TL;DR:
The Sims 4 October 27 Base Game update focuses on Food, Dining, and Drinks, delivering over 150 bug fixes, tuning adjustments, and brand-new features to improve your in-game culinary experience.
Resolved endless loading during lot placement, fixed white screens loading rental saves, restored ability to order food/drinks while bartenders multitask, and freezing fixes for Sims.
We are incredibly excited to share that the ~10 crash fixes from our September update resulted in a notable decrease in crash rates across all platforms!
New! Options to toggle muscle and weight changes, expanded 'Family Recipes' with 375+ pre-existing dishes, and improved fridge and television interactions, and more.
Join us for a Dev Q&A later today in The Sims Discord for more information on these as well as future quality-of-life improvements.
Hi Simmers!
Welcome to the Laundry List, where we share the fixes coming in our next game update on October 27.
This month’s update is going to be all about Food, Dining, and Drinks! We’ve got more than 150 bug fixes on the way, a significant portion of this update focuses directly on improving your culinary and dining experiences - including several key fixes for Dine Out!
Join us later today, October 20 for a special Dev Q&A in The Sims Discord, where members of the development team will talk through these updates, and answer questions live.
The Sims Team
Top Community Fixes
\[EA Forums] We've addressed an endless loading issue when placing lots that occurred due to excessive use of the Move Objects cheat. We updated the Navmesh (the thing that tells Sims where they can route or not) to be more robust to account for this. (Base Game)
\[EA Forums] We’ve resolved an issue that caused an infinite white screen when attempting to load into certain affected save files. While some lot details in these saves may need a little rebuilding, you will now be able to safely jump back into your worlds and reunite with your households. (Base Game)
\[EA Forums] Sims are now able to properly Order Food or Drinks from Bartenders while they are doing something else like socializing, Practicing Tricks, or other Bartender behavior. (Base Game)
\[EA Forums] Getting bitten by a werewolf now properly transforms Fairy Sims into full-time werewolves without the black visual corruption.
\[EA Forums] We addressed an instance of Sims remaining frozen that could occur after a Sim took a nap or performed other interactions. (Base Game)
\[EA Forums] We fixed a case of visual corruption which could occur on an Active Sim during their Werewolf transformation after being bitten by another Werewolf. (Werewolves)
\[EA Forums] We addressed an issue where a new Infant Sim representing a Reborn Sim was not added to the selected existing Household or appearing in Create a Sim for customization. This Reborn Sim will now be able to successfully complete the Rebirth process. (Life & Death)
\[EA Forums] Fixed an issue that could cause Sims to get stuck and freeze while planning routing. (Base Game)
\[EA Forums] Infant Sims will now fall asleep properly without needing their Energy motive to be very low.
Food, Dining, & Drinks
Based on player feedback, this update focuses on improving the food, dining, and drink experience across bug fixes, tuning, and new features. So many improvements came from your helpful suggestions and bug reports, so thank you for all of the direction you gave us along the way!
A New Feature & Quality of Life Improvements
Based on feedback from our Discord Dev Q&As, we’ve added New Game Options to Toggle On/Off Muscle and Weight changes for Sims holistically across a save + new self-interactions on Sims to Toggle On/Off these changes for Sims individually. These settings are completely independent of each other, meaning you can choose to keep weight changes active while turning muscle changes off, though please note that these options do not extend to pets like Cats & Dogs. We hope these new features give you even more freedom to customize your game and play your way.
Sims should now autonomously prefer eating Leftovers (in the Fridge or on the counter) when they are hungry, rather than creating a new meal from scratch.
Based on Discord Dev Q&A feedback, we moved the "Open" interaction to the front of the Pie Menu for Fridges. That should save a lot of time - great suggestion!
We've done a comprehensive tuning pass updating pricing and calories for all food and drink items across Base Game and all packs. We wanted pricing and calories to be more consistent and sensical.
We’ve been hard at work expanding the 'Family Recipes' feature from Business & Hobbies! We’re thrilled to announce that we’ve added over 375 pre-existing dishes (many of them cultural dishes) to the valid recipe pool across Base Game and all packs. A small handful of items didn’t make the cut (either due to technical issues or because they didn’t quite fit the criteria of a 'family dish' - like graham crackers), but you can look forward to seeing almost all of your favorite recipes included! (Business & Hobbies)
We've added a "Quickly Decorate" interaction on items made using the Baking Skill that uses a swipe animation when these baked goods are not located on the center of a counter top. Previously, Sims would route fail, and it wasn't entirely clear why. (Get to Work)
Bug Fixes
Sims are now more likely to stay seated when they are eating at a table. We fixed some multi-tasking issues around eating and conversations that were causing them to stand when they'd try to socialize while eating. There are still reasons why they might get up, but this experience should now be improved.
Sims will no longer put food in inappropriate places in general (this includes display cases). We made it so that dining tables and counter tops were the primary locations Sims wanted to put dishes.
Sims can now drag food that was prepared by another Sim into the fridge.
Sims should no longer autonomously use grills when it is snowy, rainy, icy, or storming. (Seasons)
Sims will no longer obsessively use the Pressure Cooker, which was resulting in them ignoring other food. (For Rent)
+ More
What about Dine Out?
We addressed an issue where Sims would sometimes fail to show up for a Waiter shift at a Restaurant or where certain Customer Sims would not interact with Restaurant Employees. This was caused by some affected Employee Sims being special Sims with unique roles in other packs.
Dining customers should now want to socialize less before they are seated. This resulted in them talking extensively instead of being seated. Silly chatterboxes.
We investigated Sims breaking flows and not properly dining, and we found this was caused by a VARIETY of different interactions across different packs. We knocked as many of these out as we could, but there are probably some we still missed. We did testing passes and fixed what we found, but please keep reporting and we’ll keep fixing. Overall though, this is feeling a lot better. The patch notes will include a breakdown (some are kind of funny sounding).
Customers should no longer leave food uneaten or drinks undrunk at a Restaurant before they checkout.
+ More
BONUS Quality of Life Improvements
These additional improvements weren’t really bug fixes, nor did they fit under the theme for this release, but they’re still notable enough to get a mention!
Televisions are now able to be locked similarly to computers to ensure only certain Sims will use certain Televisions. As an example: You’ve built a play room for your Child Sim, but the adults keep using it… now, you can set it so only that specific Child uses it.
As a Quality of Life update, we've moved all interactions that are considered "self-interactions" into a new "Sim Options..." category that can be accessed by clicking on the Sim that is actively selected. Some examples of these interactions include: Disable Attraction (Lovestruck), Set Rock Paper Scissors Preferences (Adventure Awaits), Utensil Preference (Snowy Escape), and Sim Physique (Base Game).
We've improved our Save Backup experience to calculate slightly differently. Previously, it wasn't always tracking as well as we'd have liked if a player didn't play for an extended period of time between sessions. Now, it will.
October Crash Fixes & September Patch Crash Fix Update
As we continue to focus on stability, our October update includes about 10 new crash fixes. These issues are tricky to track down without exact in-game steps to reproduce, so we rely heavily on submitted crash data to piece together what went wrong. We are incredibly excited to share that the ~10 crash fixes from our September update resulted in a notable decrease in crash rates across all platforms! This targeted approach is proving effective, and we will keep hammering away at these issues.
While working through this month's fixes, our data showed that many top crash reports continue to be closely linked to outdated or conflicting mod files. Where possible, we’ve implemented "guardrails" in our code to help prevent these crashes, but some conflicts remain outside our direct control to resolve. Because custom content is such a vibrant part of The Sims 4 experience, we want to empower you with the best information to keep your game running smoothly. If you play with mods, we highly recommend checking out our Mods & Game Updates Guide on the EA Forums for best practices on safely updating your files and getting back to playing.
Upcoming Quality-of-Life Updates
As the year winds down and we prepare for our teams to enjoy the holidays, you’ll see our December update will be targeting major Top Community Issues, the higher priority Automated Crash reports, and similar bugs of importance. At the moment, there are ~25 potential bugs we’ll go after, but we might only fix around 10 of these depending on how successful our investigations go. After that, we’ll begin working on a larger patch again that will be released early next year.
Some of these issues being investigated for December include:
\[EA Forums] Performance issues after extended play. We’ve had a top engineer investigating this for a bit, and the issue has proven particularly tricky. We’ll keep plugging away at it.
\[EA Forums]\[EA Forums] Investigations into reports on increased load times across various platforms. We have a few bugs we’re tracking on this and have already begun investigating. We are reproducing this a few different ways across a few different platforms, so fixes will likely be split into a few different approaches.
\[EA Forums] Gamepad Controllers failing to function after a few minutes of gameplay.
\[EA Forums] Error Code 801 is observed when a Sim travels to another lot.
\[EA Forums] A bug on inappropriate sibling relationships. We’ve addressed similar issues previously, but there are some aspects of this still being investigated. We’re fairly certain that this is occurring because of mods but want to find a way to prevent it.
And a handful of Automated Crash reports. One is a potentially quite impactful fix for PS4 users, which we already have a fix being tested against.
For all the latest news, follow Sims Direct on X and join our Discord community - we’ll share updates as they’re available.
Thank you for your patience and for all the helpful reports. Please keep posting any issues you encounter on The Sims 4 EA Forums. We’ll keep checking in, and together we’ll make this game the best it can be.
