Got a lonely sim? Have her call someone

The social need is probably the one that I pay the least attention to in The Sims 3.  It’s not that I don’t want my sims to find mates and build families, it’s just that I keep my sims busy with other activities.  So it’s only natural that my sims will eventually feel lonely and sometimes they won’t want to do anything until they interact with other sims to bring up their social need.

I will often run into a social crash with my sims when I am starting a new game or when I’ve got sims going on extended adventures without any social interactions.  Thankfully, this tip helps in all situations.  By the time my sim has depleted all of her social currency, she has almost always met at least one other sim in her universe.  I will normally, at this point, open up my sim’s relationships panel and look for one of two types of sims for her to call: either a sim from another town or a vampire.

For the foreign sims, I look for those whose portraits are greyed out, which means that they aren’t in the same town as my sim at that moment.  In the example shown here, the sim I’ll have my sim call is from China (note the little sim-China icon on his shoulder), and my sim will “chat long distance” with him.  This interaction completely ignores the game clock and allows my sim to chat with this acquaintance at any time of day to bring her social score up.  You don’t need World Adventures to be able to make long distance calls because there was a base game update that enabled travel to any other town that you have installed, so you could have a sim in Sunset Valley call another sim in Riverview.  Since your sims can travel to other towns, sims from other towns can and do travel to your sim’s town, so it is quite possible to have traveling sims in your relationship panel.  There also does not appear to be any standardized time zones in the game, so any sims in other towns will always answer the phone and be willing to talk.

I also look for vampires (which will be shown with a red outline in the relationship panel), because my sims usually crash their social needs long after bedtime, and vampires (added with the Supernatural expansion pack) tend to stay up at night so they are also good candidates for night calls.