Sims 4 patch finally lets you silence your phone and cut down on unwanted notifications

A new Sims 4 patch takes direct aim at one of the game's most persistent annoyances — the constant flood of notifications and unsolicited calls that pile up the more expansion packs you have installed. The headline change is a suite of new options for managing in-game alerts.

You can now silence your sim's phone entirely, and festival notifications can be toggled individually per pack. Several specific nuisances have been patched out: freelancer sims no longer get career calls for jobs they're not in, the Grim Reaper will only attempt to recruit sims already tagged as macabre, and sims standing on your front lawn won't ring you up to ask about your childhood. The update also ships with over 70 bug fixes — romantic partners created in CAS won't randomly turn into siblings anymore, doors and windows should clip less frequently, and the gallery UI has been cleaned up.

The Sims 4 has been a free-to-play base game since 2022, but its sprawling library of expansion packs, game packs, and stuff packs means long-time players are running dozens of overlapping systems at once. Notification overload has been a community complaint for years, so giving players granular control over alerts is a meaningful quality-of-life move rather than just a cosmetic fix.

The patch notes, as is tradition with The Sims 4, make for an entertainingly strange read — a reminder that simulating human life throws up some genuinely weird edge cases. Players who want to dig into every fix can check the official update blog for the full list.