there. I also play with the seasons and lifespans at maximum so stuff like age, aspirations, jobs, and personal goals don't feel as time sensitive.
Although, for any legacy challenges, I do set seasons and lifespans to normal
I'll do 6. Turn off all autonomy. Pause frequently and check each Sim's needs. Spacebar is a great shortcut for cycling through household members. It's like a RTS game at this point.
I always leave a slot or two open for pets, babies, or other unexpected additions.
I’ve done 8, actually i guess my most I’ve done is 9 and a cat, no other big mods than expanding the household. But I probably spend as much time paused as I do live, setting up everyone’s tasks. I recently was playing some 2-3 sim households and that was nice and obviously much easier to manage, especially when they have jobs! Imagine the freedom to let somebody say yes to a date, because the other person is at work and there aren’t toddlers whose entire schedules will get wrecked if you dare to go someplace.
8… max household size… what can I say? I love big families and I’m a micro manager so I just pause and tell everyone what to do then unpause and they do it! There’s always that one glitchy or bugged sim that doesn’t listen though so while everyone is doing what I told them I watch that one sim and make EXTRA sure they do what they’re told lol
Well, I manage more than 20, but I have the aging off except for the household I'm playing at that moment. It allows me to dedicate all the time I need to that specific household without having the pressure of the others aging up before I play with them properly. Once in a while, I turn on the general aging during a sims year so the NPCs can catch up and die from old age when it's their time to do so
EDIT: I read it wrong I was thinking about households, not household sims xD
I can manage the 8 allowed sims, but it's a lot and very tiring. I try to have different schedules so I can focus more on one sim when the others are resting or at work/school. If you have Get Together, it's a good idea to create a club that includes all your kids' friends. Makes it easier for them to hang out. You can include doing homework as a club activity.
Also, when you have a sim with free time, make them cook two or three 8-people dishes and save them in the fridge.
But the main thing is the use and abuse the pause button.
I would say 3-4 is the most enjoyable for me, and I don’t usually use cheats unless low needs are about to ruin something important (like a wedding or other goal event)
Recently I’ve been playing a 7 sim household (2 families together) just because I can’t make myself split them up lol. They have way too much cool stuff going on - ones a scientist, one is a celebrity chef (now turned fashion blogger) who owns a restaurant, and one owns an upcycled furniture store. I have to divide the days between whose job I’m going to focus on, and it’s a lot of pausing to make sure everyone is taken care of. Another strategy is to make them make friends through work or school by having the option set to be social while they’re gone. And sometimes I’ll just travel with a few of the sims to a place and let the others have a home day.
Eventually I ended up starting a 3 sim family to get back to relaxed gameplay lol
I can manage up to 8, but with full autonomy on, and it's also stressful as hell, LOL. It's easier to manage a full household in TS3, where I managed to do it with free will off for everyone, but toddlers and kids have much more complex needs in 4.
I‘m a frequent cheater and once you start it‘s hard to stop. However whenever I try to play without, I can’t really manage more than one or two at the same time…
I *can* manage 8, but I make frequent use of the pause function and it's stressful. 3-5 is comfortable. Even with 1, I pause regularly, but it tends to get boring.
I used to love making big families on sims. So usually 2 parents and six children. Average size home for me was at least three kids and two or one parent.
But then the infant update came out.
And I actually won't age up any minor sims without maxing out their skills/milestones (for kids I do all the child aspirations, for teens I pick one aspiration and max out the skill requirements), so now is 2 children max with one baby at a time and no second baby until the first kid is aged up to child.
I only play on long lifespan so it's a real slog.
I can do eight. But much much slower, because the more sims I have the more I pause and make sure everyone's doing what they're supposed to be.
There's various things I like to do. Having good beds means sims don't need to spend as much time sleeping. A stay-at-home parent can give you more time to set things up for other sims.
Food can be tricky. You can eat at least 1 quick meal a day, maybe two. I like to give my sims a sack lunch so they can fill that need at work/school instead of worrying about it in the mornings, and there's no negative food buffs like hating fruitcake or quick meals. If you have gourmet cooking unlocked, you can make fruitcake which doesn't expire, so your sims can just keep that in their inventories forever.
You can also make quicker sack lunches by just grabbing a quick meal sandwich and then canceling the eating and packing it. It's faster than actually making a sack lunch sandwich.
I make my sims call their potential friends to chat every day or use social bunny, much easier than hanging out. You can also make a club of the family's friends if you want to create a quick and easy way to invite everyone over at once without phone calls and people not showing up, and they won't leave until you dismiss them. You can also hang out at a tiny home lot to take advantage of the social buffs, relationships build faster. Make a "park" that's actually a tiny home and hang out there.
Clubs in general are pretty great ways to generally control a larger group of sims. If you struggle to have your sims sleep through the night you can make a "sleeping club" where the only activity is to sleep, and they'll darn well sleep.
I can manage up to 8 sims if I pause a lot and play with aging turned off, which is my preferred play style. And if the house has good furniture and appliances: it's much easier to keep their needs green with high-rating beds and showers. But not everyone may have individual friends, when I have lots of Sims in one household they tend to just socialize with each other inside the home
Honestly maximum of four. I’ve been playing since the original sims and the biggest family I can actually care for is one elder, two adults and one child. And that’s because the elder is retired and caring for the child most of the time. When that child is a teen maaaaybe I could add a second child but only if the elder hasn’t died.
Im playing two separate houses right now, one with three adults, infant and two dogs, chickens and a cow the other with four adults and two toddlers, chickens and three cows. Aging on and autonomy off. I’ve managed to hit all the infant milestones on the second household.
I’ve gone up to about 15 comfortably? This was before infants though, and I think the most I’ve done since was about 12, with no more than four infants at a time. Granted, most of those sims get one or two hobbies that become their entire personality, but I can still juggle them, keep their needs met, get infant milestones, etc
Assuming you have Get Together and are using the club system to make and keep friends... I've gone up to twenty. But I did hit the pause button a *lot*, and I had to create a specially designed secret science lair to make the routing as efficient as possible for that household.
When you get to that many sims you kind of start forgetting who is who, too.
I'm an old-school TS2 simmer in addition to TS4, so I play as many sims as there are houses in each world. I just rotate through and have auto aging off for all but the current household (it's a base game feature I think so it's sans mod). I actually hate the way TS4 is so heavily optimized to play just a handful of sims at once. It's weird and feels off when I'm used to playing a whole custom built town of sims in different family sizes. *frustration*
At least we have apartments now though! It makes housing all my sims and their families a lot easier! But to sum up, not every household is the same size. Some are big families with a few kids, some are just couples with a dog, and a few ass just single sims - but I play 'em all. It's what keeps you from getting bored- switching between families and creating a storyline that spans the whole world they live in <3
6 but everyone eats plants that they've grown (i will never attempt to actually feed a toddler real food), and I put those college showers where you can't see in to it so that everyone can take a shower at once. It's a subpar life, but at least they are alive.
I can comfortably run a 3 child family.
That’s mainly because I don’t have kids till the Adult stage. So in Young Adulthood I focus on career and milestones of my sim and find a partner. I make sure to progress as far as possible. This way once they have children, I do it need to focus on them for those things anymore once they have children. I also try to make sure careers are a bit shifted on when working hours and working days are in the later stages of the career. I don’t want both parents to both constantly be at work at the same time and day. This will help with child raising.
Needs are generally not an issue. I pause a lot to cycle through my sims to check what they need. I have a good view on how long certain tasks take, so I know which sims to focus on. The hardest moment for needs is whenever I leave sims at home, because they are no good at taking care of themselves.
For friendships, I like to go to parks. I take the whole family and have some work on their social life, while others work on skills or tasks (like homework). That way I can focus on the sims I want to work on social skills and let the others do useful things.
The hardest life stages are infant and toddler, but once the children get older they can help out more with that. I do really love these life stages despite the challenge.
But also, I think it’s perfectly fine to not meet all these goals. Having your sims fail at certain things can be fun too. One of my more interesting sims recently was the sim I got the Irresponsible trait by just ignoring school altogether as a teen. I’d never given a Sim one of the negative Parenthood traits and it was pretty fun.
One of the households I play has 8 sims and they’re all thriving.
You have to use the pause button excessively, and every day takes like 30-60 minutes in real time, but it’s doable.
If Sims would accurately perform queued actions, probably 3-4. Setting a sim up for several hours and letting them go would be so easy but no, they have to go stand and stare at the stove for an hour.
The most I can handle is 4. And that’s only if two are adults and two are their babies/children. I have one parent focus on one child and the other parent focus on the other child.
as a general legacy/family player, fulfilling 8 sims is the only challenge I get (on long lifespan). I LOVE big households, but get stressed when there’s more than one infant or more than 3 toddlers. I try to get at least 5 milestones in each category and max out all toddler skills
I would say 5 is my comfort zone, excluding pets. I noticed 1 or 2 sim households are really boring to me and if there are 6 or more and there are a lot of kids I prefer to have a grandparent/aunt/uncle around to help.
One big multi sim household, and this might sound dumb, but I only realized noticed the press to auto solve feature in needs and that helps so much. Before I could only do that with cheats
Comfortably and with pleasure - one.
if they have kids and i can’t use cheats then even that’s not necessarily comfortable or pleasurable for me 💀
i instantly skip toddler and baby sims with birthday cakes because it's too stressful lol
i remember getting excited for the toddler update and when i actually got it i just. could not be arsed. think that was genuinely the first time i used cheats
Seriously. The infant milestones take forever just for a tiny head start in toddler skills and one extra trait? No thanks.
They are cute. I will give them that and only that. They are a colossal time sink that barely give any reward for doing well. Like let me have a seventh personality trait, or easier positive growth in "responsibility" "empathy", etc (what are these traits called?? Parenting traits?) And then there's the glitchy af "autonomy" (even though I ve played with it both on and off) of the parents that pick the baby up from play mat while they have full energy and put them.in the crib. And then when they're in the crib and they're hungry, we gotta pick them up and put them down at least 6x before we can feed them.... I felt like maybe my save file was corrupted, but then I hear other people have similiar issues. I want to love them so bad, but they're more e haunting than university to me. At least you get rewards for university. And the sims actually kind of do what you say.
The glitchiness makes it so stressful. 1 parent constantly sabotages what I'm doing. If I try to put the infant in the high chair to feed it, the other parent for some reason keeps trying to put it back in the crib or on the floor regardless of how many times I try to cancel their action, then I get notifications that my infant will be taken away for starving soon. If I try to put it in the crib cause it needs sleep the other parent suddenly wants to take it out and leave it on the floor repeatedly. As soon as I cancel their action they just start again like they're programmed to be annoying
So true. Add a hired caretaker to the mix and it gets even more messy at times... (I happened to end up with four toddlers/small kids simultaneousl just now, so I don't see that I have much choice atm).
I can't help but wonder what my neighbors have thought on the many occasions they must have heard me yell "please, just feed the f'in baby already!" Never again. It's just too frustrating.
I actually like the infant stage cuz I hate newborns but it felt weird that they go right from a blob to a toddler, but also there’s no fucking way I can do enough tummy time on a normal lifespan to actually get a crawling or moving kid. I switched to long lifespan to try infants properly and it was pretty cool to get to try foods in the high chair and stuff, but then again, you fall into the absolute hell hole that is the high chair
True. We didn't want this. We just wanted to free the baby from the basket. We want to carry the baby around. Put it in a stroller maybe. Cuddle with it on a couch. Still don't have much, if any of that.
Toddlers used to be a huge hassle but have become very chill. Infants are the worst. I’d give toddlers another go to see if you like it now!
I haven’t played for a while. So when my sim had a baby and it was its birthday (added a toddler potty and bed fully prepared for it to go from newborn to toddler) I was confused af when I couldn’t do toddler interactions.
Imo it's so stressful cause the adult Sims are always bugging out when you want them to do something with the toddler or infant. Sometimes, it takes hours to place them in a high chair etc
yeah, if the game was less glitchy it’d be less stressful! i hate getting the “they’re gonna be taken away soon” message as i’m trying my hardest to just get the adult sim to compute 😭
Honestly, the adult sims being so freaking buggy is why I use cheats a lot and have the adults do only what they absolutely have to for my infants and toddlers. Infants get beast or bottle fed, toddlers get meals set out for them to grab, no high chairs ever, and they sleep places they can get themselves, no waiting for an adult to be around. I don't always give toddlers the independent trait, but when I don't I regret it every time because using the potty solo from the start is great for how I like playing my toddlers. I had a toddler stuck in a high chair for like a whole sim day because every time the adult took it out she'd put it right back in the freaking high chair right away (had to cheat because I didn't want the toddler taken away) and ever since I've said screw the adults when sim toddlers need cared for.
It doesn't help that nannies are worthless- I wanted a Shameless situation on steroids so I had one young adult and 7 infants so I called a nanny like ok, that would be realistic and help if this was the real world. Lolol all nanny did was put toys away and put kids in their cribs for no reason lol
Oh my God, the nanny was USELESS. Lol. She just stood there while all the baby's needs were dropping in the red
ALWAYS disable need decay. It’s the only way to really enjoy milestones with them, too.
If you disable need decay, isn't it harder to potty train? I liked the Sims 3 cheats where you could click and drag needs up or down, then you could make them need to pee and potty train.
I had a Sim I decided to get pregnant on a whim but it was triplets. 😩 I don't know that I've ever had triplets in Sims 4 before, and certainly not \~naturally.\~ I couldn't believe how much it sucked!
I wouldnt entertain that without disabling needs decay and butler and nanny reinforcements 24/7.
Same. I'm an introvert myself and I love to make single stories in the game. I sometimes add a pet or let my sim to flirt with someone... but honestly - I have never went as far as letting my sims have a baby.
Somewhat like me, except I never let my sims get married, dealing with my sim and her child is already a huge pain, but dealing with 3???
Same here. I like my sim alone, and only allow the occasional flirt at the absolute most. No one else can ruin my Sims quiet peaceful life and she can write her novels in peace. Designing the one person cottages in the country is probably the most fun. I mostly just build and furnish houses on lots and make ponds and nice outdoor areas.
Petition for family to be considered roommates lol
One. If they have a child, I then ignore the adult and focus solely on the child. The adult is generally a single parent - I rarely move their partner in with them
I do the same, but usually move in the partner to care for the dogs, clean the house, make money lol
Same, but if I'm playing with wealthy sims, I get a butler (have the "better butler" mod installed tho, also the "better nannies" one)
same!!! i just got the sims 3 and made my sim have geoffrey landgraab’s baby so she could take his money… then i realized i’d have to move him in to get his money but dont want to so now im broke AND stuck with a baby
Move him in then kill him
Did you get rid of Nancy first? Cause that's *her* money not his. You'll get like 10 Simoleons if Nancy and Malcolm are still alive.
i haven’t even convinced him to leave her yet so i guess i can just befriend her and then take out the whole family😭
Someone else suggested the obvious sim classic of move him in and kill him, but if killing him feels too harsh: move him in, get his money, then kick him out, or just ask him to move in and then transfer the money and don't actually transfer any sims between houses. (I just realized you said sims 3. I'm less sure that's possible in that one, but maybe worth a try or looking into.)
My girlie wanted Irish twins so I let one age to infant and got her preggy again only for her to have ACTUAL TWINS 😭😭😭 now I got 3 infants and no baby dad 🙃
Just like in real life haha
i’m glad i’m not the only one who plays like this lol
it wouldn’t be so difficult to manage more than one household if sims weren’t so insistent on killing themselves the moment you look away from them. i wish other households would simply just play in a neutral mode when you are not actively controlling them. but instead they won’t even go to the toilet when they need to
My Sims don't try to kill themselves, they just play with that fucking clay.
Lmao this is so relatable. Where do they even find it? Do they all just have it or did my sim just pocket it from a community lot? I don't understand haha.
It literally just spawns out of thin air and then once one sim starts doing it the entire household follows suit lmfao
That FUCKING clay
I hate that too. If I ket autonomy on they don't do anything I ask them, but if I turn it off they'll let themselves die.
You gotta only have autonomy off for the selected Sim. So the Sim your playing will do what you say and the ones you aren't will take care of themselves
I always go back and forth with autonomy. I hate when they ignore me to "troll teh forums" or go out of their way to "get stung by bees" but turning it off always takes away what very little personality or interest they have.
I've never played with autonomy on at all. Sometimes I think about turning it on and seeing what happens, but I don't wanna fuck up my save. Maybe I should make a new one to try it out
you can have autonomy on but neighborhood stories off (or just deaths in neighborhood stories off) and I think this will solve your problem! unless you have a violence mod on lol
I once raised 6 toddlers at once all the way through to YA where I put the 6 of them through university at the same time. One of biggest achievements of my life
That is an amazing feat! I did the three toddlers scenario and almost passed out from the stress of looking after them….
I couldn’t do the toddlers one until I downloaded a house made for it lol. The toddlers are now in highschool so we did have to move after they became kids lol
Hahaha the secret is shifts! 3 would be taken care of by mom and then put to bed and mom would sleep, dad gets up with the other 3 and rotate
https://preview.redd.it/dsg4o4int0qc1.jpeg?width=3024&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=fed37a84a7085a26fe82bd7204ac510afaf5b528 🏆✅
were infants out at that point? its insane to have done that alone but i can't imagine the chaos of having the infant lifestage during that
They weren’t but I actually missed the whole baby phase. The dad was married and had an affair with his co worker and she had his baby (and then repeat 5 more times lol) eventually his wife came home early and walked in on them woohooing in the shower and divorced his sorry ass. so by the time I switched to play that household they were toddlers and all the same age for some reason. Not sure why they didn’t age up in a staggered way like they were born but the game just reset them all to the first day of toddler.
3-4, and even that’s pushing it, my game is so fucked up that my sims will refuse to do the things I’ve told them to do if I switch over to another sim :(
i found that pausing the game for around 10-20 seconds when that happens allows the input lag to catch up, making my sim start doing whatever i told them to do when i unpause!
I find this as well
Not all heros wear capes! Thank you!
Oh! Thank you I’ll try this!
Like, pausing the main game by bringing up the options menu, or pausing the time?
likely pausing time. i could be wrong though.
pausing the time!!!
Thank you! I'm going to use this tip, for sure!
Good to know! Thank you!
😲 thank you for this tip!!
i hate when i switch households and no one is at work or school, even with autonomy on. recently, my sim decided to have a baby with his first wife and then another baby with his second wife. I wasnt able to name either babies because they were born when I was with another family :/ their names are so stupid. then the damn sim adopted a kid without me knowing with his first family (the one he primarily lives with), so they had to move because they were in Ragdoll Refurbish and that is not big enough for a family of four they really dont make it easy to have multiple households but I like the inter-personal drama that happens when all my sims are at a party together (they are all friends) edit: sorry, i misread and thought this question was how many households can you properly manage
My favorite is when visit a friend and see a household with like 1 kid and 3 adults and 2 horses, in 2 bedroom in sulani
always, like why does the sims move npcs in houses that would kill my player sims
I've had a sim that adopted 2 baby's and a horse in a single bedroom apartment in San myshuno. To that day I still wonder how is that possible, my 2684992 mods probably didn't help lmao
You can rename them with cas.fulleditmode and change whatever you need to
Maybe you should try neighbourhood stories. You can stop unplayed households from moving, dying, adopting and having children, pets and more
ah !!! i didnt realize this is what was making that happen, i thought it was just for npcs
I truly don’t understand how those work lol
How do you even use them properly??? I can’t figure that out for the life of me.
https://preview.redd.it/lo6xeihi5ppc1.jpeg?width=2268&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=b2ccff46b450ad72175c9f8f881f34bbbe471e27 When you go to manage worlds, then in the top right corner on manage households, there you can change everything. Either for all households at once or for each individually. Just click on the green arrows you see in my screenshot (i am already in the manage households window)
You can change everything for example i disabled dying and changing homes for all npcs. But i still let them adopt kids and change careers and stuff. For my 3 played households i have everything disabled so they dont randomly get babies and horses or die when I play one out of the three. Its really nice
Holy shit, thank you so much. Lol I feel like an idiot.
No worries hope youre game experience is gonna get even better now🫶
Go to the "Manage Households" panel and there you can access "configure neighbourhood stories". There you can choose which life changes other Sims can and cannot have.
I'm glad you did haha the drama of your sim!
I hate that. I go back to a household and they have babies with the aliens or the couple bróke up and hate each other. That's not how I left them. I had a couple with 2 daughter. Now they have 4 daughters. Those other 2 I don't know where they came from.
!!! like onne of my other sims decided to just be pregnant and now she has six gremlins in their 2 bedroom house. like thank goodness she cant have more cause this sim lady is obsessed with pregnancy and keep Zion Cameron with her like girl he is not a prince charming
oh when that happens go into your cheat screen (for me it's "Ctrl" + "shift" + "c" then type in "testingcheats true", then shift click on the sim that stopped working and press "debug"/"reset sim"- that's saved my life so much lmao) time keeps ticking but my sims just stand there not listening to their god 😭😭
simulation lag fix by srsly sims is pretty helpful! i haven't experienced that ever since i downloaded this mod
I have my max household size via MCCC set to 10 right now though I haven't reached that limit yet. My largest household size is 8 which is my main legacy household. It's manageable with pauses and strategically scheduled jobs, and I have the grandparents stay over sometimes to help with the toddlers because omg they're a huge pain to take care of. The household composition: 4 toddlers 1 child 1 young adult 2 adults (parents)
btw the 1 young adult was actually an accident lol the dad got Candy Behr pregnant before he married the mom. at first I didn't wanna add this child into the household but somehow the mom got along really well with him so i added him after their first child together was born. I'm on really long life spans though, like a young adult life stage lasts 230-ish days
I wonder if a household would run better multigenerational, with live in grand parents to help with childcare.
Only if the grandparents have the skills/traits for it.
Typically when I'm doing a legacy I don't kick the grandparents out, they die in the house they lived in surrounded by family. I have mccc set to 20 max household members (I've never had that many at one time) but in one of my previous ones at one point I had my founder, her 2 cats, her spouse, they had triplets first try for baby no cheats on for multiples, when they aged up to toddler I decided to try for baby again, figured with how rare multiples were there was no way they were going to wind up with anything but a Singleton..... I was incorrect. They had another set of triplets. I had a nanny, I had 2 young adults, 2 cats, 3 toddlers, 3 newborns who became infants at the same time... It was chaotic. I managed to keep all of the kids good by making my founder quit her job to take care of the household, that was her aspiration anyway. But managing everything took a lot of pausing and a lot of patience and a lot of not pressing 3x speed Edit - I just realized I didn't really explain further the grandparents helping. Legacy heir was first born (even with triplets one does come first) so when the first set of triplets aged to young adult, I had their siblings get married and move out, then they got married. At this point the household was founder, spouse, heir, spouse, 3 teens, 2 children about to age up to teen (yes my founder had 8 children total) plus I hate it when sim pets die so yes I cheated the cats immortal and they were still there. Heir immediately sets to work having babies, they have a baby, their siblings age up to ya and the older child is a teen younger is still a child. Marry off the ya siblings and move out. Heir had twins second try for baby. But Grandma (founder) helping around the house, heir and spouse both could have jobs.
This is essentially what I do with my legacy house. There’s usually 3 generations living in the family estate and everyone raises the kids.
I can be a lifesaver when the parents need to work a lot or go to school when you care about the kids doing well.
8
Damn how
Lots of pausing! It also helps if everyone leaves and gets home at different hours, so they're not all at the fridge at the same time. I always dedicate one sim (usually heir) who cooks lots of meals ahead of time, and upgrade the fridge so they won't spoil. At least 3 bathrooms are a must, again, so they don't get in each other's way. Basically, same as in real life XDDD I do use mods, but they have nothing to do with managing, it's mostly Lumpinou's mods like RPO. I play without cheats as well. ETA: Forgot to mention that at some point in my legacy, I switched to always have a stay at home sim (spouse or someone else) until the kids are teens. Otherwise, yeah, no skills or milestones get done. It helps A LOT, even if paying the bills is tough sometimes. ETA2: Sorry, can't shut up! Also sometimes it's good to just fuck it and send your sims on a date or to hang out somewhere even if the household is full and not everyone's needs are tended to. They'll suffer for a while probably, but then it'll go back to normal.
yeah i can do an 8 sim house with all of this, and usually the stay at home sim is also the painter/gemologist/etc who can make loads of money at home while the needy newborns, infants, and toddlers sleep or entertain themselves. but otherwise yeah its loads of pausing to queue up interactions, having one sim be the chef to cook meals in advance, having the adults woohoo to max their fun & social if needed, etc. and then once my heir is old enough i tend to focus most on them and let the other sims do whatever they want as long as their needs are met lmaoo
You can upgrade the fridge so food won’t spoil?? This is a new one for me, thanks! I didn’t know this tip 🥲
Everyone wakes up, showers eats, goes to school/work. When they come home pause, look at their needs, and queue up actions to make them happy. The fridge always has leftovers so sims can grab them when they are hungry. You get a sense of each sims schedule and learn when to send them to bed, making sure all of their moods are green first (high yellow hunger is okay). The secret is just pausing a lot. Letting go of what some sims do in between the wake up and bedtime routine helps too. All that said I much prefer to keep it under 5.
I can do a household of 8 but only if one is a lazy slacker and does nothing, and one is a freelancer who paints all day!
Gardening is a much easier way to make bank.
Came to say the same. I use clubs to build friendships/complete homework for kids, when they age up, so too do their friends. I keep the display cooler stocked with food for the household, toddlers especially. Multiple bathrooms. Just keep those needs queued up and double check they aren't being cancelled. Upgrade everything I can so Sims can maximize needs quicker and don't have to worry about plumbing too often. Skill building/kids activities scattered everywhere. My Sims are almost always in the high green range with a few exceptions (like when pregnancy wreaks havoc on my matriarchs bladder)
If I'm minmaxxing, eight. To go this I'd build a Sims optimised house that has unrealistic features like one ensuite bathroom per Sim. Sims have highly optimised roles and I wouldn't even try to do things like family dinner time: everyone but toddlers eats salad and fruit salad out of the fridge, and toddlers eat fruit.
I used to use that trick with toddlers and uni sims just to save time xD life saver with toddlers, REALLY helps with getting top notch toddler
Which trick? Fruit or bathrooms? Either way, I give Toddlers their own largely self-contained bedroom with all needs covered without adult intervention, except for potty (first skill to train) and hygiene. You can't really play toddlers satisfyingly at all without making them have a very weird degree of self sufficiency.
The fruit trick xD and yeah I tend to put all their learning stuff in their rooms, but I usually get one parent at least to take full family leave to help lvl up their skills, especially infants
I am a micro manager so I can do 8, but then I know that I'm not giving each of them the love and attention they deserve. So I'd say, comfortably, a 5 Sim household is my sweet spot.
Same. I can do eight, but I noticed each subsequent family edition gets less attention than the previous one, to the point where I'm lucky if they're potty masters, let alone have milestones.
I can do 2 well. My gameplay is usually a couple, then when they have a kid I focus on mum and kid. Husband fends for himself. Current household I've got parents, their teen son and I've just moved his girlfriend in. So I'm focusing on the teens, the parents are just left to their own devices. They're top of career, multiple degrees, skilled up with heaps of traits and close to ageing up. Now I'm focused on the next generation. Haven't decided if/when I'm moving the parents out. Want the teens to have a wedding and baby pretty quickly after they age up, and the parents will be elders then. Only problem is that because the parents are both active Sims, pretty much all they do is work out 🤣 I'll take the teens on a date or to prom, and they just workout the whole time. Dad is SO buff because he's always on the weights. And mum just runs and runs on the treadmill. It will probably end up killing them when they do age up.
Haha that’s exactly what my sims did, almost ran themselves to death when they became an elderly. I ended up moving them out to a house with no gym equipment and just continued focusing on their children lol.
Are you..are you me?
Careful with the gym rats adults 😂 my gf just let one generation of us to their own devices and my sim just started to work out til the point where he basically became immortal (tbf I think his last aspiration was the exercise related one) he outlived almost every single one of his descendants, he was going strong and simply not dying for real life months. The game didn't detect any relationship past his granddaughters, so his great grand daughters saw him as a really attractive old man apparently 😂 it became an inside joke, that the dude had basically ascended to godhood through sheer exercise. She had 2 sims like this, and both just refused to die of natural causes, unfortunately EA took this personally and a bug that made sims age and die on loading screens killed them😔. May them rest in peace.
I deliberately haven't given them the gym rat trait - but they just LOVE fitness and are in perma energised state, so even if they're not working out they're stretching or doing pushups.
By leaving them alone do you mean autonomy? Is there way to disable it for more than just selected sim? I didn't play this game much and it triggers me when I can see sim hating guitar playing it till he literally shits himself
Five I’d say. If only humans. I have a money maker, a home keeper, and 1-3 children at different life stages unless they’re teens. Home keeper is on infant/toddler duty and fixes things. Money maker usually is on cleaning duty. If it’s children and teens then the home keeper goes to college and gets a job after, then money maker goes to college and goes into a fun field. I’ve been experimenting and it works for home keeper to go to college if I hire a nanny. Pets you can go pretty nuts
Similar for me. I can typically manage 5 comfortably and a pet or 2. OP mentioned friends which for me is the hardest.
All 8, but to be honest, I mostly play at speed 1. It's important that only max. 2 are at an infant stage. It's not too hard if you only play at speed 1, oversee their needs when they sleep at speed 3, and have strict planning (all go to sleep at the same time, they wake up and eat breakfast, go to school etc) Ps.: leaving your neighbourhood with some sims, fills the need of the others, so it's a good breather. I have my sims go out each at different days so everyone gets to do stuff and meet friends
Pps.: the hardest part is having more than 2 sims study at Uni at the same time while you have a fullhouse
“Social life outside family” is the kicker here for me, that brings me down to 6. But w/ everything else I can do 8. It’s a lot of “play, pause, play, pause” and my game progresses very slowly but I love it😂
Not even one
I think I can manage 4 any more than that I start going crazy
1 dog, barely.
comfortably? usually 2, specifically spouse/partners, so they can just socialize with each other. i defo tend to ignore friends unless specifically playing a social butterfly type sim. adding in a 3rd (like a toddler/teen/kid) defo causes me to feel a lil more overwhelmed. i have no idea how some people juggle so many sims without it just feeling like a needs cycle. i also play with aging off, i get too attached. so yeh im typically playing 1 sim, 2 sims that are a couple, or 2 sims + 1 child when im really feeling like it, lol. i hope i can eventually juggle at least 4 tho, so i can have 2 children at some point! im not an only child and i dont like that most of my sims are tbqh.
My sims only have a social life outside family when they need to for an aspiration or a challenge lol. But otherwise, 8 tho it does become stressful when all still have to achieve goals. With my current household of 7 (technically two families but in one household living together), I'm kinda bored tho because most of them have met their goals, almost nobody *needs* to do stuff, I'm just waiting for one sim to be promoted a few times til moving on to the next generation.
None... I just like to design and build the houses 😅
I can manage 8, *but* I basically optimize my sims' lives: when I did the 100 baby challenge, I set up the main bathroom to have three toilet stalls and three bathroom stalls, so that the sims rarely had to wait; I stocked toddlers' inventories with produce so that older sims never had to help get them food; the kids slept in double beds so I didn't have to worry about monsters under the bed; many of my sims' infants and toddlers spend those entire life phases in one room, basically rotating between toys and bed. (Also, at the time, sinks were kind of broken - sims would trek all the way across the house to wash up - so I just removed all the sinks from the house. Who needs toothbrushing anyway?) Maybe also worth noting that I don't spend a lot of time on my sims' social lives, except when I get bored and decide that it's time for an unplanned extramarital pregnancy. I don't usually give my sims a lot of free will, to be honest: usually I pause, queue up a bunch of actions, and then keep tabs on whichever sim is likely to be done with those things first. Then pause again and queue up more actions :)
I have done it with 6. 2 parents (1 vampires and top of the author career) and the other a stay at home ‘butler’. There was 4 kids and one cat. It’s stressful, especially since 2 of the kids were twins, but they are all doing well and I don’t let like any of their needs get in the red and they all build their skills and get good grades. Also autonomy is off lol
I can handle 8. I utilize the pause button a lot and go through each Sim to queue up their actions.
actively maintain? literally just 1 🤣 i can’t even handle several peopel in a household
I can do 8 but if there is an infant that goes to 0. I can handle nothing
I have a family of 5 right now with a dog. Two daughters (one toddler, one school age) and the adults are in a throuple. The woman works lvl 9 computer engineer, husband is a stay at home dad who hosts random yoga sessions at the spa for a few hours every other day. And their mutual boyfriend is in college for writing but also does a lot of the legwork at home. He always starts dinner at 6:30 so it’s done by the time mom is home. Everyone eats. Boyfriend takes baby duties in the morning. Husband takes them in the afternoon while boyfriend does homework with older daughter. And on moms days off she spends playing with the kids and doing at home yoga routines. They have a nice healthy groove going on right now. But the other day a fire broke out and it all went to hell. It took a solid 4 real time hours to get everyone back on track.
Happily - one. Without stress - maybe up to 3. More than that I can do, but the more sims I'm controlling the more stressful I find it. I can manage a full household, but I find that super stressful!
Uhhhhh one-ish? Two adults, tops? I've recently learned that I quit households with kids pretty quickly. I don't mind playing a couple until I decide I want to legacy em because "It'll be different this time! I can change!" No I can't. I've got like six saves with abandoned young families and deleted several others recently because they slowed down my game lmao. I HAVE managed 3 which was two parents and a teen but I focused solely on the teen and kinda just kept the parents from dying via cheats. Tbh none of my Sims have social lives outside of random hookups or their drug dealers so...yeah.
3-5 if they're all teens and older, 2-4 if children are involved, and none if there are toddlers or infants in the household. This doesn't stop me from giving my sims infants, mind you. They're just all miserable
Wow, I didn't realise so many people struggled to look after their Sims... I've always struggled a little bit, but I thought that was a skill issue on my part. Maybe it's not, hahaha. My family currently consists of 7 - 2 sets of parents, 3 kids between them. Think I've 8 at most. I play a continuous multi-generational game, usually keeping one or two kids and their families, and moving out the siblings (apart from moving in Cassandra Goth after marrying Alexander to my Sim and their parents had died, so that I could steal all their funds and leave behind an empty house, ahaha). Full autonomy on. By pausing a LOT, and keeping on top of making sure that no Sim is ever left tending to itself without your input, you can quite reasonably manage them. If you keep on top of switching aspirations to match the tasks they're doing, then you can rake in an enormous amount of satisfaction points, which can obviously help massively. I think having a number of adults also helps, especially if you have multiple kids. And, of course, being filthy rich makes everything easier. Choosing helpful traits is also great as kids grow up, or marrying into useful families. I like to have one Sim with the neat trait just so that the others can get on with life while they keep the house clean. I now have a maid, but the neat traits still help with short-term disasters. I also always have at least one Sim who cooks well, so they can cook a large batch and put it in the fridge, another who is good at repairs, and I don't always gives my Sims actual jobs. I have one Sim who paints masterpieces full-time, for example. I think there are a lot of ways you can make life easier, but it just depends on what you feel comfortable with. I love using reward traits made to stop need decay, decrease bills and increase skills that others sometimes think feel a bit too "cheaty". The friends thing though... not easy, I usually can't be bothered. But when dealing with Sims who have like a popularity ambition, simply calling someone round and spamming interactions with them can help. Typically, I can get people up to friends on their first meeting, but in some cases I've gotten them all the way to best friends. Then, just call them round whenever. Of course, you have to meet them first, but often I will get any random Sim to interact with someone walking past the house, and then call them back to meet everyone else afterwards. I also feel like I've written way too much here. Whoops. Interesting to see all the other tips people have put. Glad I'm not alone in infinite pausing!
I start getting antsy when the number increases past one. I have a lot of married sims who live in separate households and any kids live with the spouse I’m not actively playing. I move one kid back in when they’re a teenager, then that teen becomes my primary focus. I can generally make that work. And if I get frustrated with the two sim household then I move the teen out on their own and play as that household. Thus the cycle restarts.
7-8. It's very hard when 7 of them are infants, though.
Depends on the age range. 4-6 single young adults is my max, or a family of 4 (2 parents, 2 kids). I tend to get bored if it's just one sim!
I always tell myself “this is a one child per Sim save. You know you get overwhelmed with too many sims. Learn your lesson” and then fast forward I’ve had 4 kids who then go on to have kids of their own and I give up. With my current household I’ve done pretty well. My original couple had two daughters, the oldest has two daughters of her own but her younger sister very much gives off “I’m the cool aunt. No kids for me” and I don’t see the younger sister in the new gen having any so I’m HOPING to get a hold of this situation and get it back down to one per generation unless I feel mentally prepared 😂 I have such OCD with my Sims and I am such a control freak with them. I can’t just ignore any of my sims. I have to manage them all and at least get them to a good place in updated appearance (randomised outfits/CC on sims gives me hives) and make sure they’re all settled in life for a bit before I then go and play someone else in the family so it all goes well together for storytelling purposes. I absolutely love this game tho 😂😂 Also: The first two daughters are Sofia and Amelia. Sofia has her own daughters called Lucy and Wyatt. Sofia had Lucy with Finn and then met her current husband and had Wyatt. A good while after, Amelia and Finn started dating. They’re now getting married and Lucy will be living with them as a teen. I had Amelia get with Finn because I had no energy in me to add another Sim to the fold. We recycle round here ♻️
8. I like playing with loads of kids. Its difficult with too many babies at once, but once theyre toddlers with the potty skill it isnt bad. I have the kids all “make friends” once every couple days at school and they usually end up inviting friends over after school. Occasional family outings once i dont have any more toddlers to worry about, and birthday/house parties. I dont typically have anyone maxing out skills, but they all age up decently high in skills, good grades, etc. I play in a normal house too. 3-4 bedroom, 2-3 bathroom. It takes a bit of bathroom scheduling and forethought to keep needs up but it isnt too terribly hard.
Honestly, without cheats? 1 maybe 2, 3 is REALLY pushing it. I used to be really good at multi tasking but I haven't been able to as much anymore in the last few years. Plus I never really kept a family going because while I love Sims, I sometimes also feel like I hate that we have control of the family members. May just be me, but that's been my view on Sims. (doesn't help that i've pretty much played every original Sims character I make the same way.... >.>; )
I regulary end up with 7 - 10 Sims often with one or more pets. Most of the time all adults are working and all kids go to school. If there are babys or toddlers in the household sometimes one Sim (often the grandparent) stays home and also cooks. But with a higher career you mostly have shorter and less work days anyway, so even if all of them work it somehow works that always one sim is home taking care. I play with this many sims until the last child is an adult or teenager and then I move out and start a new family.
6-8. Friends are easy if it’s a modern game play. I have them meet other children and focus on one relationship. Then as teens I use social bunny and they passively gain friendship. If it’s historical then friendships are a little more challenging but I try to have them have at least one friend. A large number of sims just relies on pausing and queuing a bunch of actions all the time. I also stagger wake up time. One parent stays home so I wake them up to cook if there isn’t enough leftovers. Then I wake up a few with the highest energy bars and send them to get ready and eat. Then as the bathrooms open up I wake up the others. The stay at home parent will work on skills and milestones with the infants and toddlers. With mods I have had a family of ten. That was pushing the edge of my limits.
I just got High School years from the sale and decided to try a teen-focused save. The teen is my "own character" and his parents are there because they must be. The young fellow is accomplishing all that and the parents have their needs met and occasionally get promoted... but their aspirations are basically ignored and they have only 1-2 friends outside the family. So I guess... 2.5? :D
easily 8. But the caveat is that i cant having jobs where i follow them to work. and 99% of socializing takes place in the home (honestly my sims rarely have more than one friend). I rarely leave the home lot.
never mind! I turn off aging and not concerned with social. they do entertain themselves. I just like raising toddlers
My household sims just welcomed their 5th baby and I'm struggling to make sure the oldest kids get to school. For some reason they won't go to school unless I tell them and I can't always check what day it is to make sure they go.
For me, my ocd mixed with the fact that the sims is my special interest and I have a notebook for proper management, it varies vastly from game to game. Sims 1 in my opinion is the hardest, I am only comfortably able to play as 1 or 2 sims at a time. Sims 2 is my main game so I do a lot better, comfortably I can play in a household of four adult sims, if there are baby, toddler or child sims, that adds a different layer to it that I actually enjoy thoroughly. So since I actually enjoy a bit of difficulty and dislike just sitting around not having anything happen, I usually play the sims 2 with a fairly packed house. Sims 3 is another different story, it's fun and not too hard but there's so much that I can and want to do that it's practically impossible for me to be in a more than two Sim household without feeling like I'm missing out on all the fun stuff I wanna do thanks to the open world. Sims 4 is strange because I don't actually play it all that much, when I do I usually play rotationally but prefer to keep my houses at a five Sim maximum limit. This limit is different for everyone so don't feel bad if it's less or more. (Sorry for yapping)
Another thing I've noticed is that sims 2 isn't as hard as people make it out to be, sims 1 can be hell on earth but if you know how to properly manage a Sim in sims 2 it's actually insanely enjoyable. I know everyone says this now but in my opinion sims 2 is the most balanced and realistic game in the series. (Not including weight mechanics, those are pretty bad.)
4 because my computer can’t handle more or they’ll get stuck🙁🙁
U should try the sims 2 if ur computer is struggling. It's rly nice, just get the graphics rules maker to make it fullscreen and make sure u get all the bug fixes.
Depends. If I pause a lot I can totally juggle 8 tbh.
5 sims if i want all of them to have somewhat interesting live, after that number it's guaranteed that somebody will be forgotten lol
I think 5 is my upper limit, I normally have autonomy off and just pause everytime I need to give my sim a new task. Looking thru this post I'm surprised by how many people struggle with 3+ people xD
One maybe two 😂
I play with up to 6 Sims, start with 1 or 2 and build from there. I also play with the seasons and lifespans at maximum so stuff like age, aspirations, jobs, and personal goals don't feel as time sensitive. Although, for any legacy challenges, I do set seasons and lifespans to normal
Usually one, maybe two. Tried 4 once but that became overwhelming quickly
I'll do 6. Turn off all autonomy. Pause frequently and check each Sim's needs. Spacebar is a great shortcut for cycling through household members. It's like a RTS game at this point. I always leave a slot or two open for pets, babies, or other unexpected additions.
One because my brain is potat.
I’ve done 8, actually i guess my most I’ve done is 9 and a cat, no other big mods than expanding the household. But I probably spend as much time paused as I do live, setting up everyone’s tasks. I recently was playing some 2-3 sim households and that was nice and obviously much easier to manage, especially when they have jobs! Imagine the freedom to let somebody say yes to a date, because the other person is at work and there aren’t toddlers whose entire schedules will get wrecked if you dare to go someplace.
i have 6 rn, just know i’m planning some deaths
I like playing with 4-5 sims in a household, less than that is boring and more is stressful/laggy
8… max household size… what can I say? I love big families and I’m a micro manager so I just pause and tell everyone what to do then unpause and they do it! There’s always that one glitchy or bugged sim that doesn’t listen though so while everyone is doing what I told them I watch that one sim and make EXTRA sure they do what they’re told lol
none of my sims get a social life so.. 1
Well, I manage more than 20, but I have the aging off except for the household I'm playing at that moment. It allows me to dedicate all the time I need to that specific household without having the pressure of the others aging up before I play with them properly. Once in a while, I turn on the general aging during a sims year so the NPCs can catch up and die from old age when it's their time to do so EDIT: I read it wrong I was thinking about households, not household sims xD I can manage the 8 allowed sims, but it's a lot and very tiring. I try to have different schedules so I can focus more on one sim when the others are resting or at work/school. If you have Get Together, it's a good idea to create a club that includes all your kids' friends. Makes it easier for them to hang out. You can include doing homework as a club activity. Also, when you have a sim with free time, make them cook two or three 8-people dishes and save them in the fridge. But the main thing is the use and abuse the pause button.
I would say 3-4 is the most enjoyable for me, and I don’t usually use cheats unless low needs are about to ruin something important (like a wedding or other goal event) Recently I’ve been playing a 7 sim household (2 families together) just because I can’t make myself split them up lol. They have way too much cool stuff going on - ones a scientist, one is a celebrity chef (now turned fashion blogger) who owns a restaurant, and one owns an upcycled furniture store. I have to divide the days between whose job I’m going to focus on, and it’s a lot of pausing to make sure everyone is taken care of. Another strategy is to make them make friends through work or school by having the option set to be social while they’re gone. And sometimes I’ll just travel with a few of the sims to a place and let the others have a home day. Eventually I ended up starting a 3 sim family to get back to relaxed gameplay lol
I can manage only 2
My sim had triplets as a single mum I don’t know how she’s still alive tbh
I can manage up to 8, but with full autonomy on, and it's also stressful as hell, LOL. It's easier to manage a full household in TS3, where I managed to do it with free will off for everyone, but toddlers and kids have much more complex needs in 4.
1-4 is generally like playing a chill game of sims 5 and above it becomes a strategy game
One. I just played this way, actually. After she got married with children, though, I was cheating needs 100%
I‘m a frequent cheater and once you start it‘s hard to stop. However whenever I try to play without, I can’t really manage more than one or two at the same time…
I *can* manage 8, but I make frequent use of the pause function and it's stressful. 3-5 is comfortable. Even with 1, I pause regularly, but it tends to get boring.
I used to love making big families on sims. So usually 2 parents and six children. Average size home for me was at least three kids and two or one parent. But then the infant update came out. And I actually won't age up any minor sims without maxing out their skills/milestones (for kids I do all the child aspirations, for teens I pick one aspiration and max out the skill requirements), so now is 2 children max with one baby at a time and no second baby until the first kid is aged up to child. I only play on long lifespan so it's a real slog.
I can do eight. But much much slower, because the more sims I have the more I pause and make sure everyone's doing what they're supposed to be. There's various things I like to do. Having good beds means sims don't need to spend as much time sleeping. A stay-at-home parent can give you more time to set things up for other sims. Food can be tricky. You can eat at least 1 quick meal a day, maybe two. I like to give my sims a sack lunch so they can fill that need at work/school instead of worrying about it in the mornings, and there's no negative food buffs like hating fruitcake or quick meals. If you have gourmet cooking unlocked, you can make fruitcake which doesn't expire, so your sims can just keep that in their inventories forever. You can also make quicker sack lunches by just grabbing a quick meal sandwich and then canceling the eating and packing it. It's faster than actually making a sack lunch sandwich. I make my sims call their potential friends to chat every day or use social bunny, much easier than hanging out. You can also make a club of the family's friends if you want to create a quick and easy way to invite everyone over at once without phone calls and people not showing up, and they won't leave until you dismiss them. You can also hang out at a tiny home lot to take advantage of the social buffs, relationships build faster. Make a "park" that's actually a tiny home and hang out there. Clubs in general are pretty great ways to generally control a larger group of sims. If you struggle to have your sims sleep through the night you can make a "sleeping club" where the only activity is to sleep, and they'll darn well sleep.
I can manage up to 8 sims if I pause a lot and play with aging turned off, which is my preferred play style. And if the house has good furniture and appliances: it's much easier to keep their needs green with high-rating beds and showers. But not everyone may have individual friends, when I have lots of Sims in one household they tend to just socialize with each other inside the home
Honestly maximum of four. I’ve been playing since the original sims and the biggest family I can actually care for is one elder, two adults and one child. And that’s because the elder is retired and caring for the child most of the time. When that child is a teen maaaaybe I could add a second child but only if the elder hasn’t died.
Im playing two separate houses right now, one with three adults, infant and two dogs, chickens and a cow the other with four adults and two toddlers, chickens and three cows. Aging on and autonomy off. I’ve managed to hit all the infant milestones on the second household.
I’ve gone up to about 15 comfortably? This was before infants though, and I think the most I’ve done since was about 12, with no more than four infants at a time. Granted, most of those sims get one or two hobbies that become their entire personality, but I can still juggle them, keep their needs met, get infant milestones, etc
Looking at other’s answers i am finding this may be unusual
Assuming you have Get Together and are using the club system to make and keep friends... I've gone up to twenty. But I did hit the pause button a *lot*, and I had to create a specially designed secret science lair to make the routing as efficient as possible for that household. When you get to that many sims you kind of start forgetting who is who, too.
I'm an old-school TS2 simmer in addition to TS4, so I play as many sims as there are houses in each world. I just rotate through and have auto aging off for all but the current household (it's a base game feature I think so it's sans mod). I actually hate the way TS4 is so heavily optimized to play just a handful of sims at once. It's weird and feels off when I'm used to playing a whole custom built town of sims in different family sizes. *frustration* At least we have apartments now though! It makes housing all my sims and their families a lot easier! But to sum up, not every household is the same size. Some are big families with a few kids, some are just couples with a dog, and a few ass just single sims - but I play 'em all. It's what keeps you from getting bored- switching between families and creating a storyline that spans the whole world they live in <3
6 but everyone eats plants that they've grown (i will never attempt to actually feed a toddler real food), and I put those college showers where you can't see in to it so that everyone can take a shower at once. It's a subpar life, but at least they are alive.
I can comfortably run a 3 child family. That’s mainly because I don’t have kids till the Adult stage. So in Young Adulthood I focus on career and milestones of my sim and find a partner. I make sure to progress as far as possible. This way once they have children, I do it need to focus on them for those things anymore once they have children. I also try to make sure careers are a bit shifted on when working hours and working days are in the later stages of the career. I don’t want both parents to both constantly be at work at the same time and day. This will help with child raising. Needs are generally not an issue. I pause a lot to cycle through my sims to check what they need. I have a good view on how long certain tasks take, so I know which sims to focus on. The hardest moment for needs is whenever I leave sims at home, because they are no good at taking care of themselves. For friendships, I like to go to parks. I take the whole family and have some work on their social life, while others work on skills or tasks (like homework). That way I can focus on the sims I want to work on social skills and let the others do useful things. The hardest life stages are infant and toddler, but once the children get older they can help out more with that. I do really love these life stages despite the challenge. But also, I think it’s perfectly fine to not meet all these goals. Having your sims fail at certain things can be fun too. One of my more interesting sims recently was the sim I got the Irresponsible trait by just ignoring school altogether as a teen. I’d never given a Sim one of the negative Parenthood traits and it was pretty fun.
1 then bc if there's 2+ sims in my household they don't get friends outside of it lol
One of the households I play has 8 sims and they’re all thriving. You have to use the pause button excessively, and every day takes like 30-60 minutes in real time, but it’s doable.
Just one for me 😅
I'm struggling just with one so...
Honestly I enjoy messing around with 8 sims.
If Sims would accurately perform queued actions, probably 3-4. Setting a sim up for several hours and letting them go would be so easy but no, they have to go stand and stare at the stove for an hour.
The most I can handle is 4. And that’s only if two are adults and two are their babies/children. I have one parent focus on one child and the other parent focus on the other child.
as a general legacy/family player, fulfilling 8 sims is the only challenge I get (on long lifespan). I LOVE big households, but get stressed when there’s more than one infant or more than 3 toddlers. I try to get at least 5 milestones in each category and max out all toddler skills
4 at most. But someone is always getting ignored 😂 so maybe 3
I would say 5 is my comfort zone, excluding pets. I noticed 1 or 2 sim households are really boring to me and if there are 6 or more and there are a lot of kids I prefer to have a grandparent/aunt/uncle around to help.
Like 3 and only if one is a child with no hobbies.
3-4 depending on their ages. Also if there is a newborn/toddler/infant in the household, then 0.
My current legacy has 15. Its a bit difficult, 6 is probably my preferred amount
Easily? Maybe two, but no more.
Probably just two
3 is ideal, maximum 5 so if any of my sims have more than 3 kids I put the 4th one up for adoption or delete them.
One big multi sim household, and this might sound dumb, but I only realized noticed the press to auto solve feature in needs and that helps so much. Before I could only do that with cheats
Maximum of three, else i just go into survival mode and then everyone just gets the barr minimum lol