I spent some time cleaning out old, outdated mods for my Sims 4 game last night, and updating the ones that needed updating. A few of them were completely retired, and in the midst of looking for replacements, I discovered the MC Command Center mod.

Now, I use a number of mods, and while I keep track of them on my Sims blog, I don’t usually write a post about them. But this is different due to the sheer scope of functionality.

It brings story progression to Sims 4.

Story Progression

Story progression was a bit of a controversy when it was first released in Sims 3. The idea was that the world around your current household was a living thing, and those sims would go out, get married, have kids, change jobs, move houses all on their own.

This was a shock to Sims players who, up until then, always had complete control over what every sim in their neighborhood could do. The fact that these sims were going off and making their own choices often mucked up the player’s overall plans for certain families.

I think the biggest problem wasn’t so much that story progression existed, but that in the beginning, there was no way to turn it off. I guess that the designers though story progression was so awesome that no one would ever want the option to disable it.

Once that option was available, players were a lot happier. I remembered there were some neighborhoods I’d turn it off, and some I’d let the sims run rampant.

There’s an amazing set of Sims 3 mods known as Master Controller that became essential for me to keep track of everything that was going on, especially in a larger neighborhood. Those were good times.

MC Command Center

So when Sims 4 came along, the first thing I immediately missed was the option to have story progression. My neighborhood had lots of houses… but no one was moving into them. I had lots of neighbors… but they would just grow old and die without children unless I manually created family for them.

I thought that this was going to just be the way it was… until this brilliant mod crossed my monitor last night. Why didn’t I know about this before? Not only does it return a semblance of story progression, but just about every part offers options to the player.

Suddenly, in my City Living game, homeless sims were moving into houses, getting married, and having families! This is so, so much better than them all sitting in a bin while all the houses in my neighborhoods sat empty.

The best thing is that you can set the options to only effect households you’ve not manually played. This means that even if you leave a family for a little while, they’re not going to have a couple of unexpected kids when you get back to playing them.

Everything is controlled directly from the in-game computer. I found it easy to use, and the options well-documented, so I always had a good idea what my options were going to effect.

Huge props to the modder for his work! This has made my game so much better.