Good Evening—Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays, and Happy New Year! 🎄✨
It’s kind of wild when you stop and think about it: four updates shipped since Christmas Eve, and we barely made a sound. While things looked quiet on the surface, a lot of work has been happening behind the scenes
✨ What’s New
This release delivers a strong mix of quality-of-life upgrades, backend improvements, and bigger systems we’re excited to start testing live with the community.
🏠 Welcome Lots, Reimagined (Soft Launch)
Say hello to Welcome 24/7.
Welcome lot owners now have full control over how their lots operate:
Keep your lot open 24/7, or
Open and close it on your own schedule
You can switch freely between Welcome and Welcome 24/7 with no legacy 7-day cooldown like the original TSO. This system is still being polished, but it’s ready for real-world testing and feedback.
🏡 Residential Lot Upgrades
We’ve made meaningful improvements to how lots and roomies work:
Residential lots can now hold up to 1,600 objects, regardless of roomies.
Players can now be a roomie on up to three different lots.
If you own a lot, you can still roomie at up to three additional lots.
⚠️ Important note:
If you are the last remaining roomie on a lot owned by someone else, you already own a lot, and the owner leaves, that lot will be deleted. A foreclosure-style system may come later, but for now this is the expected behavior.
🧱 Massive Content Expansion
This is our biggest upgrade yet—and it’s just the beginning:
1,000+ new objects, meshes, skins, and animations added to Volcanic
Continued development of our custom engine to read The Sims 1–era files, including custom content
Our goal is longevity: modern improvements that respect the core gameplay and values of The Sims Online.
🔄 Smarter, Smaller Updates
Big backend win here 🎉
We’ve fixed our update sequence, which means:
Future updates will be incremental (roughly 10–100 MB)
No more full client re-downloads every time an update drops
This makes updates faster, smoother, and way less annoying.
🌐 Online Dashboard & Website Update
We’re also rolling out our new online dashboard, alongside an updated website:
👉 https://www.thenewsimsonline.com
From the dashboard, you can now:
View all three of your Sims
View all three properties you own
Edit Sim bios directly
Edit lot bios directly
Move money between your Sims, directly from the website
Looking ahead, we’re aiming to bring features like city chat into the dashboard experience
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🔍 Sim Finder (Beta)
Our improved Sim Finder is live and still evolving:
👉 https://www.newso.thenewsimsonline.com/simfinder2
❄️ Seasonal Note
Winter isn’t going anywhere just yet—snow will remain in-game through February, so enjoy the vibes while they last.
🚀 What’s Next
Our forward focus includes:
Getting the full object catalog working
Writing smarter conversion tools with our own detection algorithms
Increasing object limits across all lot types
Adding more roads to Newphaville
👀 Coming Soon
✨ Magic implementation
🐾 Pet accessories
🍸 Oxygen bars
🎉 And a whole lot more fun objects
We’ve also received explicit permission from a trusted EA contact to use these files, allowing us to move forward confidently and responsibly.