I’ve never been into a pediatrician’s office to confirm this, but I’ve always suspected that in the centre of the room there’s a concrete trench beneath a metal lift. It just stands to reason that when an infant goes in for a check up, they’re plonked down on the metal frame, raised up two or three feet before the doctor goes down into the trench to inspect the baby’s fleshy chassis from below. Maxis have only poured petrol on my suspicion thanks to a section in The Sims patch notes titled: ‘Infant tuning’.

The changes are part of the upcoming patch on May 12, which bundles together a whole laundry list of fixes and changes. As well as now ensuring your sims do the basic decency of cleaning up dirty nappies, putting them into nearby bins, instead of just leaving them on the floor, Maxis have made lots of tweaks to how infants behave. (To be clear, it’s the nappies are going in the bin, not the infant.)

In what reads a little like a balance patch to Factorio, “Changing an Infant’s diaper at the Changing Table takes about a third less time than it used to.” Perhaps sim parents have been learning from the pit crews in Drive To Survive. Likewise, it will be faster to feed infants and they will get hungry more slowly. I can only assume that the bottle of milk has been swapped out for a baster, or some other high pressure pump.

In other infant related news, a frankly horrific-sounding bug has been fixed that saw some Sim parents have their children taken away even if they weren’t being neglected. After the patch is released the bug will be fixed but, tragically, Maxis say “previously removed Children cannot be restored”.

There are more than 150 fixes in the patch notes and I won’t deny I’m largely writing this post because I enjoy the mental images the fixes conjure up.

One bug saw sims caught having a secret love child or seen doing WooHoo in public being permanently labelled as scandalous. Normally the scandal label would clear once the the offense had been forgiven or used against the sim in question – though, who’s to say you can’t blackmail someone over their secret love child more than once? However, the bug saw the scandal never shifting, like a videogame recreation of The Scarlet Letter.

One final change that jumped out to me… “Sims now dance far less (about once per day)”. Now, surely that is a change for the worse.