We've all had that problem at one time or another: Sims 2 just seems boring. We play the same sorts of families and the same scenarios and it's just no fun! So how do you keep from getting bored? Here are my suggestions - add your own to this thread and I'll incorporate the best ones into the first post.


Play differently!

If you're stuck in a rut of "couple gets together, gets married, has babies, work to the top of their careers" type stuff, then stop it! Start a new family and play it utterly differently than you normally do! It's refreshing to get out of your comfort zone. Try:

• One or more hot romance sims living in a house. Try to break up as many marriages as you can!
  
• A grumpy loner who shuns all romantic relationships and is a workaholic.
  
• Try to run some successful affairs without getting caught!
  
• Stay-at-home sims - if you've been having sims have regular careers, try having a novelist, painter, crafter, etc.
  
• Had small families up until now? Try having a family with tons of babies! Or if you've always done big families, stick with just one or two children - or even none!
  
• If you never let your sims age to elder... try letting your sims grow old and die and raise the next generation!
  
• Stop cheating! If you're making your sims' lives too easy upping their needs and giving them money, knock it off! Instead, look for hacks which can make their lives harder! Higher bills, harder grades, harder homework - anything which can increase the challenge!
  
• Think about things you haven't done or haven't tried before - and then do them! Whatever you do, stop playing the way you have been, because it's boring!

Unused game features!

Most of us have several EPs... and a great number of us have never used a lot of the features! Now's a great time to try out things you never have before, and maybe discover fun new aspects of the game you hadn't thought of!

• Base game: Get abducted by aliens! Send an adult male sim, and come back alien pregnant! More info here.
  
• University: Go to college! Take a sim through college and get them great grades - or spend the whole time partying! Join a secret society (more info here)! Then once they're finished, get them a job in one of the college-only careers.
  
• Nightlife: Go on dates! Use the gypsy matchmaker! Take two completely incompatible sims out and figure out how to get them a dream date! Try going bowling, out dancing at a club, rock out in the Electro-Dance-Sphere!
  
• Nightlife: Become a vampire! See how it is to live as a creature of the night, never seeing the sun, and going, "Bleh!" all the time!
  
• Open for Business: Run a business! You can run a business not only on a community lot, but also from home - both of which offer their own unique challenges. Get your business up to five stars, keep your employees happy, and see just how successful you can become. Already tried a business? Try a different type! Do a makeover salon, an art gallery, a bakery, a toy shop, a florist, an electronics store, a restaurant, an arcade, a real estate office... Make your sim into a business tycoon!
  
• Open for Business: Make some servos! It'll take quite a while of tinkering making smaller robots on the robot crafting station (or you could just cheat with testingcheats and spawn one) but have your very own robot friend who can run amok and electrocute you!
  
• Pets: Have tons of pets! Make an old cat lady! If you've had the regular cats and dogs, try getting a womrat or a bird. If you have Open for Business, try breeding your pets and running a pet shop! Or spend some time in Create a Pet making all sorts of strange and cool new pet breeds.
  
• Pets: Become a werewolf! Howl and stalk the night all furry and scary. More info here.
  
• Seasons: Have a garden, and grow all your own produce. Try the juicer and see what cool effects you can get from different juice recipes. See how big a garden you can run and what kind of profits you can make. Join the garden club and try out the wishing well. More info on all that here.
  
• Seasons: Become a plant sim! Discover a whole new way to play including different needs by going green. Create spores of happiness and please all your friends. More info here.
  
• Bon Voyage: Take a vacation to each of the three vacation destinations. Collect all of the souveniers. Dig for treasure till you find the maps to the secret lots in each place, and meet the secret NPCs - the ninja, the witch doctor, and bigfoot!
  
• Free Time: Find out all about what the different hobbies have to offer. Craft your own pottery or clothing, and sell it if you have OfB. Visit the secret hobby lots. Get the genie!

Try a challenge!

There are tons of cool game challenges which you can try - ranging from long-term challenges like the Legacy Challenge, to shorter, crazier challenges like the Asylum Challenge. These challenges usually have certain rules (which you can choose to follow or not!) and direct you to play a certain way.

For a great list of challenges including their rules and discussion threads about them, see our Challenges Forum!

Live off the land!

This works best if you have Seasons for fishing and gardening, but you can use Echo's harvestable crops if you don't have Seasons. Make a family, make a house for them, don't cheat, and have them live off their garden and pond exclusively - no buying groceries, no working outside of the home (though they can do other activities like crafting as long as they stay at home), and children don't go to school. If they get successful enough, you can have them sell off some of their excess produce to other sims in the neighborhood... you can even run the whole neighborhood off the land - all food must be purchased from your farmers!

There's lots of discussion and more ideas on this play style on this thread.

Learn to create!

For many people, this can be just as fun and addictive (if not more so!) than actually playing the game. With all the help, support, tutorials, and info available to you, why not try it? Some of the more advanced stuff can be quite complicated, but you may surprise yourself at how well you do at simple things like walls and floors and recolouring objects and clothing.

"Don't Panic, Start Here!" is a great starting point for beginning creators and links you to the proper tutorials for complete creating noobs.[/url]

Play something else!

Shocking, I know! But absence does make the heart grow fonder, and if you're just bored as hell with TS2, go play something else! There are tons of fun games out there - go play an RPG, a first-person shooter, a city-builder, an arcade game - whatever you like, just something different. Put TS2 aside for a day, a week, a month, and then come back later once you're refreshed.

Ah, awesome suggestions! I'm especially intrigued with the idea of Living Off The Land!

Usually, I just create really different Sims..
I feel like creating a multiple-twin, huge family again..
Hmm...

And at the moment I have a freshly created Shy Sim!
Her last name is actually Shy... Lol. :D

When I'm in a total rut, I watch the opening movie for things I've never done, and then go do them. That usually leads me down an entire day of Simming with thing's I've never seen them do before.

when the game nauseates me, i just stop playing or i'll play ts1 again.

Wow great tips!

Yeah im a control freak my self, And my sim family always ends up beeing the picture perfect family, Since i max out their skills as soon as i can, thus landing them any job they want. They i get some kids and i raise them the best i can which always gets me a "grow up well" and a full aspiration meter. Which makes it SOOO boring


its just that im a fraid to what will happen to my simmies if i start drama ;_;!!!
But thanks for the sims! now ive got some idea to make MY siming experice more fun, Instead of keeping my simies safe. haha

You have some great advice. This should be stickied!

Personally, I have three entire neighborhoods going (I long ago erased Strangetown, etc.). Each neighborhood has a different theme thing going on. One hood is straight out picture perfect, no cheating, playing as intended, which I've had going for a long time.
The second hood is my Springerville, where everyone is bi, no one gets married, everyone cheats on their lovers, everyone has multiple babies by multiple partners (naturally, inteen and insem are happily used here). Most of the sims are romance or pleasure sims, and cheating is the expected thing.
My 3rd hood is my legacy challenge hood, except I have my own set of rules, in that every day that passes represents one year, so the founder started out in 1800. The rules for what items I can use on the lot, who can have what kinds of jobs and when, etc. are rigorously adhered to depending on the year. For example, women couldn't have real jobs for a long time, and then were limited in how far they could promote, which I'm keeping to. Gay sims have to keep it secret--if they are found out, they lose their chance to be heirs (until 1975, according to my rules). Makes it tough. It's 1942 right now, and my heir (males only, of course, until 1960) had to quit his job as a detective to join the military, which he'll have to stay in for the next few 'years.' Anyway, this challenge is especially fun because families don't get filthy rich within a generation or two--takes longer, especially for the early generations who only farmed--, it makes heavy use of custom content to redecorate every few years to keep up with the styles of the time period, same with clothing.

Whatever, the point being is that play according to different rules--or no rules at all--in different neighborhoods.

hey guys, I just got this game this afternoon and i can't post threads (i dont know why)

Anyways, I made a sim adult, and after about 2 hours of playing he grew old! then after another 2 hours he died! can anyone explain this to me? i really am dissapointed if sims cant live for more than 5 hours. in sims 1, they lived forever until some kind of accident, but my sim was the picture of health! Please help thanks

By the way, I have sims2 double deluxe

Are you talking about sim hours or real time? Sims do grow old and die in TS2, but you can keep playing longer by having children and playing new generations. Or use the cheat "aging off."

How do I use that?

http://www.sims2wiki.info/wiki.php?...ame_Help:Cheats

Read the How to Use section first, then scroll down to Gameplay Cheats to find that specific one.

Thanks for the help. It stinks that I cant just pause death by age : /

Well I keep having this problem where I get easily bored like most of your I suppose. I keept trying new things (including things on here) But the most fun one so far is having my own home business. Infact I spent the whole day today just making money through my business. I love it, and yes I'm a geek. I think the best idea to stay interested is just try different aspirations. Like I ALWAYS use Family aspiration with a few exeptions but recently I've been trying pleasure and romance and even fortune, which before now I hated.

One really good way of keeping the game interesting, is playing it with a dice. If you make a cas sim, let a dice decide evrything - apsiration, personality, turn ons. If it's a transition to a teen, then let the dice determine the aspiration, and keep the turnons the game gives you. It forces you to play different, when the sim who would make a great family sim, ends up being a romance sim.

I completely agree with everything said here, epsecially the play different scenarios, getting stuck in going to work and getting promotions rut does get boring in the long run.

About the stop cheating for more money and start cheating for less is probably the best advice ever - I would recommend linking it to the "Let the cruelty begin" thread, that was a nice one with lots of advice and links.

If you're stuck in a rut of "couple gets together, gets married, has babies, work to the top of their careers"

That is SO me!

I think some of these ideas are superb and I can't wait to try them out.

Being a control freak (like me) can ruin a lot of the surprises and contribute to boredom. I'm trying to find ways to back off and let my sims be stupid - er, I mean fun and spontaneous. I'm going to set up one house in a pseudo Asylum Challenge so I can still be obsessive about one sim but have to tolerate the behavior of the others. I'm trying in general not to give commands unless it's something the sim will never do independently (like pay bills) or I'm satisfying a want.

Even if you don't want to abandon control-freakishness (or whatever your style is) cold turkey, try setting up just one house where you completely violate your normal play. You might hate it, but you might find it refreshes your interest.

Agh that just pleased my mind. I feel like rushing to my sims now. But I'm scared I might cheat :o

Hah, just when I was going to go search for threads like this, lo and behold, here it is.
My families are too perfect, and then I get too lazy to actually DO something different. But these are really interesting ideas!

Thanks HP!

lmao, I've done all those things you mentioned with exception to suggestions involving EPs I don't have, but all the EPs you have mentioned, I've done it. I've done it all.

I used to be one of those players that had aging off and avoided sims becoming elders but then I started reading legacies and they seemed like a lot of fun and something I'd never done before so I gave it a shot. I'm in my third generation now with the 3G kids in college. This is what I've found during play.

Elders are boring and I don't like aging them up in platinum because their boringness lasts and lasts and lasts. But now I'm looking into alternatives to letting them age up in moderate happiness.

Sim death is amusing as hell. So are ghosts.



I've had sims abducted by aliens in strangetown quite a few times, but only through cheating. Even with better odds hacks and hacked telescopes I've never seen the full cinematic and trying to do it the garden variety way is hard! I don't want to have to stoop to going the curious house just to see it but I think I'll have to. The odds of abduction are in the ranges of legendary and myth rather than a genuine part of the game. Like cow tipping and people dragging back rats from Mexico whom they thought were dogs.

I ran three businesses, all getting them up to ten rank and then sold them and started up a new one. I did this through the founder sim's life. Running a business on a community lot gives a sim a very, very, very long life! If you're into short lifespans or want to get on with generations, running a community business is not for you.

Running a home business isn't much better. They'll age of course on the lot, but once you start a home business, better make sure you keep your doors locked at all times because random townies will wander in uninvited, use your bathroom, eat your food, play with your objects, and steal your babies! (True story if you don't have the patch that prevents guests from walking off with chilluns.)

I've had vampires. Both cheated and honestly. I found it to be fun and pointless. They got fat easily, there was nothing much to do with them and even though they did a lot of cool things, it just didn't feel like vampirism. No blood-drinking, no night stalking, no REALLY awesome powers, like strength, mind-reading, shape-shifting... it's just someone who doesn't age, who doesn't need to eat or sleep or have fun or shit, and stays up all night watching tv. Totally exciting.

I dug for treasure and often found maps and used them, heading to all the vacation places and gathering the vacation souvenirs. This is what I discovered: it's the most regretful thing you'll ever do to your game. The constant sea chanties, tai chi, hula and gestures will take over like some horrible cult where you'll be canceling actions left and right and it just... doesn't... end. Once you've sent a family on vacation and idiotically let them learn that crap, you'll never want to send another family out there again. You're not sure you'll let the ones who have learned it continue to live. The disease must be contained at all costs or the pandemic will spread rapidly and soon your entire neighborhood will be infected with tai, sea chanties, and gestures the like of which is unimaginable!

I send my teens to college but it's not something I actually look forward to. Even when I let the YAs slack off they STILL make the dean's list. It used to be that I let them work hard and earn their grades but this time, I had very rich kids going to college who didn't need to earn the high grades and land a high-paying job. So I let them slack off, using influence to have other people write their term papers. They still made the dean's list. It annoys me how easy University is and I figured out why that is. Sims have only ONE class to go to. One two-hour class that's their major? WTH? When I was going to college, I had to take several courses, most of which I didn't even need and had to write term papers for EACH of those courses, not just one. If college bound sims had to go to several two-hour classes of a day and write three or more term papers for each of those classes, then I'd be willing to forgive the fact that they go to college for free. Uni is easy, it's LONG, and it's boring. I'm so happy when they graduate and get home ready to start the next gen and they do and then the next gen become teens and I'm all like, "I have to do all that AGAIN!?"


There is something else I haven't done and never had an interest in, and I'm not sure I'll play it through. I might play out the storylines set up in the premade hoods. Like the Beaker, Curious, Grunt, Spector houses and whomever else might be there. Or the Pleasantview stories, or Veronville, Riverblossom, you get the point.

Another suggestion for keeping the game interesting? Do the exact opposite of the aspirations Have a family sim? Let them become elder without having kids. Have a fortune sim? Let him borrow money from the bank using Monique's hacked computer to buy all the stuff they want and have them in dept for the rest of their lives till they can't pay the bills anymore and then watch their stuff get repo-ed. Have a popularity sim? Instead of 20 mutual best friends, make him or her a mean sim and create 20 mutual enemies. Romance sim? Make the sim ugly and turn them into creepy stalker types! Unleash them unto sims they like and have them do romantic interactions that are too soon for the relationship points so they'd be rejected.

Knowledge sim? Max out all skills and then intentionally make bad choices in the chance cards to cost them their skills till they lose all the skills they've learned.

Ever since I read this about a month ago I knew I had to do it immediately. This has really renewed my love for the game. It's made me a lot more familiar with manipulating custom content and I've learned a good bit about history too! My family is British and the year is now 1900 (about four generations in) so we will be switching from Victorian to Edwardian soon. The posher Sims are ahead of the curve, the more traditional Sims change things more slowly (for example, they adopt technology a while after it's available). I've got technology timelines and looked up both the invent dates and the "common use" dates for everything in the game. Can't wait until I can use a good fridge! I also love paying attention to the arts and fads of the times. Our more adventurous and creative types are really into Art Nouveau right now.

I'm keeping to all the rules like you, the women don't work except lower classes who work as servants and don't marry (although I got the treadle sewing machine from mts2 so middle class ladies can sew clothes for money and unconventional ones can have a hat shop like Elizabeth in "Upstairs, Downstairs"). The hardest thing has been giving up the racial mixture I'm used to. However, I've been dealing a lot more with class issues, who can know whom, who can marry whom, who can be friends that sort of thing. I have a London, I have a rural area, and I have a village so I can have variety.

Well, I just wanted to thank you for this fabulous idea. I don't even care about my other neighborhoods anymore I love playing this one so much.

I leaxrn the game from my brother last year.He taught me the mechanics and procedures on how to play the game.I find it very interesting and exciting to play.

You could always make a big family and let the kids starve and get taken away by the social worker. And the bills could pile up and everyone could get sick. It might be fun to have some families live on the "wrong side of the tracks" and it might develop into a really interesting story line.

I've always found, that when stuck in my game, being boring, I always go vanilla. Perhaps it's just me, but I've found that with my CC, I focus more on the appearance of the sims than on storylines.

This is really helpful!!!