It’s a boy! The Sims 4’s infant update arrives in March

One of The Sims 4’s most anticipated updates will arrive in-game on March 14, developer Maxis announced during its Behind The Sims Summit livestream on Tuesday. Of course, it’s the babies update. The developer debuted a brief trailer and a quick behind-the-scenes look at the infant update, showing off everything that infants — and the player! — can do once it’s live.

And it’s huge. Of The Sims 4’s seven different life stages, babies are currently terribly limited, basically props linked to a bassinet. Babies just lay there, but the player’s still got to take care of them. The infant update on March 14 will make taking care of babies much more interesting, because they’ve finally got some agency. It starts with the Create-A-Sim screen for babies, which is where you’ll be able to change how a baby looks and what it’s wearing.

Beyond that, babies can crawl, spit up, take baths, have tantrums, bite, and be breastfed — and that’s not even it. It’s truly an all-encompassing life stage, with a ton of new technology: sitting or standing while holding a baby, giving your baby to another person, and a bunch of ways for babies to move, crawling all over all sorts of things. Socially, babies can interact with all other life stages in different ways, including animals.

It means a lot of cute new items, too, like nursery items and toys.

It’s unclear whether this new life stage will go between newborns and toddlers, or simply be the first life stage available, but we’ve reached out to Electronic Arts for clarification. Toddlers, for their part, were added to The Sims 4 in 2017, which added a lot of depth to the family experience in the game. Toddlers have their own personalities and traits, and the ability to learn new skills that stay with them through their lifespan.