How to plan a funeral in The Sims 4 Life & Death Expansion Pack

Funerals are a large part of The Sims 4’s Life & Death Expansion Pack, so you’ll need to know how you can plan one following a Sim’s demise.

As a life simulation game, death has always been a part of The Sims since the first installment of the franchise. For a while now, this has been a very ‘one and done’ type of experience — and there’s never been much that Sims can do following a passing.

That changes in the Life & Death expansion, allowing you to plan a funeral for your beloved Sims. And while the process can be pretty confusing at first, we’ll walk you through the steps needed to give your Sims a memorable send off.

How funerals work in The Sims 4 Life & Death

Funerals in The Sims 4 Life and Death pack involve three main steps: Planning, attending, and gameplay that comes after the funeral itself.

• The first step is planning, which will require you to select a specific date, time, place, and so on. 
• The second step is attending the funeral, which is treated like a limited-time event.
• Lastly, once the funeral is over, you can still mourn the Sim, relocate their Urn or Gravestone, or even release them to the Netherworld, depending on how you want things to progress with the deceased Sim.

It’s also worth knowing that funerals aren’t restricted to your family or household members only. You can hold a funeral for any other Sim in the game — even for ghosts you’ve just met!

How to plan a funeral

When it comes to planning a funeral, the first thing you’ll want to do is decide which Sim the event will be for. If the Sim who died happens to be nearby, you can select their Urn to start planning the funeral. Otherwise, you can follow the steps below:

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Select the calendar icon to begin planning a funeral.

• Select the calendar icon on the bottom left of your screen.
• On the calendar, select ‘Add Funeral Event‘.
• In the ‘Plan an Event’ tab, select which Sims you want to invite, and set the host, guest, hired mourner, dress code, and color.

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Choose who you’d like to invite to the funeral event and don’t forget to set up the dress code.

• In the Activities tab, select what will occur during the funeral, whether that’s giving toasts, lighting candles, giving an eulogy, and so on.
• Lastly, in the ‘Place’ tab, choose the lot where you want the funeral to be held.

Attending the funeral

When the funeral date of the chosen Sims arrives, you’ll get a notification in the game letting you know when to get ready. Ideally, this is when you’ll want to be on standby at the location already, as guests will usually start coming not too long after this.

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A Sim mourning during a funeral.

What happens after this depends on the activities you selected earlier. The funeral itself runs much like any other limited-time event where you’ll be tasked to complete several objectives. The more objectives you can complete, the better the medal you’ll get at the end.

For example, if you choose to deliver an eulogy, you can click the podium and select the option to complete the activity. Some of the other activities, such as mourning or lighting a candle, require you to click the deceased Sim’s Urn.

You can choose to place the Urn inside the casket as well. In this case, all you need to do is select the casket and click the Urn to interact with it.

Putting the Urn inside the casket basically just hides it from plain sight during the funeral and makes your Sim and other guests interact with the casket instead of it on the ground, adding to the realism. It’s completely up to you where you want to put it as it doesn’t exactly affect your gameplay, mainly just for visual purposes.

What happens after a funeral in The Sims 4 Life & Death?

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A Reaper Sim releasing a soul in the Netherworld.

After the funeral is over, you can still mourn the deceased Sim. However, if you feel like you’re ready to let them move on from the physical world, you can also choose to free their soul to the Netherworld, but this means they’ll no longer linger and haunt around as ghosts.

Now that you know how to plan a funeral, make sure to check out our other content for The Sims 4, including a rundown of the best mods to download, the best expansions, and all the major cheats and how to use them.