The Sims 4 May Patch has been an update The Sims Team has been hyping up for quite a while now, boasting 150+ new bug fixes, a handful of new content, a new live event, and some new features. How does it actually stand up to those claims? A huge focus of this patch has been on fixing bugs with infants and toddlers, specifically with caregiver gameplay. These issues have been consistent problems since infants were even added to the game, fixed time and time again by mods but not properly addressed by the Sims Team until now, despite infants being added in 2023.
While the Sims 4 May Patch is mostly just bug fixes and changes, some new features or items were added to the game! These include the new live event, a new basegame infant playmat, a base layers system in Create-A-Sim, and more extensive backups for any save files, especially long-term and older save files.
Table of Contents
Features & Fixes
Lady Bridgerton’s Masquerade Ball Login Event
This new live event is running from May 12th to July 7th 2026, introducing 22+ new items inspired by the Netflix show Bridgerton, with the event itself being titled “Lady Bridgerton’s Masquerade Ball Login Event“, to align with the upcoming kits and kit bundle being released on May 14th, which are both Bridgerton inspired and licensed as well.
This is a simple login event, meaning that you don’t have any in-game goals or quests to guide any sims through. Simply login a few times throughout each week, and items should unlock. If you don’t have the time or don’t personally want to wait to have these new items in your game, modder Lunar_Britney has already created an unlock that makes the items available in-game instantly. This modder also have unlocks for previous live events!
Hello, I removed the requirement to have the event items registered, allowing everyone to access the event items. Does not register the items to your account, for that, login daily to redeem stuff. All at once redeeming will not work with this type event. pic.twitter.com/ceiapL0rOt
— Lunar 🇵🇸 (@lunar_britney) May 12, 2026
New Basegame Infant Playmat
A small addition is a new basegame infant playmat, the “Lil’Wiggle Playmat” which is priced in-game as §100.
The perfect Playmat for nap time, tummy time, wiggle time, play time. Any time is a good time for an infant on the Lil’Wiggle Playmat.
The playmat has a total of nine swatches. Three designs/patterns and three swatches per design/pattern. These include Patched Pattern, Beveled Shapes, and Sheep Patterns.
Create-A-Sim Base Layers
A Base Layers system was added for toddlers and older, adding new undergarments that function similar to tights but for a Sim’s torso. Each age group (Toddlers, Children, and Teens-Elders) have different amounts of assets, with toddlers only having two options, children having four options, and teens-elders having eight options available.
These items lay directly over the skin texture, meaning that they will appear under any top, including transparent tops or tops with rips. This is intended so that you can, per the Livestream revealing the feature, add a “pop of color” to certain tops, as well as to provide more modesty for certain tops if you would like.
While I felt that they looked a little strange with some tops, a favorite use of mine was using them to “warm up” some jackets and blazers in-game, since I like their designs but feel so weird about the sim having no visible undershirt. Now, they look actually ready for the cold weather.
Extended Day/Week/Month Save Backups
While this is something that will be more noticeable/helpful in long-term saves after this patch, backup saves and your ability to restore to certain save points has been updated to reach back much further. Instead of five random saves that do not go back that far and every save overwriting the previous, the game will now keep older saves and many more individual saves, so if anything happens, you have a wide variety of points to restore to.
Infant Changes & Experience
The part of this update most heavily advertised and shown off by The Sims Team leading up to the Sims 4 May Patch has been bug fixes and feature changes meant to make playing with infants and toddlers much more enjoyable and overall easier, especially if you like to play with autonomy on. These fixes include changes to hovertips, Infant sleeping behaviors, caregiver behaviors, the “Check infant” interaction, etc.
- Infant & Toddler Changes
- In settings, Caregiver Autonomy can now be disabled. This is not recommended, but primarily for players who want a challenge or who prefer to do all infant care manually and player-directed.
- Caregivers should no longer constantly queue to “Check Infant”, interrupting their day.
- Expanding on this, a large part of this update is to make caregivers behave more like their normal selves when caring for an infant, rather than so much of their autonomy being focused on an infant, especially when said infant is completely fine.
- The pick up & put down loop has been fixed (In most instances the Sims Team found), stopping Sims from picking infants that they just put in cribs or in high chairs or on playmats to then put them on the ground.
- Sims now clean up diapers and bottle trash created from the “Change Diaper” and “Bottle Feed” interactions quickly and autonomously.
- Feeding and changing infant’s diapers will now take less time, with diaper changing taking roughly 1/3rd of the time, and feeding taking approximately 15 in-game minutes (down from 30).
- Infant Care options in the pie menu should now appear upon the first click to avoid players constantly clicking through the pie menu just to feed and care for infants.
- Milestones related to Tummy Time will now progress much quicker to account for both regular and short lifespans. The Sims Team has said that with consistent care, these milestones should be unlocked roughly around Day 3 of the infant stage. Milestones related to Tummy Time include…
- Lifted Head
- Rolling Over to Back
- Rolling Over to Tummy
- Learned to Creep
- Learned to Sit Up (Majorly triggered by the “Practice Sitting Up” interaction, but can be earned through tummy time).
- Learning to Crawl (Majorly triggered by the “Practicing Crawling” interaction, but can be earned through Tummy Time).
If you’re not a big fan of your sims autonomously caring for infants, and you would rather keep an eye on them yourself and have full control, you can now choose to disable Infant caregiver autonomy. This will stop any autonomous behavior like feeding, bathing, changing diapers, etc. Sims will still interact with infants socially, but will not tend to their needs. Since infants cannot care for themselves, this is only intended if you want the challenge or if you prefer to control everything yourself. This feature will not stop infants from being taken away if they are neglected.
When playing with these features in a newer save, I did find that the gameplay with infants did go much smoother than it has over the last three years. I tested this on a family of six; two adults, one child, one toddler, and two infants. I didn’t run into multiple consistent issues that plagued the game prior; Caregivers constantly setting infants on the floor, checking on infants over and over, taking them out of their crib or off their playmat to put them on the floor, leaving trash everywhere after feeding or changing a diaper, etc.
My sims cared for their babies and then returned to other parts of their lives, and didn’t constantly hover over them while simultaneously being incapable of properly caring for them.
A few new additions were also added to make gameplay more understandable and obvious for players. These include hovertips over interactions to better explain them, and new thought bubbles and moodlets to explain why an infant is not sleeping.
If an infant is interrupted from sleeping by a loud noise, typically a television or radio, they will now wake up with a thought bubble that shows the offending object, and they will also gain a buff explaining why they woke up.
When choosing if you want an infant to autonomously breastfeed or bottle feed and what they prefer, the game now shows hovertips to explain them further, as these do not restrict your ability to direct sims to feed infants in a non-preferred way.
On a smaller note, infants and toddlers now get milestones when they go to daycare for the first time!
What Didn’t Work?
Outside of the main infant changes and such, one feature that was supposed to be fixed (But also did not work in the Sims 4 May Patch livestream itself) was Sims autonomously turning off the source of noise if they are woken up by it. I attempted this with radios and televisions, with both an adult and a child in separate bedrooms. Even when extremely tired, they would wake up but not turn off the source of the loud noise.
But hey, at least we now know that naps are quick and restore a little energy.
As a small side note, thank you to Sims 4 Gallery User @elizabethterrio, who created the “Wonderwood Wonder” build I used to play this family!
How are you feeling about the new patch? Have you run into new issues, or do old issues that should’ve been fixed still persist? Let us know, and also make sure to report them to the Sims Team directly on the EA Forums, or look for your issue and upvote another thread! We’ll keep you in the loop with any new patches and assets, so follow The Sims Community for more!
