Children visiting a residential lot will almost always leave autonomously around 6 pm, even if they are with one or both parents, or if they are visiting relatives. If a child does not leave autonomously, a parent will eventually come to take the child home.

Children can be telephoned at any time, but phoning a playable child after 6 pm will result in one of the child's parents appearing on the lot to bring the child home. Children can be given cell phones, but will not be able to use them. Children can only visit community lots when accompanied by an older Sim, although children in other households can appear on community lots on their own.

They cannot purchase items at a cash register, but can use the ticket machine at a venue. They can care for pets, but cannot clean bird cages. They cannot get items from the mailbox or pay the bills.

When using certain items, they will use a step-stool to reach for tall items. Children in The Sims Castaway Stories do not go to school. This however, gives them more time to learn skills through various ways and make more friends, so that they can focus on careers when they become teens. They can still be removed by the social worker if their motives go down or they get too hot or too cold.

Childhood in The Sims 3 lasts 7 days in Normal lifespan mode, though it is possible to age Sims up at any time using the birthday cake. The life stage as a whole appears to represent Sims between the ages of 6 and From this life stage onward, Sims start wishing for things they desire.

As children, Sims will not initially have a lifetime wish , but will be free to build skill levels, pursue hobbies and develop friendships that will affect later life. Some lifetime wishes, however, may become available during this stage as the child's hobbies become more defined, and hard-working child Sims that are assigned one of these early wishes can sometimes even fulfill them before they become teenagers. The child stage now marks the point where acquired skills first become visible in a Sim's skill journal.

Children can build all skills except charisma, instrument skills, athletic, and gardening. However, they can be tutored over gardening or charisma by a Sim that has the maximum logic sill.

For some reason, a child's cooking and handiness skills remain invisible until they become teenagers, but all their other skills will display normally.

Children have three traits. In order for the player to select a child's fourth trait when they become a teenager, the child must have a school performance of at least a B, otherwise the new trait will be chosen at random. The worse a child performs at school, the more likely they are to gain a negative trait upon aging up. Children cannot have romance-oriented or persuasive traits like "flirty" or "charismatic," but if testingcheatsenabled true is used, they can sometimes get them by randomly rolling traits.

Unlike older Sims, child Sims can only die from very few causes: from fire, drowning, or meteor strike. This is by deliberately game design, possibly due to developers perceiving the death of children being disturbing or frightening to the player. In The Sims 3 , children are more independent than ever unlike in previous games. While they still cannot cook with the exception of the toy oven they are capable of retrieving quick meals and leftovers from the refrigerator. Children also no longer need supervision of a babysitter when left alone in the house.

They are capable of using their cellphone for the first time albeit strangely as they are unable to call emergency services. Children can stay at home alone, visit their friends' homes or visit community lots by themselves, but they must be back on their home lot before the town curfew pm. If a child is out past their curfew, they will follow the nearest older member of their household or automatically head home, after which they will be unable to leave before in the morning.

Children will always choose bicycle, even when they don't own one, as a default means of long-distance transportation when cruising alone. Just with toddlers and babies , the social worker will come and take away children, if one of them are left to starve to death or hadn't been given emotional support.

As of patch 1. Children can hug toddlers, read toddler books to them, and play peek-a-boo together. They can also feed toddlers on the ground or in a high chair. However, children cannot carry toddlers, place them in cribs or change their diapers, which prevents them from fully attending to the needs of toddlers without an older Sim or babysitter present.

Children are also capable of taking care, as well reinforce pets. Unlike previous games in the series, a child will not be removed from the household for getting F on their report cards for a period of time. They may get grounded if The Sims 3: Generations is installed. Children in The Sims 4 take 7 days to age up in short lifespan, 13 days to age up in the normal lifespan and 52 days on long lifespan. They have four different unique aspirations to choose from: Creativity, Mental, Motor, and Social, which are also special skills that only children can learn.

They cannot learn any other skills until they have reached level ten in one of these skills. They have only one trait, which is chosen in CAS, or when they age up from a toddler.

In CAS, their walk style cannot be chosen and only two voices can be chosen from: sweet and warm. Their body shape cannot be changed except by using the fatness slider, but their face can be modified. Unlike previous games, they can be set as siblings with adults in CAS. The release of Patch 46 , on January 12, , added the toddler life stage to The Sims 4. They also have no curfew, so they can stay outside of their homes for as long as they desire.

Ignoring hypothetical curfew will negatively impact their responsibility character value. Children still need to go to school; however, there are no negative consequences for not going to school except a temporary embarrassed moodlet and impact on responsibility [ TS4:PH ]. Instead of keeping certain things constantly up, they have to complete certain objectives in order to increase their grade.

They can also do extra credit after they've done their homework for that day if they already have a B or A grade. If they misplace their homework book, they can buy another homework book using a bookshelf or use another child Sim's homework book.

With Seasons or Get Famous , they can join afterschool activities. Children can be taken away on only two grounds: either their hunger motive reaches zero, or the remaining teen or older Sims in the household die.

Children in The Sims Medieval are similar to children in The Sims in that they will not grow any older except under certain circumstances. Unlike modern Sim children, medieval children cannot die of anything.

As only Hero Sims can be playable, children will be uncontrollable. However, they can still offer much help to their parents. A hero Sim can put their child to work by having them go shopping at the market or by gathering resources around the kingdom. Married couples can have as many children as they want, but one household can only have 4 children in it.

If your Sim has 5 children, you must choose one who moves away to find his fortune, study the Watcher, go to military school, etc. Single mothers can have up to 4 children. Medieval children do not attend school. Instead they have an apprenticeship relating to their parent's occupation.

For example, the daughter of the Monarch would be a Princess, while the son of the Knight would be a Squire. If both parents are Hero Sims, the child will follow the profession of whoever owns the house they live at. The Sims FreePlay introduced children in version 3.

Unlike other games of the series, the age's name is Pre-Teen [1] instead of Child , which was used since The Sims and The Sims console. Both are simple color 8-bit bitmap images, numbered to correspond with the mesh file which gives them the desired shape on the Sim. Each image file is that Sim's entire body or head, including skin there are 3 skin tones - light, medium and dark - and it is common for the same outfit to be made in all 3 tones and hair.

However, a Sim's hands are separate; hands are not part of body skins, but are defined separately in the Sim's character file. Originally, the default formal outfits used formal hands, but these hands were not used after Hot Date. A Sim's hands normally match the Sim's skin tone, though it is possible for a skin to have custom hands. For example, a skin might have white hands so a Sim using it will appear to be wearing white gloves.

Some skins have accessories such as hats and glasses, which have separate BMP and mesh files. However, if a Sim appears to be wearing accessories such as glasses, it is usually because they are painted onto the Sim's head or body skin.

True custom skin tones aren't possible, but variations of the basic skin tones are, as long as they're named so that the game engine "sees" them as light, medium, or dark tones. Some creators made "pale" versions of the light skin tone and made them available for use by others. Skins are available for different modes of dressing: Everyday, Pajamas, Swimwear and Formal.

Some jobs also have "uniform" skins. There are also nude skins for when a Sim is using a toilet, using the Vibrate interaction on another Sim or is taking a bath or shower.

The basic body types are "fit", "fat", "skn" skinny , and "chd" child. Custom body types are possible, and they can have their own three-letter identifiers. However, if Hot Date or later is installed, clothing racks will see adult Sims with custom body types as "fit".

Therefore, buyable pajamas, swimwear, etc. Likewise, buyable pajamas, swimwear, etc. In The Sims , all information about a skin file is carried in its filename. The first letter identifies the type of skin. Heads are identified with "C" for Cranium. Everyday skins are identified with "B" for Body. Pajamas are identified with "L" for Lingerie.

Formal, Swimwear, Winterwear [ Vacation ] and High Fashion [ Superstar ] skins are identified by their initial letters, though players should note that hand files also begin with "H". The next three characters are an identifier for the mesh. Maxis always used numbers, but creators could, and often did, use letters. The next two letters identify gender and age, respectively. Gender is identified with "f" female or "m" male , while age is identified with "a" adult or "c" child.

Technically, child skins could be identified as "uc" unisex child , but this was rarely done in practice. For body skins but not heads , the next three letters identify the body type. Next, there are three letters which identify the skin tone as either light lgt , medium med , or dark drk. This is followed by an underscore and the actual name of the skin. Mesh files do not have skin tone information, but otherwise follow this convention, though there are some naming conventions that only apply to mesh files.

Unlike The Sims 2 , The Sims does not distinguish between custom skins and those included with the game. All head skins and Everyday skins are available when aging a baby to a child , aging a child to an adult with the Age of Instant charm , or generating a townie.

Once created, a Sim's appearance is not editable from within the game, except for their clothes, which can be changed by using a dresser.

Some third-party utilities let players change a Sim's appearance. In Unleashed , skins for cats and dogs use a single bitmap image, though there are still separate meshes for pets' heads and bodies. Pet skins use a somewhat different naming system.

All pet skins and meshes start with "B" or "xskin-B", which is followed by the three-character identifier and either "cat" or "dog". Pet meshes are identified as body or head by a "tag" on the end of the "xskin-" file's name.

These files use the same naming conventions as the BMP files, but do not have skin tone information. They consist of two parts. One contains the information about the shape of the mesh. These files are identified by the prefix "xskin-" and the file ending ".

The other part, identified by the file ending ". These ". However, the "xskin-" file they point to is determined by a line in the file, so they can point to an "xskin-" with a different identifier, though they usually do not. The way skins and meshes work in The Sims means that some skins will work correctly with more than one mesh; a feature known as "crossmeshing". Of course, each mesh needs to have an appropriately named copy of the BMP file, so crossmeshing involves manually copying and renaming BMP files.

Crossmeshing can be available for several different reasons. Some Maxis meshes were made so that two, or even all three, body types could use the same BMP files. Sometimes, two meshes are the same, but have different filenames. For example, the F and S meshes from Hot Date are the same as the B meshes that were included in a skin pack, and later in The Sims Deluxe Edition , and the B female adult mesh from Hot Date is the B female adult mesh from the base game.

Also, each Maxis child mesh is the same for boys and girls. On occasion, meshes that have rather different styles can use the same BMP files, either coincidentally or by design. One well-known example was a C series of adult female heads that could not only be crossmeshed with one another, but with the Maxis C adult female head. Skins are still in BMP format but are now contained in a ". A Sim's body is now separate from their clothing , and there are now 4 basic skin tones light, medium-light, medium-dark and dark with each skin tone's graphic files being divided by age and gender.

Some skin tones are hidden, and can be accessed by placing Create a Sim in Debug Mode. In addition, custom skin tones are now possible, and many are available as custom content. That Sims' bodies and clothing are separate makes all outfits available to all Sims of the appropriate age and gender, regardless of their skin tone or body shape.

It also means it is now possible to create distinguishing marks such as tattoos that are unique to a Sim, although in practice this is not an economical use of drive space. Some outfits are made so that Sims wearing them appear to have tattoos. Pre-made Sims who have tattoos are actually wearing one of those outfits.