Hi, I'm trying to get started on making sims 2 animations, so I downloaded milkshape along with the unimesh plugin and the dr pixel base.

The problem that I'm having is that the mesh isn't moving along with the joint when I rotate the joint.
This doesn't seem to be the case in the guides that I have seen. For example this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XXBwbYATa9Y

What am I missing here?

Assuming you've watched or read a tutorial on making animations (you probably should, there are a lot of things you need to know), these things below are the most important:

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Always activate the ANIM mode before doing anything with the joints.

Don't touch the auskel joint, it's supposed to stay in place (don't rotate, don't move).

If you want to rotate the whole sim, use the "root_rot" joint. If you want to move the sim, use the "root_trans" joint. Select these two (one at a time) from the list under Joints. Make sure to not move the "root_rot" joint or rotate the "root_trans" joint, or you'll mess up the animation.

Don't move other joints than the "root_trans" joint. The other joints can only be rotated.

If you do the wrong things with these three joints (auskel and root x2), you usually have to start over, because fixing joints in Milkshape isn't the easiest thing.

Make sure to select everything you want to set a key on (usually the whole skeleton, "select all" works better than marking the joints manually) and "set keyframe" before turning off the ANIM mode again.

That ANIM button is all the way down the edge, I would have never found it on my own

That's a good list of tips that you provided. Is there any specific tutorial that you would recommend? The echo tutorial stickied in this forum works with an object.

The ECHO tutorial is not for posing sims, but for making animated objects.

There's one here, which looks pretty good:
https://hermit-fox.livejournal.com/524.html

A couple Youtube variants:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7dfk6rN4IUY
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qkm4ImBIqAs (how to add more poses, although the one by Hermit-fox shows how, too)