Sims 4 | Paroxysm of Giggles / Critical Mass

Last week when I started playing the Nature’s Calling event, I just took a million screenshots, and then chose a select few to illustrate my blog post. This week, I’m playing around with some video editing.

I’ve screen captured myself playing the Sims 4 Nature’s Calling event for Week 2 and put it on my personal YouTube channel. I’ll embed that below, so you can watch it if you are interested.

I haven’t done any serious video editing in quite a while (and that was in Final Cut Pro, and I’m using Adobe Premiere now), so I’m back to newbie skill level. I’m hoping that this will inspire me to edit and post more of our travel videos (since we have a 3 1/2 year backlog already!). My edits are pretty minimal in this video, although I did learn how to do my closed captioning, so I’m pretty excited about that.

Here is a link to the video I watched to learn how to do the closed captioning. Both for your benefit, and my future reference. You’re welcome!

I also got to hear all of my “so,” “like,” and “um” words…. Sooo, that’s great….

I’m sure my narration will get better the more that I do it and am aware of what I’m saying.

I played these quests a bit later in the week – because life – so the Week 3 quests should be available in just a couple days. Let me know in comments if you’d prefer I share my experience via screenshots like in Week 1, or if you prefer the video walkthrough from this week.

The screenshot method is certainly a lot quicker to do, but I feel that the video option is a bit more… personable. (And by my unpolished presentation, you can be sure that it’s not AI generated!) I captured just over an hour of gameplay (after capturing and then losing about 1/3 of the gameplay because I didn’t know what I was doing). Next, I recorded my voiceover where I narrated the gameplay events. This took the same length of time, since I did it all in one take. I used Quicktime for both the screen capture and audio recording. I think it worked pretty well, considering that it’s a free app that came pre-installed on my Mac. Editing the video in Premiere took several hours, but I got it down to about 40 minutes. It took another 40 minutes to encode. Then, I was ready to upload it to YouTube. It was 1 am at this point and said that it would take 3 hours, so I went to bed. I ended up waking up around 5 am and couldn’t resist working on it some more. I finished all of the background video settings in YouTube Studio and published it. Then, learned how to do the captions and added those. After finalizing things on YouTube, I linked it on my Facebook page, and came here to make this blog post. It’s just about 7:30 am now, so post-upload editing took me 2 1/2 hours. I’m confident that I can get my production times down as I get more competent!

I hope you enjoy, and thank you for your feedback!

The Sims is by far my favorite game. It’s the only one that I’ve played with any regularity over quite a span of years. I’ve nearly collected all of the expansion packs, game packs and stuff packs (who can keep up with all of the kits unless you’re a Sims YouTuber or Twitch streamer?) and love finding out new ways to play the game.

To celebrate the upcoming Enchanted by Nature expansion pack (dropping July 10!), EA just launched a new in-game event called Nature’s Calling, and I jumped in as soon as it dropped today.

🌿 Week 1, Quest 1: Whispers on the Wind

The first quest, Whispers on the Wind, had two required and one optional tasks. The optional tasks in this event require specific content to have been purchased for your version of Sims 4.

⚠️ Don’t skip the optional task! Once you complete the required objectives, the optional one disappears. Do it first if you want the bonus reward.

📌 Tasks:

✅ [Optional] Place a Romantic Blanket from the Lovestruck Pack on your home lot
✅ Spend time outdoors
✅ Visit any park

I bought the blanket first, and put it on the lot, then had my Sim, Linden Zamia (a plant name, of course), make herself a nice garden salad picnic and enjoy it outside (fulfilling another task).

After her picnic lunch, I had Linden go to the Isle of Volpe Park in her home neighborhood of Henford-on-Bagley. This completed the Whispers on the Wind quest and I received the Reclaimed Woodworking Table, 5,000 Simoleons, and the Odonata Glasses.

🌿 Week 1, Quest 2: Attuned to the Echoes

The Quests tab on the Rewards pop-up showed the next quest available this week: Attuned to the Echoes.

📌 Tasks:

🎣 Fish from a pond (It took me a minute to find the fishing sign by the river, and apparently a river works – doesn’t have to literally be a pond)
🌥️ Cloudgaze or stargaze
🪑 Sit on a park bench and “listen to the wind” (The picnic table by the river worked to fulfill this one)
🗣️ Ask a Sim if they “hear the whisperings” (Luckily, a nearby Sim was grilling)
🛠️ Place the Reclaimed Woodworking Table on your home lot
🪵 Craft two sculptures on the woodworking table (Linden’s handiness skill is … a work in progress)

Fishing alongside the river — Fishing in the river

Linden sitting at a picnic table in the park — Fishing in the river

When listening to the wind at the picnic table, I received this notification:

Linden using her new woodworking table — Linden hard at work making sculptures. It’s all about the skill gainz!

Once all of the Attuned to the Echoes tasks have been completed, I received the following rewards:

Handiness Vol 1
Reclaimed Wood Wall
Instant Hygiene
Touch Grass Weekly, Issue #1

⏳ What’s Next?

Once the weekly quests are done, the event window shows a countdown until the next quest set unlocks. Good news: if you’re joining late, you can still access previous weeks’ quests, and there’s a two-week grace period after the final week to catch up.