The Sims 4: Dream Home Decorator game pack introduces the Interior Decorator career. At last, Sims are able to take a more active role in shaping their homes — and since most Sims players have been casting themselves in the role of architect and interior designer for years, it’s a way to bring both major gameplay styles together for the first time in this generation of the franchise.
- About the Interior Decorator career in The Sims 4
- How to get started in the Interior Decorator career in The Sims 4
- Interior Decorator gigs in The Sims 4
- The Client
- Performance and Reputation
About the Interior Decorator career in The Sims 4
The Interior Decorator career is a profession, or active career, in The Sims 4 (like the careers added in the Get to Work and Get Famous expansions). This means that you have the option to accompany your Sims to their place of work and control their actions throughout the work day. It also means that there are no branching career paths: instead, all Interior Decorators advance through the same ten promotion levels.
It’s currently unknown which Discover University degrees will aid your Sim in climbing the Interior Decorator ranks. However, my money’s on Art History due to the fact that it’s the only one which combines visual design and communication skills, and we know you need both for this career. I’ll be sure to check back and confirm one way or the other once I know for sure.
How to get started in the Interior Decorator career in The Sims 4
To join the Interior Decorator career, use your Sim’s phone and go to Careers > Find a Job > Professions (optional filter). Scroll down until you see the option for Interior Decorator, then click the tick button to accept the job.
However, this is where things get a little bit different. The Interior Decorator career functions somewhere halfway between a classic profession (like Doctor, Scientist, or Detective) and one of the freelance careers that have been added to The Sims 4 through various update patches and DLC over the years.
Instead of being assigned a work schedule, with days off and shift patterns decided for you, you need to seek out gigs for your Sim and manage their time without that structure. If you’ve already played Get Famous you’ll be familiar with this style of gameplay, as it’s shared with the Actor career.
On your Sim’s career panel, there’s a button in the top right corner with an icon of a clipboard inside it. Click on this to see the list of available gigs.
You can choose to filter this list for residential or commercial projects, as well as for gigs that require additional building or just interior renovations.
At first, you won’t have very many gigs to pick from. However (unlike in the Actor career, for example) you will be able to see greyed out options that are locked due to your current experience and reputation.
You’ll also be able to see the client’s name, the type of renovation they want, their budget, and a brief description of the goal (i.e. “Fabulous Living Room Renovation”). There’s also your Sim’s eventual pay, their start date, and the deadline for completion.
Simply click on a gig in the panel to take it.
Interior Decorator gigs in The Sims 4
Once you’ve accepted a gig, it will be added to your Career panel. Note that like all gigging careers in The Sims 4, you can only have one active gig at a time.
All gigs have a start time and a completion deadline. For Interior Decorators, all gigs last 12 in-game hours, starting at 9am and with a deadline of 9pm the same day. During an active workday, it’s possible to extend the timer once to give yourself a couple of extra hours, but that second end time is a hard deadline with no further room for negotiation.
Like the other active professions (and the Paranormal Investigator freelance career), you’ll be given a choice at the gig’s start time: accompany your Sim to work, or send them alone. Doing the latter will result in your Sim going to an ordinary workday off-screen — they’ll still gain experience and bring home the same pay, though I’ve observed it’s impossible to get a promotion when sending a professional Sim to work alone.
Plus, clearly the whole point of the Interior Decorator career is player micro-management. Really the only reason not to accompany them is because you have another active professional Sim in the same household who needs your attention.
When you arrive at the client’s location, you can visit the Career tab again to view the Gig Tasks checklist. Again, this will be familiar to anyone who’s played with The Sims 4’s active professions, freelancer careers, or Island Living’s odd jobs before. These are the tasks that you need to get done before the gig can be considered complete.
However, there’s a few other considerations for an Interior Decorator to bear in mind, and they have to do with the client.
The Client
Below the gig details and above your task checklist is another section brand-new to the Interior Decorator career: the Client section.
To begin with, it shows three circles with question marks in them. In order to carry out the renovations for the gig to the highest quality, you should talk to the client to fill these circles with their Likes and Dislikes.
Using the Get to Know interaction is a good way to build rapport, but be sure to ask directly about their favourite colours and design styles. Asking about their hobbies is a good idea too, as client will react to objects that relate to the skills they like (or don’t like) to practice.
The client will also tell you a few things they don’t like, so be sure to avoid those or risk lowering your score for the gig.
Which brings us neatly to the other aspect of client management: the Reveal. This is an interaction used by an Interior Decorator shows off their work to the client, reality show-style. Their reaction will be based not only on how well you matched their requirements, but will be strongly influenced by their Likes and Dislikes.
As long as you complete your Gig Tasks on time you’ll likely see your Career Performance increase. However, don’t dismiss a client’s preferences, as these can impact on your Reputation.
Performance and Reputation
There’s one career feature that’s so far unique to Interior Decorators: a second progress bar.
For every other career in The Sims 4 (and indeed in most Sims games before it), you’ve had a Performance bar measuring your progress. High performance means a promotion is on the horizon, while poor performance might mean demotion or even outright firing if you don’t take steps to improve it.
Interior Decorators are still measured on their performance, but they also have to manage their Reputation. This is completely separate from the social reputation system introduced in Get Famous, and relates solely to how well regarded they are as a professional.
The key difference here is that there’s some room to “fail” certain requirements of the gig — negatively impacting your performance — while actually improving your reputation. A good example would be going a little way over budget, but producing something the client really responds well to. If they decide that you spending those extra couple thousand Simoleons was justified by the results, they’ll sing your praises even though you didn’t quite hit the spec.
Conversely, fail to suss out a client’s dislikes and you risk your reputation taking a hit, even if your performance was perfect on-paper.
Obviously in an ideal world, you stick to the description and please the client so that both bars go up — but anyone who’s done creative work for clients will surely relate to the compromise.
The post The Sims 4 Interior Decorator career beginner’s guide | Gigs, Clients, Reputation explained appeared first on VG247.
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