Scrappy Mechanic / The Sims

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• Scrappy Mechanic Main Page
• Scrappy Mechanic - Simulation Games

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Being a massive franchise, The Sims has its fair share of Scrappy Mechanics in the series.

This list is ordered from the first game to the latest game in the franchise, and any expansion packs goes with their respective game (e.g. Livin' Large goes with The Sims list, etc.).

Be prepared to see the word "mod" in this list... a lot, as they fix most of the issues listed here.

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Franchise-wide

• Many players who like role-playing or want to replicate their own family have noted that the CAS is surprisingly limiting when it comes to building "unusual" households. Half-relatives, ex-partners and other similar things can't be created in CAS, and requires either mods or extented gameplay to happen. In fact, some games explictly block otherwise available options if it sees it as "unusual" ^{For example}Sims 3 doesn't allow you to have a 2-person household that consists of a young adult and their underage relative - either you create an unwanted parent just to kill them off immediately, or make them roommates before turning them into siblings with mods. As such, creative people and those who actually have such families have to go through extra steps to express themselves.

The Sims

• If you make your Sims very Neat in their personality, they will always make their bed when they wake up and you can't stop them once they have started.
  • If your sims are less neat in their personality? They will not flush the toilet.
• The TV and the stereo(s) are always left on automatically. This not only means the player will constantly hear the noises from the TV and the radio, but it'll run their bills up since the usage is calculated into the bill.
• In Vacation, if a Sim family you're playing as returns from a vacation, sometimes, the vacation car would get stuck at that family's household and stay there for the entire rest of the day, honking the horn constantly, or until you'd literally go out of that household and come back in.
• If your Sims left the lot for any reason, time was frozen on the home lot... but their needs weren't. This can lead to your sims coming home depressed and tired (or even falling asleep on the street) when they have work and school tomorrow.
• Doubling as Scrappies, the street musicians introduced in Unleashed (W. C. Friendly and Giuseppi Renni — the former appears on community lots with an espresso bar, the latter on ones without), due to their habit of blocking doors and stairs while performing and taking their sweet time to perform before moving out of the way, which often causes Sims who were about to leave the lot to have their motives severely depleted by the time they manage to go home, at least if the player doesn't just quit to neighborhood in frustration first.
• A feature introduced in Unleashed allowed for puddles to spread under objects where Sims cannot clean them, forcing the player to go into Buy mode and move away the obstructing objects. The feature proved annoying enough that it was Dummied Out in a patch shortly after.
• Weekends and "Days off" do not exist here - meaning the only way to get a full day with the kids without tanking their grade is to send them on vacation.
• The strays in Unleashed could prove annoying real fast with their tendency to pee everywhere (tanking your Sims' Environment score in the process) and block vehicles (leading to annoying honking). It was enough for Maxis to offer a free downloadable "No Pets Allowed" sign which would force strays to leave the lot. Purchasing a fire hydrant could also stop them from peeing everywhere.
• The Raccoon would cause the burglar Scare Chord which had a tendency to scare the ever living crap out of players, especially younger players. What's worse, it was much more common than the burglar and had a tendency to disappear as soon as it appeared, giving the impression the sound played for no reason. It would then proceed to wake every Sim in the household with the noise it makes diving into the trash can.
• Another change brought by Unleashed was adult female Sims walking with a less elegant and more slouched posture than before, which was nicknamed the "Gorilla Walk" by the community. A third party fix was made to correct this, although the change was supposedly reverted by Maxis themselves in Makin' Magic.
• When a Sim is on level 10 of their career, they will, sooner or later, quit that job out of nowhere to pick up a middle-rank job in another career. While the game at least provides a plausible explanation via dialog box, it still makes the huge effort put into leveling up all for naught and the salary cut (anywhere from a few §100 to over §1,000!) can severely destabilize the game. As a result, it can be tempting to not bother with promotions past a certain level (depending on salary and chance cards). To the rejoicing of many, this was done away with in future games, with the aging mechanic providing the life changes the "job switching" was probably meant to emulate.
• The "room" meter almost always keeps the Sims away from obtaining a perfect mood, and even in a very well-designed house, they still have it half-red. Thankfully abolished in Sims 3; since "moodlets" co-exist and are not mutually exclusive, a house in disrepair will contribute to negative moodlets in Sims 3 and discomfort moodlets in Sims 4, but it's no longer a need to have a spacious house (and you can get positive moodlets for environment through decorating rather than trying to expand).
• You can't pre-determine any relationships in "Create-a-sim" mode. This means sims need to spend the first several days interacting with one another to establish bond(s) that should already be there.
  • Because this also includes sibling bonds, you also can have two adult sims who are siblings fall in love with each other.
• The phone chat introduced in Hot Date only allowed calling a household once every few hours. Trying to call the same household within that time limit would result in a "Leave me alone!" message and a relationship loss even if the Sim called a different person. This proved especially annoying when trying to maintain relationships with Townies since they technically belonged to a single "Townie" household. It didn't help that the interaction itself only gave a +5 relationship boost if the Sim was lucky enough to pick the correct conversation subject (else they got yelled at and got a -1 relationship loss).
• Sims have to have at least one or two points in cooking to not start a fire. This also means that starting up a new family means you'll have to have Sims spend time studying cooking.
• Sims have almost no Circadian rhythms to speak of. Sometimes, you can send your sims to bed at 6 PM because they're so tired from work.... and they will still be asleep at 7 AM and be cranky. While other times, you can send them to bed at 6 PM... and by 1 AM will get right up and refuse to go back to sleep.
• In the console versions' "Get a Life" mode, the levels "Money from Mom" and "Party Animals" pair your Sim with their mother or Malcolm Landgraab's child, respectively. They're controllable in the same way as your Sim, with one major difference - they will outright refuse to do any house work if instructed to do so, making the player Sim (who has better things to do like improving their skills and making friends, both of which are required to advance in their career) do the work. While Mom is excusable in that she's tired of cleaning up after you ("I'm not a maid!" she says), Dudley/Mimi are just plain lazy. Fortunately, the remaining levels pair you with a roommate with no such limitations.
• If a child Sim fails at school, they will be sent to a Military School and leave the household. The military school for delinquent children was fast becoming a Discredited Trope when the game came out due to a range of abuse and negligence scandals in the 90's, and by the time of The Sims 2 the military school punishment was replaced with a social worker taking the child away.
• "Free range" flies - that is, the flies that are not on top of spoiled food and trash, but instead fly around the house, dropping the Room motives of the Sims in the same room as them. Unlike all other pests, they can appear even on lots without trash, and unlike roaches, they cannot be interacted with in any way by a Sim. Instead, a cat is the only way to remove this pest, often forcing players to use the "moveobjects_on" cheat to get rid of them.

The Sims 2

• Starting from FreeTime, Mr. Humble will give you a new computer. Always nice - but he does this for every family you create. Needless to say, mods were instantly created to disable this since the very high end computer messes up "rags to riches" scenarios. Some are also annoyed by the Product Placement aspect of it (the computer includes a copy of the then-upcoming The Sims 3). On top of that, there's a potential softlock in Apartment Life: on apartment lots, if you haven't picked an apartment before Humble shows up, he can't find a place to put the computer and will get stuck in an endless loop, hanging the game and forcing the player to either quit without saving or turn on testing cheats and click "Delete" on the error dialog that pops up.
• "It's raining!" "It's hailing!" "It's snowing!" Yes, it's raining and hailing... how is it possible to get the "It's raining!" off of your task queue?
• Put a computer in the house and the Sims will always try and play on it unless you have free will off. This gets very annoying when you try to make your Sims stand outside so they don't miss the school bus or the carpool... and they decide to go play on the computer.
• Put a stereo in, and you better get used to the music - because it's not turning off (unless you turn off Free Will in the options menu, so they won't try to turn the blasted thing on again). Tough luck for you on Apartment and Dorm lots, though, as NPC sims will turn the damn thing on every single time. Short of deleting the stereos entirely or putting them where uncontrolled sims can't reach, there's no other way to get around this annoying problem.
• Pregnancy causes hunger and energy to deplete so quickly that failure to juggle both adequately is quite likely to prove fatal unless you micromanage like crazy. (Giving birth is 100% safe in the Sims' world, but pregnancy cravings can be a literal killer.) Gets even worse with Nightlife installed, as you'll often find yourself in the extremely frustrating position of watching your pregnant Sim starve to death after she (or he) falls asleep face-down in a plate of food. Luckily, the pregnancy mechanic was overhauled comprehensively in The Sims 3 to prevent this from happening.
• Hope you enjoy the gesturing in Bon Voyage, because once you install it, that's all they'll do. Unless you get a mod... again!
• The FreeTime expansion adds some cool new items and the hobby system into the game. The problem is, once a Sim gets some hobby enthusiasm, 90% of their wants will roll up to be hobby-related. Have a new baby? Trying to get up the career ladder? Making a best friend? No aspiration points from those, because your wants are all "talk about hobby," "read hobby page in the newspaper," "practice hobby," etc.
• The nannies are notorious for being incompetent to a dangerous degree (as in, "set the kitchen on fire by being too busy force-feeding a non-hungry baby to look after the TV dinner she's cooking for a toddler even though toddlers can't eat those" dangerous) and very glitchy (refusing to leave after being dismissed, getting stuck on the lot or even multiplying), to the point they're seen as the scrappies of the NPC characters.
• If you hired a maid, and you have a dishwasher and an empty coffee cup sitting around anywhere in the house, the maid can get trapped in a loop trying when they put it away, pulling another coffee cup out of nowhere, and then putting that in the dishwasher.
• BBQ grills at community lots (especially in Bon Voyage) can really conjure a nightmare as NPCs don't seem to know how to clean up after themselves. Expect to see a lot of dirty dishes around the area as Sims won't clean them up automatically. Some of them are even only half-eaten. And Sims will keep making more of them if there's a BBQ grill available. The sheer number of dirty dishes in the lot is guaranteed to ruin your Sims' Environment need, and the only way to get rid of them is to have your Sims being ordered to clean it up themselves, which also took precious time and energy out of them while the NPCs will still keep cooking more food before leaving them out there again and again.
• Married family sims can roll fears of being caught cheating. Even when they're not cheating on their spouse. Cue facepalm from the player.
• Just like in Sims 1, the environment need can be a scrappy mechanic. Sims will complain about their environment need when it's red, which can be a bit of an annoyance, especially if players intentionally want a room to be small or have other features like partial walls that sims might find appalling in a well-designed (to the player's eyes) house.

The Sims 3

• Base Game:
  • The mechanic whereupon a new neighborhood is automatically populated with expansion and patch content buildings (Showtime venues, consignment stores, etc) when created. These new buildings occupy empty lots, seldom (if ever) match the neighborhood theme and are often placed haphazardly, either facing away from the street or smack dab in the middle of a large lot. This can leave a simmer spending several minutes after loading a new neighborhood rooting out, deleting and then repurposing the resulting empty lots so their towns don't look ridiculous. There is no way, official or not, to turn this feature off, unlike other scrappy mechanics.
  • The babysitter. Good lord. Picture this; your sim is a single parent with a baby and has to go to work to earn money, so naturally you call for a babysitter. The babysitter will be there for a while, but then a pop-up will suddenly appear where she says that she needs to go because she has another client, 'in the middle of your working hours! Not wanting to have the child taken away by the social worker, you have to get home as fast as you can to take care of your child, interrupting your work day and earning less cash! To make matters worse, the babysitter might even have done nothing but stare at the baby for the short time s/he was there, thus also leaving your baby with a terrible mood by the time your sim makes it home. Being a single parent (or two working parents) makes it incredibly hard to NOT lose your baby to the social worker...
  • Story Progression can cause problems. The idea behind story progression is that when you are not playing a family, they will continue to progress (i.e. go to work, get jobs, etc.). However, this can mess up a lot of things. Sims can get in relationships, get married and break up, among other things. Story progression has even been known to cause babies to disappear from NPC households. A frighteningly-common scenario is that you're highly invested in the Newbie family, go play with the Goths for a day or two, and progression has caused the Newbies to move out entirely.
  • If you call the firefighters for no reason, you get a fine, which is logical. To check whether they have been summoned for a valid reason, the game checks whether there are burned appliances in your household. Therefore, if you have replaced the destroyed furniture before their arrival, the game will consider that they have been called for no reason; same thing if a Brave Sim extinguished the fire themselves, since putting out the fire would then be so quick that it wouldn't have time to damage anything. To add insult to injury, 9 times out of 10 it happens because a Sim burns their meal while cooking with a smoke detector installed in the kitchen, which automatically summons the firefighters. To make things even more frustrating, this very event usually happens with a new household, when you're already low on cash and are struck even harder by a §500 fine.
  • The sub-worlds are instances separated from the main world, which prevents career progression for self-employed professions while you're in a sub-world.^note Thankfully you can circumvent this by keeping the items in your inventory to sell them once you're back in the main world, unless the Sim is a writer (progression is direct instead of requiring to sell crafted items). Also, the Genie lamp bug mentioned under Good Bad Bugs has the side effect of replacing the Genie by a totally different NPC, which is inopportune if you were building friendship with this very Genie in order to eventually free them.
  • The Sims 3 Store has not been well received, due to the rather pricey items (most of which are essentially priced custom content), Game-Breaker items, and the fact that it requires online registration of the game to log onto, which leaves several players who are unable to register their game online out. This is most likely the reason The Sims 4 removed the feature as a whole, but kept the gallery itself.

• Late Night:
  • Celebrities and vampires, which quickly become an uncontrollable plague. Thankfully, Supernatural and its accompanying patch give you the option to prevent them from spawning.
  • By becoming a celebrity, even by accident, even with the celebrity spawning turned off, your Sims are potentially subject to scandals that give them a negative moodlet. Oh, and they also damage their relationship with every sim the affected sim is acquainted with regardless of the absurdity of the claim. This can often lead to half the town hating your Sims for no real reason. You can offset the loss by personally interacting with each individual sim to assuage the rumors, and to sue for slander. This is exacerbated by the fact that some of the "legitimate" scandal types make no contextual sense; for example, Woohooing with a member of "the Occult" (i.e. any kind of supernatural being) will shame you in the public eye even if half the population have some kind of supernatural affliction or another, or if your Sim is one themselves.
    • Making things worse, if you also have World Adventures or University Life, and end up being hit by a scandal on vacation or while attending university, the quick option of suing for slander isn’t available, as there’s no city hall in those destinations. Also notable for World Adventures is that you can be hit by a scandal for something that happens when you’re deep inside a tomb. Get hit by tranquilliser darts at the top of a pyramid and pass out? The paparazzi standing outside the closed ground floor entrance will name and shame you for something that they didn’t see, or was even something you did of your own accord.

• Generations:
  • The Memory System. It's a return of the Memory System of The Sims 2 in which Sims get memories added to their book whenever something significant happens in their life. Instead, Sims get memories for almost everything they do. Went to buy something? Memory! Just unclogged a toilet? Memory! Passed by the library on your way to work? Memory! It doesn't help that you get an incredibly annoying pop-up saying that your Sim obtained a memory every time this happens. Fortunately the developers had a heart and allowed you to disable the pop-ups, but not the memories. But wait! There's more! Inactive Sims also gain memories. And memories take up space in your save file. If you've noticed that your game is loading/saving slower than usual after installing Generations, it's probably the game trying to process all of your memories. It's not surprising that within a week or so of this new system, mods immediately popped up to stop the memories. With the Seasons patch, they finally allowed disabling memories.
  • The Romantic Reputation system, which causes spouses to declare Sims a cheater simply for interacting with another Sim. It gets quite juvenile in some situations. For example, did a Flirty Sim decide to bat an eye to your Sim? Your Sim's spouse will then call you a cheater and proceed to reject all social interactions with you and even break up with you afterwards.
  • The ability for parents to autonomously punish their children for poor behaviour. The problem is, this system is far too sensitive. A whoopee cushion can cause a child to be grounded for two days. When grounded, they are literally not allowed to leave the house under any circumstances, not even to go to school, unless you decide to let the punished Sim "off the hook" or use a mod to let them decide the punishment. It should be noted that skipping school also causes grounding. So your child is grounded, then their parent will not let them go to school, and then extend the grounding, since they skipped school. Worst still, not going to school will result in the kids' grades dropping and being grounded again!
  • Teens cannot drive unless being taught by an adult in the household (before, the teen was automatically able to drive, even right after aging up from being a child). This can be annoying, as sometimes the teen and/or adult will not follow the other to the car, thus rendering the entire situation completely pointless.

• Pets:
  • The ice cream truck, which will frequently park in front of your home lot and stay there for hours like a stalker. Also the paparazzis from Late Night, though they won't bother you unless you're a celebrity.
  • If you have a pet bowl Sims will autonomously refill it, sometimes even when it's not completely empty. This is extremely annoying if you want to give your pets gourmet food since Sims will always fill it with the bog standard food, even if they have the gourmet food in their own inventory.

• Supernatural:
  • This pack adds zombies which never stop coming and constantly attack your plants. It is pretty much impossible to have a garden without freezing the lunar cycle (the closest option you have to turning the zombies off entirely.) Try to outsmart the zombies by growing plants in indoor planters? Then you can enjoy the zombies standing at your doorstep all night complaining that they can't get inside to eat them. A simple trick to safely garden is to build a perimeter or fence, then add a fence door. Left-click the fence door, left-click to "Lock...", and choose "Everyone but me" or "Everyone but my household."
  • Witches may randomly start casting spells on yous Sim if you interact with them. This can range from giving them a Frog head, to causing them to instantly fall in love or become the most hated enemy of who ever they interact with next. This is every bit as infuriating as it sounds. With a a sim whose already in a relationship falling in love with somebody else, becoming the enemy of a good friend, or even their partner. A Witch Sim may also decide to cast the Love Charm on themselves autonomously, which can screw up any relationship planning you've been doing if you look away for a few seconds.

• Seasons:
  • This pack adds the attraction system. Said mechanic also adds the sub-mechanic of your Sim receiving love letters and gifts from other Sims in their mail or calling them on dates. Couple that with the unbalanced romantic reputation system, and your actually faithful Sim can still be considered cheating. The gifts and letters also tend to come in unnecessarily large numbers. There are mods that completely disable this.

• University Life:
  • The "Heat of the Moment Kiss" interaction. If the receiving Sim reacts positively to it, then the two are automatically marked as being in a relationship. The issue is that the player has no control over how their Sim reacts to it. A Sim who is already seeing someone can be kissed out of nowhere, return the kiss, and suddenly be romantically involved with another person without the player having any control over it.
  • EA somehow decided it was a good idea to add a University Mascot (AKA some idiot dressed as a llama) to spawn whenever you start a new game. The mascot will stay on your lot for hours on end, even if you completely ignore him/her, as you cannot ask them to leave like you can with other Sims. The mascot also spawns if you travel to another subworld (i.e. go to University, the place he/she is promoting in the first place) and come back home. Naturally, there have been mods created to prevent the mascot from spawning.
  • The graduation ceremony. It lasts for a very short amount of time (less than 5 hours) and the pathing is legendarily bad, with 20+ Sims all trying to go through the same door one at a time. It's not unusual for a Sim who lives farther away from the annex to be unable to attend because of the pathfinding logjam, which can have effects ranging from them not getting their diploma and bonus trait to crashing the game due to script errors.

• Island Paradise:
  • Comparing them to other supernatural beings who are more game-breaking, mermaids are this for some players. Starting with the fact that becoming a mermaid is a tough task on its own, mermaids don't do THAT much and are extremely needy. They need to be hydrated all the time, or they'll faint or even die on you...like vampires, but much worse. Mermaids also get hungry pretty quickly for some reason and a usual meal doesn't refill their needs as much - you need kelp or raw fish for them to have in their inventory. Best part? When you leave them to play on their own, they still try to eat human food and stay hungry all the time, only decreasing their bladder motive. They also don't run for some water to swim at instantly and wait for themselves to faint. Also if you bought Mermadic Kelp for 25000 Lifetime Happiness points and left your troublesome mermaid without the salty water for only 2 days, it will turn 'human' again unless you buy the Permanent Mermaid lifetime reward.

The Sims 4

• The somewhat sudden change on mood influenced by many, many factors including room decoration, traits, and lot traits, might make it harder to accomplish whims that you want. It also extends on aspiration goals, as some including having to do a particular thing with the correct mood (such as one of the cooking aspiration need to be accomplished while "inspired" and Computer Whiz has one of the objectives being having to play video games for two in-game hours straight while "focused"). The fact that some of the "Very" variants of the moods (such as "Inspired" and "Very Inspired") resetting the mood-based whims didn't help either.
• Unlike past games, you can't buy birthday cakes, and instead must make them on your own. While it's fun for story-based players, it can be an annoying and time-wasting inconvenience for others.
• In contrast, an update fixed things so that Social Services no longer provides free bassinets, and you have to buy your own, even if your Sim is in labor and you still don't have one.
• When a sim eats food in a place other than the kitchen, they will prefer washing their dishes in the bathroom instead of the kitchen even if someone is already in there.
• Some apartments have fixed lot traits that can be a real pain. Have fun keeping your Sims happy in a place infested with rats and power outages.
• Apartments. For some, a large portion of the appeal of this franchise is to simulate living a life better than our own. Cramped quarters, extremely close proximity to irksome neighbors, and the distinct inability to have a private yard are all reasons people move into houses, anyway. For most, the apartment neighbors are the worst quality; it makes it more realistic, but it is still a pain in the ass to live peacefully when your neighbors either make constant noise or are chewing you out for comparatively minor things like practising acoustic guitar in the opposite side of the building.
• The random holidays from Seasons. The calendar shows what happens in the next 7 days, and the permanent holidays for each season are always visible. The random holidays only pop up if they are within those next 7 days, and some of them are annoying. Neighborhood Brawl has every Sim taken over by a brainbug that causes them to Fight any Sim of their same age-group they interact with on that day. Fortunately, the player can stop the holiday from occuring before its day or choose to End Holiday Early. Unfortunately, not completing the obliged tasks for the holiday, even by ending it early, will result in a depressed “Failed Holiday” moodlet that lasts most of the next day.
  • On the subject of holidays, the Gnomes who appear during Harvestfest. Giving them a gift they do not like will cause them to zap your Sims, resulting in a drop in the need meters and they will proceed to trash your house if you decide not to beg for their forgiveness. If they do enjoy the gift, they will “reward” your Sims with seed packets, regardless of whether or not the Sims in question even have any interest in gardening. And they will continue to flood your house with seed packets even long after the holiday has ended. Ignoring them completely will not fulfill the holiday obligation, resulting in the above-mentioned “Failed Holiday” moodlet the next day. Sims with “mean” or “evil” traits can destroy the gnomes, but unless they have one of those traits, it’s mostly a matter of choosing what the player deems the lesser of the three evils. However if you destroy a gnome, the rest will get angry and trash your house anyway, and even if you destroy them all they come back. Luckily, if you don't mind missing out on the Harvestfest, you can remove the holiday in the calendar and prevent them from appearing.
    • Luckily, the calendar allows you to edit even premade holidays meaning you can remove the gnomes altogether.
• Whims being clogged up by wants of buying certain items. Owning a pool, buying a Bee Box, Thermostat, or Umbrella Stand (Seasons), keep popping up. Even if the player buys the item in question, but places it in the Household Inventory because they may not want to have it in the house, the Whim to buy that very same item will pop up again.
• Foldable beds, because they can instantly kill your sims if the fates didn't align. Spent a lot of time creating a sim and they then immediately go crush themselves before you remembered to save? Tough luck.
• Neighborhood Actions Plans in Eco Lifestyle. In theory, they allow you to vote to change your neighborhood, with NPC voting allowing for chaotic and unpredictable results. The problem is that most N.A.P.s are minuscule or just minorly inconvenient, rather than any real game changer. One of them, Sharing is Caring, is Game-Breaking Bug incarnate: sims have no limits as to how much they can steal with this trait, so they can clean out lots within a few sim hours. Removing certain items will outright break most community lots and make them non-functional. The only way to stop Sharing is Caring from ruining your game is to disable the NPC voting feature altogether.
• The introduction of Wants and Fears in the July 26th, 2022 update. In theory, the return of the Wants and Fears feature from The Sims 2 to replace the long-abandoned and buggy Whims sounded like it could've worked. But this introduced a crop of issues:
  • Firstly, right away, Wants appeared to be even more limited and repetitive than Whims were. Not only are there only Wants for the base game and the High School Years expansion that was released a couple days after the patch, the Wants only seemed to be separated into three categories: long-term wants that take time to achieve, short-term wants that can be done quickly, and reactionary wants, which are based on where the Sim is and their current motives. These Wants can be very repetitive, with Wants such as "Listen to (x) Music" and "Talk with (Sim)" appearing way too often.
    • Wants are also a step-back in another way: unlike Whims, there is no small X you can click to remove a Want and get another one. To remove Wants, there are a couple ways: either wait until the next day, where unpinned Wants will be re-rolled, or go into the Rewards Store and purchase the "Want Refresher" potion for 200 Satisfaction points... and it seems that Wants give less Satisfaction points than Whims.
    • On an unfortunate side-note, Sims could get Wants to ask a Sim to be their boyfriend/girlfriend, but due to a bug, Sims could get the Want to ask toddlers and children to be their boyfriend or girlfriend, even worse if the two Sims are related. Unsurprisingly, this was fixed rather quickly.
  • But the thing that immediately became the Scrappy Mechanic to many Sims players were Fears. Unlike how Fears were in the Sims 2, Sims don't start out with Fears, but rather develop them over time. After a while, a fear will develop from certain conditions, like "Fear of Being Cheated On" being triggered by bad Woo Hoo or lack of interaction with partner or "Fear of Death" from witnessing a Sim dying, and they constantly get negative moodlets should they frequently experience these fears. These fears can be overcome by different means for each Fear (e.g. to have a Sim overcome their fear of being cheated on, they can "Talk About Relationship Fears" with their partner). So, for people who wanted the return of Fears, they were disappointed to find that these fears are basically In Name Only from their Sims 2 counterpart. Things went From Bad to Worse from there:
    • It became very apparent very quickly that Sims could get Fears way too easily. Just having a Sim experience one of these triggers for Fears could put them into a constant bad mood.
    • A Sim could also get these fears regardless of their traits, likes and dislikes, or lifestyles. For example, a Sim could love gardening and be a Green Thumb, but will be scared of tending their garden if they get from being swallowed by a cowplant.
    • The Fear of a Dead End Job. To many Sims players, this Fear was the one Fear that showed just how much of an Obvious Beta the Wants and Fears feature is. A Sim gets this fear by not gaining a promotion in a long time, and to resolve it, the player has to click on their Sim and select "Regain Passion" before going to work. But with this fear, it seemed like it was the easiest fear to get, due to getting a job being a main mechanic in the game, and promotions already taking time due to factors like meeting requirements or leveling up a skill that's required for the career. Not only could a Sim could just get this Fear regardless of whether or not they have the Workaholic lifestyle, they could also get this Fear just when they're coming home from work and they've been promoted. The "Regain Passion" interaction is also a pain, only appearing when a certain moodlet relating to the fear appears. The moodlets for both the fear and the moodlet you get from regaining passion also only last for a few hours, and because a lot of jobs end in the afternoon, either moodlets won't last long enough for a Sim to regain their passion in the morning or for that passion to last until morning. Even worse is that the "Regain Passion" interaction can fail, and the moodlet for that also lasts for a few hours.
    • The Fear of Unfulfilled Dreams is another notorious one for players who simply want to have fun with the game and not have to worry about the Wants and Fears system. If you do play like this, be prepared to see that notification for the fear appear every time you decide not to fulfill the Wants for your sim. Again, a mod has surfaced to prevent this particular Fear from appearing and another kills off all of the Fears entirely, leaving only the Wants.
  • In the gameplay options menu, there is actually a button where you can disable the Wants and Fears system. Surely there can't be anything wrong with it! However, when you exit Create-A-Sim and load into a house, the Wants still appear above the Sim's head because the option turns itself back on! You need to do this every time you open the game or leave CAS due to a bug that prevents the option from turning off completely. Fortunately, that bug has been fixed in an update that was released on January 17, 2023.
• Some Sims who are currently not being played will sometimes autonomously flirt with another Sim, needlessly filling up the romance gauge. This is especially true if you don't want the flirter in a relationship with the Sim whose actual lover you want them to be with is in the same room with them. Once more, there is a mod that allows you to actually choose if you want your sim in a romantic relationship with the offender or not by actually locking the romance gauge with them until you select the option "express interest in a romantic relationship".
• First person mode is introduced in an update, but not only it was hidden and buggy, you can't directly control your Sim.
• Do you have a stereo in your Sims' house? Have you noticed that they will often drop everything they have going on to seek that stereo out and dance to whatever is on it at any given moment, for hours on end? Have you also noticed that leaving a single stereo on in the other side of a house will make every sim on the lot refuse to sleep? Have you noticed that that's really annoying?
• Sims also feel compelled to use a computer, whether they're part of your household or neighbors. While there is a "Computer Security Settings", they sometimes didn't work and need multiple confirmations. At least you can put the computer inside a room that you can lock it.
• Sims will also gravitate towards automatically going to the refrigerator and making food for themselves if hungry - even if another member of the household has been instructed to "Serve [A Meal]", right next to them. Deleting the action from their queue doesn't stop them, because given a few more minutes they'll continue their inexorable march towards the fridge to make completely pointless food. Sims will also repeatedly take their hungry toddlers in and out of high chairs, even if another adult has already given the toddler food that doesn't need to be eaten in a high chair.
• You aren't allowed to shower or cook in when visiting a household, which can be jarring if the household you're visiting are family or friends. The guests at your house, however, can rub their grubby hands in your bath or rifle through your fridge to their hearts' content.
• Some players think that the pets getting counted as Sims is this and it's easy to understand why, because in The Sims 3, pets are actually separate from the main Sims, for a total of 10 (8 Sims, 2 pets and vice versa). Naturally, this severely limits the amount of normal Sims in the now-starved 8 maximum Sims per household because of it. Mods such as TwistedMexi's Full House or MCCC (MC Command Center) can override this, but be warned as CAS is still limited to 8 Sims regardless and it automatically removes the additional Sims. Made a mistake during the editing process? Better hope you have a random Red Shirt nearby!
• If you have a child sim, it is guaranteed they'll wake up every night from the monster under the bed. From there they'll be too scared to go back to sleep and will even automatically attempt wake up a teenage/adult sim if you're not quick enough to clear the queue. Talking to the monster will lead to the child sim to become energize if they befriend it or scared if they fail to do so. Both options will lead to sim to unable to go back to sleep. The only way to completely get rid of the monster is the use the Defender Light.
• Trying to dine out is usually an all day endeavor. The waiters take forever to get your orders, the food is not always served at the same time, and your sims love to leave their seats in the middle of all of it.
• The "Growing Together" expansion introduced Family Dynamics. One of the family dynamics is Jokesters. Family members who have this dynamic will autonomously non-stop tell jokes with each other, go into the Hysterical emotion and can die from laughter. Once again, a mod that can disable deaths from emotions exists, such as the previously-mentioned MCCC.

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