Default Sexual Orientation Override

Since I’ve decided not to follow EA in their mission to make The Sims 4 even more unplayable than it already is, here’s something people have been asking me for a while. I’ve had it in my own Mods folder for months, but never shared because it will almost certainly break every patch — it edits the CAS Client tuning to change the default sexual orientation from what Maxis has set.

UPDATES:

05/10/2025

• Updated for Adventure Awaits. I also noticed the options were resetting to the default (no romantic attraction and both sexes sexual attraction) upon entering live mode, so I applied a fix for that (requires the core library), the mod will fixup the settings in accordance with your chosen option only once, and only for the Sims who have the default settings, the first time they're instanced by the game. It will not touch the Sims you have set manually or the Sims that have been set by EA, if you want to edit those you'll have to do it manually.

The problem:

Whenever you create a new Sim — or the game generates one — their sexual orientation is, for some reason, set to:

• Romantic attraction: None

• Sexual attraction: Both sexes

This affects all newly created Sims, random townies, and all premade Sims prior to the patch that added this system. I find this setting pointless and irritating, because it often makes romances impossible (unlike the old “everyone’s bi” setup) and it messes with game dynamics in ways you won’t notice until it’s in your way.

I'm not about wasting time changing pixels "sexual orientation" as if "sexuality" mattered to bloody code, so I always forget the option even exists in cas.

The solution:

I made a tuning override to roll back the defaults to something more playable. You get three flavours, all interchangeable:

1. Default to opposite sex — All Sims will be created attracted to the opposite sex by default (unless you change it manually).

2. Default to same sex — All Sims will be created attracted to the same sex by default.

3. Default to both sexes — My preferred option, which restores the old “everyone’s bi” behaviour and removes the problem entirely.

So every ideologue, left and right of the spectrum, can get equally pissed at me giving people the freedom to set up the game they paid for to their liking instead of the group-think approved one. Only pick one, they conflict with each other.

I’ll also include instructions for editing the tuning yourself in case EA breaks this (again). Be warned: it’s fiddly and annoying to do manually.

Also, since this will conflict with other mods that remove accessories from newly generated Sims, this file applies the accessories removal too, and I'll include the same edit for pets and horses. This only means Sims in cas will not be generated with random accessories.

This is not for beginners. We're dealing with these files: client cas tuning for Human Sims and for Human-werewolf Sims. They're basically identical and each has an associated SimData file.

They determine a number of things like the chance of a Sim created in cas to be wearing makeup or accessories upon creation and which sexuality options, gender options etc. is assigned by default.

I suggest you use notepad++ with double window to edit the tuning and SimData file together because they must match.

The tuning side is pretty much plain english and rather easy to understand:

In the screenshot above the setting means that the trait "attracted to males" is given by default to male Sims, not given to female Sims, who get the unselected option instead. The trait "attracted to females" is given to female Sims, not given to male Sims, who get the unselected option instead.

The SimData file is a lot harder to navigate, but the options are the same:

1 means true, 0 means false. You can identify the trait given by the ID even if the SimData file lacks comments. The SimData file is the mirror image of the tuning so if an option is set to true in the tuning it must be 1 in the SimData file. To find the correct section I suggest using the hex of the string:

Search for the same hex in the SimData file and you'll have found the mirror section:

Set the option to mirror whatever you set in the tuning for the edit to be applied correctly.