Preparing for the big day
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 of the final social events your Sims may find themselves hosting shortly before their big day is the Rehearsal Dinner event. Here’s everything you need to know about hosting a Rehearsal Dinner.
Planning the Event
There are two ways Sims can plan a Rehearsal Dinner; through the phone and the calendar. Planning a Rehearsal Dinner 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 Rehearsal Dinner. 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 Rehearsal Dinner.
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 Rehearsal Dinner. 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 Rehearsal Dinner. 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 Rehearsal Dinners 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. Rehearsal Dinners 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 filling buffet tables, drink fountains, 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. During our Rehearsal Dinner, other Sims still showed up on the lot and crashed the dinner. It wasn’t a huge problem for us; they did not interfere with the event goals and if anything, they added to the social atmosphere but if you’d prefer to make your Rehearsal Dinner invitee-only, we recommend hosting on a residential lot.
You’ll notice that the Rehearsal Dinner is pretty much the exact same thing as the Engagement Dinner in terms of structure. Both events have the same list of activities available for them and they can both be held on all the same lot types; however, since every event type has customizable activities, you can set the two events apart by selecting different activities for them. You could also opt to have a Rehearsal Dinner but not an Engagement Dinner or vice versa.
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, such as the champagne bottles on ice and the buffet tables have group interactions on them to help you control the flow of the event. You can direct all your guests to come and make toasts or grab food to eat. 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. If you’ve just called everyone to sit down and eat, it’s best to wait until all the guests have finished their meals before directing them to make toasts, for example.
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 Rehearsal Dinner 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 scheduled quite a few activities for the Rehearsal Dinner; all the same activities we set for the Engagement Dinner, in fact, and we did not have much of an issue completing all the tasks within the given time frame. We did run into a few hiccoughs with some actions. For example, slow dancing with the engaged couple didn’t seem to complete the Dancing activity; only dancing together with the guests completed the activity. The slow dancing was also very short; the Sims would do one or two little moves and then stop dancing most of the time.
Hosting a Rehearsal Dinner, 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 Rehearsal Dinner is not something that suits your Sims, you can skip it entirely. Like we mentioned earlier, if you’ve thrown an Engagement Dinner previously, you’ve basically already had a Rehearsal Dinner and don’t necessarily need to have both events unless you plan to have different activities at each event.
