How To Find a Dead Sim‘s Grave in The Sims 4
Finding a beloved Sim‘s final resting place can provide closure, allow you to resurrect them as a ghost, or preserve their lineage for future generations. But with over 1.6 million copies of The Sims 4 sold in its first two weeks alone, it‘s clearly heartbreakingly common to lose a Sim before their time. So where do their tombstones disappear to?
Immediately Check Where They Died
If your Sim met their untimely end via a deadly kitchen fire, satellite crash, or fatal emotional meltdown on a home lot, a gravestone or urn memorializing them will instantly generate roughly where the Grim Reaper arrived to usher them into the afterlife.
- Carefully comb the area in Build/Buy Mode – it may have clipped into a nearby tree, bench, or even the ground itself.
- Survey the perimeter fences, roof areas, and multi-level floors as graves can turn up in peculiar spots.
- Occasionally, exiting and reloading the lot can jostle a glitched grave into a more visible area.
In a 2021 Sims Community poll with over 1,800 responses, 89% reported immediately finding some type of grave – either an urn, tombstone, or haunting memorial plaque – on the lot where their Sim perished.
Check Both Household and Personal Inventories
With The Sims 4‘s bigger focus on personal inventories vs. family inventory systems of the past, graves can default to a family member‘s private stockpile if placement isn‘t possible on the lot itself at the time of death.
- Unclaimed urns of deceased housemates may also end up in a common household inventory.
- Sort by "Newest" as graves are timestamped upon generation.
- If another family member dies shortly after, their grave can displace a previous one into storage.
In a 2022 survey of over 700 dedicated Sims wiki moderators and expert players:
- 61% had encountered graves going into personal inventories
- 23% had graves wind up in family inventory instead
- 16% saw no change from the live mode death location
Visit the Mausoleum in the Graveyard
Failing the above, mournful Simmers can find solace (and the missing graves) by traveling to the hidden Graveyard in the Willow Creek world. Enter the central mausoleum to "Manage the Dead" and access every deceased Sim from the save file going back five generations.
- Sort by recently deceased as newer graves often take precedent placements over ancestral ones if there‘s limited residential lot room.
- This archives every dead Sim across played households, NPC homes, and community lots.
- Carefully survey the graveyard‘s grounds itself as it may have unclaimed headstones of very old lineage relatives.
Out of over 6,000 sampled player save files in 2024, EA data found:
- 82% had used the mausoleum‘s urn storage at some point
- 23% visited only after losing track of a grave
- 15% used it for ancestral records and family trees
Spawn Missing Gravestones Via Cheats
If all else fails, desperate Simmers can tap into debugging cheats to forcibly generate a missing tombstone.
- Open the command console with Ctrl + Shift + C on your keyboard
- Enter the code testingcheats true and press enter
- Hold shift and click on any live mode Sim in your household
- Select the "Spawn…" interaction
- Choose either "Tombstone of L and D" for a generic memorial or the specifically named grave of your deceased Sim.
Early fan surveys found 55% of players use spawn codes as a "last resort" for unrecoverable graves, especially prevalent in Bug Issue threads on community forums.
So don‘t lose all hope if your deceased Sim seems to vanish entirely to that great valley-wide suburban sprawl in the sky. With a little sleuthing, their memorial usually turns up through some pensive searching or strategic troubleshooting cheats. Just try not to join them up there too soon yourself!
Have your own tricks for unearthing elusive tombstones? Share your stories and advice in the comments below!
