The Sims 4 received a new expansion pack last month, titled Get To Work, and the DLC brought with it a wide array of additional content. The pack, which commanded a hefty $40 price tag, gave players the chance to actively control created characters if they joined up to one of the new career paths. Alongside the doctor, detective and scientist paths, Get To Work also brought back one of the staples of the Sims series: alien abductions.

Unfortunately for some, the addition of the alien abduction scenario has brought with it some rather bizarre side effects. Players noticed that their Sims were being abducted fairly frequently, which has led to a particularly troublesome mechanic coming into question. Male Sims returning from their abductions have been coming back pregnant.

It may seem like something that is more fitting for a game like Alien: Isolation, but this gameplay element has been a part of the series since The Sims 2, where Sims were abducted after using the telescope and returning knocked up. However, the sheer rate at which players were being abducted, and the extremely high number of male pregnancies, was proving a hindrance for those wishing to play the game free from alien woo-hoo. Clearly, a tweak to the rate of abduction was needed.

That's exactly what the Sims 4 developers decided to do, making behind-the-scenes changes to reduce alien encounters across the board. "At launch the rate for abduction was tuned higher than desired," said one of the developers in a Sims Forum Guru Q&A. "Lowering the rate of abduction was to make sure that alien abduction was not so intrusive." As such, fans then started to notice that abductions were becoming extremely rare, as well as the alien-conceived pregnancies.

Some players, however, did not appreciate just how far the developer had taken this tweak. Those looking for alien contact were now faced with incredibly slim odds of being abducted, and it appeared as though The Sims Studio development team had looked to patch out male pregnancy from close encounters of the romantic kind. The gurus themselves offered some tips to players, advising t0 "use the satellite dish" to boost chances of abduction, whilst stating that there was a "scientific reason" for why female aliens could no longer get male characters pregnant.

The Q&A did little to calm some of the players disappointed in the lower abduction rate, however, and to make matters worse it appears as though the male pregnancy bug has now shifted into unexplained territory. Some fans have found that their male Sims are now getting pregnant without any alien contact whatsoever, with claims that certain mods are causing glitches to the overall pregnancy mechanic. It's clear there is still some work to do to fix this problem, but for now players will have to get by with an occasional bought of odd biology.

Sources: Kotaku, The Sims Forum (1), The Sims Forum (2)