Leading a New Life

When you dive into Create a Sim, you have complete control over the physical appearance of your Sim and can deck him or her out in any number of outfits. Frumpy? Flashy? The choice is yours.

But there is so much more to a Sim than the clothes, the number of wrinkles, or the hairdo. What makes a truly lasting impact on your new Sim is how you designate and develop their personality.

Before exiting Create a Sim, you give your Sim up to five traits that are the building blocks of their personality. But it doesn’t end there. Traits lead to wants and desires.

How you indulge these wishes also affects your Sim’s well-being, measured by their current mood. Use this section to learn all about shaping personalities, weighing wishes, and managing mood.

The happier you make your Sim, the more rewarding life is on both sides of the screen.

Personality

The fifth tab of the Create a Sim tool is where you determine your Sim’s personality. If the Sim is a young adult or older, you may assign five traits that define their personality.

There are more than 60 traits to choose from in the Create a Sim tool—and not all of them are positive. For every Ambitious trait, there is the Loser trait.

Traits affect your Sim’s lifelong wishes and goals as well as their core personality. The selections you make here stick with your Sims for the remainder of their lives (well, there is actually a way around this...but more on that later).

Choose carefully because these traits have far-reaching effects on all aspects of life, from how the Sim functions in a social situation to how they like to spend quiet time at home—if at all.

Your trait choices also affect your Sim’s Lifetime Wish. The Lifetime Wish is the big dream your Sim hopes to grab. Depending on the combination of your traits, you have five different Lifetime Wishes to choose from.

There is no obvious mathematical formula for determining which traits combinations result in which Lifetime Wishes you are offered, but common sense plays into it.

Selecting the Bookworm trait makes it more likely your Sim will be offered the Illustrious Author Lifetime Wish.

Traits

There are 63 possible traits to choose from in The Sims 3. Traits include personality triggers such as Brave, Frugal, Loner, and Unlucky.

They range from positive to negative with a handful of relatively neutral traits somewhere in the middle.

Because these five traits not only make up the core of your Sims’ personality but also affect what Lifetime Wishes are available to them, consider how they might factor into the kind of life you’d like to live inside The Sims 3.

Lifetime Wishes

At the very end of the Create a Sim process, you select a Lifetime Wish for your new Sim. This wish is the Sim’s main goal in life—it is the dream that ultimately defines them.

While you do not necessarily have to play the game strictly to satisfy these wishes, they do give you some structure. Plus, fulfilling a Lifetime Wish rewards your Sim with Lifetime Happiness points—a lot of them.

Lifetime Happiness points are a currency that your Sim banks when you help them satisfy smaller wishes or maintain high spirits.

While you can amass a lot of Lifetime Happiness points by fulfilling the day-to-day wishes and making sure your Sim is consistently happy, there is no bigger payout than the Lifetime Wish.