Life stage activities and celebrations
Generations adds gameplay tied to each phase of a Sim's life. Children can play dress-up, build sandcastles, bounce on spring rides, and bond with imaginary friends that emerge from special dolls. Scouts, ballet, and school field trips with souvenirs round out the childhood experience. Teenagers deal with mood swings, attend prom, throw unsupervised house parties, take driving lessons, and pull pranks like booby-trapping toilets and rigging showers with dye.
Young adults and adults can throw bachelor and bachelorette parties, plan larger weddings, and face mid-life crises that push them to change their look or make impulsive decisions. Elders gain canes for getting around. The expansion also brings back a dating system with interactions like gift-giving and stargazing.
Boarding schools, chemistry, and daycare
Five boarding schools let players send children and teens away for specialized education, including military school, prep school, and art school. Each school can influence the traits a Sim develops when they age up.
A chemistry set tied to the Logic skill introduces potion making. Potions have practical effects, from pranking other Sims to turning imaginary friends into real household members. A home daycare profession lets Sims earn money by watching neighborhood children.
New traits, objects, and lifetime rewards
Two new traits arrive with Generations: Nurturing and Rebellious. Build mode gains bunk beds, treehouses in three themes (space rocket, wooden shack, and princess), spiral staircases, seesaws, and slip-n-slides.
New lifetime rewards include the Motive Mobile, which fills needs while traveling, and the Hover Bed. A memories system records milestones like first kisses and driving tests so Sims can review them as home videos on their television.
The patch 1.22 update released alongside Generations introduced per-age-stage lifespan sliders and the shared memories system. For background on the pack's development, see what EA's 2011 pre-release interview revealed about the expansion.