Sims 4 Bug Leads Players To Count Their Calories

City Living, the latest expansion for the The Sims 4, introduced Festivals, which have food stalls where your sims can eat. It’s a nice bit of urban realism: When your sim is out and about, they can grab a quick bite on their way home. The problem is that some sims will never stop ordering food from them.

Normally, sims who aren’t hungry don’t eat. Players are reporting instances where sims who aren’t hungry will still order from the food stalls over and over. In a larger thread cataloguing the change, Kaptaingarvin on r/thesims notes, “I’ve caught my own Sims ordering food again the moment they finish a meal. Doesn’t matter what their Hunger meter is like. It can be 100%, they will finish a meal and then go to order more food immediately.”

In my own playthrough I did notice my own sim autonomously ordering more food if she was idling at a festival. Especially at the Spice Festival, which is all about food from foreign countries, she’d wander over and grab another plate if I didn’t stop her. But who could blame her? If I also had access to a food cart that sold bhelpuri I’d be there in a heartbeat.

That said, weight gain is tied to eating food in game, and weight loss is tied to working out. Sims will eat food of their own accord, but don’t seem to work out in the same way. In turn, some sims are now gaining weight over time. Slowly, some players are noticing that any uncontrolled sims will have the same body shape. It the sort of phenomenon that is prompting some players to calorie count for digital characters, all in the name of controlling what they look like:

Most players seems concerned about “townie” sims, which are the sims that are populated by the game. “Personally I don’t mind my controlled sims having to work out more but there is little I can do about townies without cheating,” writes Shellbemme on The Sims’s official forums. Indeed, you can stop unplayed sims from gaining weight, but that means downloading MC Command Center, a mod that gives players more control over townie sims, among other things. In MC Command Center, you can set an upper limit for the size of all sims. But not all Sims players like to use mods, and some enjoy a diversity of body types in their games, which that mod would prevent.

“I tend not to see overweight sims as major issue personally because I play my game with a diversity of body shapes and sizes (like real life),” writes staravia81 on The Sims forums.

Thanks to this weight quirk in the latest update, some players are now cataloguing their sims’ eating new eating habits. The Sims forums user Chellejo notes, “My sim ordered 5 plates of food back to back. She wasn’t eating the whole plate. She’d eat a bite or two, the plate would disappear, so she’d go order again.”

Not all players are concerned with unplayed or townie sims gaining weight, however. This is a game about crafting narratives, and part of that can be rolling with whatever the game throws at you. On the The Sims forums, Aushy writes, “I normally just let it go! It doesn’t really interrupt their life in any way, and I usually am looking for a variety for my Sims’ appearance.” Replying to her, PlumbobGrandma adds, “It might add an interesting story line or make your sims even more cute and likeable!”

Over on Reddit, moon_child20 is excited about the change, which will help with her own storyline. “I should try it, because I’ve been trying to fatten up my husband sim for a few sim weeks at home, and nothing happens,” she writes. “Maybe a trip to San Muyshuno would do him some good.”