The Sims 1 & The Sims 2 gained an increase in players when the Legacy Collection was released as part of the Sims 25th Birthday Celebration. However, despite Sims enthusiasts being eager to jump into the fun, there has been a series of technical hiccups along the way. Thankfully, many of these notable bugs and gameplay issues have been and continue to be remedies by the release of patches. As of April 3, 2025, The Sims 1 & 2 have released Patch Notes #7, fixing another series of problems.
This set of patch notes answers several problems, including the likes of Alien Baby Sims being missing from Alien Abduction, being unable to call Animal Control if the picture-in-picture window is open, and more. Other than this, there are several notable general gameplay fixes and improvements and minor tweaks to improve the user experience that you can read about below.
The Sims Patch Notes – April 3, 2025
Fixed Issues:
- General stability and performance improvements
- Various game tabs don’t use the full available window width
- Name selection for townies is not as random as it should be
- Animal Control can’t be called if the picture-in-picture window is open
- Travel loading screens are inconsistently scaled
- Using Shift + Windows + Arrow keys to move the game window between monitors doesn’t always resize as expected
- The Sim portrait camera was not always correctly positioned (already created portraits will not be regenerated)
Functionality Improvements:
- The Sims will warn users whose user names contain characters that could cause crashes
- Edge-scrolling hit zone now includes the full letterboxing area
The Sims General Notes:
- The Sims requires a Vulkan compatible GPU. Please check GPU compatibility with the manufacturer, and keep your drivers up to date.
- On some NVIDIA GPUs pixels could appear misplaced or misaligned when there is a contrast between them. NVIDIA has a driver in late February that addresses this. Please make sure your drivers are up to date.
The Sims 2 Patch Notes – April 3, 2025
Fixed Issues:
- General stability and performance improvements
- CAS Sims are clipped on ultra-wide screens
- Alien Baby Sim is missing from Alien Abduction
- A member of the Curious family would sometimes not appear in the Alien Abduction
- It is possible to queue an infinite number of actions during camera snapshot which results in a crash
- It is possible for the keyboard to lose input focus and prevent the player from entering text
- In-game UI is too small on higher resolutions (see below)
- Edge-scrolling does not work
- The UCP panel disappears after the college send-off animation
Improved Functionality:
- The Sims 2 now uses a borderless window to provide the fullscreen experience
- Improved redraw time when moving the game window from one monitor to another using Shift + Windows + Arrow keys
- The Sims 2 will now, by default, use a larger scale factor to produce in-game UI on screens larger than 1080. If a larger or smaller UI is preferred then the cheat code “uintProp uiScaleFactor” can be used to specify a preferred value. Valid options are 1, 2 or 3. The game uses “2” by default. This value can be set to be persistent in the “Graphics Rules.sgr” file located in “The Sims 2 Legacy Collection\EP9\TSData\Res\Config” (where this folder is located will vary depending on which storefront you purchased the game from).
The Sims 2 General Notes:
- Gaming performance on Intel Arc systems can be sub-optimal for games that rely on DirectX 9. Intel is continually working to improve performance on these systems, but at the time of this writing we have observed performance penalties that make us recommend caution in playing The Sims 2 on them. Please see the Patch 5 notes for more information
- When switching between Full Screen and Windowed mode with Alt+Enter, there can sometimes be a substantial delay (many seconds) while the scene is recalculated and rendered
Stay tuned for more updates on everything The Sims, and be sure to browse the site for the latest news and announcements.
