Whenever The Sim 4 has an update, there’s always a few interesting bugs. There aren’t too many other games where you have to ban Santa from clubbing. In the latest update for the Eco Lifestyle expansion, the game now has a bug so good I hope it never goes away. For some people, Sims who pee standing up now pee fire.
First let me just say: this is superior to our human forms of peeing. Just look at this:
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As you can see in this beautiful Reddit video, it’s even more incredible in motion. Imagine, taking a piss and instead of a sad tinkle you hear a crackle of flame as your pee stream hits the water. Imagine how powerful that would feel, ejecting piss-flames from your body. No longer would you have to worry about your male roommates leaving the toilet seat up. They now have a really, really good reason not to miss the bowl.
Most people are assuming this is just another wacky Sims 4 bug, like when babies used to get stuck in a void right at the very edge of a lot, lost forever to geometry. Reddit user Ruinthefun, though, looked into the game code and said that they think the interaction for creating a fire in your toilet with piss was built into the code intentionally. According to them, your Sims have a 50 percent chance to cause a toilet fire unless your lot has an insect farm, or the toilet has a specific upgrade. Even then, it’s hard to say for sure if this was written into the game to test a feature and then not removed, or if The Sims 4‘s development team also was as amused by peeing liquid flame as I am. Ruinthefun thinks it’s intentional.
“The name of the effect that plays, ‘ep09_plumbing_toilet_fire,’ indicates it is VERY specifically intended for toilet fires, so it’s not simply a debug response to set fires. It has probabilities (if you’re testing something, you don’t want a thing that happens SOME of the time, you want it to HAPPEN), and modifiers that alter that probability. What it LACKS, and thus is why this is seen as a bug, is any particular logical REASON for WHY this should happen,” Ruinthefun wrote. “None of the things being checked for offer any rational explanation of why pee should or should not catch fire either literally or figuratively.”
This is now my favorite conspiracy theory. I reached out to The Sims 4‘s development team to ask if the fire pee is a bug or a feature and they have not yet responded. All I really care about is that it never goes away. The next time a Sim burns down their house in my game, I want it to be because they missed the bowl.
