Game Help:Pregnancy
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Pregnancy Guide
This guide is all about sim pregnancy, and everything related to it.
Pre-Pregnancy
Try to make sure your sims are ready for the new arrival. This means you'll need to have some simoleons saved up to pay for a crib and changing table, a separate area in which to put the nursery, and enough simoleons ready to convert that nursery into a new bedroom for the child once they grow up. You'll also need to pay for bottles (which come out of your food budget) and perhaps hire a nanny, so having at least 5000 simoleons per baby is advised.
Getting Pregnant
The easiest way to get pregnant is to have a male and female sim relax on a bed. They'll need to be in love to be able to try for baby (or woohoo). With one sim selected in live mode, click on the other sim and choose cuddle, then kiss, then make out, then try for baby. You may be able to skip some of those but hey, who doesn't like a little foreplay? They'll also give a little boost to your sims' relationships, which can be helpful if the "try for baby" option doesn't show up when you first relax.
Your sims will dive under the covers and giggle and have their fun, with fireworks. As they finish up, turn up your speakers or put on your headphones and listen closely. If their encounter has resulted in a pregnancy, you'll hear a sweet little lullabye. If you don't hear a lullabye, your female sim didn't get pregnant and you'll need to try again.
The chances of pregnancy seem to be around 50% so it may take several tries to get your sim pregnant. Remember that your female sim cannot be within 3 days of becoming an elder or she cannot become pregnant. Same sex couples and male sims cannot become pregnant through "try for baby" without hacks.
If you want your female sim to become pregnant and the father does not live on the lot, you'll need to make sure you have the female sim controllable in order to get her pregnant - you can't control the father and have her get pregnant that way unless they both live on the same lot.
Alien Pregnancy
Male sims can become pregnant if they get abducted by aliens. For more information on aliens in general, including alien pregnancy, see: Game Guide: Aliens
Other Pregnancy Methods
As mentioned above, the easiest and most common way of getting pregnant is to relax on the bed. However, your sims can get pregnant in any of the ways they can also woohoo. These include:
- In changing booths on community lots
- In hot tubs
- In cars (Nightlife)
- In the photo booth (Nightlife)
- In elevators (Open for Business)
You can also impregnate sims using the Tombstone of L&D. You spawn the tombstone of L&D by enabling the testingcheatsenabled cheat. You can use that to create same-sex pregnancies, impregnate a sim by any other sim, or even impregnate a sim by themselves!
Abortion
Have an unwanted pregnancy? Get rid of it using the InSIMenator.
What to Expect When You're Expecting
Pregnancy for sims lasts three days from the time of conception. Each day is a little different. Here's what you should expect for pregnancy:
Day 1
This is the first day after conception. You probably won't notice a ton of difference - the sim's motives/needs won't really drop much quicker than normal. However, they will be pretty nauseated with morning sickness, and will run to the toilet to throw up. They'll get a thought bubble with a pacifier and a question mark in it when this happens ("Am I pregnant?") and they may occasionally just retch a little, covering their mouth with their hand and holding their stomach, getting the same thought bubble, without throwing up.
They won't be showing yet, and they'll still be able to go to work or community lots.
Day 2
On the second day, your sim will start to show - the camera will zoom in on them and they'll grow a small pregnancy bump, switching into maternity clothing at the same time. They'll also begin to waddle when they walk, which is quite cute.
At this point, they'll need to stay home from work and community lots. Your sim will get 3 days of maternity leave at this point if they are employed.
The nausea and vomiting should be gone at this point, but you'll notice that their motives and needs will drop a lot quicker. You'll need to keep a close eye on them to make sure they are taken care of. Bladder, hunger, energy, and hygiene will drop very quickly, so you'll need to plan their day very carefully. Having someone around to do the cooking so they can just grab a plate is very helpful.
Your sim won't be able to exercise and participate in certain other activities while pregnant, but you'll find they have new interactions - other sims will be able to rub or listen to the pregnant sim's belly. The pregnant sim can also autonomously rub their own belly, which is quite cute. You can't make pregnant sims do it, though, unless you get this hack by Squinge.
Day 3
Day 3 is pretty much the same as Day 2, only needs drop a little bit quicker and the sim's pregnant belly will get even bigger. At the end of Day 3, your sim will give birth to their baby!
Birth
When your sim is ready to give birth, the camera will zoom in on them and they'll start moaning, clutching their belly, and huffing and puffing. If you have cinematics enabled in your game options, you'll get a cute little cutscene for the birth, and your sim will end up holding their beautiful bouncing baby.
After the baby or babies are born you'll get a popup in which you can name the offspring.
Sudden Pregnancy Death Syndrome
Occasionally, pregnant sims will suddenly and unexpectedly just drop dead, even when the pregnant sim's needs are not low enough to die. For this reason, it is strongly advised that you remember to save your game if you're getting a sim pregnant, and that you install the University Patch - note the last item on the list of fixes there.
Choosing Baby's Gender
If you want to get a baby of a certain gender, there's a couple methods for doing so. For more information, see: Game Help:Choose Gender of Babies.
Twins, Triplets, and More
There is a small chance (around 5-10%, higher if your sim is a twin themselves) that your sim will have twins. Because of this, you'll want to try to make sure that your sim gives birth with some empty space around them - after they have the first child they'll put it on the ground and have the second one, so they'll need to have room to put down the first baby.
If you have the Open for Business expansion, you can have your pregnant sim eat cheesecake, and that will make them have twins. There is also a cheat for having twins if you have Open for Business or later expansions.
The twinsrcute cheat is a myth - never worked and never will. Woohooing after pregnancy also does nothing to influence the chance of twins, and eating any foods other than cheesecake also does nothing to give you twins. It's also not dependent on birthsign or anything else but chance and the cheesecake/cheat stuff listed above, unless you are using a hack like the InSIMenator.
Triplets and quadruplets are not normally part of the game - you cannot get them without a hack. For that hack and other pregnancy related hacks, see: Content List: Hacks and Hacked Objects: Reproduction, Relationships, and Family.
Identical twins are generally impossible in the game due to the way genetics randomize - with the birth of each child the game re-randomizes genetics between the parents. Parents with very similar facial structures will tend to produce children that look very similar, so normal twins may appear pretty much identical, with slight and subtle differences that you may not be able to see in the game.
The only true identical twins possible are created by impregnating a sim with their own genetics, a self-pregnancy, that results in twins. The offspring of a self-pregnancy is always an opposite-gender clone of the parent, so a self-impregnation's twins would be identical.
Rolling the Pacifier and Firstborn Syndrome
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Sims2RPC - First-born Syndrome fix, Rich Presence & Borderless |
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There is a quirk of the way the game generates genetics that you should know about before your sim gives birth, to avoid your babies all looking the same, with the same personalities.
What is Firstborn Syndrome?
Firstborn syndrome is a result of a quirk in the way the game generates genetics for new births. When you load the game, it starts at a certain point in its "randomize genetics" sequence every time. If you have a certain family have one new baby each time you load the game, all of their children will be identical: same skintone, hair, eyes, facial features, and personality, and very similar interests. Hence, all subsequent children will be identical to your first child.
To put it another way (which may be clearer to you) the following actions will result in Firstborn Syndrome:
- Load your game.
- Load a lot with your couple you plan to breed, Sim A and Sim B.
- Have Sim B get pregnant with Sim A's baby.
- Have Sim B give birth to Sim A's baby, Baby C.
- Save and close the game entirely - shut down Sims 2.
- Load the game again.
- Without doing anything else first (i.e. without Rolling the Pacifier), load Sim A and Sim B's house.
- Have Sim B get pregnant again by Sim A.
- Have Sim B give birth to Sim A's second baby, Baby D.
- Baby D will be identical to Baby C.
Firstborn syndrome may not be noticeable in your game if you tend to have more than one child per load of the game, if you often make new sims in Create a Sim first (thereby randomizing genetics when you hit "random sim"), if you use very basic facial sculpts for your sims (as most people do!) or if the parents of your sims are very similar in appearance. However, it is occurring, and if you want to have unique children, you should Roll the Pacifier!
What is Rolling the Pacifier?
"Rolling the pacifier" is the method you use to avoid Firstborn Syndrome, giving you unique children that are not identical to your first one. Rolling the pacifier basically means to randomize the genetic sequence in your game.
You only need to roll the pacifier once per load of the game, before the sim gives birth. You can do it when the sim is already pregnant, before pregnancy, immediately upon loading and then play other lots first, or right before you go in to the lot with the sim giving birth - it doesn't matter when you do it, as long as you have done it during that load of the game.
There are several methods you can use to roll the pacifier:
- Go into Create a Family, then Create a New Sim. Click the "random sim" button (the one that looks like dice) several times.
- Go into Create a Family, then Create a New Sim. Create one adult male sim. Then create one adult female sim. Then Create a Child using those two sims and hit the pacifier button several times. This is the origin of the term "roll the pacifier" though not the easiest way.
- Use J.M. Pescado's FFS Lot Debugger to randomize genetics. It will warn you that you are going to be exiting the lot, going to the neighborhood, without saving. Let it do so and your genetics will be randomized.
If you use either of the Create a Family methods you don't need to actually save those sims - just exit to the neighborhood without saving the family. It's the randomizing through rolling up new sims that's important, not the actual creation of sims.
When do you Roll the Pacifier?
You don't need to Roll the Pacifier before the first child for a particular couple - they'll be your firstborn, and that's fine. However, you will need to roll before the birth of any subsequent children, once per play session. Let's put that a little more clearly:
- Sim A and Sim B have their first baby, Baby C. Doesn't matter if you rolled before this birth or not.
- Sim A and Sim B can now have any more babies you like during the same play session, without closing the game, and they won't be firstborns.
- After that first play session, though, if you want Sim A and B to have any further babies... before the baby is born, you'll need to Roll the Pacifier so you don't end up with a copy of Baby C. That means if you close the game and load it up again, you'll need to Roll the Pacifier before Sim A and Sim B have any more kids.
- You only have to Roll the Pacifier once per play session - before you have any babies you don't want to be firstborns. Your genetics will still be randomized if you load other families to have babies (or not) or load up other neighborhoods. It just needs to be done once after you load the game.
