The Sims 4 My Wedding Stories: Family Gathering Guide

Presented by EA Creator Network – Software Not Final

The Sims 4 My Wedding Stories adds a total of seven new wedding and marriage-related social events. Engaged Sims can host engagement dinners, rehearsal dinners, bach parties, and family gatherings before their big day. Wedding ceremonies and receptions can be planned as separate social events instead of being lumped together. Vow renewals for married Sims are a social event now instead of just being an interaction on the wedding arch.

One social event Sims may find themselves hosting at any point during their engagement is the Family Gathering event. This event is designed to encompass any family’s pre-wedding traditions so this type of social event could look very different for everyone. Here’s everything you need to know about hosting a Family Gathering.

Planning the Event

There are two ways Sims can plan a Family Gathering; through the phone and the calendar. Planning a Family Gathering through the phone will start the event immediately. Using the calendar to plan the event will allow you to schedule the dinner for a specific date and time in the future. On the phone, select Plan Wedding Event in the social tab and select the Family Gathering. On the calendar, select the day you’d like to plan the event for. Scroll down in the left sidebar and select Add a Wedding Event then select the Family Gathering.

Invite Sims

The Invite Sims tab has two roles to fill; hosts and guests. Select all the Sims you’d like to be attending the Family Gathering. If you want friends and family of both engaged Sims to attend, make sure the Sim planning the event knows all of their betrothed’s friends and family, too. Otherwise, they won’t show up in the invite list.

Plan Activities

The next tab will let you select the activities you’d like to have at your Family Gathering. All wedding events have customizable activities so you can tailor all of your wedding celebrations to your Sims’ preferences and cultures.

The available activities to choose from for Family Gatherings are:

• Desserts
• Tea
• Drinks
• Dancing
• Have Toasts
• Celebration Feast

The activities you select are purely up to your own tastes and preferences. Choose all of them, only one of them, or an assortment somewhere in-between.

Select a Place

You can select the location and time of your event on this screen. Family Gatherings can be hosted on many different lot types. The following are all the lot types that showed up as being available for us in the venue list:

• Residential (Engaged Couple’s Residence)
• Bar
• Beach
• Café
• Nightclub
• Lounge
• Library
• Museum
• Park
• Pool
• Wedding Venue
• Chalet Gardens
• Karaoke Bar
• Island Bluff
• Ancient Ruins
• Centre Park
• Community Space

We did place a restaurant and spa down in our world just to see if they would be available venues for this event but they did not appear in the list of venues.

Hosting the Event

If you planned the event using the phone, the event will start immediately. If you planned the event through the calendar, you will receive a notification one hour before the event starts to remind you about it. If there’s any setting up that needs to be done beforehand, it’s a good idea to head to the venue an hour early to do any prep work, like steeping tea, setting out desserts, and adding any objects needed for the activities you chose.

When the event starts, you will be prompted to travel to the venue you picked if your Sims are not already there and any Sims you invited will show up. Since we’d already had a pretty formal Engagement and Rehearsal Dinner, we decided to go more low-key with the Family Gathering and just host it at our Sims’ house. If you host a Family Gathering on a public lot, other Sims may still show up to the lot during your event and mingle with your guests. If you don’t want this, we recommend hosting a Family Gathering on a residential lot.

You’ll see the typical social event goal tracker pop up in the top left corner but it works a little differently than other social events. There is no bronze, silver, and gold progress bar listed at the top and no main goal to complete; the success of the social event just depends on whether or not you are able to complete all of the activities you selected for the event.

Many of the objects tied to event activities have group interactions on them to help you control the flow of the event. You can direct all your guests to come and grab food to eat, for example. This avoids the problem of your guests all milling about aimlessly doing their own thing. Just click the object and select “Call Attendees to Activity.” If guests are currently occupied with another event activity, they may not be responsive to being assigned a different activity.

The tea set does not have a Call Attendees to Activity interaction on it but after steeping the tea, your Sims can serve the tea. During wedding events, Sims have the option to serve tea to another Sim while bowing or kneeling but tea can also be given to other Sims more casually as well. We noticed that our Sim wasn’t able to serve tea while kneeling/bowing to anyone but her father so these more formal interactions may be reserved for the parents of the engaged couple.

If you don’t know how to complete a specific activity, hover over the activity in the event goals list to get a tooltip with some helpful information on how to complete it.

Our Family Gathering did not have an event timer but it started at 5pm when we scheduled it via the calendar and ended at exactly 11pm so it seems like this event lasts for 6 in-game hours. We only scheduled two activities for the Family Gathering but we previously hosted an Engagement and Rehearsal Dinner with many activities scheduled and did not have trouble completing the activities in time. We did run into a few hiccoughs with some actions. For example, once we had served the tea, we couldn’t drag the tea set onto a different surface. Otherwise, things seemed to run smoothly for this event.

Hosting a Family Gathering, like all the other lead-up events to the wedding ceremony, is optional. My Wedding Stories is about tailoring your wedding to your own likes and experiences so if a Family Gathering is not something that suits your Sims, you can skip it entirely.