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The Sims 4 has a lot of content; there's no debating that. After 11 years and dozens of expansions and other DLC, there's no shortage of stuff to do in this game. But for most folks, playing house the normal way eventually gets old. You've played the way EA wants you to play, you've found a pretty solid stable of mods you like, and now you wanna try something new. It's time to dabble in some community challenges.While the best The Sims 4 challenges have prominently been used by content creators who needed things to make videos about, these challenges tend to be just as amusing for regular folks to take on in their own games. When you need to spice things up a bit, these are great ideas to try. Just keep in mind that, even though some of these challenges have a lot of rules, they're more fun if you tailor them to how you like to play instead of sweating all the legalities, especially if you're not actually competing with anyone else. 100 Baby ChallengePerhaps the most well-known Sims community challenge is the 100 Baby Challenge, in which players are tasked with having 100 offspring that grow into adults from a single family in as few generations as possible. But the twist is that the family can only have one person who gets pregnant at any given time--the matriarch, as it were. The challenge requires each baby to age up normally until they reach young adulthood, at which point they can move out, making room for new babies.And when the matriarch becomes too old to have children or dies, another child will take over as matriarch. The ultimate goal is to reach a hundred babies while going through as few different matriarchs as possible. There are a huge number of rules involved with this challenge, including many that factor in DLC. And there are variations for The Sims 2 and The Sims 3 as well. Legacy challengeIf the 100 Baby challenge sounds like too much, the Legacy challenge may be more your speed. In this challenge, we start with a single sim who has nothing, put them on an empty lot, and spend a set number of generations (like 10 or more) building up the family to see how wealthy and successful you can make them over a long period of time, while also building up a large estate on the lot that you started with, so ideally you'll begin on a bigger lot. As with the 100 Baby challenge, there are many rules for this one, as well as several variations that will ramp up the difficulty. Rags to Riches, and Homeless challengeTechnically these are distinct challenges, but they overlap each other so much we might as well lump them together. These are both essentially supercharged versions of the Legacy challenge where you start off with nothing or next to nothing--and with the so-called "Homeless" challenge, you don't even get a home lot, and you'll have to live off the facilities in public areas, like parks, gyms, and bars. It can be pretty tough to get going like this, particularly if your Sim has no education or skills to speak of, but that's also why it's interesting--you'll be thinking about The Sims 4's systems, and also real-world systemic housing problems, in all-new ways. You can go through the rules for the Homeless challenge here, and the ones for the Rags to Riches challenge here.We should point out that these challenges play a little bit differently with the new Enchanted by Nature expansion, which added the Natural Living skill that makes it pretty easy to live in the woods without any furniture. While that skill lessens the friction of this challenge, for some folks that'll be a reason to give it a new shot. Black Widow challengeThe Sims 4 is usually a nice game, but what if you don't want to be nice? Then it's time for the Black Widow challenge, in which your Sim is tasked with marrying another Sim and then killing them in order to get their money. While, yes, The Sims 4 does not have a murder mechanic, the Black Widow's target will be a member of your household that you can manually control--you can lock them in an empty room until they starve, or make them sit in the snow until they freeze, or trick them into getting eaten by a cowplant, or whatever else you might want to do to these poor digital souls. And then once they're dead and gone, you do it again and again until your Sim dies of old age. You can read more on the rules and scoring here. Not So Berry challengeSome of the best Sims 4 challenges are the arbitrary ones, and the Not So Berry challenge, co-developed by YouTuber lilsimsie, definitely fits that description. Essentially a themed version of the Legacy challenge, the Not So Berry challenge tasks you with color coding each generation of your family--the first generation wears mint-colored clothing and has mint-colored hair, for example, but the second generation would be rose-themed. You'll likewise decorate your Sims' home with the current generation's color. For the full list of rules and color schemes, you'll want to pay a visit to lilsimsie's site. Black and White Build challengeNothing complicated about this one, as the only task here is to build a house that looks dope in black and white. This requires messing with your computer or monitor's settings, though. On a PC, you'll want to type in "Color Filter Settings" in the Windows start menu, turn the filter on, and select Grayscale as the option. On a console, you'll instead go into the settings on your monitor or TV, and under the display settings you'll turn the color slider all the way down, which should make your screen black and white. Then build away. Just be sure to see what it looks like in color once you're done, because you'll often end up with some really fascinating color schemes from building this way. Shell challengeThe idea with this one is pretty simple: From the Gallery, search for and download a frame of a house, or "shell," which has exterior walls and doors and a roof but otherwise has nothing inside, and then do what you can to make it your own. It's not a complicated challenge, as it's just a way to inspire you to try something new by using somebody else's frame instead of your own. Tiny House challengeThe task here is to choose a very small area within a lot, like a 16-tile square, and build a home entirely within it. The bb.moveobjects cheat is an absolute necessity for this challenge, since you otherwise wouldn't be able to fit much of anything in a space that small, and the Tiny Living DLC adds some furniture that'll help, like a bed that folds up into the wall. Even so, this challenge requires serious creativity to do it well. No CC/Base Game challengeJust build a home while only using free, base-game items--no DLC or custom content allowed. For folks who have been collecting DLC and CC for years, this challenge can be pretty illuminating, as it'll force you to play without some of your favorite items. It's also a good challenge for a friendly social competition, since everyone will be working with the same items. Real House challengeYou can probably figure out what this one is without any explanation--obviously, this challenge is about recreating a real house in The Sims 4, as best you can. You'll need to take liberties with some things, since EA probably doesn't have perfect recreations of all the furniture and appliances in your house, but figuring out the best replacements is part of the fun. James Turner's challenge generatorIf none of the other challenges sounds particularly compelling to you, or if you're an old hat who's already done all these challenges, YouTuber James Turner has a challenge generator that gives you random requirements for a home design and the makeup of a family. For example: make a rustic-style home with three floors, a budget of 16,000 simoleons, and a family that consists of two couples. Check out the challenge generator here.Sometimes the challenge generator spits out some strange requests--I've gotten "make sure all the bathrooms have at least five toilets" before. But if you don't like what it gives you, you can just generate a new one, or simply disregard the nonsensical suggestion. The purpose of the challenge generator is to give you ideas, not to force you to play in a way that annoys you, so it's best not to be too legalistic about it.
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