How To Give Your Legacy Family Spares Purpose

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[00:00:00] Gloria from Yellow Llama Co.: Welcome to Sentimental Simmer, a podcast made for emotionally attached simmers and storytellers with wild imaginations. I’m your host, Gloria, and I run Yellow Llama Co, a planner shop made to help simmers play with purpose. Every week, I talk all about things, sim life planning, storytelling, and memory keeping. I’ll also brainstorm new ways to obsess over our pixel people, whether they be in the Sims or another live sim game. And now let’s get into it. Today, we’re answering the question of what to do with those spares in your legacy families. Just after you’ve managed to get a hold on your big family household, who confronted with the next burning question every swimmer is all too familiar with, what to do with all those spares? Depending on how big you let your family legacy grow, You might have up to 6 sim siblings to displace, and that’s

Gloria [00:00:55]:

just if you’re playing without mods or cheats and not counting any random offspring. The struggle is real After one of my favorite family legacies from Appaloosa Plains moved on to Meadow Glen, a beautiful Sims 3, like, medium sized custom world by My Sims Realty. It took them just 1 generation to nearly fill up the entire town. Mind you, the family did start off with, like, about 5 kids. Each one of them settled down in town and had kids of their own as soon as they left the coop. I loved all of them and wanted to keep track of all of them as well and the new families. So it was pretty hard when I could when I realized I couldn’t Keep up with it. It just became too overwhelming. So what can you do? Let’s explore. Okay. The easiest solution or maybe not so easy

Gloria [00:01:38]:

depending on how attached you are, is to kill them off. You can’t miss out on a sim life that is no more. If they don’t exist, you can have FOMO. Right? You can’t film for someone who is not there. You may also prefer killing them off than forgetting about them. Right? That might actually be, Like, easier for you to get through to let go of them now than to know that they’re still existing in your save file and you’re, like, missing out on their lives. Now to make this feel more organic, you can create a storyline around their departure. For example, you can have the survival of the Finnish sibling scenario like we had Discussed a few episodes back. We could have them abducted by aliens, but they just never returned. You could turn the unaliving of those poor, poor spares into a tradition, a

Gloria [00:02:24]:

family tradition where you could have a ritualistic locking away of spares in a room with no food. I don’t know how you would turn it into a storyline. Okay? I don’t know, but make it work if you want. If that’s, like, if that’s your jam, if you like to Do things like that to your poor sims? You could also have that one last swim. Instead of last sim swimming, it could be one last Swim in winter before the sim says their goodbyes could somehow make this make sense in your family legacy vision. Or if you wanna keep that spare or spares, you could give them a purpose or some sort of specific role within the main family unit so that they can stay without, you know, them being much of a hassle. So they don’t actually have a particular story of their own. Their only

Gloria [00:03:09]:

purpose moving forward is really to Serve the main family, the main ear. So they could be the maid. You can give them, like, cheat up their neat skill. You can make them the caregiver for any new kids. You can make them the dedicated memory keeper for the family. You can, like, max out their photo skills and painting skills. You can, like, already raise them with this in mind, knowing that this will be their purpose in life and then they can, like, paint all the sims and make photos and just make sure that, you know, all those important Artifacts, those records of the family are collected. You can also make sure they’re not allowed to have kids. They can’t be Grow in the family more than necessary. You can also make up, like, maybe a fun conflict if they, like, choose to disobey and have their

Gloria [00:03:51]:

own kids. But, otherwise, you can, like, let them have fur babies or travel the world, but that’s about, like, the extension of their of what they can have in life. You can also move them out. Like I said, that was kind of still an issue for me with the other family. But if you incorporate their lives In the lives of the heirs, then it might not be that strong, that feeling of FOMO, because you can visit them often. You can make them still be an important part of of the family as a whole. Like, you could have the aunt be the godmother of the kids that if the heir ever, you know, decided to peace out, there’d There’ll be someone very important in their lives that could take care of them. You can also collect these fairs somewhere else in the world, like, in an

Gloria [00:04:31]:

institution made especially for rejects where you can leave them and forget them because you know they won’t find any further purpose in life because they are part of this new So so you can have, like, a, like, a kind of retirement home, but for spares. You can have, like, a boarding school of sorts. It could be a convent for you can make them turn into monks and nuns. You can make it like a prison. Like, you can do some storytelling around it to make it make more sense in your in the context of your your save file or your legacy gameplay, but That’s where you can, like, kinda push them all off to the side, but you won’t have FOMO because they’re not doing anything with their lives anyways because they’re in prison. Right? And like we discussed in last episode, if you wanna move

Gloria [00:05:10]:

them out, but you wanna keep from them being scattered and, you know, it being too overwhelming to keep track of them, you could have the entire Family and relatives live on the same lot, which is possible with the for rent, expansion pack and the residential rental lot. You could also just call it a day entirely And say, you know what? We’re closing the spare story now. This is where their story stops, is where the air story begins, is where the air the spares stops. And you can think of the storylines for why this sim is now leaving your sim into your save entirely so they could pursue their own journey in a new save file. For example, in my farming family in Appaloosa Plains, the ones that ended up moving to Meadow Glen Glen, I had gotten Pretty far with that family, but I also

Gloria [00:05:54]:

wanted to play, at that time, the new pack that came out that was the Showtime pack. And so I had 1 of the grown children move out of that save file entirely. So I I like, she was no army resistant. She only, like, existed within the family tree, and I moved her into her own save file to live out a life of stardom. And that just fit organically in my gameplay because it was a very, you know, wholesome farmer family life, And she didn’t wanna be part of that lifestyle anymore. She wanted bigger things. She wanted to go to the big city. And so it felt natural for me to just start a new save with her fresh, And boy, did she get on to some scandalous things? Yeah. That was fun in itself, and I still continued to play the farmer family in their

Gloria [00:06:36]:

own safe file. So they continue to live on and that legacy still had its, merit, but that was a way that I could, like, remove some spares from the equation so that I mean, it was still super overwhelming because we still have, like, 4 other kids that were growing up and and creating their own lives. But yeah. So that was a way how I was able to, remove a sim from the family, but still keep their story going, if you know what I mean. You can also have a mysterious disappearance. So as we know famously, Bella, goth, kind of like I don’t. The timeline is, like, so complicated, but at some point, she disappeared. And you could do the same with your spares. Like, they just go poof, and they’re still part of the family tree. It’s probably especially important here to make sure you

Gloria [00:07:18]:

keep track of the family tree with an external software. So if anything goes wrong in the whatever way you decide to make them go poof, they still exist somewhere else so you know that they did exist at some point. But you since they don’t exist in your game anymore, in your sim file, you don’t have anything to take care of or worry about. But they’re also not dead, so you didn’t have to do anything, like, Drastic. And I know it can be hard to let go of a spare whether or not you’re unliving them or you’re just removing them entirely from the safe file. And I think to help with that whole feeling of letting go, especially if you got attached to them during childhood, it’s just to make sure every step of the way you’re always collecting their stories and their memories when you’re

Gloria [00:07:56]:

playing them. And so you you always have that. Right? And the point of playing a legacy family is to progress With further generations, and there will always be a main character. If you play it, you know, naturally, it it will get overwhelming if you have, like, too many too many plates spinning. I think the priority is growing the family and the legacy rather than having a story for every spare. So you eventually just have to let go. You can also let the spare be true their name and actually use them as a spare. So for example, if your storyline dictates that you kill off the main character, The spare could swoop in and take care of the kids or, you know, the farm or so maybe it could be fun. Maybe. The heir had a jealous Twin and the jealous twin terminated the air. And

Gloria [00:08:43]:

so the twin is air. That’s one way you could go with it. You know, as we’ve, you know, discussed Previously as well, you can obviously play family units in rotation. There’s still an air family unit. So the family unit with the air, that is still like top dog and top priority, but the spare families are played as well. So rotational gameplay is just a great way in general to also keep things fresh, and you’re always playing different sims in different, like, Storylines. And in this case, you know, there actually may be storylines that complement each other quite well because like we discussed earlier as well, you have a common goal in a legacy Family, you can have, like, a common path and direction that they wanna go, in a a vision, and they can support each other in that vision. Each having their own, like,

Gloria [00:09:25]:

Storyline and tangents, but all in all, they’re all, like it’s all about turning sims into vampires ultimately or Saving the earth. You know? And so you can with rotational gameplay, you can play those different storylines with a slight, you know, twist with each different spare household. And without wanting to make things too overwhelming, you could also decide on having just more than 1 heir. Who said that you had to play always with 1 heir? Sure. It feels like the logical decision in every story. There’s usually a main character and in this legacy family story or there’s a main character as the heir or the founder, but nobody’s stopping you from playing with 2 or more airs. Maybe to make it more manageable, you could have, like, an air Hierarchy where there’s a class 1 air, class 2 air or, you know, top dog air and

Gloria [00:10:13]:

second top dog air or something like that where They have different priorities over each other. Yeah. It’s it’s a it’s a difficult thing because like we said in the last episode, it’s not easy to manage a big family, and that Big family could be in a sense of a household or just multiple family units within an overarching legacy. Right? So we wanna keep things lean where we Can, but sometimes if you just want to play multiple sim children, then do that. You know? I think you’ll find, you You know a way to make it work. It doesn’t have to be like that for every generation, but 1 generation might decide they’re all important. And then they, you know, are killed off in some other way in the storyline. So I hope these ideas, these these tips help it feel less overwhelming and help You may

Gloria [00:10:57]:

become to the decision on how to handle all those spares in your legacy family gameplay and and so that you can, you know, Focus on growing that family rather than, oh, no. What I’m gonna do with all these bears? You can already like it from the get go, maybe have some ideas and thoughts, and maybe it’s also inspired some new ideas that you have. And please do share. Like, if you have any ideas, please, you’re welcome to join the club on her feet. I’d love to hear what you think, how you’re playing your game, what you do with your spares, what have you done with them in the past, what are your plans for them in the future. I think there are so many, many more ways to explore this topic. So, yeah, feel free to share in the community. You can join at yellowallamaco.com/community.

Gloria [00:11:40]:

In the next episode, we’re going to be talking about how to actually reach more than 1 generation, how to really grow a strong and thriving long legacy. So stay tuned for that. Until then, Happy Simming!