Maxis is finally giving The Sims 4 babies (and toddlers, and children) a major, needed overhaul, including upgrades like having Sims pick up dirty diapers off the floor and stopping Sims from repeatedly picking up and putting down infants over and over again.
This comes from a “laundry list” shared by Maxis today highlighting over 150 fixes and new features coming in an update on May 12, many of which have to do with infants and toddlers. Some of the changes were instigated by feedback from recent polls asking The Sims players what their most-wanted fixes and changes were, with Maxis prioritizing the ones that got the most votes.
These highly requested changes include several that sound silly, but genuinely are going to make playing The Sims 4 so much more enjoyable. For instance, they’re fixing an issue where Sims would keep picking up infants, putting them down, and then picking them up again over and over, which was always weird to watch and annoying to try to move the Sims out of. Sims will also now proactively pick up dirty diapers left on the floor after changing an infant, instead of just leaving them. And various infant interactions have had their timings tuned: they can be fed and changed faster, their hunger decreases more slowly, and their Tummy Time progression now moves a bit faster. This bit is genuinely huge: infants are naturally supposed to be a lot of work, but given the speed at which The Sims moves, infants have long felt a little out-of-step pacing-wise with how long it took to just do basic things with them.
Similarly, there’s now a toggle to turn off Sims’ autonomously caring for a baby, and leaving it fully in player control. Silly as this sounds, a lot of players have reported that Sims get this weird behavior where they would constantly check on babies who didn’t need checking on, but then wouldn’t actually do anything to address their needs (or would interrupt taking care of those needs to keep checking on the baby). This seemingly will turn that off and just let the player say “Hey, go feed the baby” directly. I haven’t seen anything quite as extreme as some folks have reported, but this is definitely helpful to have—sometimes you really just need a Sim to freakin’ focus, ya know?
It’s not just a baby update, though; there are some other cool things in here too. A new Base Layer feature is expanding fashion choices by allowing us to dress up our Sims with a base layer of clothing like a long-sleeve shirt or tank top, and then layer other outfits on top of it. There are some updates to sleeping interactions that will help Sims in relationships actually sleep together correctly instead of getting confused and continually getting out of bed. Also apparently Sims with the Jealous trait were getting jealous of their partner for interacting with their own children, so that’s getting fixed too.
A lot of these fixes sound small, and they are, but taken all together this is genuinely a massive improvement, especially for babies and kids. Younger Sims can be really fun and building families is a huge part of many people’s enjoyment of The Sims 4, but there have been a lot of little nagging issues with them over the years that, taken collectively, made them quite the headache to deal with. The full list of updates is right here and goes live on May 12, with Maxis continuing to investigate some other major issues with saves and performance that the community has requested the dev look into.
