Your Sims Can Now Die a Moldy Death With 'The Sims 4' For Rent Expansion Pack

The brand new Sims 4 For Rent expansion pack opens up a whole new world of building and gameplay, particularly in the multi-family space. That's right — with this new pack, you can finally live out your dream of becoming a landlord or living closer than ever to your fellow Sims in an apartment, a townhouse, your mom's basement, and more. The possibilities are endless!

However, along with this new and exciting aspect of the game, a surprise fan-favorite feature has emerged from For Rent: mold. Yes, mold. Fans of the Sims franchise are always clamoring for new WooHoo spots and new death opportunities, and this East Asian-inspired expansion pack definitely delivers on the latter.

So, how does the new mold death work? And is this going to make playing with For Rent a challenge? Let's dive in.

The Sims team teased this new and terrifying death in the official release trailer for For Rent, and fans instantly had this to say: "It's giving The Last of Us." We couldn't agree more — the infected Sim literally has fungus growing out of his head, and he's certainly behaving like a zombie. So... are zombies going to be a thing in The Sims 4 now? Not quite.

Fortunately, while the death animation certainly harkens to a zombie outbreak, your poor Sims won't be roaming around like this for eternity. Instead, immediately after turning into a mold zombie, the Sim will pretty much keel over and die.

However, the trailer also showed that if your Sim comes back as a ghost after dying of mold, they'll be able to spread mold spores through their breath. Whether it's just a silly animation or can actually infect other Sims is yet to be seen, but you may want to be careful around them. Just in case.

Luckily, if moldy death isn't really your thing, the feature is easy to avoid so that it won't affect the rest of your gameplay. In a gameplay preview hosted by the Sims team, it was revealed that mold will actually be a Lot Challenge, just like Off-the-Grid or Gremlins. This means that when you build a Residential Rental lot, you'll have to turn the mold on if you want to play with it.

And as for the pre-built lots in the world from the new pack, if they contain the Mold Lot Challenge, you can easily go into Build Mode and remove it. Plus, since For Rent gives you the ability to edit units separately, you can add mold to a single unit without infecting the rest of the units on the lot.

Thankfully, even if you decide to spice up your game with the Mold Lot Challenge, your Sims aren't necessarily doomed to a fungal death. As either the tenant or the property owner, you'll have three options to get rid of the mold on your lot. You can opt to simply clean it, deploy a patented Mold-B-Gone Bomb, or destroy it with fire — because this is The Sims 4.

The Mold-B-Gone seems to be the safest and quickest way to get rid of the growing mold piles, but it'll cost you a pretty 750 Simoleons. If you'd like to take the risk and try one of the other two options, beware — it could go wrong.

The Sims 4 For Rent expansion pack releases on December 7, 2023 on console and PC.