I like to use the Freezer Clock in case I need to pop into someone else's lot for a few minutes (for example, Tara Kat to sell her kittens to other playables, I freeze the time, sethour to 9am, teleport the other Sim in, use the debugsocial to make sure they accept the sale, teleport them and the kitten away, and then sethour to 6am again).

I play college students through one semester per rotation, and everybody else through one day, usually ending around 9 or 10 am, when the car pool comes. If a Sim doesn't start work until the afternoon, or is staying home with the kids, I'll finish when they've had breakfast and settled down to a task.

I usually play shopping districts first, then downtown, then colleges, then the main hood, starting in the bottom left corner and working clockwise. Sometimes a Sim will get played twice in one rotation, if they start or leave college, or if they move house. This doesn't bother me because, realistically, not everyone lives for exactly the same length of time anyway. It also doesn't bother me if they're not all on the same day/in the same season -- on the contrary, if I'm starting a new hood, I tend to move in one or two families at a time so that they're not all aging up on the same day.

Like others, I play a 1 day, 6 am to 6 am rotation. I've tried longer, but it's not my style at all. The only exception that I will make for interrupting the rotation is if a female pixel is pregnant and due to deliver after 6 am-it doesn't happen very often, as I have the 18 hour pregnancy hack and I time it down almost to the exact hour when she will. In most cases she does give birth early in the morning, and time drags for both me and them because she's wide awake (giving birth does that) and it takes a bit to make her tired before I close out the house for the day's rotation.

How I start-with the very first family and work my way through every one in the order they were created (according to SimPE). In fact, most of the time I number the lots in SimPE with the same number and name of the resident-ie, "#1, Mortimer Goth", and so on for the lot sync timer. The lot sync timer is so crucial to my play style that every house has it installed before anyone resides there-I try to keep it synchronized very tightly, so as to not throw things out of joint.

I don't use the seasons for any real purpose-they're not markers of any sort, except to keep the sunburn lotion on hand during summer, and winter does not exist in the neighborhood-I dislike it in real life, and pixels probably wouldn't either.

As to how I play-because I have Chris Hatch's 'half-speed' mod, I can enjoy the day with the family I play-noting down any special events on a separate application, which I save when I'm done with that particular day. I also have a program, "Keep Note" that details every family, every event that I've noted for posterity with those notes I made.

Why I play this way: It's because I like to view this as a play (or soap opera) in progress, with no real script to go by. The pixels provide all the entertainment, I just (usually) sit back and watch the mayhem as it unfolds. This also gives me a view into how some relationships develop or change over time, and why some events happen.

I wouldn't recommend this to everyone-because I can only play a couple or three families at a sitting. Any more, and I'd get buried with various details. This way I can sort of plot what I want to happen (which is sometimes upended) vs what will happen. I don't do much directing for them, as the pixels are getting better at taking care of themselves-although they do have to be reminded to water the garden and clean the house-otherwise they're on their own.

Just don't use Chris Hatch's 'speed' mod with Community Lot Time or it will bork the time, aging and motives of all the sims on any lot you load even once it's removed.

I used to play 1 week rotations, Sunday morning to Sunday morning. For whatever reason I got into the habit of saving at 2am (except if there were ghosts around). It felt like the right amount of time for me and with BoilingOil's Slow Aging Controller it didn't eat up too big a chunk of my sims' lifespan. If I had anyone at Uni, I would play a full year at the end of playing the main hood. The change came when I started using Squinge's College Pack mod. I found I had a lot of trouble keeping track of what day any YA-only household was on, so I switched to a Season to Season rotation instead. I'm not terribly fond of it, as it feels too short. But at the time I didn't want to extend my seasons to 7 days. Now that I'm using Almighty Hat's Proportional Age mod, I may do so, since a 7 day season might not feel too out of place.

I play in rotations for a week at a time, from Monday to Monday at midnight. I play households in the order that they were created, and I keep track of them using the same spreadsheet I use to track everything else in my BACC.

I do sometimes play out of order. I sometimes get too bored with very large families (and I modded out the 8-sim limit so some are quite large) to play for a full week. So I just switch to some other household instead. I just make sure each one completes the current rotation before playing it further.

I prefer to move sims out a few hours after the start of a new rotation so they don't lose any time when they start on their new lot.

College is played in two rotations, the first being the freshman and sophomore years and the second the junior and senior and the semester after they graduate, should they stay for it. Sims who go to college do so the day after they grow up from children. This keeps ages in sync, and it also means that sims can be teens or young adults, but not both.

I use a seasonal rotation, with the normal EAxis length seasons. As I don't keep many notes, this enables me to keep track of where I am in my rotation, since by hovering over each household I can see what season they are in. I usually play to 7 a.m. after the season change, so the household is saved in the daylight. If the season changes during the day, I finish the rotation as soon as I notice.

I play seasonal rotations. I keep track of my rotations with a spreadsheet in word. As a rotation goes on, I color code the households that I still need to play so it's easy to see which ones I should focus on. I don't play households in any specific order, just whatever one I feel like that day. But once a household crosses to the next Season, I have to get through the other households before I can continue that one. But I'm not super strict, if I really want to keep playing that household I might play the next season too. Or add days to their existing season to give myself more time with them. If I remember to turn off aging I do, but more often than not I forget to. I'm not overly bothered with ages being exactly right down to the last day. Hadn't even thought about that moving Sims between households without households being on the exact same day of season means they age differently compared to old and new household members. Just as long as people don't age up before someone that was born before them, I'm okay with it.

I'm also not bothered about syncing up days between households. I am picky about each household individually and what day they are on, but doesn't bother me if house A enters summer on a tuesday and house b on a friday. Each household stays in sync with their own weekdays, so if they move on a thursday I use day setter to make them arrive on thursday in their new home. And if it's an apartment, I refund them part of the rent for that week since they don't live there a full week. And naturally I also make sure they are on the same day of the season as they were in their last home.

If there is a special event of some sort that would cause memories in more than one family, I either play them all until they are on the same day before I let the special event happen, or I use SimPE to move the memory to the correct place in their memory panel. Usually the latter, because I tend to not remember that someone will be born that rotation, or that someone ages up.

I could never play 1 day rotations. It takes me a day or two to really get in to a household, so having to move on all the time would take all the fun out of it for me. I used to be the kind of player that played one household for months and then getting bored and never looking back. I like playing rotations, but I need more time with each family to find it enjoyable. Though winter rotations do tend to become a bit of a drag, because in my hood winters are 7 days long. Spring is 5, and summer/autumn is 6. You'd think one day more won't make that much of a difference, but you really notice it.

Seasonal here, too. I used to play until an age event (aging up, birth, death), but that didn't keep my seasons intact, and it gave me an incentive to cheat an unnecessary birth in families I didn't really enjoy (looking at you, Ramiswamis). But, someone here was talking about seasonal play, and I thought about five strict days and the joy of keeping my whole hood in season, just in case I ever became someone else and was more diligent about decorating the hood view.

As for how I play, it's kind of evolving, I think. My custom hoods are pitiful. I have ten houses in each and they are usually in a row or square so I can just go from to the other. But, I'm thinking of the logistics of playing according to my log, in a sort of alphabetical method. I don't know how that would work, though, and I have to really think about it before mucking up my hood rotation (OCD you know). I wouldn't be able to sleep if I did it wrong. I'm not kidding.

As for uni, I have the one day per semester mod, and, again, I play one season. But my unis are hard (I don't care for uni and most of my students fail out).

I handle moving sims by just doing it. They move in and out during regular rotational play. In Monopoly (communist hood) there are seasonal taxes which occur every Sunday morning. If the household didn't earn enough to pay, they are assigned a room mate. So, someone moves in on Sunday. Marriages and move ins in other hoods occur whenever.

In Downton, whenever the handmaids start, I expect flurries of move ins at any point during the season. My uber hood. which is where the inhabitants of planet Earth moved when the solar flares hit, has no rules regarding move ins.

I tend to move my families around a lot, and they move at the end of each season, if they are moving.

I am probably the worst rotational player on earth. All I can say is that I start at one point and then continue to the next one when I feel like it - and over time I did get through all 152 households in Black Rock Moutain. At least once! Some of my families are more background characters to me, although if I need a teen to send to Uni to fill up one of my 6-dorm rooms (with only playable students), they may suddenly find themselves in the spotlight

Oh, I do, from time to time, get through all of the families in the 3 (my own custom) subhoods too.

I don't think there's a "worse" way to do it, so long as you're having fun. What works for me obviously wouldn't work for everyone and vice versa. If your method works for you, then it's good!

<SIMelissa's jaw drops!> 152 households!!! I don't think I've ever had more than 20 households at any given time. Truly, I am impressed!

I currently have 14 households in my Four Corners-Bitville, which is actually quite a lot less than it started with, because the majority of sims (including every single sim in Bitville) started out as single-sim households. Of those households, I control 12 and my husband controls 2. It's currently my biggest hood and undoubtedly the largest I've ever played in rotation.

It must be so much fun to play with someone else like that. I wish my cats would learn to play.

Like some here have mentioned already, I started playing with a rotational style after a lot of the households in my previous install of the game were horribly out of proportion, age-wise. (There would be great-great-grandchildren and their great-great-grandma would still be an Adult!)

Starting off on a brand new household on the standard Monday morning, I play till Wednesday morning at 1:00-2:00AM. (Each roation ends around that general time, excluding late night births, so all I have to do on the next play through is just speed 3x till it's wake-up time.) Next rotation, Wednesday till Friday. After that, Friday till Sunday. And since it ends on an odd day, it then goes to Sunday-Tuesday, Tuesday-Thursday, Thursday-Saturday and then Saturday-Monday. Then we're back to the original Monday! And it goes from there.

I generally rotate based on the location of the lots. I start on one edge of the map and make my way around. Really, though, it doesn't matter who I play first, since they are all on the same days and season. So every once and a while, I will switch it up a bit.

If I move Sims around to another household, I will generally use a mod to change the day (Day Setter or Sim Manipulator) to whatever day of the rotation the rest of the hood is on. I don't worry too much over things being perfectly matched up, though.

As far as Sims going to college, I play them through two semesters that counts as one "rotation." (So Rotation 1 would be Freshman year, Rotation 2 would be Sophomore, etc.) The main hood rotates, then I go to uni and play the two semesters, then back to the main hood for another rotate, to simulate "time passing" back in the main hood.

It certainly has its good points. But it also has a downside, like recently when all my houses were on the last day of Fall and I was like, "Hon, you really need to play your houses so we can transition the hood into Winter," but one of his households was stuck on their honeymoon so it took forever and he didn't want to send them home early because they hadn't learned the hula yet. Or when he says, "You need to go make your sim become best friends with my sim, because I'm too lazy to make my sim put in the effort."

When I first started my hood, I rotated households, but as the generations went on, it got to be too much to keep track of all those households.

I have an Excel file with all my playables by name, as well as their life stage in birth order (I checked SimPE's numbers). I hop around households to keep the aging in (relative) order. (The file is also color-coded by family lines, subhood and a few notes like possible future partners and whether or not I plan to send them to college.)

Where I choose to play is random. Sometimes I'll want to play university, sometimes I'll want to play certain households, or start a relationship between sims, or send a family on vacation. Sometimes I'll have 5 pregnant sims give birth back to back so I only have to use the Batbox rerandomizer once. Currently one of my elder sims is next to die, so I just had a wedding for her daughter and another daughter gave birth so she could be there for it. Last year, I had a flu outbreak that infected- I swear- half my hood, so I went around playing households so I could cure enough of them, because it made the game such a pain to play. (This is why vaccinations are important.) But I do keep them all in aging order.

I've thought about synching the seasons a little better so I could have lot visitors in seasonally appropriate clothes or decorate my community lots for the holidays, but I haven't committed to that undertaking yet.

Paying close attention to syncing really kills my drive to play the game so I go by seasons and ages of the children. I really want it to be a tight knit community for better or worse, so if someone just had a baby but everyone else is at toddlers, I play that house until they've got a toddler. When a toddler ages to child, I play the other houses until their toddlers are children. The only rotational thing I care about is keeping the generations on the same wavelength.

I play from Monday at 9am to Monday at 9am. If sims have move out at a different day for whatever reason, they move into small, temporary apartments (I have the no20khandout hack from MATY, so they always move into small apartments first, anyway) and I play them until they catch up with everyone else. Then they move out and back in, so they're on the same day as everyone else. I started with just one family and the BACC challenge really started in generation two, so to keep track of households, I'll play every generation two sims' family tree in order of birth, if that makes sense.

Wow you guys are so strict! (compared to me ). I just play whatever I feel like, no order, no specific rotation and so on. I don't really care if Dina who married Mortimer got older and Nina still is an adult.
As long as you have fun playing - play the way you want!

You have just upset my OCD.

Seriously though. That's great! I love it when people say they just play whatever family they feel like. I would worry about the ones I wasn't playing. They have feelings, too, you know.

Can I ease your pain by saying my download-folder is a absolutely OCD dream, Now we talking structure!
I have different folders for different hoods - all strict organized.

My sims never does the things I want them to do.. so they can have a little pain!

And my downloads folder is a NIGHTMARE. The paradox of OCD is that if it can't be perfect, the person usually gives up and it becomes the messiest of messy. Consider that OCD is very common for people who are hoarders (as I am), and you will understand it.

when I first discovered cc, I was only going to get a couple of things I really needed, so I didn't need to bother with strict organization. But now, ay yi yi.

My biggest problem with not playing rotationally is that I'd worry what the other households were doing and if it would affect them negatively.

Plus the fact that I couldn't see the out of balance aging thing very well-I hated that Bella would still be an adult and her kids were elders. Against my better judgement I aged down the Oldies, but they'll still be older than Mary Sue.

Balance, balance!

It's not the balance thing for me. I can just make up something to account for it. It's the fact that deep in my heart I really think I'm hurting their feelings if I don't play them.

It's part of my OCD. I used to have to play with my toys an equal amount of time, too. And I had to use color crayons in order. I would get bad grades on coloring because I couldn't color things the way they were supposed to be. For example, I couldn't color the pig pink if it was the blue crayon's turn to be used.