The Sims 4's rampant pregnancy bug was apparently caused by 'performance optimizations' and has now been fixed

The baby boom is over. EA has neutered a bizarre bug recently introduced to The Sims 4 that erroneously marked Sims as being pregnant, irrespective of whether they were male or had previously engaged in 'woo-hoo'.

The bug initially appeared last week, slipping undetected into the game in a base game patch that coincided with the launch of the new Enchanted by Nature DLC. The bug indiscriminately identified random Sims as being pregnant, while also seemingly breaking everything else related to pregnancy. Baby bumps were flattened, pregnancy tests vanished from the shelves, and despite my earlier assertion, these phantom pregnancies never seemed to produce simulated sprogs.

The bug also had several other side-effects adjacent to the game's reproductive cycle. It prevented falsely impregnated Sims from aging, but stopped them from woo-hoo-ing ever again. Now there's a deal with the devil for you.

Anyway, EA says this has all now been fixed. "Today’s update will fix the recent issues seen with Sim Pregnancy introduced on July 1," the publisher announced on its website yesterday. "The issues were related to performance optimizations and have now been reverted to resolve the issues reported." I'm sorry, but the excessive pregnancies in The Sims 4 were caused by improved performance? That's too perfect.

Alongside this general fix, EA also notes that "any Sim pregnancy related mods should return to their pre-update functionality, though you should still check with the specific mod author for updates." It had not occurred to me up until reading this that Sims 4 pregnancy mods would exist, and having just Googled it, I can only apologise for how severely I underestimated the Internet on that one.

In any case, your Sims should become pregnant in the normal way now. At least, as normal as a game that lets your Sims have kids with The Grim Reaper gets. As for how the Enchanted by Nature DLC has been received more broadly, the community seems divided on it. One Steam review by EmeraldOak calls it "one of the best packs that [EA has] released", while others observe that the fairy theme is a bit bland and superficial, which to be honest sounds typical of The Sims 4.