Essential DLC

[Backupfly]

I've been playing Sims 4 with WW and a couple of animation mods. This is my first time playing Sims, so I only have the base game so far. But I'm liking it, so I was wondering, what DLCs do you recommend? There's so many, between expansions and kits and whatnot, that it's hard to figure out which ones are worth it and which ones not so much.

 

So, which do you consider the best or essential DLCs? Especially if they work well with Wicked whims mods

[Neodarkside]

14 hours ago, Backupfly said:

I've been playing Sims 4 with WW and a couple of animation mods. This is my first time playing Sims, so I only have the base game so far. But I'm liking it, so I was wondering, what DLCs do you recommend? There's so many, between expansions and kits and whatnot, that it's hard to figure out which ones are worth it and which ones not so much.

 

So, which do you consider the best or essential DLCs? Especially if they work well with Wicked whims mods

 

DLC as in Player made stuff? or Sims Expansion and Packs?

[Neodarkside]

I'd say 90% of player made stuff works with Wicked Whims. I've yet to find one that doesn't, even Deaderpools MC Command Center works alongside it, I think both authors talk to each other to make sure they don't overlap. Heres my personal recommendations

 

Player made content.

 

MC Command Center: Can change how the game plays. Can add and delete traits, change how many days a sim is alive, remove unwanted/broken clothing off sims. It pretty much is a tweak tool to customize the game how you see fit and has saved me much headaches for alot of things. Its a must have recommend.

 

Basemental drugs: Changes drinks in game to actual alcohol with different moodlets. Adds drugs, cigarettes, ability to have bouncers for bars to keep teens out.

 

Nisa's Wicked perversions: Adds new traits plus the ability to sell and convert family members into sex slaves. New traits add interesting things, like Daughter of the Eastern Hare, having WW sex can cause your character to become pregnant but instead lays eggs which can be sold.

 

--Maxis Expansion content.

 

Island Living: Love the ocean lots, adds mermaids. They are... so-so in terms of new "races"

 

Snowy Escape: Adds a new world with skiing and Japanese style content, haven't played it much yet, but seems fun so far.

 

Seasons: Adds weather and holidays, and a new world (I think?)

 

City Living: Adds the Down Town world, I like many of the apartments and neighborhoods in this one.

 

--Maxis packs content

 

Strangerville: Adds a story driven world, I liked it as I love the weirdness it added

 

Making Magic: Adds a new world and spellcaster as a "race". Spells are mediocre, hoping for WW based spells honestly.

 

Jungle Adventure: Adds new vacation world, sights are kinda neat, can make for some cinematic WW scenes, can make your sims rich fast.

 

Vampires: Adds new dark world, stays darker longer and adds vampires. Needed more lots tho.

 

Spa Day: Adds spas, its ok, kinky spa fun for some animations.

 

 

Stuff to avoid, Personal preference here.

 

Bust the Dust Kit: Its broken, very very broken

 

Parenthood: Pros and cons... Pros, allows your adults to be a parent, adds some neat objects. Cons. EVERYTHING ELSE. Kids and Toddlers SUCK, they trash community lots, their parents do SHIT to stop them (kinda like IRL I guess). Childhood phases are... ok, I can see a few of them being manageable. The Teen phases... SUCK. To me it ruined gameplay with teens who were my favorite age group. You could have a nice Teen, play them nice and proper, polite, beacon of goodness. And then Maxis slaps the MEAN phase on them. I had to find a mod to remove phases the moment they appear.

 

Laundry Day: Sounds good on paper, do laundry. Sure if your washer and dryer didn't break every 2 cycles. Not sure if it was fixed finally or I still have a mod but they don't seem to be breaking as often. Nice thing is, you can buy this pack and never use it, just don't add a washer, dryer, and clothes hamper and it never happens.

 

 

 

[Guest]

You kind of get broke if you buy all DLC.

 

Sadly, some mods do require some mods to work.

Have to check when they are on sale, so you do not pay too much.

 

I do experiment with Basemental Drugs. Seems great, though on their website they stated also Sex Traffic but not much information was given.

Originally i thought this was for someone who wants to be a drug lord, but it seems it integrates well, even if you just want to use drugs in game play and live with the consequences.

 

Glad it has no DLC requirement.

[Neodarkside]

On 4/17/2021 at 10:54 AM, wutpickel said:

You kind of get broke if you buy all DLC.

 

Sadly, some mods do require some mods to work.

Have to check when they are on sale, so you do not pay too much.

 

I do experiment with Basemental Drugs. Seems great, though on their website they stated also Sex Traffic but not much information was given.

Originally i thought this was for someone who wants to be a drug lord, but it seems it integrates well, even if you just want to use drugs in game play and live with the consequences.

 

Glad it has no DLC requirement.

 

Heh yeah, it can happen. Someone new getting into the game, take advantage of their build a bundles and sales. Me tho, I tend to buy things as they are released (with the exception of a few like the Kits and the Star Wars dlc).

 

Basemental is fun as I have a few Sims who I like to be pot heads, just lazy chill sims. Couple of my townies I've made drug dealers, some look the part, like the rough tough looking punk, but some funny, like the sweet old lady down the street or the pretty housewife. I don't much care for the harder drugs and haven't had any sim go to deep into that. Then theres the alcohol, I liked the idea that these are alcohol, not fruity juices. I don't agree with sims getting tipsy off a single drink, but ok.

[Guest]

Are there any shady towns or run down areas that play well with prostitution?

I wonder.

 

Right now i have "Get to Work", "City Living" and "Get Together".

 

Nightclubs and Brothels seems mostly for a player to run it and not to work there actually.

 

Any recommendations?

 

Thank you

[Oops19]

 

11 hours ago, wutpickel said:

Are there any shady towns or run down areas that play well with prostitution?

I wonder.

One option may be to use the World Builder mod to build such an area. The eco living harbour could have some potential but even though I bought this pack I rarely use it.

 

The Willow Creek park In the evening could be a nice place to meet and exchange.

One should have a lot trait so sims know where to go just to f. a whore. Without a trait attracting the right sims to the place may always be a pain.

[Neodarkside]

I've found many run down public lots on the Sims 4 in game search thing. Just try keywords (Abandoned, run down, etc). The middle neighborhood of the Get Famous world is also nice for red light district or run down locations.

[Guest]

8 hours ago, Oops19 said:

 

One option may be to use the World Builder mod to build such an area. The eco living harbour could have some potential but even though I bought this pack I rarely use it.

 

The Willow Creek park In the evening could be a nice place to meet and exchange.

One should have a lot trait so sims know where to go just to f. a whore. Without a trait attracting the right sims to the place may always be a pain.

Well, Nisa's mod has some traits that i do not use. Others from her mod are not in the game for some reason. But i use the Bimbo traits which help and of course Nisa's work cloth setting which make sims of the right kind to propose.

So it does work but not a lot.

Unrelated to this topic, i noticed that my Sim world has a lot of women but not a lot of men. It may be equal but in all venues there are a lot of women.

 

As for the places, i actually tried to find something but its not so easy. I have to check if i have safe search on because i did not find a lot. There are some run down venues but they are more made for people that want to control the business side of things. So not exactly what i am looking for.

I have to study a little to know how you can create something.

 

Parks are mostly deserted at night. It seems that Sims follow are good life. No one is making any bad deeds.

[Scorpio]

On 4/16/2021 at 9:58 AM, Backupfly said:

So, which do you consider the best or essential DLCs? Especially if they work well with Wicked whims mods

My personal favorites:

Get to Work (Needed if you want to utilize WW Strip Clubs)

Get Together (New Clubs feature, can add WW Have Sex for a club activity and ask sims to join club to create a  Sex Club)(Nice sized town  + DJ's & Nightclubs) 

Spa Day (adds some new jobs for NPC's  for Yoga, Massage Table & Chair, and Sauna's plus using these objects for more sex animations)

(No Spa lots included so you have to download one from the Gallery)

(But you can also place these new objects in your home or on other public lots)

[jyotai]

I'm also new to Sims 4. Last Sims game I played was version 1 when it was new, and a few hours of 2...

 

Got Sims 4 when steam had that sale last week and bought maybe 10+ different DLCs as well...

 

So from a fresh user POV...

 

City Living is one I like even though you can't redesign outside of the apartment walls - this constraint makes setting up a residential lot it's own engaging challenge of "cram all the things I want in here, and none of the junk I'd put in if I were just 'filling mansion space'. It's also easy to set up a whole drama plot line by picking one of the buildings with multiple apartments and moving sims into each apartment - your neighbors will appear in the hallway a lot so regardless of which household you play the others become major characters in the story.

 

The Vampire Pack - unless you're into vampires this one is almost just straight out annoying to have. It came in a bundle so I grabbed it up because "the discount was too good to pass up" and now I find myself using mods to keep the vampires out of the rest of the game. That said - some good fashion in there. Some of the only Maxis sources of 'cool fancy fashion' for male sims. And if you are into vampires this one would probably be the top of the list because they do seem really well done. Not sure I could recast "The Originals" with it though - the only Vampire show I've ever liked. But that's my challenge for the 1 single lone empty lot is has.... and it only has 3 more lots if I recall right.

 

Get Together and Get To work - these are kinda must buys. 103% of all CC on every modder site seems to use about 301 different items from each of these packs. Like... seriously... you won't be able to use most CC or stuff in the Maxis library until you have these two. That said... once you have them you'll see why. It's just full of things that build out the basic game to be a much fuller experience. It's kinda hard to describe. If the Basic game was Vanilla, this is French Vanilla. It' just 'more of that, so I can O.D. on this ice cream'. When I look at reviews of Sims 4 they are mostly very negative - and it feels like a lot of that is because the stuff in these two packs was not in the basic game.

 

Seasons - every review seems to say this is the most vital pack to get. So... last day of the sale I got it. I held off because it has no new lots, no new world. And now that I have it... I see no new benefit to having it. I do not understand at all why this is one of the highest rated packs. Basically all it seems to do is cause your sims to pull out umbrellas or run and hide when it rains...

 

Eco Lifestyle - I've yet to even visit the new zone this adds, but I've been dropping solar panels and other elements this adds into the lots all over my game. I've made one of my sims into a professional protestor (World Unity - she's a Flag Smasher if you've been watching Falcon and Winter soldier... Disney paints that movement as villains but then gives them a cause that is good, so I gave that to one of my 'pure' sims). It's is absolutely funny to hear how she talks when holding up a sign and yelling for her cause. I like this pack a lot, but it's a wholly optional kind of content.

 

 

Cats & Dogs - if you're pet obsessed this is a high value buy. Otherwise I dunno. I do like the new zone it adds. It's got a lot of variety to it. But I may either move half the families to other zones or replace them. For expac related reasons they're the only pre-made families with pets, and it's kinda odd having all the pet owners in just one place.

 

I also got Dine Out, StrangerVille, Get Famous, Tiny Living, Paranormal Stuff, and a few small packs - but haven't done enough with these yet to know what I think of them.

 

...

 

Wait for a another sale. Last week almost everything was 50% off... That makes a huge difference.

 

 

On 4/21/2021 at 6:37 AM, wutpickel said:

Well, Nisa's mod has some traits that i do not use. Others from her mod are not in the game for some reason. But i use the Bimbo traits which help and of course Nisa's work cloth setting which make sims of the right kind to propose.

So it does work but not a lot.

Unrelated to this topic, i noticed that my Sim world has a lot of women but not a lot of men. It may be equal but in all venues there are a lot of women.

 

 

The Nisa mod is really weird. It feels like 3 or 4 mods crammed together.

I'm not sure what I would ever do with the egg-laying women stuff...

Or what connection it has to the prostitution stuff.

And I could do without all the mermaid and succubus stuff.

- It should be split into 4 mods right there: egg-layer, Mermaid, Succubus, and Prostitution. I think a lot of people only want the last part.

 

MCCC has a setting to adjust the ratio of men to women. In population, set the percentage of random sims that are men. Default is 50. If your game has gotten out of balance could delete a few dozen homeless sims after adjusting that setting.

 

 

Vital mods...

 

Wicked Whims is vital to anyone who's found this website I suspect. OP already knows that though. There is a wide range of quality in the animation packs... But overall, coming from Skyrim modding - the Sims 4 animation packs are on average higher quality than the ones for Skyrim. I've only seen one pack that had what I felt were actually badly done animations- while in Skyrim that's about 20-30% of the animations I've seen.

 

Ebonix - this creator makes really nice hair, though some of it clips in the scalp. Their clothing is more of a mixed bag. Some great, some clippy. If you want more African looking sims you will want to check this person out. Note that if you do want more African toned sims, prepare to become very frustrated with things like 'nipple mods' that support 732 shades of pink, green, blue, and violet... yet not one single shade of brown or black... Like... there is more support for sims with Green skin than Black sims...

 

Fashion: you can kinda just start here: https://www.thesimsresource.com/members/Bill_Sims/ - and go nuts. About 30-40% of the modders there are insanely good. But beware, a few of them use screenshots from art apps, and when you get the item in game it's low poly and a blurry texture... I started with a name that has good stuff though, so you can start your journey there. After each download I end up on a page of recommendations and that's what causes my trips there to last hours...

 

 

LittleMsSams: https://littlemssam.tumblr.com/tagged/lot+trait - Starting with the link to the lot trait extender that is actually by Nisa. But explore the rest of what's on there. Dozens of little mods to tweak gameplay. So many vital things there - but what you will want will vary by person. I've got 65+ mods from there (65 in one folder, and more in some sub folders).

 

 

  

On 4/16/2021 at 9:43 PM, Neodarkside said:

 

Stuff to avoid, Personal preference here.

 

Bust the Dust Kit: Its broken, very very broken

 

I literally bought that right before reading this thread.

 

So I guess I will find out why soon.

 

 

 

[Guest]

Got to say, i check that all DLC & addons cost about $500 if you bought them with the 50% off ticket.

I am not that into the Sims that i would spend so much money.

City Live is good but besides mostly having Karaoke, there is not much. The nice thing was that you could rent an apartment which is kind of cool.

I expected more street life but there is not much. Besides the occasional fairs.

[jyotai]

21 hours ago, wutpickel said:

Got to say, i check that all DLC & addons cost about $500 if you bought them with the 50% off ticket.

I am not that into the Sims that i would spend so much money.

 

Yeah you gotta pick and choose. I didn't buy ALL the DLC, but I did buy more than a new player should.

 

I've been wanting to return to Sims for years and right now seems like the ideal time.

 

I've been reading articles full of complaints that I don't see in my game, and when I check the date they're often issues that are now fixed. It seems like with games like this it's better to buy in late and not become bitter than to buy in early and get the fun drained out of you as you wait for your issue to be addressed.

 

For me for example, a major issue is skin tones - and while I did see a note when I loaded up the game that customizable skin tones was a new feature, I did not realize how extreme of an update it was - that before Dec 2020 making a brown or black sim was just... complicated. Instead I got to join in after that was fixed and so my Sim areas look like where I am in the real world, Northern California. I had no idea this issue might have existed for me had I failed to resist and bought the game just a few months ago.
- I write that because... some folks might be here looking at this and limiting their buys on the idea that Sims 4 has been out too long and maybe Sims 5 will replace it in a surprise announcement. If Sims 5 came out today, I might instead keep playing Sims 4 for a few more years until enough updates existed to make Sims 5 worth it.

 

(This also explains why when I went looking for dark nipple tone mods, I've had so much trouble - as Maxis made dark skin tones seems to be only recently added to Sims 4).

 

Street life issues. One article I just read noted that Sims 3 had more of an open world - people wanting all that street life would likely prefer that game. I looked at it and there's just something "off" in the visual style of Sims 3 for me. Sims 4 feels like Sims 1 updated to modern levels of polygons but Sims 3 looks different. The truth is probably the exact opposite... but that's just how it looked to me. So I'm glad I went with Sims 4.

 

 

I've been reading some articles about how mods break with patches. I'm dreading what that will be like when the next patch day somes, my Mods folder gets about 20,000 more entries per minute right now...

 

[Guest]

I have to admit that i joined the Sim 4 party late. I just bought it recently in fact.

In my memory, Sim 3 was pretty nice. In the past. Now with Sim 4, i prefer Sim 4. The graphics are just way better but you are more limited in walking somewhere. Everything is travel now. Even if on a plaza and want to enter a store. You travel there.

Silly.

 

So i can not even have a comment about Sims coloring options. I thought it was all along like that.

 

I just wish that real life could be more transparent in the game. Well, normally people want to escape from reality but i think i like more realism in the game for my game play.

I currently run Nisa's mod and well, it works well so far.

But there are surely also people that just play "normal" as a couple.

 

I do not think i would really go back to Sims 3 though. I just reinstalled it to check for comparison. First not every mod is available for some reason. So that makes it harder.

But you were able to run around and could have some devious things going on in the park at night.

So i think it was fun, but now i prefer really Sims 4 over it.

 

As for the DLC's. Not sure. I think i am ok with what i have at the moment. It would add anything more for me if i bought some more. Except if i use some Lots maybe that require them.

[Scorpio]

1 hour ago, jyotai said:

I've been reading some articles about how mods break with patches. I'm dreading what that will be like when the next patch day somes, my Mods folder gets about 20,000 more entries per minute right now...

The secret here is not to update your game right away and you can keep on playing as normal and only update when you want to.

Be sure to go into your Origin/Steam Settings and disable Automatic Updates so you don't get caught with your pants down when a surprise update happens.

If/when the game won't launch without updating switch Origin/Steam to Offline mode and play offline for at least a week to see what mods are broken.

Then collect all the updated mods and store them, for just before you decide to update the game.

 

Another tip: When Wicked Whims is updated you will get notification of a new version available... DON'T DO IT YET.

Wait and see if it's a major update, bug fix, or broken, and watch the threads for new problems, caution is advised.

AND

Always keep at least one previous version of your major script mods in case you need to roll back to the previous version.

Once these mods get updated there old version is gone.

 

BTW I loved playing sims 3 other than the bugs but the mods fixed most of that.

Rather cartoon-ish sims but cc helped quite a bit too.

Played S3 for 2 years and held off buying S4 do to so many complaints.  

Then I only bought Base Game on sale just for trying it out first, not out much if I hated it.

[Vengeance_11]

On 4/22/2021 at 8:07 PM, jyotai said:

Seasons - every review seems to say this is the most vital pack to get. So... last day of the sale I got it. I held off because it has no new lots, no new world. And now that I have it... I see no new benefit to having it. I do not understand at all why this is one of the highest rated packs. Basically all it seems to do is cause your sims to pull out umbrellas or run and hide when it rains...

This is a fan favourite because it adds more variety to the game. Without it, you just have constant sunny weather. With Seasons, you get snow, thunderstorms and heatwaves, as well as seasonal events like Thanksgiving, Christmas (sorry, Harvestfest and Winterfest) and New Years.  It makes the game feel more alive because you don't have the sun blaring down on you each and every day.