New Wishes

As soon as your Sims arrive in town, they start expressing wishes to you via the Wish panel at the bottom of the screen. In addition to their Lifetime Wish, which you selected in Create a Sim, Sims can have up to four active wishes at a time. When a Sim has a new wish, it appears in the arched bubble on top of the Wish Panel. Multiple wishes can stack up in that arched area, so use the arrows on either side to scroll through them and see what the active Sim desires at that given moment.

To promise a wish and add it to your Sim’s active wishes, left-click on the wish. To deny a wish, right-click on it. There is no punishment for denying a wish. A Sim will just forget about it—there are no grudges for canning a Gardening class wish or whatever. However, dismissing a wish doesn’t necessarily mean a new wish will immediately take its place. You may have to wait a while before your Sim conceives of a new wish. Exploring town or mingling with other Sims often encourages your Sim to develop new wishes, so if you need to nudge your Sim, get out there!

Wishes are not universal across age groups. Sims of differing ages will want different things. A child will never have a desire to join a specific career track, but instead want to be talked to, played with, or receive a new object like a toy. Teen Sims start to mingle wishes with young adult and adult Sims, although you will see slight variations on wishes—many are socially oriented, too. Because Sims can undergo personality changes as they age, some wishes do not survive the move between age groups. For example, the desire to have a baby will disappear when your adult Sim moves into the elder age bracket.

To learn more about a wish, just move the cursor on top of it. The full details of the wish appear in a box. The box explains what the wish is, what needs to happen to fulfill the wish (you can sometimes get hints here), and how many Lifetime Happiness points the wish is worth once fulfilled. Wishes with loftier or more time-consuming goals are commonly worth more Lifetime Happiness points.