Sims 4 Cheat Sheet Shows Which Game Packs Are Worth The Money

Let’s face it: The Sims 4 has too many expansion packs. No matter how you feel about each individual pack, including the upcoming Enchanted by Nature, you have to admit that the sheer number and constantly ballooning cost of Sims DLC makes it confusing and inaccessible. If you’re a new player, it can be difficult to jump right in – while you’ll almost certainly want to start with more than just the base game, it’s almost impossible to tell from store listings which of The Sims 4‘s 80-plus DLC is actually worth the price of admission.

To help you decide, Reddit user UnstoppableUnicorn666 has compiled a comprehensive list of all The Sims 4‘s expansion packs, breaking them down by various figures in order to determine which are most worth your money. Each of the 16 expansion packs is listed by the buy items, build items, debug items, liveedit items, wallpapers, floors, and gameplay items included. A column for “lies of items” also appears, comparing the number of items the expansion pack is advertised as having to the number of items it actually has, eliminating duplicate items (e.g., special variants of hanging mirrors that are designed to work on different wall shapes).

Sims 4 Packs Have Wildly Different Contents

How The Biggest & Smallest Expansions Compare

The result of their findings was that Sims 4 expansion packs have a wildly varying number of items included. The biggest expansion pack, by these metrics, is Get Together, with 311 items total – although Get To Work has more items in its regular catalog, Get Together speeds ahead with its 60 liveedit items. However, it’s also the expansion pack with the biggest number of “lies,” with 35% (or 125) duplicates.

Cats & Dogs actually has a bigger proportion of duplicate items, with 36% – but since it’s a smaller expansion pack, that only amounts to 119 total items.

It’s worth noting that duplicates don’t affect the advertised size of expansion packs all that much – those that are advertised as including more items than others often still do, even after the spreadsheet accounts for duplicates. The big outliers here are Get Famous, which includes 274 items, of which 80 are duplicates, and Eco Lifestyle, which includes 183 items and a whopping 85 duplicates – 46% of its total catalog.

Sims 4 Packs With Fewer Items Might Still Have Great Gameplay

Different Players Might Find More Value In Other Expansion Packs

A cool good looking Sim with an apartment full of build buy items from the Sims in the background — Custom Image by Akshay Bhalla

While it’s fascinating to see the numbers broken down this way, these figures really only stem from one person’s way of looking at Sims expansions. The spreadsheet prioritizes items included over all else, which, if you’re a frequent builder, will be important when deciding which expansion to buy.

Sims 4’s Free Base Game Update Finally Fixes The Most Annoying Problem

Inventory management somehow got worse over the years as more and more packs were introduced, but the new base game update addresses that.

However, the post also notes that sometimes the smallest expansions also have the biggest impact on gameplay. The DLC with the lowest number of items – Seasons – also has the highest number of gameplay items at 15. Eco Lifestyle, with the highest number of duplicates, has 12 gameplay items. And even those expansions that don’t include many gameplay items may introduce a ton of new gameplay features, so really, you’ll want to read up on what’s actually included before you commit to a Sims 4 expansion based on item number alone.

Source: UnstoppableUnicorn666/Reddit