★ TIPS & TRICKS for making your own save file in The Sims 4 - Including FREE template!

social swimmers and welcome back to a brand new video I think we can all agree that the default save file that comes with the Sims 4 is not the best especially if you've been playing for a long time it gets a little repetitive at the same time it can be super incredibly daunting to make your own save file if you have all the packs or even if you have just a few there is so much to do so many families so many builds Etc but don't write I have a list of amazing tips for you today that will help you massively in making task less daunting and feeling super in control when making your own safe off for The Sims while not losing your creative energy to do so at the end of the video I'll even give you some insights on how I kept track on making my own save file and I'll show you some of the best features of that save file so you can take some inspiration so make sure to stick around for that but don't worry there is a lot of good value in between because all the 11 tips that I'm about to give you today use them to your own benefits and making a safe bubble but easy and fun this video took a long time to make so feel free to give it a cheeky like I very much appreciate it and without further Ado let's get into the video foreign tip number one is to actually start off with an empty save file it saves you an incredible amount of time if you don't have to delete all of the pre-made Sims and pre-made builds this can literally take up a day if you don't have an empty save file and there are people who have already done this I added a download link to my favorite which is called the seriously blank save file it is completely free to download and all you have to do is drag and drop it into your save files folder on your PC this save files folder can be found in your documents Electronic Arts The Sims 4 saves all you need to do is just grab the file that you downloaded drop it in that folder and that way it will be automatically loaded into your game as soon as you start up and you have a empty save file to start working with tip number two is as soon as you start making builds families Etc keep a record I Will Show an example of the record that I kept at the end of the video but just find a way that works for you just make sure that you register the amount of Sims you've made the kids the pets the type of buildings the price of the buildings and this all sounds like a lot of work but actually you're gonna save yourself a lot of work or brain pain down the line the reason for this being is that there are so many Lots so many families and you want to make a balanced save file if you just start creating off the bat you don't really think about it and you just don't write it down you'll probably end up with a save file that only has families and no singles or only has very expensive builds and no starter homes maybe you even forget to leave certain Lots empty and you'll be left with a save file where you constantly have to demolish things if you just want to play for instance racks to riches on an empty lot the reason why writing everything down sounds like a lot of work is because I can imagine it can be a little bit of a struggle to start with what do I need to register and what do I need to think about therefore I've also made sure to link an empty Excel file in the description it is based off the one that I used you can download it for free you can use it to your heart's content so you are also allowed to download it and then just adjust it but I listed the most important things and kind of already built some Excel logic into it so that if you fill it in while working on it the dashboard should update automatically and you should not experience any struggles or challenges when making your own safe file tip number three is to use mods which is obviously I know not something that everyone can do but if you're open to using mods I can highly recommend using both MC Command Center and UI cheats the reason for this is with MC Command Center you can actually give your Sims skills so as soon as you've made a household you can go into MC Command Center and you can click around and actually assign skills to your Sims and when you do that your Sims will get like a level one of that skill this way you can actually give your sim some skills ahead like cooking and stuff because to me it doesn't make any sense that most adult Sims in my saves do not have any skills because they've lived through their entire teenage and young adult years so why not have cooking skill or maybe gardening I also like to give them skills that work with their jobs Etc this is however a little bit of work so you have to be up for the task but if you really like storytell and you really like creating Sims I think this is one of the steps you might actually most enjoy about making a save file I then use UI cheats to actually skill them up like make sure that the cooking is not a level one but I change it to I don't know maybe a level four or five and also I use this to already level them up in their career so not all of my Sims are like at level one of the career but they are actually already maybe at level four or something so that if you meet a salmon you start dating them it's not like they just appeared out of thin air but they actually have a little bit of a backstory speaking of backstories that is a very nice Bridge into tip number four which is to give your Simpson backstories The Sims has this great way of actually allowing you to type a little bit of a backstory at each household you can do this through the household manager but you can also do it by clicking on a house if a Sim if a family already lives there and then you can just type out a little backstory I really like to do this because it helps me think about what type of SIM lives there I prefer to even write the backstory before even making this Sims I just copy and paste it into my game at a later point but the reason for doing this is because it gives me some handles onto what clothing to give them how many kids they have if they have any pets and also what kind of house they live in for instance if you have a very minimalistic Sim you might give them a completely different home compared to when you have a very extroverted maximalist Sim also if you have a family home all of these things if you think about it up front it will massively help you for instance in our save file we have this really cute household that apparently traveled the world with their kids so their entire house is filled with paintings that kind of signify their pictures from all over the world and just having this little hook will help you a lot in staying creative into making many many builds for one safe out tip number five I kind of mentioned it already but that is to make the family before the builds or even think about your neighborhoods and think about what kind of families or what kind of types of Sims you want to have living there we for instance created this real really rich neighborhood in Willow Creek where we made one house the mayor house and all their houses around it are also these really big fancy Villas we also have a beautiful farming District where we just have a bunch of farms sitting next to each other and the reason we were able to make this work and I keep saying we because I didn't make my Safe Fall by myself I made it with my best friend which was a super fun project this is a bonus dip in between so keep your eyes and ears open do it with someone together if you have a friend or some a family member or someone if you're part of the Sims Community find people who want to build it with you it gives a little bit of a logistic challenge for like having to upload things to the gallery so that other people can download them because in essence you're building two separate save files you're just using each other's builds and families but honestly it was so much fun to share this whole process with my best friend and to to kind of bounce off each other's creative ideas so if you know someone who also plays The Sims I highly recommend not doing it alone but basically this really helped us to kind of make make the families or the strategies for each neighborhood um before we started building because that way our neighborhoods looked cohesive which is a massive one-up from the default say file in The Sims because it doesn't really look cohesive to me the builds are kind of just plopped randomly I feel like every world has a different style mixed in together in neighborhoods and I really like that in my own safe how things are a little bit more consistent and there's actually a theme to each neighborhood so I highly recommend thinking about your strategies and your families before you start building tip number six if you don't count the bonus tip is to actually use the club system from get together if you own that expansion pack to make clubs for your Sims far beyond the default clubs that are already in the game for instance we have a fishing for friends Club in our save file which is basically just all of the Sims that live in our save file that are interested in fishing and they are basically in that club together there are two empty spots so if you start playing with a Sim who is into nature or outdoor activities you can join this club and it's like a friend club for outdoor activities we set up these clubs with all the like approved activities or age group limits we also have a Scouts group for our kids we even have singles as Pringles as a club which is basically a club that you can join to easily meet some of the Singletons in our save file these things are make such a massive difference when doing gameplay in our save file because all of our Sims actually know people already because as soon as you join a club all of those Sims that are in the club will actually appear in the Friendship panel and then again with UI cheats I give them a little bit more friendship or sometimes even cheat some romance between two Sims in a club because eventually that is kind of realistic in real life as well if you meet new people at work they probably have a friend group or they're probably part of a family with a backstory in a history so we try to give as many levels to all of our Sims as possible so that if you play in the save they actually feel like Sims that have their own lives and the save file feels alive if that makes any sense tip number seven is not necessarily a tip but more or less something that we found out the frustrating way is that the game no matter how hard you try will generate tangis you cannot stop this there are like jobs like bartenders or the ones that man the Stalls at the market in what is that world called again like the British inspired world where you have Agnes crumple bottom hitting you with the back I keep forgetting world names these days it's terrible but like all of those places need to be manned and even if you have a bunch of Sims that do not have a job that don't live anywhere the game will for some reason not take those Sims and use them they will still generate townies with very weird outfits to man those jobs the best you can do is all the way at the end if you've finished everything in your save file and you feel very happy with the look and the feel and the amount of families that you have play a little bit in it I would say like maybe two or three days in game visit as many public places as you can because that will actually trigger the game to generate all of these townies and then as the last step in your process give all these tummies a makeover give them a new name maybe give them some better outfits I don't know what you want to do with them but basically use the ones that were created by the game itself by default because they have already been pre-signed that job in that little time window that you've been playing and then you can give them a makeover the reason I say do this all the way at the end of your save file is because if you constantly do it in between what you basically get is that all the things that you've already built in your save file will actually start to run so your families will start to have lives they might have children you can turn autonomy and like um continuous life off obviously for non-played Sims which I highly recommend doing by the way when you're making a safe file because you might have to play test some things and you don't don't want your families to live their life while you're building the save file but still I just would recommend doing it all the way at the end because that way you are 100 sure that those random townies will generate for every world that you've been playing in ETC so um that would be my tip just give a makeover to the default ones that are created by the game rather than trying to create your own because for some reason the game just doesn't accept them and it's very very frustrating and we tried and we wasted a lot of time on this so take it from me don't waste your time just use the ones and give them a makeover tip number eight is again something that I did not do and I wish I had done and that is to work one world at a time the reason I'm saying this is because if you finish the entirety of Willow Creek you can actually create a copy of that save file which I highly recommend doing by the way anytime you want to play in your own save file is to load the game click save as and create a copy of your save that way your base safe always stays intact and nothing ever changes but like by doing it World by world you can actually if one world is completely finished or maybe two worlds are completely finished you can already play in it you can create a copy and you can start playing it and see how it feels see if you want to tweak some things and this is such a massive Game Changer because we try to do all of the world at once before we started playing we went from world to World from family to family and this caused us to have to work on the save file for seven months before we could even start playing in it and this wasn't too good for our motivation it wasn't really helpful to feel like you constantly had to build and create families and not be able to play the game but at the same time we both didn't really want to start any challenges or play the game because we felt like it didn't make any sense to play it outside of our own safe file because we were building our own safe out I highly recommend doing it World by world because that way even if you're halfway done you can already kind of play in your safe I'll get if what you like what you don't like maybe tweak some things in the original file but do a world by world and don't make the same mistake as I did and try to do all of them once because you are going to lose your motivation the only reason we pulled through is because we did it together if I had to do that alone I would have quit probably tip number nine is one that I already kind of briefly touched upon but is think about the style of your neighborhoods if you want to do a modern build make sure that the houses around it also look kind of modern also try and pick builds that work with the surroundings in that world and try to use landscaping or trees that you see in the world and bring them back into your build so kind of if you use a tree use a tree that is already around your build this one will make your builds fit in way better with all the rules that you're playing in giving it far more consistency than the default save file but also it will make your neighborhoods really look that all the things match up and I think this is great for gameplay or storytelling because your Sims can kind of live in a place that fits with their personality so you can really have an area of blue Suburbans or you can have this really modern desert home where maybe only very rich people live I don't know but it is great for storytelling to aim Advance kind of think about what you want for instance in Del Sol Valley we have this one place where it's kind of only run down homes and it is the place where all the actors who are very much not making it or are trying to make it are living as roommates in one household and then obviously all the way at the top of the hill in Del Sol Valley we have all the big fancy home for all of the super famous families that have potently made it and the way that we kind of like thought about this up front really decided the style that we wanted to build in for us so that run down neighborhood is consistently run down every house that we place there looks absolute trash it also helped us in deciding where we wanted our community Lots so for instance our restaurants and our gyms and stuff tend to be quite close together because in real life that would also make sense so we almost approached the design of our Maps as if we were playing City skylines we really tried to think about the infrastructure because yet again if you're playing in that save file and you have that set up it's gonna to make the world view alive and it's going to make it feel like it makes sense tip number 10 is one that I I struggled so much with getting through all of the world and that is do not be afraid to use the gallery it might be your own save file but that doesn't have to mean that every single Sim or build in the save file has to be your own you can even completely make a save file with just families and builds from the gallery I know that in our save file we have a bunch of like Community Lots like a bowling alley and a restaurant because even if you work with the two of you you might be able to build one maybe two maybe three restaurants but at one point you're just done building restaurants but at the same time we wanted to have every world to have a restaurant that also fit the style so we ended up downloading this super cute ramen bar for in Mount comoribi and now our Sims can actually have food in a place that fits with the environment that is super cute very well decorated or better than the one that we have by default in-game but at the same time it doesn't have like the limitation of or like the pressure of us having to build it so I highly recommend if you're daunted by the task of starting a save file just every time you're on the gallery and you see something you like save it to your library because even if you start the process of making your save file in six months and you're not ready for it now every time that you save a build that you like you will be able to go back to that and like place it in your save file as soon as you start building it and then tip number 11 again one that I already kind of mentioned but I'm gonna mention it again because I cannot stretch the importance of this one if you feel like your save file is ready to play do two things one if you play in it in the game make sure to save it as and create a new instance of your save file this way your original save file stays in packed and even if your game at one point gets terribly corrupted you still have that one base version and mentioning corrupted save files back up your saves especially your save file as soon as it is a finished product me and my best friend actually made a copy of that and uploaded it to a shared Google drive because now no matter what happens to your game even if our game completely breaks or at one point we have to delete everything we will be able to re-download it and place it back into our save files folder and we have an uncorrupted always working version of our own save file and last but definitely not least I promised you all the way at the end of this video I would show you how we kept track of our save file like mentioned earlier I will make sure to probably a better looking version but like upload a template for you to use that is based off the one that we did and I'll link it in the description box down below so you can use it to your heart's content but let's dive right into the Excel sheet that we use to keep track of our safe file don't be scared there's a lot going on here but I'm gonna walk you through everything of it so basically I'm going to start with the top that is called Lots done this originally was just called Lots but eventually we called it done because everything was done but this just is a list of all of the lots that you have in the game every single one of them I'll make sure that in the template below you will also have all of these Lots um we also decided up front what kind of this was just something that we decided in conversation is like hey do you think that should be a rental do you think that should be a cafe etc etc but we decided to um like write it down here as well because that way we could keep track of how many cafes we had how many bars we had how many bowling alleys we had etc etc we also had a status occupied or unoccupied this obviously was not relevant for either rentals or Community Lots but this way we could see how many empty houses we had in the safe which is obviously very important because if you want to be able to play in the save you don't want all of the houses to be occupied already because you want to live there too then we had some details because we also had some unfurnished build in our save file which was basically a home that you could move into but then furnish it to your liking if you were to play with a specific family we wrote down Eve the lot had any traits we did not give every lot trades because we felt that that wasn't very realistic because sometimes trades give a lot so many Buffs that it almost feels like it's cheating but some of them have traits and we also have some of them that have a description if we felt like a particular build had a very specific backstory especially the empty builds we wrote it down so that if the other person because obviously we both made builds um if the other person made a build with like a thought behind it or an intent that way we could actually read it up and then you could see which builds had the description we also listed the value this was mainly important to decide how many starter homes we would want um as you can see for the apartments it wasn't very relevant because obviously those are places that you rent but every single build had a value in and this was also to make sure that for instance not all of the builds Were Far Over 2K so you can see here we have one for 144 244k but also one of 19. so that way we could very easily filter out which ones were starter homes and if we had enough or if we wanted more of those then for households we had a list of all the households that we made and we elicit how many Sims there were in the household how many pets there were in the household where they live what lot they lived on what type of family it was because we didn't just want Singletons or families we also wanted to make sure that we had roommates that we had some really big families some really small families and the status is what we used when it wasn't done yet so it is now empty because every time one was done uh we emptied it and then as you can see we have all of these family descriptions that we made that kind of told the backstory of that family or our Sims I hear you think but how am I going to balance out having enough teens having enough kids Etc if you just list the amount of Sims well that's where this list comes into play and unfortunately this was not linked we did everything manually I was not an Excel wizard back then I'm not claiming to be one right now but at least I know a little bit more so I might be able to if I can link some things in the template I will try to do my best this is basically all of our Sims everything single one and the reason we did this because I can hear you think through my screen oh my dear Lord why would you do this this is so much work but this way we could keep track of having a balance between male and female Sims we could keep track if we had enough Sims versus pets we could keep track of all the age groups that we had to make sure that we had enough kids young adults teens Etc we could make sure that there were not too many Sims living in one world for instance if you place all of your big families in Willow Creek Willow Creek is going to feel incredibly crowded but if you place all of your Singletons in new Crest that world is going to feel very empty so this way we were able to kind of balance it out we also noted if they were in a club or not because obviously we wanted to make sure that as many of our Sims are part of a club because that gives them some sort of friend group or backstory we wrote down what their relationship was again we wanted to make sure that we had a balance between either their couples singles or Mary read because that way your safe file feels really balanced and we wrote down if they had a career or not because obviously you don't want to have a save file with 500 astronauts and no shifts this had the whole list of each Sim and it was very nice for instance you could filter on young adults and adults because those are the age group that usually have careers and you could fill them in for those career groups so doing in Excel allowed us to kind of filter on the information that we needed at the time this all boiled down to our main overview which kind of showed our world and how many percentage of it was done that was kind of a estimated percentage so if we had done 50 of the bills and houses we'd just write 50 but it was kind of to just keep track on how far we were then we could also see how many households we had how many Sims we had how many pets we had how many Lots were done and how many Lots we still needed to do that was all based on the statuses in all of the separate lists as you can see you also have a clubs Rose and Club staff that's basically because we decided to make different clubs because you cannot upload clubs to the gallery we both needed to do them manually anyways so we both have a different list of clubs and I went a bit further in how many clubs I made that my best friend she kind of kept it a bit more simple but that's why we have separate tabs but though those don't really show up on our dashboard um also you can see some Dutch in here because both of us are Dutch but basically what it meant was we listed all of the careers that we have and we listed how many of these uh were present because again eventually the whole goal of this was to make a balanced save file that if you play in this save file that you feel like there is enough of everything you feel like you can meet different Sims with a lot of different careers with a lot of different traits with a lot of different backstories that there are enough singles enough married couples enough Elders so that if you play here everything truly feels balanced out fun fact if you see this if you watch the end entire video and you think I think that after watching this I feel less motivated to actually make my own safe out don't fright my save file is completely available to download or I should call it my save file it's basically me and my best friends to save file it is available for download however we did make this in like 2019 so some of their more recent expansion packs don't have any builds to them so if you place it in your game that will actually be replaced with the default EA version which kind of could be a fun thing for you to do to download our save file and then just the last two or three worlds kind of change it to your own liking and make it in a way that it is yours but still you don't have to do all the worlds I made sure to also link our save file in the description box down below like mentioned it is completely free to download if you do end up playing in it I would love to hear what is your favorite build what is your favorite Sim what is your favorite story or neighborhood please let me know in the comments down below if you watched it up until this point in the video thank you so much for listening to all my rambling I hope it was useful to you if it was don't forget to give the video a really big like and also if you're interested in more Sims videos I'm playing my own let's play and I'm actually doing a bunch of videos on mod CC and building tutorials over on my YouTube channel so feel free to check it out and if you like what you see don't forget to hit that subscribe button and notification Bell and with all of that out of the way thank you so much for watching and I will see you on the next one bye everyone [Music] thank you

Channel: RosannaTxt

Views: 55,768

Keywords: the, sims, savefile, save, file, how to, tutorial, tips and tricks, tricks, tips, create your own savfile, save file, the sims, the sims 4

Id: 4qRf7A94gL4

Length: 25min 50sec (1550 seconds)

Published: Thu May 25 2023