All the needs were tougher to keep up on back in The Sims when it first came out, especially the Social need if your Sim lived alone. Since you needed set numbers of friends before your boss would promote you, too, being social in The Sims was essential.
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By going to the right places to meet the right people and paying attention to everyone’s interests, you can chat with like-minded Sims while safely avoiding negative social interactions (which didn’t add much to your Sim’s Social motive, anyway). Keep a Sim’s personality in mind when you stop by for a chat!
How To Meet New Sims
Before you can begin making friends in The Sims, you’ll first need to introduce yourself to other Sims nearby when you see them. Travel was a bit more limited in general in this first installment of the game, and a reliable way to find new faces to introduce your Sim to was to watch for Sims walking by out on the sidewalk. If you’re fast enough, you can head outside and say hello before they’ve walked the length of the sidewalk in front your lot and disappeared.
But with the expansion packs that came bundled in the Legacy Edition, we received community lots of varying types, and these will often be your Sim’s main way of meeting others, since they tend to be natural gathering grounds. Whether it’s the vibrant Downtown, Studio Town, Old Town, Magic Town, or the vacation islands, there are bound to be Sims there that you can go up and greet before you begin talking to them – there’s not much you can do until you say hello.
Another viable way to meet new Sims is to add other Sims to your household when you’re making the family, which not only creates additional Sims but allows you to customize their personality, which does matter when making friends and approaching social interactions. If you’re not into caring for another Sim or two, you could always make extra households to fill up the neighborhoods, which provides plenty of new Sims for your Sim to potentially meet.
Additionally, when you see one of these Sims in public, you’ll already know a bit about them and which interactions may work best based on the personalities you assigned them in the Create-a-Sim menu.
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How Do Interests Work?
You know those icons in the speech bubbles you see when your Sims are chatting, the stuff like neckties or balloons or peace signs? Those are there to indicate what your Sim is talking about at the moment, which will likely be one of their interests, and as you may expect, Sims converse most successfully with Sims that have similar interests.
When checking out your Sim’s information, their interests are measured from zero to ten, just like their skills with the notches to indicate each metric. If a Sim has less than three points toward a particular interest, talking to them about that will typically be unsuccessful, bringing up that dreaded red negative symbol. On the opposite end of the interest spectrum, Sims with more than six points of interest toward something will typically be successful, making them easier to befriend than others.
Because of this, even if you don’t know what the other Sim’s interests are, you’ll need to watch the other Sim’s reaction to different topics, since if they’re not interested in something your Sim is talking about (as indicated by the same symbol with a red X through it when they reply), the interaction will almost always cost you relationship points instead.
If you’d like your Sim to be into different things for whatever reason, reading a magazine in the Downtown neighborhood can add a point toward another interest in their Simology menu, at the cost of deducting one point from one of their current interests.
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Keep Personalities In Mind
Even once you’ve factored individual interests into the picture when you’re trying to put your Sim out there, there are still plenty of things you’ll need to remember when approaching new Sims. While they’re not quite as diverse as they’d become in later entries of the series, a Sim’s personality decides how they react to different interactions. Much like in the real world, you’ll need to take a person’s nature into consideration when deciding how to approach befriending them.
If you click a Sim’s personality traits in their Simology menus, they’ll provide a brief overview of how that personality trait impacts them in daily life, including but not limited to social situations. For the most part, it’s largely straightforward – playful Sims enjoy jokes more than serious Sims, mean Sims dislike the compliments that nice Sims respond well to, etc. Sims that are less outgoing tend to be trickier to befriend than others as well.
Regardless of how you’re interacting with a Sim, though, they’ll inevitably grow tired of repeated interactions, which means you can’t do an interaction you know to be successful five times in a row in conversation and expect that Sim to respond well each time – no matter how much you like something, too much of anything can be too much, both in real life and The Sims.
Finally, keep normal social decorum in mind when approaching other Sims, because while they may be digital dolls, they still have some boundaries. Sims tend to rebuff compliments, hugs, and tickling until you’re at least somewhat close with them, but you wouldn’t tickle someone you just met, would you?
Overall, though, you’ll often be wise to take direct control of your Sims’ social interactions so you can ensure they have successful conversations. Left to their own devices, Sims make some odd social choices from time to time and may not be able to read the room well enough to stop doing something another Sim doesn’t like if you don’t stop them. Once you’ve worked out what that other Sim likes, you can have your Sim stop wasting time on interactions that don’t work to give preference to ones that do.
Call Friends Often
While later expansions added lifetime relationships to the mix, you’ll notice that friendships decay faster in this game than they appear to in others. You’ll see a loss of a few friendship points each day, and you may even receive a phone call from that Sim if the meter sinks too low telling you they’re not your friend anymore because you’ve been neglecting the relationship.
As such, it’s not a bad idea to routinely give friends a phone call, at least every couple of days if you haven’t seen them on your lot or out in public since then. You can call any Sim that has a phone in their house (which is something to remember when you’re building), and they’re also eligible to be invited to any parties you throw. If you’ve both got the time when you ring, you could even invite them over to your house to talk a little more directly.
Parties are also a good idea, since parties bring several of your friends over at once, which means you can work on more than one relationship at a time.
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