So, I know that the game generates random townies to "fill in the background" for various worlds. I'd really kind of rather it didn't. I had the bright idea of making a few 8-sim "households" and putting them in Unplayed/Not in World in the hopes that the game will use them instead. I'm not really sure how well that idea is working. (In my case, I've complicated my life further by using Kuttoe's "Keep Sims in the Home Region" mod which limits background and NPC sims to those "assigned" to a given world, causing more sims to generate to fill necessary roles in each world... but that may or may not be a separate matter.)
Has anyone else tried something like this? Are there any serious flaws with my idea that I'm not considering? If the idea might work, how many "background" sims would I need to create to have a good buffer? Or am I just creating a bunch of sims for no reason (beyond the joy of doing it)?
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Make sure you have a lot of townies in your Library. I haven’t used this because I didn’t want it applied to every world, so I don’t know how well it works.
I use something similar to your method for The Magic Realm, which, I think, needs 12 Spellcasters available to populate. I have an apartment with 8 in it, and the townies in Copperdale have become Spellcasters. It mostly uses those sims but occasionally still generates randoms, which wind up in unplayed households. I just edit them to make them fit.
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My concern about that is that most, if not all, the sims I have in my library are in my game already and several of them are in the library multiple times (every time I start a new save with the same household another copy shows up in the library). So, I'm worried I'll end up with duplicates running around... and that's not a storyline I want to explore.
In the past I used mods like npc control by Paulson or no random townies by Zer0 or all the modules from townieoverhaul by Bienchen (Bienchen's mods is probably what I would recommend)
These days I use mostly some custom settings in MC Command Center (population settings set to 0 for all ages (Population_Percent)) and just one module from bienchen called townieoverhaul nonewbarflys because the game generates a crazy amount of townies every time you visit the bar.
I use that MCCC setting in my game. Like you, I have lots of the Sims in my Gallery in the game already, and there are a number of duplicate Sims in the Gallery, too. The other day, my daughter and I saw three versions of the same Sim at a pub. The fear is real.
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For them to keep their jobs, don't enter Live mode with them. Place them on a lot then evict them. Or, select Create a New Household from the Manage Worlds screen, replace the auto Sim with the ones you want, save, then just don't select a house for them - they'll end up in the Manage Households tab as "Not in World".
On console nothing you can do but delete them, but they keep making more of them. If you try to edit them, then they just use a different sim instead for their role.
It’s really awful and I hope they change this entirely in any future sims games, we should be able to control exactly who is in our world.