Our guide to everything that comes with the free version of The Sims 4

Much like discovering a new hobby, getting into The Sims can be a huge drain on your wallet. Picking up baking sounds cheap until you find yourself buying fancy $10 flour and insisting that you need that top-of-the-line stand mixer—and it’s the same with Maxis and EA’s simulation series, with more expansion packs than you can shake a DRM contract at plus the extra cost of Stuff Packs, Game Packs, and Kits. 

Luckily, you don’t need to start big. The base game for The Sims 4 is completely free, and although you might feel like you’re missing out on all the added fun of the expansion packs, there’s still plenty to enjoy in the base game alone. Here’s everything you can do, see, and enjoy with just the free base game.
 

The basics

The Sims 4 comes with all the basic stuff you’ll need to actually, you know, play the game—but don’t be fooled. These “basics,” thanks to 10 years of free updates, are about as in-depth as you can get. 

In Create-A-Sim, the character creator, you can build a Sim, give them different outfits for every occasion (with up to five variations for each) as well as add on accessories, jewelry, makeup, medical wearables, tattoos, glasses, and hairstyles. On top of that, you can give them a handful of positive and negative personality traits, dictate their life’s aspirations, and change their sexuality, gender presentation, voice type, and even their walk style. When you’re done, you can edit their relationships with others in their family, give ‘em a name, and bam! You’ve created a whole dang person with complex wants and needs. For free.

Once you’re in the game and you’ve bought a place to live, you’ll also get access to all the basics of Build and Buy Mode. By default, in the base game, you’ll have access to all of it: windows, doors, walls, roofs, and basically everything you need to build a functional house. There are plenty of trimmings to make your new pad look nice too like pools, foundations, and fancy stuff with fun architectural names like “spandrel” that you can pretend you learned from a real book instead of a video game. Hop into Buy Mode, and you’ll have access to just about everything you’d expect to find in an IKEA warehouse minus the $1 hot dogs: chairs, beds, tables, lights, storage, decor, and more. The only limit is your imagination!

But playing The Sims is about more than house and character basics...
 

Skills and careers

Once you’ve made your character and their house, you’ll get to dip into Live Mode.

You’ll probably need to get a job to start with. There are 10 basic careers to choose from, each one requiring different skills, having optional “paths” at the end, and giving the player different rewards as they climb the ladder. But you could also choose to be freelance, self-employed, a Paranormal Investigator, or a Style Influencer, all of which offer the choice to work from home making money independently. Another option is to do odd jobs for people without just disappearing to work every day.

When you aren’t working, you can build up your Skills, of which there are 20, ranging from the old favorites like Charisma and Logic all the way to new ones like Rocket Science and Video Gaming. Get good enough at some of these Skills, and you can even discover secrets and new ways of making cash, create new interactable objects, and dive into the deep world of Collectibles. In fact, let’s talk about the deep world of Collectibles right now!
 

Collectibles

The Sims 4 base game offers players the chance to get really, really into collecting with many different collections to obsess over depending on your character’s main interests. 

For example, you can collect rocks, but don’t be fooled—rocks are actually just a way to start collecting other things found inside the rocks. Break open a rock, and you’ll find metals, fossils, and crystals. You can send the metals and crystals off to the Geo Council through the mail to get Elements or use a microscope on them to find all the Microscope Prints. While digging for rocks, you may come across Mysterious Time Capsules containing MySims Trophies.

You can also max out the Rocket Science Skill to find SPACE rocks or aliens in jars, take photos with your observatory to get space prints, catch frogs and breed them, make online friends to get postcards, and invest time and money into gardening and fishing to complete your collections of fruits, veggies, and fish. 

There are even some limited-time collections—like Sugar Skulls, Easter Eggs, and, uh, inspirational posters from Millie Bobby Brown’s Sims collab—that can be accessed through using the bb.showhiddenobjects cheat. Yay, collecting!
 

Three worlds (and two hidden ones)

The desert community of Oasis Springs, the woodsy suburb of Willow Creek, and the completely empty Newcrest are the three worlds available in the free base game, and they'll give you plenty to get started with—including populating Newcrest with your own choice of homes and businesses of course. 

But there are also two hidden worlds—Forgotten Grotto and Sylvan Glade—hidden away in Oasis Springs and Willow Creek, respectively, which we won’t tell you exactly how to find but…(spoilers!) just explore the neighborhoods, and you’ll eventually stumble upon their secrets.
 

The supernatural

You don’t need one of the many supernatural expansion packs to experience the supernatural in The Sims 4. The base game includes playable ghosts, a Cowplant that can eat people, multiple ways to become semi-immortal, the option to become a Plant Sim that survives on sunlight and water, and the ability to resurrect the dead. Sure, it’s not vampires, but vampires cost money, and this is free. And on the subject of free...
 

Free stuff

There are a few free things you can download from the start page! Make sure to grab them!

The first is Grim’s Ghoulish Guitar, which you get if you sign up for EA emails. It’s a guitar with a skull on it. Simple, but pretty sweet. 

The second is Holiday Celebrations, which was updated several years in a row to add more stuff. It adds a ton of festive items to the game, including a Christmas tree with gifts, a snowman, twinkly lights, interactable crackers, and lots of seasonal clothing, too. 

There are also lots and lots of small things that we can’t possibly keep track of that were added in patches, like new clothing, hairstyles, household items, and more. Oh, and free Star Wars costumes, including Leia, Luke, Vader, and Boba Fett. Let your fanfic imagination go wild. 
 

Extra stuff

There’s more you can get for free than just the in-game stuff we’ve mentioned so far. There’s a lot of stuff that we can only really call “stuff” because it doesn’t fit into any neat category. It’s bullet list time!

• A first-person camera (press shift + tab to enter it), which enables you to experience a cool, if slightly janky, new perspective
• The Gallery, which contains Sims and lot designs done by other players that you can download—just make sure to filter by “Base Game only,” and check that they’re free of custom content, or “CC” as most creators will call it
• Story progression and Neighborhood Stories, which will make other Sims across the neighborhood get married, have babies, find new careers, and die, making the world feel that bit more real (and yes, you can turn this off)
• A Guided Tour with Emily, which generously walks you through the game, even giving new players a boost on their skills and a handy $5,000 reward for completing the tutorial
• Create-A-Sim Story, which helps you create a more fleshed-out Sim in Create-A-Sim with a fun personality quiz
• Welcome Scenarios, where you can play premade households with predetermined stories and different outcomes, which provide you with rewards for playing them
• Cheats! All of them! You know ‘em, you love ‘em, it’s cheats!
   

All the updates

Excellent news: The base game includes every single one of the 150-something patches over the past 10 years.

That means that you get toddlers. You get pools. You get a shipping-crate-sized delivery of bug fixes. And you get a ton of cute little changes, like the ability to make your Sims take their shoes off indoors, options for birthmarks and vitiligo, new music from artists you might have actually heard of (albeit Simmified), and honestly, loads more. It’s a much better game now than it was at launch.

And all of that is free? Sounds like a pretty good deal to us. You can download The Sims 4 right now on the Epic Games Store.