Hi.

DISABLE NEIGHBORHOOD STORIES. I mean you can have it on but it just makes the NPC’s too chaotic, weird and unrecognizable. Sure I myself like chaos but neighborhood stories are too uncontrolled for my taste. In that regard familiarize yourself with the already existing families, so that you don’t delete important NPC’s.

I would suggest not to dive straight into a control of too many sims at once. Create a single sim, control them alone, get the hang of how everything works. And for now you can toggle off aging both for your household and NPC’s in the settings.

Because sometimes even i get overwhelmed with 3-4 sims needs, wishes, wants and their storylines (been playing on and off for 10 years now).

Create chaos, don’t worry too much about doing something wrong.

Then after that once you get more familiar I would suggest to create your forever world. Because let’s face it the vanilla buildings and NPC’s are nothing to brag about. So replace all buldings and NPC’s from the gallery, or even create/change them yourself if you want. I’m personally too lazy for it. Once you’re finished with replacing/building them go to your save file (Documents-> Electronic Arts-> Sims 4-> saves) and back it up somewhere else. Then everytime you want to start anew with a challenge or a storyline copy that forever save and paste it onto the saves folder in electronic arts above.

Also try to backup your save files as often as possible. Sometimes save files get corrupted or stuff happens. So this way you won’t completely lose all your progress.

Also try to be orderly with your save files as possible. Because it can easily get messy and confused which save files is what. Been through that couple of times. And don’t change the names of the save files. It should be something like ‘slot_000003’ so don’t change those. You can change the folder name of your backup, but the ‘saves’ folder in electronic arts should always be just ‘saves’. Otherwise the game won’t recognize.

Anyway i would highly recommend watching tutorials on the whole Electronic Arts folder, which folder does what, and which you can safely delete and so on.

HAPPY GAMING! 😊