Collect Trading Cards in The Sims 4 Kids Room Stuff!

The Sims 4 Kids Room Stuff pack is coming next week on June 28th! Awesome activities, outfits, and bedroom decor for child Sims await.

Sims 4 Kids Stuff Puppet Theater

First up is the Puppet Theater, where kids can put on puppet shows for their family and friends. Putting on performances will increase their social skill, which in turn unlocks new plays. There are five plays in total for kids to unlock.

Sims 4 Kids Stuff Voidcritter Battle Station

An all-new feature for the Sims franchise arrives with the addition of the Voidcritter trading card game! There are twenty cards for Sims to collect, trade, and train. Kids can insert their cards into the Voidcritter Battle Station to compete against each other. With their cards in place, the cute critters will appear onscreen and commence battle.

Sims 4 Kids Room Stuff Screenshot

Define their personal style with an assortment of science fiction, nature, and athletic themed furniture. Cover the walls with posters of the latest tween pop star sensation for the music lovers.

Sims 4 Kids Stuff Tweens

Crank up the new Tween Pop radio station or BEtween TV channel included in the pack to amuse the kids and annoy their parents.

The Sims 4 Dine Out Livestream: Restaurant Rundown

On the cusp of the launch of the Dine Out game pack was a new livestream with information regarding the restaurant management system. Let’s take a look at some of the features you can expect to see when the pack releases on June 7th.

Sims 4 Restaurant Management

The business button located to the far right of the screen will be your go-to location in customizing your restaurant.

Restaurant Employee Sims 4

With the Manage Employees button, players can hire chefs, hosts, waiters. Listed underneath each potential employee are stats that influence their performance. For example, with chefs, the cooking skill and mixology skill influences the quality of food and drinks they prepare. Waiters rely on the fitness skill to reduce the chances they drop a meal. In addition, Charisma will also be necessary to improve the customer’s satisfaction to their service.

Restaurant Management 2

Within the Restaurant Settings menu, you can setup the price markup, advertising costs, the restaurant’s menu, the employee uniforms, and the customer’s dress code. You can set the price markup to a maximum of 300%. However, high markups require high quality food. Customers may give the restaurant a poor “Value Rating” if the high price doesn’t match the quality.

Sims 4 Dine Out Menu

Certainly it wouldn’t be a restaurant if you couldn’t customize the menu. Underneath each meal is a difficulty rating that could lead to poor quality meals if the chef has low cooking skills. If you don’t have the time to sift through all the meals, there are presets available to help you fill the menu quickly.

Your employees will have a selection of uniforms to select. Aside from full-body attire, there are restaurant themed tops as well.

The final option in the Restaurant Settings menu lists the customer dress code. Here you can select everday, athletic, swimwear, party, and sleepwear.

Customer Talk Sims 4

As the manager, you’ll mainly be tasked with keeping your customers happy! You can welcome them to the restaurant, check on their table, and give them free drinks, food, and desserts. You’ll also will be responsible for keeping your staff in line through praising, criticizing, firing, or paying for their training to increase their skills. With cooks, there’s even an extra menu where you can suggest changes to their cooking speed.

Restaurant Stats Sims 4

Clicking the Shift Summary button opens up a panel with the current status of your restaurant. From here you can view your net profits, customer reviews, and employee satisfaction.

Sims 4 Rating

Above each customer is a star rating that represents their current satisfaction with the restaurant. By hovering over that sim, you can see their opinion on the restaurant. As you increase the star rating for your restaurant, more and more Sims will stop by to the point where you could see 16 sims at a given time. A neat little interaction for the more important patrons, like the Food Critic, is the “prioritize food” option. This speeds up meal preparation for the table you select, at the cost of delaying another customer’s meal.  

Sims 4 Perks

As you continue to run the restaurant, you’ll earn points that can be spent on Restaurant Perks to add additional functionality to your business. First we have, “Curious Customers” which unlocks a new interaction where customers can ask management what dish they should order. There’s also “Surplus Harvest,” a temporary perk which reduces the cost on ingredients to prepare the meal. “Meal Rush” applies a temporary boost to the number of customers who visit the establishment. Other perks we saw include, “Patient Patrons,” “Well Managed,” “Tidy Tippers,” and “Well Funded Foodies.”

 

Sims 4 Introduces Gender Fluidity to Create-a-Sim

 

Today’s new update marks the first time in Sims history where Sims can officially wear clothes outside of their gender. Kiss those mods goodbye, as now your Sims will gain access to almost the entire lineup of clothes, hairstyles, voices, and accessories that were previously only available to specific genders.

Gender Update Examples

Create-A-Sim will now utilize a Gender Customization option that allows you to change whether the Sim has a masculine or feminine frame, their toileting behavior, and whether or not they can be impregnated. Create-A-Sim will also have a new filter that lets you toggle the display of masculine or feminine fashion choices.

 

 

Gender Update Render

These new changes follow in line closely to games like Saints Row 3, which was one of the few at its time to allow the main character to wear clothes of either gender.

Sims 4 New Gender Options To help visualize these changes, let’s go through the process of creating a new sim. First you select whether the Sim is male or female. By default the clothing options, hairstyles, and accessories will only display fashion choices matching the Sim’s sex.  If you wish to display clothing of the opposite gender, you’ll need to disable the [masculine] or [feminine] filter.

Sims 4 Gender CustomizationUnderneath the male and female symbols are the Gender Customization Options. This allows you to change your Sim’s physical frame, their clothing preference, their pregnancy setting, and how they’ll use the toilet.

For those curious about the random generation of townies, Lindsay Pearson took to twitter to clarify that “the game will not automatically create any NPCs using this new functionality.”

Sims 4 Sunlight effect

Aside from this, we finally have the new lightning system that was announced in a previous post. This new effect allows both the sun and the moon to project through the windows if the player sets their Lighting settings to Very High in Options.

The Sims 4 Dine Out Restaurant Customization Preview

In The Sims 4 Dine Out Game Pack, players can create, own, and manage their very own Restaurant Venue. First off, you’ll need get those creative juices flowing and pick a name for your restaurant.

More important; however, is the choice of aesthetic. There are all sorts of possibilities for designing a unique restaurant, the only requirements being a bathroom, Host Station, Waiter Station, Chef Station, and some Dining Spots for your customers to comfortably enjoy their meal at.

Sims 4 Dine Out Wait Staff

There are three job positions that you’ll need to fill in order to run a well-oiled restaurant: Host, Wait Staff, and Chef. The host greets the customers and shows them to their table. The wait staff then takes their order and delivers their meal after it has been prepared by a chef.

From the Employee Settings menu, you can choose uniforms for your staff, and dictate the dress code of your customers.

Sims 4 Dine Out Customer Review

One of the keys to running a successful restaurant is maintaining a balance between customer satisfaction and your profit margins. The quality of your restaurant will be judged on a five star rating scale based on its service, ambience, and food.

Once a patron has paid their bill, a star containing a number will appear over their head, indicating the rating they’ve given your restaurant. These Customer Reviews will dictate the overall star rating of your restaurant. You can view your restaurant’s rating through an interface shown in the trailer. It also lets you know the areas in which you could improve, and those in which you excel.

By improving your rating, you’ll earn points used for unlocking Restaurant Perks. Among the list of perks are extra wait staff positions, discounts on ingredients, and the Inspirational Speech social interaction.

Sims 4 Dine Out Food Critic

As the owner, your Sim can chat up restaurant patrons, even offering to comp their meal, to increase your star rating. When a Food Critic stops by, you may want to recommend an ideal meal for him to taste. You don’t want to keep him waiting!

Sims 4 Dine Out Customize Menu

There are several preset food menus for the restaurant that you can choose from. Otherwise, you can customize your own menu, selecting each and every dish that your restaurant can serve.

There are four meal categories available for patrons to order from, including Appetizer, Main, Dessert, and Drink. Mix in some experimental dishes to make your restaurant’s menu stand out.

Sims 4 Dine Out Customizable Sign

Among the new decorative objects in the pack are a new aquarium and a set of customizable signs. You can add all sorts of decals to the blank signs to represent your restaurant.

Look forward to experiencing all of this and more when The Sims 4 Dine Out debuts on June 7th!

The Sims 4 Lets The Sunlight In With A New Update

Sims 4 Sunlight effect

SimGuruPizza shared a screenshot of the new lighting effect that’s coming along in a future update. This effect allows sunlight to cast through the windows against objects and the floor.

Sims 4 Sunlight Effect

The new effect was first spotted for a brief moment in the new trailer for The Sims 4: Dine Out! Here you can see the sunlight shine over the tables and the wood panel flooring.

Aside from that, there have been other minor tidbits revealed on Twitter as well. For instance, we can have birthday party and dates inside the restaurant.  We can also post our photos to “Simstagram” and receive a +1 Happy Moodlet for doing so.  Well that’s all for now, see you next time!

Manage a Restaurant in The Sims 4 Dine Out Game Pack

The new Game Pack teased last month has been officially announced and slated for a June 7th release. In The Sims 4 Dine Out, players can build and manage their very own restaurants. Experiment with fanciful new meals and test them on your famished customers.

Sims 4 Dine Out Restaurant

For the less business oriented, a number of pre-made restaurants are available for your Sims to dine at. Classic diners, sports bars, and high-end restaurants are just a few themes you could choose from to stylize your eatery.

Sims 4 Update (4/21/2016): Tragic Clown Returns

 

Tragic Clown Sims

No longer just a mere painting, the Tragic Clown has officially returned to the Sims as a new NPC. This sim can spawn in two different ways, by either randomly appearing on a community lot or from being summoned from viewing the Tragic Clown painting.

Tragic Clown Sims 4 Pub

Upon viewing the painting a second time, a notification will pop up alerting you of his presence. He emits a a +2 sadness aura for Sims close by and will randomly perform juggling acts that tend to fail miserably.

Aside from that, this update contains a few bug fixes for both PC and Mac. The most notable one is for the Mac version where players were unable to connect to the gallery if too many mods were installed.

The Sims 4 Teases New Content in Seasonal Previews

A new video was released today, teasing some new content to come for The Sims 4. This is the first of their new seasonal previews, which they intend to release every few months.

The video shows a restaurant-themed Game Pack, slated for a Spring 2016 release. In addition, a new Stuff Pack centered around children will be released sometime in the Summer this year.

Names and additional details for these packs will come at a later date once they’ve been formally announced.

The Sims 4’s Spring Challenge Begins on March 22nd!

The Sims 4 Growfruit

A new patch will arrive on March 22nd, introducing a new Spring Challenge for a limited time. Throughout the months of March and April, players can find a unique new Sim named Jasmine Holiday roaming around. She’ll give out Growfruit seeds to Sims that speak with her, which can then be planted to grow a Growfruit tree.

The Sims 4 Growfruit Planet Render

Returning to Jasmine with 20 Growfruit will unlock a new planter object. With a ‘perfect’ Grapefruit, you can earn an additional, fancier planter.

The Sims 4 Egg Hunt Render

The Bunny Egg Hunt returns this year, now with two extra eggs to collect! Collecting all twelve will unlock a stuffed bunny object.

 

Sims 4 Update (02/04/2016): Gardeners and Tragic Clowns

The Sims 4 updated today with a surprise update celebrating the series 16th anniversary. Items and interactions from previous games in the franchise were included in today’s patch.

Sims 4 Gardener

First we have the Gardener, who can be hired from the cellphone menu. They tend to appear in the mornings at 9:00 AM to water your plants. If you think they’re doing a great job, you can even give them a tip of 100 Simoleons.

Tragic Clown Sims 4

Next is the Tragic Clown painting which first appeared in The Sims 1. Sims who gaze upon this miserable painting will be swept with of sadness. Aside from that, there’s the Plumbob poster to celebrate The Sims’ 16th Anniversary.

Kleptomaniac Skill

The Kleptomaniac Trait from The Sims 3 has returned enabling Sims to swipe objects from their neighbors. Kleptomaniacs who get caught in the act will have the Embarrassed moodlet. Kleptomanics also gain a few social interactions, such as nervously asking a Sim about their “prized possessions”, or “enthusing over the Thrill of stealing.”

Grilled Cheese SIms 4

Lastly we have the Grilled Cheese aspiration. It unlocks after eating several Grilled Cheese sandwiches. Once it’s selected, you can chat with others about Grilled Cheese. Completing all the tasks in the Aspiration unlocks the new “Melt Master” trait. This trait allows Sims to summon Grilled Cheese sandwiches and paint Grilled Cheese on an easel.

Custom Content Logo

One cool minor feature lets you filter custom content from the base game. In addition, all custom content will now have a blue wrench icon attached to their portraits.

Other notable aspects to this update are:

  • The inclusion of the Treat items from the #TeamTrick vs #TeamTreat event.
  • Twitter functionality, allowing you to post screenshots and achievements.
  • New Audio Settings, letting your radio music match the game’s current speed.

Previous Sims 4 Release Notes can be found in The Sims 4 Updates category.