'This isn't a one-time effort': The Sims patch set to fix over 150 of the community's most reported bugs, from making kids look more like their parents and ensuring nude Sims no longer wear hats

As I have written time and time again at this point, The Sims 4 is a mess. One that only gets more complex with every kit, game pack, and expansion that gets stuffed into its spaghetti code. EA has been making a more concerted effort to address the multitude of bugs and glitches since it introduced a more dedicated team last May, with numerous laundry list bug fixes happening over the last 18 months.

This time, the developer is looking towards the EA forums, a verifiable hive of community-reported issues. It's also a place where other players can vote on bug reports—the higher the votes are, presumably the more common/irritating the issue is. A November 4 update will see over 150 fixes coming—from the top-five most voted fixes to some rather niche squashed bugs.

EA says that since announcing it wanted to more heavily prioritise community-requested fixes back in a post back in September, it's seen a "148% jump in views and 903% surge in votes; this helped us understand what's affecting your game the most and directly shaped what we worked on for this update."

In terms of how that's shaken out for popular fixes, the most popular bug report was photos taken with the in-game camera disappearing from saves entirely, turning them into little more than black rectangles adorning Sims' walls and tables. It's a bug that was reported at least two years ago, which feels kinda wild that it's only just now being addressed.

Other top-voted bugs that'll be receiving a fix are:

• The 'Sabotage' interaction being available even when the Sim had no relevant traits or aspirations.
• Mixologists not taking drinks orders because they're too busy yapping to other Sims.
• Kids not inheriting certain facial features of their parents, like noses and mouths, even when both were the exact same Sim (this bug has allegedly been around for a decade).
• Romantic relationships decaying seemingly as a result of having a baby. Which, ouch.

Outside of the most voted, there are a multitude of base game and pack-specific fixes coming, too. Bizarrely, there are two hat-related fixes—NPCs like patients and ranch hands won't wear random hats anymore, and Sims in the nude won't be keeping their beanies on, either.

Equally strange fixes include Sims no longer using their phone while jogging or in the water, Sims putting books and food back where they belong rather than in random chests or boxes, and preventing WooHoo with the Grim Reaper from being cancelled.

My favourite fixes here, though, are two relatively small ones: a reduction in the footprint size of a number of music players, and making sure outdoor trash cans stop randomly breaking. With the former, it should make placing smaller music players much easier, rather than them sharing a similar footprint size to larger players like the Kaboom Box.

The latter has been an issue that plagues more than a few of my saves—on numerous occasions, outdoor trash cans will straight-up stop working, rendering me unable to interact with them or dump the contents of my full indoor trash cans into them. It's such a small bug that creates big frustrations, so I'm glad to finally see a fix for it.

You can peep the full laundry list in EA's forum post, with the patch set to arrive sometime on November 4. It shouldn't be the only time the developer does this, either. The post promises that "this isn't a one-time effort," adding "We're committed to addressing community-raised issues consistently, and work is already underway on the next batch of fixes planned for December and beyond."