How I set up rotational gameplay in the Sims 4!

[@biancabfaa]

I loved it!! This really inspired me to play the sims, thank you so much!! And I really hope to see more videos like this and gameplay with your family too, your sims looks so interesting. ❤❤

[@starstruck_sims]

@@biancabfaa thank you so much for watching, I'm glad you found the video helpful!! I'll definitely be posting more ☺️

[@yaboyleo3092]

I love this!!! please make more content about this style of gameplay!!!

[@starstruck_sims]

@@yaboyleo3092 I'll definitely be making more about my playstyle and gameplay ideas!! Thanks for watching 😊

[@raynereisinger826]

This is so helpful! I've never thought about playing like this before! I usually play one family until I get bored with the storyline and make a new save for something new. But with rotational gameplay you can do that without abandoning the save you're currently in. I think im definitely going to try this next time I play!

[@starstruck_sims]

@@raynereisinger826 I'm glad you found it helpful and if you do try rotational gameplay, I hope you enjoy it!! ☺️

[@raynereisinger826]

@@starstruck_sims It's only been a day in the save and I'm loving it, I made an apartment building full of different families and I'm obsessed with it so far! 😄

[@starstruck_sims]

@raynereisinger826 ooh that sounds so fun!! Enjoy playing ☺️

[@ItsSimothee]

Thank you for sharing your gameplay style! It seems like an epic delight! 😊

[@starstruck_sims]

Thank you for watching!! ☺️

[@perkytxgirl]

I was playing this way but then I got exhausted because my founder has 250 decedents (not all still alive but still so many to play), Your videos gave me some new ideas and I will probably go back to that save some day. My biggest problem came down to computer performance if I didn't mark some of my families 'unplayed", but then I discovered marking them unplayed had issues too! Also, culling was ruining my family tree until I discovered MCCC could flag ghosts to never be culled, but my tree was already messed up when I discovered that. One ideaI explored is that some households weren't families per se. For example when a generation was aged up to young adults I had cousins living together working on their careens and partying instead of getting married. I had one household that was the "bro house" where some of the young male sims just lived their best bro life.

[@starstruck_sims]

It is a lot of sims to play! Oh noo I'm sorry about the computer performance, around how many were you able to keep as played sims? I have a little over 150 now, and I have some performance issues but I don't know if they're from mods or from the save file itself. I'm glad to hear you got some ideas from the video! I like your idea of having some households not be families. I do that when my sims are young adults before getting married; I'll often have cousins or siblings live together in an apartment or go to university together. I really need to get better at not making all of my sims have kids though lol. I very rarely let any of them have more than 1 kid, but I need to have some without children or else my save file will get too crazy. But I love having the continued storylines and seeing what the kids look like so it's hard to make myself do that lol

[@TheDawnofVanlife]

I am a huge rotational player. Agree on the smaller families, I do sometimes have sims I feel like are ‘big family’ type sims, so I let it happen but most families I try to keep at 2-3 kids (if they have kids) and below 4 sims per household. I do find with big Sims households its harder to goal set and meet goal, but its okay. I’ve also relaxed in the idea every sim is gonna be perfect. In fact I took out a mod that enforced homework because every kid wouldn’t be an A student and I wanted to give some sims a chance to be bad at school. 😂 For aging I found I hated breaking it up, so I just have a custom long lifespan I set in MCCC and I will play a week with aging on for everyone, keeping the world in sync, then I turn it off for a cycle of playing through all the families (restricted to a week). The game for me is trying to meet all the goals I set for each family (a running document) but if someone ages up before I do absolutely every thing I planned (or dies unexpectedly) I like the challenge and pivot of dealing with that and examining what I do next. But either every sim is on pause with aging or they all are aging up a sim week and however that lands during the time I am playing with the ‘age up’ family, that’s what I move forward with. And it means I don’t have to peice together catching up friend groups and generations. And I just prefer it that way. 😊 I have also just learned the magic of sim dumps when the save is starting to feel too incestual. i too just some times go on the gallery and find acceptable townies and dump them in game (with the home regions mod I can even give them world ‘assignments’). Then assigned them to unplayed and see where they show up. I diversified my celebs this way just so there were more celebs to run into around the world and not the same ol, same ol Maxis ones. Sorted them between del sol, San Myshuno, and windenburg, the three places I see celebs existing. And if they come to impact my played sims, I’ll set them up in a proper house for story telling. But I sort of detach from the 8 adult sims I might have parked in a 20x20 lot otherwise 😂😂

[@starstruck_sims]

Ooh I love your comment so much, thank you for sharing your strategies too!! I do have one family where it's an 8 sim household because it makes sense of them and I try to keep all the others small. When I do play that 8 sim household, I try to focus on one sim for a few days and let the others have autonomy (which can be stressful but I like seeing what skills and stuff they pick up on their own, especially toddler/child/teen sims). I definitely need to work on not having all my sims be A students, it kinda just happens that way but I want to make more of an effort to not have them be A students lol I've had a few like that so far that stay at B or C grades but I'd like to have more, it's just more realistic. Your lifespan method is really interesting! Do you ever miss more than one life stage of a sim that way? I can be fine if I miss, like, the toddler stage for example but if I miss toddler, childhood, and half of teen, I'd feel like I missed too much lol! I loooove your idea of getting more celebrity sims into the world that way, I'm huge on celebrity gameplay (a lot of the big drama in my game comes from either celebrity or occult stuff), so I'm definitely going to get more celebrity sims from the gallery! Thanks for watching and commenting!

[@TheDawnofVanlife]

@@starstruck_sims nah, I only have aging on for a sim week with one family, since I have long lifespan on when I do and have even customized it since with MCCC (my pregnancies last 5 days not 3, and my newborns are newborns for 5 days before they become infant) 7 sim days doesn't age anyone to quicky. I might miss a whole newborn stage or an occassonal birth, but never an entire infant or toddler stage. Then aging is off again while I visit every family in the rotation before I land back on my age up family. You don't catch every birthday and have to do clean-up on outfits after auto-aging, but sometimes game selected traits on age up are fun to discover and have to deal with and work with (and justify :D). For me it keeps the game fresh. I also go big for the birthdays I do catch and since many of my sims know each other, they are at the party anyway.

[@starstruck_sims]

@TheDawnofVanlife ahh i see i see, that makes sense! I might try custom lifespans sometime. Right now I'm trying out considering one sim day = 3 months (based on the pregnancy timeline), and I'm keeping track of this family's exact ages lol I've never done that before but it's fun.

[@TheDawnofVanlife]

I honestly love hearing how other people play there rotations and that we all have our own unique ways of doing it. I love love Sims 2, but I did always sense there was a ‘right way’ to play rotationally that developed among the fans of the game (including me). Some of that also had to do with how the game itself worked. When it came to time passing so you kind of had to work within that game rule base. For all the things that are complicated and frustrating about Sims 4, as a rotational player I think I got happier with it when I stopped trying to play it like Sims 2 (Sims 2 is still a banger). there are so many customization options with aging and who ages when (even in vanilla game) and neighborhood stories is also more customizable then people give it credit for. Even without mods, there’s so much you can tinker with in game settings. And yeah it takes some experimentation to find your personal special sauce, but I like that the options are there.

[@starstruck_sims]

@TheDawnofVanlife I love hearing other people's styles too, it's really interesting! Thanks for the nice conversation ☺️ Ooh wow I didn't realize that about the Sims 2, I wonder how much that influences players today still in how they play the game. I was a kid then so I don't remember too much of how I played, but I was also much more into Sims Bustin' Out and Urbz than the main games of the franchise, so I definitely missed the community aspect of the games back then (being on playstation also, I never played with mods until the sims 4, so I wasn't involved with the online community until then also). Do you still play the sims 2 now sometimes? I agree about neighborhood stories and game settings being very customizable! Neighborhood stories options are so useful for my sims' townie friends

[@clairedrn7421]

thank you for these very useful tips!!!!!!!

[@starstruck_sims]

@@clairedrn7421 no problem, thank you for watching!!

[@landosking9532]

I haven't tried rotational as it seems a little intimidating trying to play that many families. I have a generation (not so berry) game where I play the one family with the heir. I sort of do rotation but only spend a brief time on the other families. When my heir ages up to a young adult I go around all my previous Sims houses and quickly do some tidying up. I have rules on what I do, mainly getting Sims married or pregnant. Then I leave the household to do what they want. I leave aging on so Sims will die whilst I am playing the main household. Playing this way is the best thing I have ever done.

[@starstruck_sims]

@@landosking9532 that sounds like a nice way to do things! Keeping things moving with the other families while focusing on your main sounds nice. I can definitely see that being a good way to keep invested with the game!

[@SamJones-qx9hz]

I love rotational gameplay and still feel like I'm ironing out the kinks of how to do it in sims 4 so thank you so much for this. I didn't realise until you asked but I do prefer smaller families - it is so much easier to really get to know my sims and they seem to have much more interesting storylines. Because of the nature of sims 4 big families take so much micromanagement to keep them on track and though I love the infant lifestage everyone else is forgotten if they are around 😅 One question I have is how much time you dedicate to each family? Do you stick to a time limit or play as long as you like?

[@starstruck_sims]

@@SamJones-qx9hz Yes, the big families are soo much work! All of mine are small right now except the one I'm currently playing, 7 sims and a pet 😅 I usually play sith autonomy off, but with them I have to leave it on or it would take me sooo long to play them haha. I usually play for one life stage before moving on. Basing it on the kids' life stages since the adult ones are much longer. So I'll stay for the whole toddler stage, then move on, for example. For young adults, I'll stay for the whole university stage (if they go, maybe about 60 or 70% of my sims do), and then post-university until they have a baby.

[@SamJones-qx9hz]

@starstruck_sims Thank you. I usually play for a season (14 days) which worked fine in TS2 as seasons froze as you rotated, where TS4 seasons keep progressing which makes it difficult to play families through each season concurrently (I hope that made sense 😅) This is something I've been struggling with and looking for alternatives so thank you. I also really like your idea of rotating through family groups - I think that would help keep storylines flowing more easily. I love how your family has grown - can't wait to get some generations going in my game. If you feel like sharing I would be interested in knowing what information you record for individual sims to help with your storytelling? All my records and planning are written and I seem to have little bits all over the place 😅 Thank you again for your videos, they have been so helpful ❤️

[@starstruck_sims]

@@SamJones-qx9hz ooh so you could play one family with spring, for example, and then switch to another family and it's still spring? That's cool, then you don't have 5 million Winterfests like with the sims 4 haha. I only had base game for sims 2 so I didn't know! I also play with 14 day seasons, in the sims 4 though. I just feel like 7 days are too fast lol. The type of information I write down for sims are why I gave them certain traits, the relationships with their families, what their future plans are, what their strengths/difficulties are, and anything I might forget if I leave that sim for a while. I also need to organize my notes haha they're in several different documents 😅

[@BethPlaysSims]

im gettinto to rotational game play, could you share how you keep record of you families

[@starstruck_sims]

I try to write each generation's information in a separate document and keep all those documents together! I write about their relationships with their family/friends, why I gave them certain traits, their future plans, and anything interest that happened to them or about their personality that I might forget if I don't write it down. And using the Sims Legacy Hub family tree is really helpful too for me

[@vanessahonest3462]

How do you keep it fun? I can usually get to the third generation but then I stop playing because I don‘t have any ideas left and don’t really feel a connection with the grandchildren

[@starstruck_sims]

I'd say the biggest thing I do is look for hints of conflict. If that's conflicting traits or lifestyles, for example, I use that to make difficult family relationships. Doesn't always have to be huge crazy drama (although of course that's fun!), but even just estranged family members can be interesting. Having different power dynamics can also help, whether that's some family members with more money, or more power like if they're occults or celebrities etc, that can create some division too. And just in general I try to choose all their traits based on their environment as they're growing up. A newborn that's always screaming will get fussy or sensitive when they're an infant; an infant who gets mostly speech milestones might become a charmer or silly as a toddler, and so on. And that stuff also influences their relationships, so if one parent is very busy maybe the child isn't close with them or maybe they're clingier. I have a couple videos on my channel for this, "How I never get bored playing the Sims 4" and "How I make the Sims 4 more interesting" with more ideas and strategies I use! Thanks for watching btw ✨

[@vanessahonest3462]

Thank you for answering and for the great tipps!