Follow these steps to get rid of a Sim for good:
Click the “…” (more) icon in the top corner of the screen.
Select Manage Worlds from the menu.
Save your current game when prompted.
Locate the household your Sim lives in.
Open the Manage Household screen for that house.
Hover your cursor over the icon of the Sim you want to delete.
Wait a second or two until an X button appears over their portrait.
Click the X and confirm the deletion.
That’s it, your Sim is officially history.
Important: Always save your game before deleting a Sim. If something goes wrong, or you simply change your mind, having that save means you can go back to it instead of losing progress for good.
Not totally sure you want your Sim gone forever? You can move them to a different household instead. This won’t delete them from the game, it just gets them out of your active household.
Use this method if you want a particular Sim out of your sight but you’re not ready to commit to deleting them for good.
Open the Manage Household screen.
Click the Transfer icon (the two arrows).
On the left-hand pane, you’ll see a list of all your Sims.
Click Create New Household (or pick an existing one if you’d rather move them there).
Select the Sim you want to transfer.
Click the transfer arrow to confirm.
If you’re not planning on ever playing that Sim again, you can create a “dump” household where you toss all the Sims you don’t like but can’t quite bring yourself to delete.
Yes, you can delete all premade Sims and townies through Manage Households. However, The Sims 4 will continue generating new NPCs to fill essential roles.
Whenever your Sim visits a new lot, the game needs Sims to populate the world. It automatically creates NPCs for jobs and activities such as:
Bartenders, vendors, librarians, and other service workers.
Customers ordering food and drinks.
Sims dancing, walking around, or simply making venues feel alive.
Unless you’ve created an enormous number of Sims to fill every possible role, the game will eventually generate new random townies.
If you want more control, there are two popular mods:
NPCC (NPC Control): Lets you assign NPC jobs to specific Sims, preventing the game from creating random replacements for many service roles.
MC Command Center (MCCC): Can make the game generate new townies from your Library instead of creating completely random Sims. To enable this, open MC Population > Import Tray Settings > Import Tray Percent on a computer and set the percentage to 100%. Just make sure you have plenty of households saved in your Library or downloaded from the Gallery so the game has enough Sims to choose from.
You might see claims floating around that you can simply remove a Sim from the family tree in the base game. Worth clearing up: there isn’t a built-in way to do this in The Sims 4.
The workarounds people use involve third-party mods (like relationship/family management mods), and even those come with their own compatibility risks and aren’t guaranteed to work cleanly. If you go that route, back up your save first.