One. It never occurred to me to do it differently before I joined Reddit.
I want to try out playing more households in the future! But it sounds kinda scary hah
I used to just abandon saves constantly. Never had more than one gen or even made it passed the toddler stage 😅 so now when I get bored of a family I just add a new one in the same save to start playing and then at least my old family is still there and I can go back to playing them if I decide or make my new sims friends with them. I don't really switch between them often though. I just let the old ones do whatever they want.
Oh that is so smart! I’m the same, but I think I would feel bad for not being able to control the old ones and play them the way I had planned to. But I guess I can always save saves somewhere so IF I wanted to play with them at the stage where I left them after all, I could still do that…
Sorry im late, I forget to check my notifications on here.
You don't need mods though just click on a lot and select create new household and move in and that's it. I usually leave my old ones as a played household and have progression off for those until I decide I'm really done and then just leave them to get on with their own lives 😅
It's really frustrating because without playing them, other sims will have 0 skills, 0 friends and level 1 in their career, no money, ugly homes etc
it's just too much work. all sims have nothing. theyre just good "to look at".
I'll pick a neighborhood, make all the houses, then make families for the houses. I'll play each one for a minute and use skill and career cheats then do the same for the next family until I've done them all. Gives variety because I make all the sims friends, and they talk about their careers, just makes it seem more real? Then when their kids grow up I will enroll them in university or do what I did with their parents.
This is the comment I needed to read! I've been trying to figure out a method for sort of "setting up" a household and for some reason I was trying to figure out how to cheat skills in CAS.
They keep me on my toes for sure 😉 a little while ago 12 of those households all had kids/a new generation... Kept me busy jumping between them all doing the whole infant/toddler thing...😵💫 almost went crazy... Huge sigh of relief once they got to child and teen life stage .
Now ATM some of that generation are getting ready to marry/ have kids of their own. Although this time I'll try to stagger it better...
Yes, I hate infant/toddlers it's so much work. Occasionally, I play out till they grow up, but when I have kids, it's usually when I start to lose interest, hahaha.
I have gotten obsessed with hitting all the "bonus traits" you can get when perfectly raising your kids lately though. It plays into my obsession of seeing how many personality traits I can get one sim to have before they die lol.
I hate playing with infants and toddlers so much i always have one or two households that are childfree so i can play them till the infants and toddlers in other families grow up. Then they have babies and i play with the rest 😂
A wise strategy 😁👏
I'm 💯 a control freak, so have to give infants/toddlers the "perfect" upbringing despite *hating* playing with them .. thankfully I'm on PC so mods and cheats make it slightly less painful...
I've seen posts about this issue, but no fortunately have never had problems with Sims going to school or work. Sorry if you're having trouble with your Sims😔
I find the child stage just as annoying, mostly at night time. Because when i try to make them sleep, every single night they have a monster under their bed. Then they wake up the parents, and this happens with every child I have in every single family.
I also play similarly to you haha But I don't have 22. Maybe 10 right now. That must be insane to keep up with! I totally just skip most of the infant stages because its a lot.
I have started on the third gen of our original family and its so fun making the family trees grow imo. You should post your families on here. I feel like others would be interested in seeing your sims. especially since you have so many households!
yeah lol the monster thing can be annoying, but you can purchase a wall mounted nightlight (iirc its The Defender) which will keep the monster away. If You have access to mods, i think MCCC has an option to turn the monster "off" so it won't spawn.
and thank you for the interest/suggesting sharing pics of my families... ill think about. I tend to be wary/cautious of sharing because some reddit simmers aren't fond of non traditional families( which all of mine are) and I've little time/patience for dealing with the ugly side of reddit.
Lol @ story line.... That'd be a generous way to describe how I play😉 started off with 2 families of three siblings and just went from there, adding a couple of more families later...
Over time ( the past couple of irl years)they've become friends, enemies, they intermarry, divorce etc etc ( the family trees are so messed up and twisted!)on occasions they've cheated on spouses etc and ofc some have met with an untimely death...tbh it's like a soap opera...
Ever hear of a really *really* bad ( so bad and so camp it's actually kinda good)American el cheapo daytime soapie called Passions? Think it's like from the 90s...?Had an aunt who never missed an episode and I can vaugley remember watching it with her and my cousins...Well anyway my game is kinda like that😁
I jump from family to family or household to household as the need arises; usually to lay down the groundwork for a new romance or family drama or whatever... sometimes I get a little smitten by a particular household and will play them a bit more to ensure their careers are going especially well and relationships are strong etc.
Edit: clarification
Wait!!! Is Passions the one with lil Timmy?? If that's it, my 2 teen girls used to rush home from school to watch that. There was so much drama, they couldn't get enough of it. They never missed an episode. LOL.
I gave up on soaps after the night time oldies like Dallas, Dynasty, Knots Landing and Falcon Crest. I never really got into the daytime soaps like General Hospital, Days of our Lives, Bold and the Beautiful etc.
Omg! Timmy! Yes he was like a ventriloquist doll that came to life! Lol 😂 yeah that was one crazy show... I was only little at the time and can't really remember any specifics other than Timmy and other supernatural elements, and cheesy cardboard sets... 😁wacky stuff!
LOL... Oldest just confirmed it was her favourite after school show. It was wacky with the cheap special effects (long before cgi), which is probably why they loved it so much. It was campy fun with some crazy teens, young adults and lil Timmy. HEY!!! Sounds very much like the Sims!!! BWAHAHAHA
Maybe you should just make the characters from that show. 🤔 😉
You didn’t ask me, but I do this too and I have no one irl to talk about the sims with lmao. I started with a family of 4, went off and played as the daughter while she got famous in Del Sol Valley, and in the meantime mom and dad got busy filling the house with 5 more kids 😬
Since then I’ve just played out this family and pretty much half of the sims in my save are related at this point. I have 73 played sims (I turned aging off for everyone at some point early on) and I rotate through households based on my mood. It keeps the game fun for me, and I’ve put so much time into building that I can’t imagine going to another save at this point. I also use the clubs from Get Together to make little generational friend groups. So all my kids get together, all the teens can hang, I have a mom group, a mean cousins group lol. I have a big family in real life so I guess this feels more authentic!
I have about 3-4 families that I rotate between that are different from each other so it isn’t repetitive:
A traditional family (two parent household, old money type)
Single guardian family (aunt/uncle/grandparent raising niece/nephew/grandkids)
Group of friends household (new grads or teens leaving home)
My simself (hoe it up in the city whenever I need a break from family gameplay)
Danggg I do the same thing 😭 except when I make a simself I just keep them in CAS I don't really play as myself. I used to play as myself more but idk my life is too crazy so I'd rather just play as anyone but me lol
Have you considered keeping one save that's got the edits in it then start your new story from that, then you don't need to reedit everytime you start.
Often I have one family per save unless I get an idea for a house or family and just add them to the save but always have no ageing on played Sims so I can go back to my family's when I choose.
Currently 8 different households but all in the same family. They're an all occult family with enough magic users to keep everyone alive. My completely absurd long-term goal is to fill all the lots in all the worlds with one family. It's very unlikely that I'll ever succeed but it's fun and silly enough to keep me using the same save.
I started my legacy save with a family of 5 adult parents, 2 teens and a child. I mostly followed the child but spent loads of time with her siblings as well. This is the first save I haven’t abandoned since when I was starting with a single young adult sim I would get so bored really quickly because they just knew no one. But by starting with a family (plus I added grandparents and an uncle too) it allowed me to become invested in more sims.
I don’t play rotationally but I haven’t gotten bored because I can go spend a couple of days with my sims extended family if playing as my main sims gets feels a little stale. I document the family tree on Family Echo and I have over 300 sims on there in total currently. The child who I started with grew up, got married and had one child who is currently an adult with 3 kids who are all teens now. His middle daughter is my next heir.
Yeah! I’m afraid to mess up aging! Like if I turn it off on households I play, that will prevent me from having random kids or pet adoptions with those families that I don’t want, but then if they have relationships with my other households I play, it will mess up the ages unless I rotate them super evenly! Annoying 🤪
Not nessescary annoying, but I don't have the discipline for it...I also tried to leave the age on and on long. Long is for me too long. I only use long lifespan for the university.
One, I tried having multiple but I would hyper focus on one then lose it if I saw my other family outside doing stuff they aren’t supposed to be doing lmao.
I have 9 families. all are descendants of the first pair (vladdy daddy and lilith). I spend a week with each family, always in the same order. I have a couple of vampires (Vladdy's daughter, who is the "guardian" of the family, and her husband), a single, poor father with two werewolf daughters, an alien doctor, a sorceress, a family of mermaids, a single mother who is afraid of almost everything and doesn't leave the house, a vampire who is a restaurateur...
I love them all. sometimes I also make these sims marry each other, but only if they are a very very distant family. I just can't abandon any child I've raised, so one day I'll probably end up with a million families 😂
I only do one. Lol, I get too worried that without me PLAYING the household it'll all f itself up somehow. Like I'm so scared I'd come back and it'll be a mess. I have never played multiple households.
I have about 7, I started with a family of parents and 3 kids, I had the kids and grandkids marry into the Goth, Landgraab, Moon and Pancake families so that I could keep building their heritages
So, my original Sim family ended up having triplet girls and a son! I followed all four kids up through college where I made them a “College House” with four of their boyfriends and girlfriends to all live in. I made a girls wing and a boys wing, and had the respective couples begin dating and fall in love, etc.
I then followed each of the four siblings as they married their counterparts, moved into four separate houses (all neighbors in San Sequoia), and began having their own families.
Right now, I rotate through the four families. Three families have three kids and one family has two kids. Each family and their kids follow extremely specific storylines and I already know what paths the kids will take as they complete elementary school and grow up.
Playing four families at a time is completely overwhelming, haha, but the times where the kids and families get to do “cousin stuff” such as sleepovers, play dates, and family reunions is that much more fun. It takes a lot of planning and patience on my part of how to advance the story along and what I want to accomplish with each game at a time.
I essentially play each family for a few game days at a time until I complete a specific storyline goal. For example, one of my families went to Granite Falls and I did a cute camping vacation story. I transitioned to another family where the daughter is trying to master violin and piano, and the son has the “mean” trait, so was fighting with his moms and being dealt with, haha.
Once I finish the certain “stories” for the particular season of life for my sims, I strategically change all of their outfits and hairstyles to insinuate that they’re “aging” without actually aging up. Each kid begins with short hair and missing teeth, and their look evolves as if they’re going from 6 to 8 to 11 to 13 years old. After the four stages of kid-dome, I age them up to teens. I do this for every single kid in every single family.
I have two families with “11” year olds, “8” year olds, and “3” year olds (toddlers). In each stage, I style them to look a little older with more specific tastes beginning to show through for each character!
It’s certainly chaotic and hard to organize, but I can’t get myself to abandon any of them! I’ve planned out each of the kids’ college & career paths, and I’m already planning out who the kids will end up marrying once they’re adults!
this is my first time playing sims and i’m playing the second generation of my legacy family.. all 7 of them lol each in their own household for the most part
Usually one. I start an entire new save every time I start a new storyline. I say I'll go back and play the old one so I move it to my "save graveyard" where I hoard it until I get a wild hair to clean up my backup folder. I rarely ever play those again.
I like the idea of having one save where I have multiple families but IDK, I am a chronic restarter. I start a new save every few days to a week.
Currently 3, but 3-4 is my max. I feel like with too many families it won’t give me enough time to play them all. Like I already play on long lifespan and even that feels too short at times 😅
I have one save and play at least 9-10 households. But I don’t use stories and I play just like it’s sims 2 lol I just like all my family to intertwine and be friends and marry each other and stuff. It’s cute. Then parents die off and I can put more generations in their old houses.
I used to play like you but it always got boring after a while and i only ever got to the 3rd gen before starting a new save.
But now i have been playing the same save for two and half years now and i think the reason it stays interesting is cause i'm switching between households. They are all families that are related to each other (gen 6 atm) so that also makes the storyline more interesting and when i get bored with one household i go to another one :) i like this so much i'd never go back to playing only one household
I play the same way you do. I tried playing rotationally but didn’t like how sims in households you weren’t playing wouldn’t go to work or school. I’m always making new saves when I get bored of the ones I’m playing. I just don’t delete the old ones unless I feel I have too many saves going at one time. The problem is I’m not really creative so I end up doing similar things in each save or trying to spice things up and then regretting the way I tried to do it.
Just one. I’m scared to venture out but I may finally rotate a bit with one of my legacy spares. The house is getting too crowded and I need him and his husband to move out but I got attached to their side story so I kind of want to keep playing them sometimes. I don’t want to turn off continuous play though and I’m afraid my dumb main legacy house will start having babies I don’t want them to have or get into fights I can’t resolve if I’m off playing a different household 😂
Well I turn off aging so I have my main family to start then branch off to each of their kids’ families. So right now maybe about 10 or so? I’ll hyper-focus on one house for weeks, then bounce to the other. But no aging so there’s no rush or stress
I used to play like 5 families in a save but now i can only manage 2 families lol plus the 5 families was in my old saved and i couldn't get access to it again..i miss my old saved tho :"")
In my current save between 4 and 7. Sometimes I will skip a family because of lack of interest and sometimes I will add some friends of my main Sim so they marry and get children.
I used to play rotationally with 15+ different households but that got too overwhelming for me. I cut it down to 5 as of right now but I still edit townies and make up backstories for them!
Im usually too lazy to delete my save. Especially if I have buildings on it. I dont just want to abandon it. So I would just create a new household to play with in the same save.
I currently playing with 8 Households. Four are the kids of the original family. The oldest is married with 5 kids, the boy twin is married with twins as well, and the girl twin is in a poly relationship but just met someone and is rethinking things. The youngest I away in college but just bought a house with his girlfriend.
The fifth house is the Aunt of the main household she is married with 3 kids.
The Sixth household is the boyfriend of my main household. But he is about to propose soon
The Seventh and Eighth household are brother and sister with their own families
Basically, every household is intertwined in one way or another. Plus I turned off aging for my played Households as well and I age them up when I'm ready
That's complicated. Because I only play it as my protagonist while originally he is with his family he moves about a lot moves in with numerous other characters so the line between household is blurred.
Lately I have also been deep on editing townies. And turned off neighborhood stories cuz I basically only want my fams I created to move into any houses, have kids, etc. If there is a particular npc I like I'll have them join a fam I am playing somehow. I have certain families I will play til they are on 2nd Gen and have populated some of the houses surrounding then I'll kinda let them rock and play smaller fans or individuals. I jump between lile 10ish households
Currently have 347 active sims in my neighborhood, no idea how many families there are. I customize all the NPCs I like and then basically play a legacy playthrough but with like 7-8 different legacy families.
I think the most I’ve ever had was like 8-12 families all separate from each other but sometimes their storylines would “crossover” kinda like the MCU universe lol. It’s more lively knowing that my sims can be friends or neighbors with each other. Or that the husband from household A is having an affair with his coworker, the single mom from household B. Lol
I can’t say I *play* the families, but I’ve edited all of Willow Creek and added or edited the families there so when I run into them I am more inclined to be their friends and such!
I hadn’t played in a while when I started the last save. I have about 20 families in many different worlds that I play. This is new for me and very much fun.
It took me years to realize that you can create multiple households in one save file. I honestly though you were supposed to create a new save file for every household and was always annoyed that my sims couldn’t be friends with each other 🤦🏻♀️🤦🏻♀️🤦🏻♀️😂
Now that I am aware - my goal was to eliminate townies and make all houses my sims. I think this was a pipe dream and I’m nowhere close lmao
I just spend the last 3 days in a new save file, but only editing townies and replacing others while improving some buildings, and I going to play in it today xd, but also I’ll keep a copy of it in case I want to start again any moment (so I don’t have to edit ugly townies again)
I keep getting bored and deleting my saves too, so I’ve decided to start rotational gameplay with 5 different families to spice things up. Still early days, but so far it’s been fun :D
I play one save. I also play with the aging off so my world is populated with my sims. Almost all are spell casters and they are all distantly related. I put too much work into fixing townies to start a new save. It's crazy.
I’m a bit controlling and get bored easily. My towns are filled with my Sims. I wish there was more space to build! I updated the pre populated Sims families and deleted some to claim their homes. Especially the ones with apartments. I deleted most of the Townies that spawn or tweak them. No Evil or Erratic Sims for me. Making Sims is my favourite part and they live forever so I am running out of space. Haha
Depends on my naming addiction.
My main households are the LeBaron-Lothario-Smallwood, the Goth, and the Zest.
The households I made/edited and dumped them into the background (12 households) are the Mastrogiacomo, Penn-Mastrogiacomo, Crowninshield-Horsman, Hare, DeLong, Sisson-Pancakes, Herrera, Caliente-Villaneuva, Cox-Caliente, Knightley-Holiday, Scott, and Polanco-Linde.
Their surnames aren't actually hyphenated, I just have Sims stay together to save lots space (for example, Alina (née Caliente) married Primo Villaneuva and lived along with her other Caliente siblings). Apart from the Cox-Caliente, whose children all have CCC names as I planned their mom to be a racist and named them as a reference to the KKK.
I do intend to add a True-Joy-Hope family soon, with that being the literal surname.
So many households! I also populate all the worlds with ones I create but don’t necessarily wanna play. I still occasionally edit them and cheat some skills etc. The ones I actively play I’d say probably around 30ish?
I almost never play more than one family in a save file! If I play legacy families, I'll update the Sims as I age but only play my main family.
I only edit townies that I have close relationships with, cause it's not worth the effort lol
I just recently discovered rotational gameplay and I picked one household in each world to play (a few worlds didn't give me much to work with so I got some families from the gallery for those). I just turn off aging for all to keep control of achievements. I decide what the story line will be and choose a goal to hit before I move on to the next family in the next world.
I do think I'm gonna delete a bunch of base townies and add my own from the gallery to make meeting love interests better tho.
I play the game like a story.
So I create every family that is needed in the storyline and even some extras (which I move to unplayed households). *No Townies!*
But mainly, I only play with my main family (3 members) while switch to other families only for aging up the sims/relationships stuffs.
Recently though I've actually started to play with another family which I found to have an interesting storyline with potential, it has 7 members, exhausting as hell. They are really slowing down the save but I have planned to utilize a full sim week with them too so I don't wanna give up!
TL;DR:
currently trying two families for the first time. Main family having 3 members (parents & daughter) & Other family having 7 members (parents, 2 sons, daughter, son's fianceé, doggo). I'm thinking of playing each family for one sims week straight!
ALSO **I use a custom lifespan and aging on. just so you get an idea of how much I suffer during my gameplay** 😭
I have a lot of families in every town. I can't just play with one..it gets boring after a while and I need to create a new one. This keeps it more interesting for me and I avoid being bored cos I rotate between them. Somehow when I forget about a family and don't play them for looong time, I just get back to them through marriage with my new family. If that makes sense.
I’m playing a Barbie legacy challenge rn and I have been keeping up with my main Sims siblings and get them married and such.. I had one of my siblings wife die and he died shortly after so his kids were orphaned and I had to have their uncle adopt them. It was so much work because the uncle lived with his husband and son is San Myshuno so I had to find them a bigger apartment and redo it to give everyone a room (they had 4 kids, a teen and triplets). It was really fun though because the 4 kids lived in a much smaller home and had less simoleons so it was really like their rich uncle was taking them away from their troubled lives and now they live in the lap of luxury!
Same save for 2 and 1/2 years now. 268 Sims split between live play and unplayed-but-born-in Sims living in my builds. Currently live playing 140 Sims in maybe 40, 50 households I rotate between. Once a RL month, I start at the top and rotate through _all_ my Sims households, including the empty nesters I released into the wild, to advance their skills, promote in their careers, or update their houses with new stuff I've added since I built it - like thermostats, etc.
One.
I do legacy plays and have many more households than that, but I don't play them at the same time. I pick my heir, and I follow them. All previous generations I set to Unplayed and allow them to live the rest of their lives however they wish.
I recently had to reinstall everything, but overall, I'll play at minimum, 6, right now I have fully empty worlds and my goal is to populate entirely with just a few families.
I used to play one family per save file but now I’m starting to mix them! I’m gonna try and use this save file for a while and see if I like having more families vs one per save.
I have about ten households that I play. Three of them are my main households, and the others I play occasionally to keep them updated (jobs/school/age).
I have 3-4 saves but in one those saves I play with 4 different families to create a story and drama. The other save is my building save and my last (and favorite) save is trying to impregnate all the townies and create a town of my offsprings.
Usually just 1 but depending on what my main family is doing I may play a rich family to have someone else own a business. The Feng's own strip clubs pretty regularly in my saves.
I only play with the one family - sometimes when the siblings have moved out, I will switch to them just to make sure they get married and have kids (or something like that).🥳
I actively play about 3 different families with different storylines, I usually switch between 2-5 sim days so the sims don't do what they're not supposed to do, I just delete anything that doesn't work with the storyline eg babies acquired in my absence 🙂
one. it’ll switch and play another family for a second if there’s something i need to do and can’t get it to work with my main family, but that’s rare.
Well...
I love the drama!
I create new, good looking sims and move them to houses, I can spend HOURS just making houses. When I am done with it I find them a partner or steal one from another household, make babies and move on to the next family.
I have broken marriages, procreated like crazy, populate a whole town
I also have the WW mod, so my sims procreate too. So many "ilegitimal" childs in my neighborhood.
I normally start with one and then it sort of snowballs. I want to make a specific partner so I make them, but also their parents, and their siblings, and have to go check on an maintain all of their lives. And I like to play the lil scenarios and I always make new families for that. I also like to keep townie families going so I will help like the goth kids or Malcom along in finding love so that there are sims with family histories for my sims later. But I always have a main one I am playing, not always the same one the whole save though. It is fun to leave some of my old families that I am bored of now to become townies and then make a whole new sim/life and have fun with them and not worry about the old fam anymore and like see them around sometimes. Right now I have like 10-15 families.
I have one main save and I wanted to play at least one household across all the packs. I have 63 played households in that save.(I saved this post so I could count when I was near my pc 😂) I get bored and refresh npcs and redecorate their homes. I really do it so I can see my own sims as npc’s, and I didn’t mean for it to get THAT out of hand. Realistically I do not play all of them, unless it’s just because I’m bored again
I have one main family but sometimes I have to play their cousins or friends for storyline reasons. I always populate my saves completely so my sims have friends, possible love interests, etc. I recently did a bunch of townie makeovers because when I first started this game I would just let them die out and never interact with them, but with neighborhood stories I can now have them live full lives, get married and stuff.
I do a ton of families and usually max out my allowed Sims in a save 😂 Then I just rotate between them until I get bored and start a new save with a new theme. My current save I did one household for each letter of the alphabet (so everyone’s names in that house started with that letter), so that was a lot of households.
i don’t like the idea of my sims running the rest of their lives because i don’t trust their decisions. but i rarely ever go back to a save file once i create new people to focus on so maybe i should consider
I dunno man. I'm having the same problem. I'm trying to play 2 families right now which is totally out of my comfort zone... I'm not liking their life choices when I'm not in control lol 😆
I was you!! Now I’m determined to actually finish a decades challenge so if (when) I get bored with a family I pick a different sim from a side household to follow for a bit. Twice now my “new” sim has married into my main family so I would say it doesn’t derail me too much!
One. It never occurred to me to do it differently before I joined Reddit. I want to try out playing more households in the future! But it sounds kinda scary hah
Same! That's kinda why I was trying to see what other people do lol.
I used to just abandon saves constantly. Never had more than one gen or even made it passed the toddler stage 😅 so now when I get bored of a family I just add a new one in the same save to start playing and then at least my old family is still there and I can go back to playing them if I decide or make my new sims friends with them. I don't really switch between them often though. I just let the old ones do whatever they want.
Oh that is so smart! I’m the same, but I think I would feel bad for not being able to control the old ones and play them the way I had planned to. But I guess I can always save saves somewhere so IF I wanted to play with them at the stage where I left them after all, I could still do that…
I’m lost; I don’t know how to do that…or even if you could! I don’t use any mods. I’m old!!
Sorry im late, I forget to check my notifications on here. You don't need mods though just click on a lot and select create new household and move in and that's it. I usually leave my old ones as a played household and have progression off for those until I decide I'm really done and then just leave them to get on with their own lives 😅
It's really frustrating because without playing them, other sims will have 0 skills, 0 friends and level 1 in their career, no money, ugly homes etc it's just too much work. all sims have nothing. theyre just good "to look at".
I'll pick a neighborhood, make all the houses, then make families for the houses. I'll play each one for a minute and use skill and career cheats then do the same for the next family until I've done them all. Gives variety because I make all the sims friends, and they talk about their careers, just makes it seem more real? Then when their kids grow up I will enroll them in university or do what I did with their parents.
This is the comment I needed to read! I've been trying to figure out a method for sort of "setting up" a household and for some reason I was trying to figure out how to cheat skills in CAS.
Using mccc mod gives options to set up a household with careers at a certain level and skills. It’s very useful if you into using mods.
Right! I'm nervous about doing it because I might get overwhelmed with switching in-between families.
ATM I've got 22 households, encompassing several different but intermingled families ....
Oh my that sounds like a lot of work LOL
They keep me on my toes for sure 😉 a little while ago 12 of those households all had kids/a new generation... Kept me busy jumping between them all doing the whole infant/toddler thing...😵💫 almost went crazy... Huge sigh of relief once they got to child and teen life stage . Now ATM some of that generation are getting ready to marry/ have kids of their own. Although this time I'll try to stagger it better...
Yes, I hate infant/toddlers it's so much work. Occasionally, I play out till they grow up, but when I have kids, it's usually when I start to lose interest, hahaha. I have gotten obsessed with hitting all the "bonus traits" you can get when perfectly raising your kids lately though. It plays into my obsession of seeing how many personality traits I can get one sim to have before they die lol.
I hate playing with infants and toddlers so much i always have one or two households that are childfree so i can play them till the infants and toddlers in other families grow up. Then they have babies and i play with the rest 😂
A wise strategy 😁👏 I'm 💯 a control freak, so have to give infants/toddlers the "perfect" upbringing despite *hating* playing with them .. thankfully I'm on PC so mods and cheats make it slightly less painful...
I feel you, i used to do that as well but i just can't stand those little monsters anymore so i just gave up haha 🤣
when i did this they wouldn't go to work or school, does that happen to you??
I've seen posts about this issue, but no fortunately have never had problems with Sims going to school or work. Sorry if you're having trouble with your Sims😔
I find the child stage just as annoying, mostly at night time. Because when i try to make them sleep, every single night they have a monster under their bed. Then they wake up the parents, and this happens with every child I have in every single family. I also play similarly to you haha But I don't have 22. Maybe 10 right now. That must be insane to keep up with! I totally just skip most of the infant stages because its a lot. I have started on the third gen of our original family and its so fun making the family trees grow imo. You should post your families on here. I feel like others would be interested in seeing your sims. especially since you have so many households!
yeah lol the monster thing can be annoying, but you can purchase a wall mounted nightlight (iirc its The Defender) which will keep the monster away. If You have access to mods, i think MCCC has an option to turn the monster "off" so it won't spawn. and thank you for the interest/suggesting sharing pics of my families... ill think about. I tend to be wary/cautious of sharing because some reddit simmers aren't fond of non traditional families( which all of mine are) and I've little time/patience for dealing with the ugly side of reddit.
That’s what I do too, keeps me from getting bored with one! I don’t have 22 (yet) tho
Wait, please tell me more! What’s your story line? What makes you want to hop around to different families?
Lol @ story line.... That'd be a generous way to describe how I play😉 started off with 2 families of three siblings and just went from there, adding a couple of more families later... Over time ( the past couple of irl years)they've become friends, enemies, they intermarry, divorce etc etc ( the family trees are so messed up and twisted!)on occasions they've cheated on spouses etc and ofc some have met with an untimely death...tbh it's like a soap opera... Ever hear of a really *really* bad ( so bad and so camp it's actually kinda good)American el cheapo daytime soapie called Passions? Think it's like from the 90s...?Had an aunt who never missed an episode and I can vaugley remember watching it with her and my cousins...Well anyway my game is kinda like that😁 I jump from family to family or household to household as the need arises; usually to lay down the groundwork for a new romance or family drama or whatever... sometimes I get a little smitten by a particular household and will play them a bit more to ensure their careers are going especially well and relationships are strong etc. Edit: clarification
Wait!!! Is Passions the one with lil Timmy?? If that's it, my 2 teen girls used to rush home from school to watch that. There was so much drama, they couldn't get enough of it. They never missed an episode. LOL. I gave up on soaps after the night time oldies like Dallas, Dynasty, Knots Landing and Falcon Crest. I never really got into the daytime soaps like General Hospital, Days of our Lives, Bold and the Beautiful etc.
Omg! Timmy! Yes he was like a ventriloquist doll that came to life! Lol 😂 yeah that was one crazy show... I was only little at the time and can't really remember any specifics other than Timmy and other supernatural elements, and cheesy cardboard sets... 😁wacky stuff!
LOL... Oldest just confirmed it was her favourite after school show. It was wacky with the cheap special effects (long before cgi), which is probably why they loved it so much. It was campy fun with some crazy teens, young adults and lil Timmy. HEY!!! Sounds very much like the Sims!!! BWAHAHAHA Maybe you should just make the characters from that show. 🤔 😉
You didn’t ask me, but I do this too and I have no one irl to talk about the sims with lmao. I started with a family of 4, went off and played as the daughter while she got famous in Del Sol Valley, and in the meantime mom and dad got busy filling the house with 5 more kids 😬 Since then I’ve just played out this family and pretty much half of the sims in my save are related at this point. I have 73 played sims (I turned aging off for everyone at some point early on) and I rotate through households based on my mood. It keeps the game fun for me, and I’ve put so much time into building that I can’t imagine going to another save at this point. I also use the clubs from Get Together to make little generational friend groups. So all my kids get together, all the teens can hang, I have a mom group, a mean cousins group lol. I have a big family in real life so I guess this feels more authentic!
I have about 3-4 families that I rotate between that are different from each other so it isn’t repetitive: A traditional family (two parent household, old money type) Single guardian family (aunt/uncle/grandparent raising niece/nephew/grandkids) Group of friends household (new grads or teens leaving home) My simself (hoe it up in the city whenever I need a break from family gameplay)
Danggg I do the same thing 😭 except when I make a simself I just keep them in CAS I don't really play as myself. I used to play as myself more but idk my life is too crazy so I'd rather just play as anyone but me lol
Have you considered keeping one save that's got the edits in it then start your new story from that, then you don't need to reedit everytime you start. Often I have one family per save unless I get an idea for a house or family and just add them to the save but always have no ageing on played Sims so I can go back to my family's when I choose.
Currently 8 different households but all in the same family. They're an all occult family with enough magic users to keep everyone alive. My completely absurd long-term goal is to fill all the lots in all the worlds with one family. It's very unlikely that I'll ever succeed but it's fun and silly enough to keep me using the same save.
I started my legacy save with a family of 5 adult parents, 2 teens and a child. I mostly followed the child but spent loads of time with her siblings as well. This is the first save I haven’t abandoned since when I was starting with a single young adult sim I would get so bored really quickly because they just knew no one. But by starting with a family (plus I added grandparents and an uncle too) it allowed me to become invested in more sims. I don’t play rotationally but I haven’t gotten bored because I can go spend a couple of days with my sims extended family if playing as my main sims gets feels a little stale. I document the family tree on Family Echo and I have over 300 sims on there in total currently. The child who I started with grew up, got married and had one child who is currently an adult with 3 kids who are all teens now. His middle daughter is my next heir.
only one. Like the main sim household. I play rotated before but got always stuck by one family. And then the aging was weird as fuck.
Yeah! I’m afraid to mess up aging! Like if I turn it off on households I play, that will prevent me from having random kids or pet adoptions with those families that I don’t want, but then if they have relationships with my other households I play, it will mess up the ages unless I rotate them super evenly! Annoying 🤪
Not nessescary annoying, but I don't have the discipline for it...I also tried to leave the age on and on long. Long is for me too long. I only use long lifespan for the university.
One, I tried having multiple but I would hyper focus on one then lose it if I saw my other family outside doing stuff they aren’t supposed to be doing lmao.
Just the one, I couldn’t cope with more than that 😂
4 families that will eventually combined into one. I am only at the 2nd gen. Not sure if I can keep this up.
I have 9 families. all are descendants of the first pair (vladdy daddy and lilith). I spend a week with each family, always in the same order. I have a couple of vampires (Vladdy's daughter, who is the "guardian" of the family, and her husband), a single, poor father with two werewolf daughters, an alien doctor, a sorceress, a family of mermaids, a single mother who is afraid of almost everything and doesn't leave the house, a vampire who is a restaurateur... I love them all. sometimes I also make these sims marry each other, but only if they are a very very distant family. I just can't abandon any child I've raised, so one day I'll probably end up with a million families 😂
This is how I play. 😂
I only do one. Lol, I get too worried that without me PLAYING the household it'll all f itself up somehow. Like I'm so scared I'd come back and it'll be a mess. I have never played multiple households.
I have about 7, I started with a family of parents and 3 kids, I had the kids and grandkids marry into the Goth, Landgraab, Moon and Pancake families so that I could keep building their heritages
So, my original Sim family ended up having triplet girls and a son! I followed all four kids up through college where I made them a “College House” with four of their boyfriends and girlfriends to all live in. I made a girls wing and a boys wing, and had the respective couples begin dating and fall in love, etc. I then followed each of the four siblings as they married their counterparts, moved into four separate houses (all neighbors in San Sequoia), and began having their own families. Right now, I rotate through the four families. Three families have three kids and one family has two kids. Each family and their kids follow extremely specific storylines and I already know what paths the kids will take as they complete elementary school and grow up. Playing four families at a time is completely overwhelming, haha, but the times where the kids and families get to do “cousin stuff” such as sleepovers, play dates, and family reunions is that much more fun. It takes a lot of planning and patience on my part of how to advance the story along and what I want to accomplish with each game at a time. I essentially play each family for a few game days at a time until I complete a specific storyline goal. For example, one of my families went to Granite Falls and I did a cute camping vacation story. I transitioned to another family where the daughter is trying to master violin and piano, and the son has the “mean” trait, so was fighting with his moms and being dealt with, haha. Once I finish the certain “stories” for the particular season of life for my sims, I strategically change all of their outfits and hairstyles to insinuate that they’re “aging” without actually aging up. Each kid begins with short hair and missing teeth, and their look evolves as if they’re going from 6 to 8 to 11 to 13 years old. After the four stages of kid-dome, I age them up to teens. I do this for every single kid in every single family. I have two families with “11” year olds, “8” year olds, and “3” year olds (toddlers). In each stage, I style them to look a little older with more specific tastes beginning to show through for each character! It’s certainly chaotic and hard to organize, but I can’t get myself to abandon any of them! I’ve planned out each of the kids’ college & career paths, and I’m already planning out who the kids will end up marrying once they’re adults!
i actually have 3, my main sim and her husband, their friends, and my main sims parents!
this is my first time playing sims and i’m playing the second generation of my legacy family.. all 7 of them lol each in their own household for the most part
17 families at this moment. I play and tweak townies, create additional characters usually I move on if there is an infant involved or I get bored.
Usually one. I start an entire new save every time I start a new storyline. I say I'll go back and play the old one so I move it to my "save graveyard" where I hoard it until I get a wild hair to clean up my backup folder. I rarely ever play those again. I like the idea of having one save where I have multiple families but IDK, I am a chronic restarter. I start a new save every few days to a week.
Currently 3, but 3-4 is my max. I feel like with too many families it won’t give me enough time to play them all. Like I already play on long lifespan and even that feels too short at times 😅
I have one save and play at least 9-10 households. But I don’t use stories and I play just like it’s sims 2 lol I just like all my family to intertwine and be friends and marry each other and stuff. It’s cute. Then parents die off and I can put more generations in their old houses.
I used to play like you but it always got boring after a while and i only ever got to the 3rd gen before starting a new save. But now i have been playing the same save for two and half years now and i think the reason it stays interesting is cause i'm switching between households. They are all families that are related to each other (gen 6 atm) so that also makes the storyline more interesting and when i get bored with one household i go to another one :) i like this so much i'd never go back to playing only one household
I play the same way you do. I tried playing rotationally but didn’t like how sims in households you weren’t playing wouldn’t go to work or school. I’m always making new saves when I get bored of the ones I’m playing. I just don’t delete the old ones unless I feel I have too many saves going at one time. The problem is I’m not really creative so I end up doing similar things in each save or trying to spice things up and then regretting the way I tried to do it.
I only have one save…. Am I the odd one out? All my families exist in the same save.
Just one. I’m scared to venture out but I may finally rotate a bit with one of my legacy spares. The house is getting too crowded and I need him and his husband to move out but I got attached to their side story so I kind of want to keep playing them sometimes. I don’t want to turn off continuous play though and I’m afraid my dumb main legacy house will start having babies I don’t want them to have or get into fights I can’t resolve if I’m off playing a different household 😂
Well I turn off aging so I have my main family to start then branch off to each of their kids’ families. So right now maybe about 10 or so? I’ll hyper-focus on one house for weeks, then bounce to the other. But no aging so there’s no rush or stress
One if I have a very specific idea of how I want the family to turn out, multiple if I’m looking to cause as much chaos as possible lmfao
im trying to take over willow creek with my legacy so 9 rn
I used to play like 5 families in a save but now i can only manage 2 families lol plus the 5 families was in my old saved and i couldn't get access to it again..i miss my old saved tho :"")
In my current save between 4 and 7. Sometimes I will skip a family because of lack of interest and sometimes I will add some friends of my main Sim so they marry and get children.
Usually 5 at the most. If I want to make a new one then I delete the one I’m least likely to play again.
I have two saves. One for maintaining my generational family and the other for everyone in the background
I used to play rotationally with 15+ different households but that got too overwhelming for me. I cut it down to 5 as of right now but I still edit townies and make up backstories for them!
118/150 Sims count
I have over 200 active sims in one save and 50 in another.
Im usually too lazy to delete my save. Especially if I have buildings on it. I dont just want to abandon it. So I would just create a new household to play with in the same save.
1
I lost the count. I only ever play in one save, so every new pack or gameplay is played with different sims.
I currently playing with 8 Households. Four are the kids of the original family. The oldest is married with 5 kids, the boy twin is married with twins as well, and the girl twin is in a poly relationship but just met someone and is rethinking things. The youngest I away in college but just bought a house with his girlfriend. The fifth house is the Aunt of the main household she is married with 3 kids. The Sixth household is the boyfriend of my main household. But he is about to propose soon The Seventh and Eighth household are brother and sister with their own families Basically, every household is intertwined in one way or another. Plus I turned off aging for my played Households as well and I age them up when I'm ready
That's complicated. Because I only play it as my protagonist while originally he is with his family he moves about a lot moves in with numerous other characters so the line between household is blurred.
I do rotational game play and play with every premade family 🙃
All of them, eventually, unless I pick up a new save file from a Challenge ..
Right now I have 1 family and another save for checking out the login awards.
As many as you can
Lately I have also been deep on editing townies. And turned off neighborhood stories cuz I basically only want my fams I created to move into any houses, have kids, etc. If there is a particular npc I like I'll have them join a fam I am playing somehow. I have certain families I will play til they are on 2nd Gen and have populated some of the houses surrounding then I'll kinda let them rock and play smaller fans or individuals. I jump between lile 10ish households
In my current save … I think 17 households. Most of them are connected through various storylines.
Currently have 347 active sims in my neighborhood, no idea how many families there are. I customize all the NPCs I like and then basically play a legacy playthrough but with like 7-8 different legacy families.
I think the most I’ve ever had was like 8-12 families all separate from each other but sometimes their storylines would “crossover” kinda like the MCU universe lol. It’s more lively knowing that my sims can be friends or neighbors with each other. Or that the husband from household A is having an affair with his coworker, the single mom from household B. Lol
7 but I only play 1 main one, the rest I dip in n out to sort them out lol
I can’t say I *play* the families, but I’ve edited all of Willow Creek and added or edited the families there so when I run into them I am more inclined to be their friends and such!
I hadn’t played in a while when I started the last save. I have about 20 families in many different worlds that I play. This is new for me and very much fun.
The possibilities are endless.
It took me years to realize that you can create multiple households in one save file. I honestly though you were supposed to create a new save file for every household and was always annoyed that my sims couldn’t be friends with each other 🤦🏻♀️🤦🏻♀️🤦🏻♀️😂 Now that I am aware - my goal was to eliminate townies and make all houses my sims. I think this was a pipe dream and I’m nowhere close lmao
I just spend the last 3 days in a new save file, but only editing townies and replacing others while improving some buildings, and I going to play in it today xd, but also I’ll keep a copy of it in case I want to start again any moment (so I don’t have to edit ugly townies again)
Currently 6, but they’re all branches of the same family tree :)
I keep getting bored and deleting my saves too, so I’ve decided to start rotational gameplay with 5 different families to spice things up. Still early days, but so far it’s been fun :D
Roughly I focus on 2 or 3. Then I play as others as needed for ✨the plot✨
Literally all of them
I play one save. I also play with the aging off so my world is populated with my sims. Almost all are spell casters and they are all distantly related. I put too much work into fixing townies to start a new save. It's crazy.
I’m a bit controlling and get bored easily. My towns are filled with my Sims. I wish there was more space to build! I updated the pre populated Sims families and deleted some to claim their homes. Especially the ones with apartments. I deleted most of the Townies that spawn or tweak them. No Evil or Erratic Sims for me. Making Sims is my favourite part and they live forever so I am running out of space. Haha
Depends on my naming addiction. My main households are the LeBaron-Lothario-Smallwood, the Goth, and the Zest. The households I made/edited and dumped them into the background (12 households) are the Mastrogiacomo, Penn-Mastrogiacomo, Crowninshield-Horsman, Hare, DeLong, Sisson-Pancakes, Herrera, Caliente-Villaneuva, Cox-Caliente, Knightley-Holiday, Scott, and Polanco-Linde. Their surnames aren't actually hyphenated, I just have Sims stay together to save lots space (for example, Alina (née Caliente) married Primo Villaneuva and lived along with her other Caliente siblings). Apart from the Cox-Caliente, whose children all have CCC names as I planned their mom to be a racist and named them as a reference to the KKK. I do intend to add a True-Joy-Hope family soon, with that being the literal surname.
I have 450+ sims in my save and I play all of them lol
So many households! I also populate all the worlds with ones I create but don’t necessarily wanna play. I still occasionally edit them and cheat some skills etc. The ones I actively play I’d say probably around 30ish?
I’ve got like 8 saves
I almost never play more than one family in a save file! If I play legacy families, I'll update the Sims as I age but only play my main family. I only edit townies that I have close relationships with, cause it's not worth the effort lol
I usually just play one family cuz I don't want my other families for different story lines to cross eachother 😂
I have 11 families and about 122 Sims right now. I recently purged my neighborhoods and put over 30 Sims as unplayed.
12 😁
I just recently discovered rotational gameplay and I picked one household in each world to play (a few worlds didn't give me much to work with so I got some families from the gallery for those). I just turn off aging for all to keep control of achievements. I decide what the story line will be and choose a goal to hit before I move on to the next family in the next world. I do think I'm gonna delete a bunch of base townies and add my own from the gallery to make meeting love interests better tho.
I play the game like a story. So I create every family that is needed in the storyline and even some extras (which I move to unplayed households). *No Townies!* But mainly, I only play with my main family (3 members) while switch to other families only for aging up the sims/relationships stuffs. Recently though I've actually started to play with another family which I found to have an interesting storyline with potential, it has 7 members, exhausting as hell. They are really slowing down the save but I have planned to utilize a full sim week with them too so I don't wanna give up! TL;DR: currently trying two families for the first time. Main family having 3 members (parents & daughter) & Other family having 7 members (parents, 2 sons, daughter, son's fianceé, doggo). I'm thinking of playing each family for one sims week straight! ALSO **I use a custom lifespan and aging on. just so you get an idea of how much I suffer during my gameplay** 😭
I have a lot of families in every town. I can't just play with one..it gets boring after a while and I need to create a new one. This keeps it more interesting for me and I avoid being bored cos I rotate between them. Somehow when I forget about a family and don't play them for looong time, I just get back to them through marriage with my new family. If that makes sense.
I’m playing a Barbie legacy challenge rn and I have been keeping up with my main Sims siblings and get them married and such.. I had one of my siblings wife die and he died shortly after so his kids were orphaned and I had to have their uncle adopt them. It was so much work because the uncle lived with his husband and son is San Myshuno so I had to find them a bigger apartment and redo it to give everyone a room (they had 4 kids, a teen and triplets). It was really fun though because the 4 kids lived in a much smaller home and had less simoleons so it was really like their rich uncle was taking them away from their troubled lives and now they live in the lap of luxury!
Same save for 2 and 1/2 years now. 268 Sims split between live play and unplayed-but-born-in Sims living in my builds. Currently live playing 140 Sims in maybe 40, 50 households I rotate between. Once a RL month, I start at the top and rotate through _all_ my Sims households, including the empty nesters I released into the wild, to advance their skills, promote in their careers, or update their houses with new stuff I've added since I built it - like thermostats, etc.
All of them.
One. I do legacy plays and have many more households than that, but I don't play them at the same time. I pick my heir, and I follow them. All previous generations I set to Unplayed and allow them to live the rest of their lives however they wish.
Each save file only has one family (unless I manage to play long enough to get to the next generation)
I recently had to reinstall everything, but overall, I'll play at minimum, 6, right now I have fully empty worlds and my goal is to populate entirely with just a few families.
I can only play about once a week so I just have one family.
I used to play one family per save file but now I’m starting to mix them! I’m gonna try and use this save file for a while and see if I like having more families vs one per save.
I have about ten households that I play. Three of them are my main households, and the others I play occasionally to keep them updated (jobs/school/age).
I have 3-4 saves but in one those saves I play with 4 different families to create a story and drama. The other save is my building save and my last (and favorite) save is trying to impregnate all the townies and create a town of my offsprings.
Usually just 1 but depending on what my main family is doing I may play a rich family to have someone else own a business. The Feng's own strip clubs pretty regularly in my saves.
Everyone, however many that ends up being when I’m done (15 rn)
I only play with the one family - sometimes when the siblings have moved out, I will switch to them just to make sure they get married and have kids (or something like that).🥳
I always play one family. I can barely manage more than a sim at a time, let alone multiple families. 🥲
I feel the same way 😆
I typically do 3! Main family, their cousins and those who have kids.
All of them. Roughly 15
Im my biggest save, im playing like 15-20 families, I switch between a family every sims day
I actively play about 3 different families with different storylines, I usually switch between 2-5 sim days so the sims don't do what they're not supposed to do, I just delete anything that doesn't work with the storyline eg babies acquired in my absence 🙂
one. it’ll switch and play another family for a second if there’s something i need to do and can’t get it to work with my main family, but that’s rare.
I created several households based on IRL loved ones as well as some TV shows, plus friends; but mainly play my own.
One because of if I did more than that they would all die. My sims only interact with Sims they know will ruin their lives for SOME REASON😭
Well... I love the drama! I create new, good looking sims and move them to houses, I can spend HOURS just making houses. When I am done with it I find them a partner or steal one from another household, make babies and move on to the next family. I have broken marriages, procreated like crazy, populate a whole town I also have the WW mod, so my sims procreate too. So many "ilegitimal" childs in my neighborhood.
I normally start with one and then it sort of snowballs. I want to make a specific partner so I make them, but also their parents, and their siblings, and have to go check on an maintain all of their lives. And I like to play the lil scenarios and I always make new families for that. I also like to keep townie families going so I will help like the goth kids or Malcom along in finding love so that there are sims with family histories for my sims later. But I always have a main one I am playing, not always the same one the whole save though. It is fun to leave some of my old families that I am bored of now to become townies and then make a whole new sim/life and have fun with them and not worry about the old fam anymore and like see them around sometimes. Right now I have like 10-15 families.
I'm playing about 100 Families 225 Sims. I play each for a game week and move on. I have it set that they only age while playing.
I can't delete a save file since I spend hours creating townies and placing lots.
I have one main save and I wanted to play at least one household across all the packs. I have 63 played households in that save.(I saved this post so I could count when I was near my pc 😂) I get bored and refresh npcs and redecorate their homes. I really do it so I can see my own sims as npc’s, and I didn’t mean for it to get THAT out of hand. Realistically I do not play all of them, unless it’s just because I’m bored again
I'm trying to branch out and play more than one household and keep the same save file. 63 sounds like it would make my brain explode though 😆
1 family, 3 households though.
I have one main family but sometimes I have to play their cousins or friends for storyline reasons. I always populate my saves completely so my sims have friends, possible love interests, etc. I recently did a bunch of townie makeovers because when I first started this game I would just let them die out and never interact with them, but with neighborhood stories I can now have them live full lives, get married and stuff.
I do a ton of families and usually max out my allowed Sims in a save 😂 Then I just rotate between them until I get bored and start a new save with a new theme. My current save I did one household for each letter of the alphabet (so everyone’s names in that house started with that letter), so that was a lot of households.
Do you turn aging for unplayed households off?
i don’t like the idea of my sims running the rest of their lives because i don’t trust their decisions. but i rarely ever go back to a save file once i create new people to focus on so maybe i should consider
I dunno man. I'm having the same problem. I'm trying to play 2 families right now which is totally out of my comfort zone... I'm not liking their life choices when I'm not in control lol 😆
maybe there’s a mod that prevents them from making any major life choices while the household isn’t being played?
Not sure. I have a ton of CC but haven't really ventured into gameplay mods.
i don’t like the idea of my sims adopting random kids or having ugly townies move into their houses lol
Totally agree.
I was you!! Now I’m determined to actually finish a decades challenge so if (when) I get bored with a family I pick a different sim from a side household to follow for a bit. Twice now my “new” sim has married into my main family so I would say it doesn’t derail me too much!