In The Sims 4 Cottage Living, your Sims can meet and befriend a variety of wild animals, like bunnies, foxes, and even birds! Becoming friends with these animals offers your Sims several different perks and benefits, particularly when it comes to protecting your home from fox heists!
Read on to learn more about wild foxes!
Meeting Wild Foxes
If your Sims want to meet wild foxes, they can find them running around all over Henford-on-Bagley. If you want to meet wild foxes outside of Henford-on-Bagley, you’ll have to assign the new Wild Foxes lot challenge to your lot in other worlds.
Wild foxes do not have an object they return to, like bunnies and wild birds so you’ll just have to keep an eye out for them roaming around the area.
Once you find a wild fox, it’s best to avoid most interactions at first. The fox won’t trust you and all socials are likely to fail. Instead, have your Sim watch the fox until you’ve built up a bit of a relationship with it. At least a quarter filled friendship bar is recommended before trying to attempt other socials.
Socializing with Wild Foxes
Once the fox trusts you enough, you can start trying out other socials with it. There are various conversation socials, both mean and friendly. You can see which interactions are mean and which ones are friendly by the icon next to it. Your Sim can also sing to the fox which is a social with an adorable new animation.
Singing to the fox can have good or bad results. When the interaction is successful, the fox will howl along and sing with your Sim. When the interaction fails, the fox will cower and growl at your Sim.
You can also name foxes by clicking on them and dress them up in various outfits obtained from the Creature Keeper in the Bramblewood. This can be a good way to differentiate foxes you’ve befriended from foxes that are still strangers.
Foxes are more of a pest than anything else. They aren’t particularly helpful like the bunnies and birds and will make life difficult for you. They will attack and kill any bunnies on the property, which is not only sad but also frustrating if that bunny was helping you in your garden. They will kill your chickens, too. Foxes will also sneak into the chicken coop and steal your eggs. There are various countermeasures you can take against foxes, such as installing a fox alarm on your coops and owning llamas or dogs as pets. Llamas will spit at foxes trying to harm your livestock and dogs will chase foxes away from the property for you. You can also shoo them away yourself.
A chicken coop with a fox alarm installed. The alarm goes off and scares away the fox when it attempts to get into the coop.
Another way to get foxes to leave your livestock and eggs alone is by befriending them. Once your Sim becomes Good Friends with a wild fox, you can ask it not to steal from you. Each wild fox has its own individual relationship with your Sim so if you really want your home protected, you’ll have to do this for each individual fox in the area.
Gifting the Foxes
Another good way to build a relationship with wild foxes is to bring them presents. Many different things can be given to wild foxes as gifts. You may have more gift options depending on which add-on packs you have installed. Here are the different types of items that can be gifted to wild foxes:
- Flowers
- Fish
- Farmed Insects (Eco Lifestyle)
- Eggs
- Drinks
- Cross-Stitch
- Canned Goods
- Books
- Wool
- Wooden Sculptures
- Wild Insects (Outdoor Retreat)
- Veggie Meals
- Produce
- Paintings
- Milk
- Meat Meals
Each fox has its own gift preferences and it’s largely trial-and-error figuring out those preferences. Your Sim will just have to try gifting it many different types of things to discover what it likes. You don’t need to be scared of gifting the wrong item, though; we found that giving a fox any gift would increase relationship slightly, even if it was a gift it didn’t particularly like. Liked and loved gifts provided the biggest relationship boost, however. Sims with the Animal Enthusiast trait have a slight advantage when it comes to gifting wild animals; they have the ability to Discover Gift Preferences on wild animals.
Once your Sim has gifted the fox, you will see a thumbs down, a thumbs up, or a heart next to that category of items the next time you try to gift it. This reminds you of the fox’s preferences you’ve discovered so far so you don’t have to commit it to memory. Each fox has a set of disliked gifts, a set of liked gifts, and one favourite type of item. Once you discover a fox’s favourite gift, it will be listed on its info panel when you hover over the fox.
Wild foxes can also give your Sim gifts. If you’ve built up a friendship with a fox, you can sometimes receive a gift from it when you click on the Gifting social category. Sims can receive many different types of items from wild foxes, including animals treats and food.
Benefits of Wild Fox Friendship
The only real benefit to befriending foxes is to convince them to stop being aggravating pests. They don’t do anything to help you like the bunnies and birds do. Unless you really want the occasional gifts they can bring you, it’s probably a lot easier and faster to just own a llama or a dog or have coop alarms installed to keep the annoying critters away from your property.
