The issue of the students being so random (and npc-ish)

ravynwolvf

There's no setting in the game to make it choose the students you want; it's the same situation as it is on every community lot. But for anyone who does modding there's a fix. It's a simple one, but there's multiple tuning files to edit.

There's these sim filters that determine a lot about what sims will show up. Hundreds of them. Maybe a thousand. But with Sims4studio they are easy to find; you just search for hsstudent and highschool and they pop up. All you have to do after that is add one magical line:
<V t="has_home_zone" />
<V t="can_be_outside" />
<V t="is_hidden">
<U n="is_hidden">
<T n="invert_score">True</T>
</U>
</V>
The first one; has home zone. It makes the game choose only sims who live in homes. The rest is to just show where I put it.

I have no idea why they don't program it to choose home sims first to begin with. It's a very odd choice. I only know how to do home, homeless or both, but there has to be a way in all their coding they could have done homed first and fill in the rest with homeless.

I've gone in and done this for easily 60 types of sims, and it works perfectly. Every lot I play only MY sims show up; I just let the game make bartenders, vendors, DJs, etc. It really changes your game entirely. I don't put my mods up anywhere because I don't want to constantly update them, though most of the ones I make are fine and rarely need it, anyway. That and most sites have so many hoops to jump through to submit mods. But they aren't that hard to make and are pretty safe; if something doesn't work, you just take it back out without saving.

I know this is only a self help method, but if you're willing to do a little learning, modding can really transfer control of your game over to you. No crazy outfits, sims you want to see, no random pizza walkers or fake vampires, no doing something you don't want them to; most all of it is there for you to change.

Simmingal

been complaining for ages about how game will literally spawn randomized townie for everything instead of using sims all I want is randomized townies off toggle

ravynwolvf

Simmingal wrote: »

been complaining for ages about how game will literally spawn randomized townie for everything instead of using sims all I want is randomized townies off toggle

Unfortunately because of the way it's coded, I can't imagine there'd be a way to do that, now. Even if they could override whats in each filter all at once. But the biggest roadblock would be that some of the filters call for special traits or skills. Like the master fisherman. It calls for someone with the master fisherman career, and a high level of fishing skill. Why, I have no idea, because all they do is stand and fish like everyone else. DJs are similar. When I tried to make all djs have homes, I had to edit the filters even more so they didn't require skills and a career in djing, or no one would show up, since none of my homed sims had djing as a career or high enough skill. Sooo you kind of have to change each one individually.

But they could at least stop creating extra sims for stupid jobs. There's an ambient walkby mailman, maid, pizza man, fake vampire, and alien in disguise. That's all they do; walk by. But instead of using the same one again, they create about three for each one.

Simmingal

I mean in older games we had specific sims for each npc role and the role would stay on that sim instead of game spawning new ones
I think such thing should be achievable if they so wanted just add like npc manager so you can set sim of choice for those npc

ravynwolvf

Yeah, in older games. But there are literally about a thousand sim filters choosing who does what, now. Every one of them would have to be edited to change the choices. I know, because over time I've done about 400 of them myself to get rid of random sims (I hate them, too). Each neighborhood has a walkby director that will direct something like at 8am 6-8 sims will appear; sims going to school, work, jogging, an ambient mailman, etc. Then at 10am there will be 6-8 or something more. It's all very directed, and they'd either have to start all over or change all of it. You do notice though that there are a lot of the same sims doing things like manning the stalls or bartending. That's because when the game generates them, it tags them with those jobs. But for some reason it makes more. And more.