The best Sims 4 mods
The best Sims 4 mods can expand an already big game in extraordinary ways. New mods appear all the time on ModTheSims—which has long been the go-to hub for creators—every week. There, you’ll find everything from minor tweaks to complete reworks of major systems. Some modders, including LittleMsSam and KawaiiStacie, have even got so popular that they've created bespoke websites for their growing list of creations.
The biggest challenge with Sims 4 mods is determining which ones still work. Some mods are faithfully updated, but others have broken over time with new patches and features added by EA.
With that in mind, here’s a collection of the top up-to-date mods for The Sims 4, from the tiny to the virtual life-changing. Make sure you read the installation instructions for each one, and check for any conflicts to make sure you’re not running two that will clash.
To get even more out of the game check out our round-up of the best Sims 4 expansions and game packs. If you want immortal Sims, free houses, and infinite money, check out our list of Sims 4 cheats.
Get to College
Send your Sims off to get a higher education with Simmmythesim's free Get to College mod. This mod adds three majors to the game—Physical Education, Fine Arts, and Music—and if your Sim manages to study hard and graduate they will start their chosen careers at level four. College life is broken down into specific days including Activity Days, Lecture Days, and Presentation Days. You Sim will need to work hard to graduate but it's all worth it for that leg up on the digital career ladder.
Bunk Beds
Sims 4 has seen two DLCs that would have been perfect for bunk beds come and go. We didn't get them in the Discover University expansion nor the Tiny Living stuff pack. Fortunately, prolific Sim stuff modder Ravasheen is on the case and has created working bunk beds that can be oriented in several configurations. Its a perfect way to squeeze bigger families into your tiny house projects. You can even tuck tiny desks beneath your lofted bed.
No death Murphy Beds
When the Tiny Living stuff pack came out, fold-down Murphy beds seemed like a treat. That is until everyone realized that they seem to kill your Sims quite often. This mod may seem simple but it can save you from a real headache. No more Murphy bed deaths and cheating your Sims back to life after!
Life's Drama
Life's Drama adds a dash of controversy to every neighborhood, with 11 new dramatic scenarios for townie NPCs, some of which you can intervene in. Your Sims might peer out their window to see a couple embroiled in a huge argument, a robber trying to pick a pocket, or a bride running away from her wedding.
You can simply enjoy watching it all unfold or, if you're feeling like a good Samaritan, help an NPC in need, such as somebody who's being terrorized by a rowdy gang. Don't worry: you'll be rewarded for your time. You can cause some drama yourself via the new "Exposing A Loved One" action, which works on Sims that have partners. Drop the bombshell, and grab some popcorn.
Full installation instructions are here.
The Explore mod
This mod from KawaiiStacie adds a bunch of rabbit hole actions—activities your Sims can do on their own without you following—that activate buffs or improve your Sims' relationships with those closest to them.
Once your Sims have visited the DMV for a license or bus pass, you can send them exploring just by clicking on them, which brings up a radial wheel of options. You can send them shopping (they'll come back with new clothes), to dance classes, to local attractions, to gambling spots, to take on some part-time work, and more. Their skills and motives will change based on the activity you choose, and you can tell your Sim to "Explore With" another character if you want to improve relations.
Sims will also randomly explore if you don't intervene, which is neat. The mod works with the base game, but some options rely on specific packs: you can't send Sims for take-out ice cream if you don't own the Cool Kitchen Stuff pack, for example.
Private Practice
This ambitious mod wants to overhaul healthcare in the Sims 4, adding health insurance, optometry, pharmaceuticals, more diseases and plastic surgery. If your Sims weren't already dark holes of micromanagement—constantly doing their best to wind up dead by winter weather or a burning stove—Private practice lets you manage ever more elements of their well being like blood pressure and weight.
It also comes bundled with Nies' Cooler Sickness Mod, which adds off-screen NPC illness progression. The mod fits particularly well with the Get To Work expansion, which introduced new illnesses: with this mod, those illnesses add new moodlets with strong effects, and your Sims can call in sick for work when they have these moodlets.
Meaningful Stories
More Sims 4
A mod pack containing some of prolific Sims 4 modder roBurky's best work, all aimed at making your Sims feel more human. If you've used Emotional Inertia or True Happiness—both previously on this list individually—then you'll attest to the quality of roBurky's work, and both of those mods are in the package alongside other must-haves.
Emotional Inertia, redesigned just for this collection, stops your Sims' moods flipping on and off like a light switch. In the base game, simply having a good meal in a well-decorated room fills them with joy for a few hours, but then the feeling vanishes. Emotional inertia makes moods less predictable, but more stable: they'll change less and last longer, making it more difficult to game the system. True Happiness, meanwhile, changes your Sims' default state from "happy" to "fine". Making them happy actually requires something special to happen, such as meeting a new partner, which will boost their mood considerably for a short time.
But Meaningful Stories is more than just these two well-liked mods. It also changes how the environment, such as paintings, impacts your Sims' moods. The effects are now more subtle and build up over time. It also stops extreme mood swings, so that instead of going from extreme happiness to sadness your sim will move through the natural, neutral in-between stages. Lastly, it creates more variable moodlets, meaning the same source of mood can give stronger or weaker effects at random.
Modder roBurky has other features in the pipeline, which you can read about on the mod page.
Get a job
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Players are adding new careers to ModTheSims every week, so if you’re ever looking for inspiration on which direction to steer your Sim in, give it a browse. The imagination behind them is impressive, and most of them give you a fully-fleshed out path to follow. Whether you want to become a tattoo artist , game developer, stock broker or zookeeper, you can now follow your dreams. We especially enjoy transforming our sim from a lowly PR assistant to the owner of a sports team in the sports agent career, which is a converted version of a career from The Sims 3: University Life.
A word of warning: these custom careers won’t work with most career overhaul mods, such as Turbo Careers—but don’t let that put you off.
Custom food interactions
If you want more culinary creativity, then Custom Food Interactions is the only place you should start. It doesn’t add any ingredients or recipes to the game—it just adds new possible interactions to cooking equipment along with a framework that lets you craft a fridge-full of custom meals from other modders’ kitchens.
With it installed, you’ll want to head over to the ModTheSims custom food section and pick from the menu. You’ll find recipes for everything from Chinese dumplings to beignets, blueberry cheesecake to biriyani. Grab an optional bib to make sure you don’t accidentally salivate on your keyboard.
Some players are having trouble with custom food since the June 2019 patch, but it seems to be fixable by deleting specific recipes, usually the jambalaya from Louisiana Style Recipes 2—just delete the jambalaya.package file (Heart Cookies is another potential red flag).
Have Some Personality Please!
This is one of our favourites on the best Sims 4 mods list. It's a huge overhaul of—as you can probably guess—the way Sims’ personalities work. It changes lots in the background (read the description on the mod page for an exhaustive list) but the best thing about it is that it eliminates all idle conversations. Never again will two Sims blab aimlessly to each other about nothing in particular: instead, they’ll be forced to choose an interaction, which is far more interesting.
Those interactions aren’t random, either: the mod will select them based on traits, moods and the existing relationships between the two Sims in question, which will give them a greater sense of autonomy than ever before. Expect more kisses from love interests—and more sucker punches from your enemies.
Become a Sorcerer
Do you miss the magic of previous Sims games? Become a Sorcerer adds a hearty serving of the supernatural, letting your Sims sling magic spells that can either suck the sadness out of a friend or strike down an enemy with a bolt of lightning.
You just need to touch lump of clay, choose one of three rituals—they’ll determine which Needs are replaced with new magical ones—and get to casting. Using magic strengthens your powers and unlocks new spells, but it also depletes your “Magical Connection” (a mana bar, basically), and you’ll have to drain either yourself or another Sim to replenish it.
Depending on your choices, you’ll lean towards good or evil, which changes the type of spells you can cast. Do-gooders can eventually bring ghosts back to life, but if that doesn’t sound like fun, just set fire to a table instead. If you’re bored of your current playthrough, then this is bound to liven it up.
New personality traits
Many of the best Sims 4 mods affect the ways Sims interact with each other. The Sims 4 has a long list of traits that change the way a Sim behaves, and because they’re relatively easy for modders to create you can quickly expand that list through custom content. The Sweet Tooth trait, for example, makes your sims better at baking and adds new moodlets to help them express their love of cake, while the Robots group of traits lets you spawn human-machine hybrid Sims, or just full-on robots who must visit a recharging station every few hours.
There are tonnes of traits available on ModTheSims—you can grab individual traits or packages of traits, like this wide-ranging collection from modder KawaiiStacie, or this selection of hobby-themed traits, which makes your sims artisans, horticulturalists or movie buffs.
Want to try out several new traits at once? This mod lets you add more than three traits at a time: you just need to type a quick cheat code including the name of the desired trait to add it to your Sim. It’s all explained on the mod page.
Build your own houseboat
If you’re tired of living on land then this mod lets you take to the water, transforming the game’s decorative boat models into full-on houseboats. They look pretty, and the limited space means you’ll have to get creative with what furniture you try to pack into them. It’s a good choice for a minimalist designer.
Old French Village
Hum along
Enjoy the Sims 4's wonderfully jaunty soundtrack with the best gaming headsets out there.
Bring the Alsace to the Sims 4 with this charming village of old-fashioned cottages. There are ten houses to choose from of varying grandeur (the mansion at the top of the hill is particularly spacious) as well as a pub and café for when your Sims feel peckish.
Somehow, modder catdenny has made the village only using default assets from the game, which is impressive. It does mean that there are slight variations in style, but unless you’re a stickler for European architecture then it probably won’t bug you. It just looks like a nice place to live.
You can add the village in ‘Manage Worlds’, but it will only fit in a vacant 64x64 lot. Sadly, there are no lots big enough in the base game, so you’ll have to travel to Brindleton Bay (part of the Cats & Dogs expansion) or Windenburg (from Get Together) to find a viable plot. If downloading the mod doesn't add it to your library, simply search for it in the Gallery, at the top-right of your "manage world" page.
Turbo Careers
Another one from Zerbu, the Turbo Careers mod makes all adult (and two teen) careers function like the active careers from the Get to Work expansion. You can download work venues from the Gallery, including ones with a combined function, or make your own—just make sure they have the right objects for Sims to do their job.
The necessary activities for career progression are naturally related to the career—programming, cooking, exercising—and sometimes Sims will receive fieldwork. An athlete might have to go to the gym and show off her muscles, while a Sim who works in business might have to offer career advice to those running retail venues.
You can browse all available careers here and the venue requirements for every job here.
MC Command Center
MCCC is a mega-mod that lets you tweak virtually aspect of your Sims’ lives, giving you godlike control over them and others in their world. You can blacklist certain clothing items, even on Sims you aren’t controlling. You can set employment rates for Sims of different ages, scan Sims to find out if they’re pregnant, or even terminate the pregnancy.
There are also lots of automatic settings geared towards letting non-controlled Sims live full lives without you, getting married and having babies of their own volition, and you can also use the mod to adjust the in-game time settings so your Sims don’t take half a day to shower and have breakfast. If you only grab one mod, make it this one.
Height Sliders
With the new Create-a-Sim tool in The Sims 4, you can spawn Sims of many different widths, but you can't alter how tall they are. This height slider from GODJUL1 lets you adjust the height of your Sims so that the world looks more naturally varied: just click and drag their feet in Create-a-Sim to stretch or shrink them.
Replacement paintings
Once your artist Sim has churned out five paintings a day for a week you start to see the same images coming up again and again. This mod from DaisyTighfield replaces those default paintings across all categories with images from around the web, featuring lots of fanart from popular movies and video games.
If you like what you see, you can follow the links provided to find the original images on Deviantart or other sites. You can even create your own masterpieces for your Sims to paint in-game—the instructions are on the mod page.
Gender Preference mod
The Gender Preference mod lets you change the preferences Sims have for romantic partners of particular genders (in The Sims 4 currently that’s just two, female and male). You can adjust the numbers to set your Sims to prefer one gender to the exclusion of the other, to prefer one but also like the other, or to like both equally. Romance away.
Risky WooHoo
Another mod bringing The Sims closer to real life is one from PolarBearSims. It introduces a chance that female Sims who WooHoo rather than explicitly Try for Baby will still fall pregnant. The mod comes with a variety of different percentage risks and adjusts the chances based on where your Sims are getting it on as well as the traits they possess. It also reworks aspects of pregnancy, introducing complications and possible infertility for some Sims.
It should be noted that you can also manually adjust the chances of getting pregnant in MCCC. Risky WooHoo is compatible with that mod, but MCCC will overwrite the percentage chances.
If you’re looking to change the game even more, have a proper dig into the Create a Sim ‘custom gender settings’ in the base game. They were updated a while back and now provide you with more options, such as the ability to allow same-sex couples to fall pregnant.
And for even more control, check out artulwww’s Pregnancy Mega Mod, which lets you do things like give birth to quintuplets.
For more on the Sims, check out our Sims 4 review and our account of the Sims 4's terrifying first-person mode.