EA's The Sims 4 has amassed a huge community of dedicated fans who just want to see the game be a better version of itself. It's been seven years since the fourth installment of the Sims games first came out, and Simmers haven't been idle while waiting for the next paid DLC.
From custom content like fan-made stuff packs to full-fledged mods that allow the player to customize their entire game, the highly talented Sims modders have something for everyone. Some of these mods in particular were created with the intent of improving gameplay and resolving some of the issues in The Sims 4, making them essential for all players of the franchise.
10 Sims Can Eat More Snacks With Custom Food Interactions
After playing The Sims 4 for a while, Simmers might find the list of food items in the game to be quite stale— no pun intended. This is where the Custom Food Interactions mod comes in, with its wide variety of dishes and snacks, and many new interactions that greatly improve the Sims' quality of life.
With this mod, Sims can enjoy falafel, mango mousse, mochi, and more than thirty other food items by selecting their fridges, stoves, and microwaves. Custom Food Interactions also lets adult and teen Sims feed these new food options to toddlers and children, allowing for more family gameplay.
9 Height Sliders Help With Realism
It's somewhat bizarre that all Sims in The Sims 4 stand at the same height from the moment they turn into teenagers until their last days as elders. This has been an issue that many Simmers have complained about since the game's inception, as it's quite impossible to discern between life stages at first glance.
As per usual, modders have come to the rescue in the form of Height Sliders, a mod that allows players to change a Sim's height in Create-A-Sim. It's not a perfect solution as there are still a few in-game animation issues after the alteration, but it does provide an effective option!
8 Better Education Means Better Sims
Bored, troublemaking toddlers? Children who don't seem to get anything out of going to school? The Education System Bundle will take care of this dilemma and turn them into better Sims all around. This mod does wonders for the youngest members of the family, allowing toddlers to go to pre-school and completely overhauling the school system to let children build their skills during classes.
It also provides new interactions like sleeping in class, playing on the phone, and slacking off for grade and high schoolers, and includes an online school option, making this mod a must-have for any family-oriented Simmer.
7 Build & Buy Mode Made Easier
Navigating Build & Buy Mode can be a pain when trying to find a particular item and having to sift through thousands of options, but with the Better BuildBuy mod, this process has been greatly simplified. It adds better filters and organizes the sneaky debug objects that can only be accessed by cheating so that they're easier to find.
Furthermore, the mod also allows the player to expand the item catalog to up to five rows to make browsing a much smoother ordeal. All in all, this is an excellent mod for hardcore and casual builders alike.
6 Making Cheating Much More User-Friendly
From the popular money cheats to small ones like changing the time or weather to suit the player's needs, cheating is an essential part of the Sims experience. While most cheats are easy to access by typing codes into the Cheat Console (to open it one must press Ctrl + Shift + C), the UI Cheat Extension mod makes things a lot more user-friendly.
With this mod, taking care of a Sim's needs is as easy as dragging on their Needs Bar and clicking away unwanted Moodlets. Achieving goals and getting promotions is also quickly doable by right-clicking and setting the appropriate values to make the Sim's stats go up.
5 Browsing Create-A-Sim Quicker With More Columns
Everyone loves taking their time creating the perfect Sim, and while the Create-A-Sim platform has greatly improved from the past Sims games, it can still use a little help from the More Columns mod.
It does as its name advertises, increasing the columns in CAS up to five to allow players to see more items in one go. Now it's a lot easier to search for that one pair of pants that got buried under the clothing items from the new pack!
4 Adding Drama With Meaningful Stories
Simmers have complained about the shallowness of the Emotions system on The Sims 4 for years now, so modders took it upon themselves to solve the problem as best as they could with an array of useful mods.
One of them, aptly named Meaningful Stories, promises to make Sims feel more human by making the events in their life more challenging and significant. Gone will be the Sims that are perfectly happy one moment only to be completely depressed the next, with this mod, they'll all finally have emotions that make sense and don't just disappear randomly.
3 Making Sims More Unique With Custom Traits
It's no secret that The Sims 4 got a lamentable downgrade from The Sims 3 when it comes to personality traits. Most of the traits in the fourth game are either too broad to make unique Sims or too specific to make them somewhat playable.
The wonderful Sims community made it their mission to diversify the traits, by either tweaking the existing ones, remaking traits from previous games, or creating totally new ones. There are several places to find them, but the Traits category in the popular site ModTheSims is a good start.
2 Whether Wonderful Or Wicked, Everyone Has Whims
As a favorite of Sim Youtubers everywhere, Wicked Whims is perhaps the most popular mod ever and there are several reasons why. People who feel that the game is too PG-13 for their liking have found that Wicked Whims serves their kind of mature gameplay quite well, with the 18+ mod including various types of "adult" content that would never appear in the game otherwise.
Thankfully, the same developer also worked on a SFW version of the mod called Wonderful Whims, which includes most of the important features from the original like enhanced relationship and woohoo interactions.
1 Gaining Ultimate Control With MC Command Center
A classic for every Simmer out there, MC Command Center is as essential as a mod can get. It allows the player to rule supreme over ninety-nine percent of the game, from controlling NPCs to being able to check any Sim's info with a single click. Simmers can also control the population growth in any of the worlds, send aliens to abduct certain Sims, and even control the number of babies a Sim is pregnant with and their genders.
MC Command Center also brings back the beloved, if slightly flawed, story progression feature from The Sims 3, which allowed un-played households to essentially 'live their life' without getting direct input from the player. It's a feature that many wanted back in the game, and this mod makes it, and much more, possible.