Do you download households, and if so, where? «12...Next Go

SimKeats

One thing that keeps me from playing more empty custom worlds is, it gets boring, maybe lonely. I thought, I'll hit the exchange, and most of what I see is like... cheaty, or 100 baby challenge, or something, alot of Cullens lol.
So I was wondering, for others who like to add existing households, where is your favorite place to get them?

CravenLestat

From sims 3 worlds.Anytime I need a model..Bamm have tons to choose from for example the Dragon Princess pics I just mentioned to you,well that girl I did not make.That is Lily January from Lunar Lakes she is a pretty hot sim if I must say so.Sims 3 townie families are awesome and have stories already and skills and wishes everything is there not to mention really well made and you will never get bad CC from librarying/binning a EA sim or family.Win win.

Goulsquash

Personally I don't do this (because I fill my empty towns with my own sims, but thats ultra time consuming) but a lot of simmers pull their favourite households from various worlds.

SimKeats

@CravenLestat I thought that was Kylie Singer from ITF, but I meant non-EA households, I like alot of the ones in game, but they are also part of what gives those towns their individual charm to me.

CravenLestat

@SimKeats That is not Kylie Singer who is from ITF that is Lily January I put the ITF hair on her cause it looked cute with the outfit

http://sims.wikia.com/wiki/Lily_January

TreyNutz

I use NRaas StoryProgression's Rapid Immigration to fill empty worlds. I have it set up to use sims in the household bin as a genetic pool for immigrant residents. A year or so ago I spent a few hours pulling sims from various worlds, TSR, and MTS and creating 13 eight member households for that purpose. That was a lot of work but now it's set up I get random looking residents (and service sims if I choose to implement that option) instead of sims with the default pudding face.

SimKeats

@TreyNutz how hard is it to set that up, and is there a way to get rid of the built in sims in the household bin?

Karritz

I prefer to get my existing households from my library. I have downloaded a couple of sims from the Exchange - a couple of dogs and a cat. They were all made by people I knew of and trusted - such as Sim Gurus.

I have my existing households in the state they were in when first made plus after they've been played for varying lengths of time.

This means I can have brand new never played sims or sims/households with skills and possessions.

Many of my households include Sims of all ages and pets too.

The majority of my existing households though are of individual Sims so I can easily mix and match personality types depending on what I want for a particular game.

This way I get to know and appreciate the features of my sims.

I have put a lot of time into making them and teaching them their skills I don't see any reason not to use them over and over again.

I do still make new sims in CAS quite often too to add interest or if I find some new skins I want to try out or get ideas of different trait mixes or careers.

I have over 400 households in my library or saved onto my hard drive waiting to be installed if I decide I want one for a particular purpose in any game.

I still have my original Sims I made back in June 2009. I thought I'd lost the first two I ever made but came across them recently. They are a mother and daughter. They didn't suit what I wanted in that game so they've never been played much. The third Sim I made has been the main Sim in most of the games I've played since them.

The only problem with these old sims is they are base game only. But they are still good to play with and I can make small changes with Master Controller if I want to.

I do have fun occasionally when I place an old household into a new game and introduce these old Sims to all the things that have come into the game since they were last played.

SimplyJen

I makeover EA premades.

TreyNutz

SimKeats wrote: »

@TreyNutz how hard is it to set that up, and is there a way to get rid of the built in sims in the household bin?

I just hide them from within the game. There's a way to remove them from the game files completely, but I think it involves editing some files in the Program Files (x86) folder. I haven't gone that far so don't know what's involved.

NRaas SP has a way to disallow certain households from use as a genetic pool. I use that setting but there was a discussion about this on NRass Chatterbox a year or so ago and the consensus seemed to be that this setting isn't honored by the mod. Or at least that was my impression from that discussion. I don't worry about it too much because I have so many sims in the genetic pool (and almost no other households saved in the bin) that even if SP does use built in sims sometimes it won't affect much.

Anyways, City hall or computer>NRaas>StoryProgression>General Options>Options: Lots>Options: Immigration/Emigration.

You'll have to set the Immigration Gauge greater than 0. Set it to something absurdly high, like 1000. The immigration pressure will never reach that high and by setting it greater than 0 you'll have access to all the other immigration settings. This is what I use:

Chance of Bin Offspring - 100
Chance of Random Offspring - 0
Equal Chance to All Bin Sims - True
Immigrant Name - Random
Immigration Disallow Bin by House - choose which household bins SP should not use but note that SP may or may not honor this setting, and seemingly will use the built in sims even if you hide those households from the household bin in game.

The default value for Chance of Bin Offspring is 50, and Chance of Random (i.e. EA created) Offspring is 10. I don't know what happens the other 40% of the time.

I've seen a tutorial on the web which suggests using 1 sim households for the genetic pool and setting:
Maximum Bin Household Size to 1
I ended up with so many sims to use as a genetic pool I decided not to go that route.

To use Rapid Immigration, click on the setting and enter the number of households you want SP to create and immigrate into town. It should create a new household every 5-10 min until it reaches the number you set, or there is no space left.

You can change which types of households immigrate with the following settings:

Whole Family Immigration Size
Immigrate Single Sim Chance
Chance of Immigrant Friends (note, this will always be 2 sims as roommates)
Chance of Singe Parent Immigrant
Chance of Partner Immigrant

The chance of an immigrant family (2 parents and some kids) is whatever percent is leftover from the last 4 settings.

There are similar options under NRaas>StoryProgression>General Options>Options: Sims>Options: Immigration/Emigration. However these options are for replacing service/role sims with immigrants and for replacing roommates with immigrants. The roommate setting includes dormies and sims like Emit Relevart. The setting for service/role sims seems to work ok at first, but I've had 2 games now where it gets stuck continually creating homeless sims. You can flush those with Ovewatch or have SP manage the homeless, but the creation process makes the game terribly laggy. I enable that setting when setting up a world now, but don't leave it enabled during normal gameplay.

Pary

I usually make my own families, and then keep them in the bin for populating worlds. Or, I pull my favourite households from all EA worlds, and populate my empty worlds with them.
I would love to use other people's households sometimes, but most people use far too much CC when creating theirs, or, there is hidden CC attached.
At one time, a bunch of us put up our favourite sim households, or simselves, so we could download them, and play them in a world and share pictures of our games. It was really nice, having "familiar faces" so to speak, and getting to know other people's sims.
I find it a little saddening to always have to use my own sims, where I already know all their traits and personalities, but its better than ending up with a truckload of unwanted CC.
I never download from the exchange for this reason.

SimKeats

@Pary yeah, I found like 3 households on the exchange earlier that I wanted to give a shot and they all were too sketchy after checking with Custard.

@TreyNutz thanks, I'm gonna give these settings a shot.

Pary

It might be nice to set up an "exchange" thread here in the TS3 section, for exchanging households and single sims for putting in each others games.
The families could be made base game only, and no CC allowed, and people can make them over in their own games if they're not happy with the current looks. they need not be only S3packs, it's easy enough to just grab the library file and post that if people ( like me ) prefer that option. That way no CC is going to sneak in.
I'm sure SGDrake would sticky the thread if asked.

Assuming people are interested in this kind of thing anyway.

SimKeats

I would probably enjoy a thread about Simselfs (though we often tend to make them idealized) for sharing, since Carl's has an "official" forum world, I'm sort of surprised no one has ever collaborated on such a thing here. I think it would be fun to play in a town populated mostly be people I recognize from the forums.

CravenLestat

You can use me in a town just keep me away from seafood and keep me close to the ladies Give me a hottie sim to live with that can cook mac and cheese.

http://www.thesims3.com/assetDetail.html?assetId=8910589

No CC just store or expansion and stuff pack is all I ever use.

CravenLestat

@SimKeats I like your simself thread to grab other peoples simselfs especially ones I see post daily since I can already guess their personality. Assuming it is no CC thread I luff it.

And @Pary Love your idea too you know how long it has been since I made a base game clothes only sim.So spoiled to SP and store and exp.Would be fun I like it.

Karritz

CravenLestat wrote: »

@SimKeats I like your simself thread to grab other peoples simselfs especially ones I see post daily since I can already guess their personality. Assuming it is no CC thread I luff it.

And @Pary Love your idea too you know how long it has been since I made a base game clothes only sim.So spoiled to SP and store and exp.Would be fun I like it.

I tried making base game sims a few months ago and found it just about impossible - depending on the definition of Base Game only.

There are sliders and traits and all sorts of things to deal with that make the job not worth the effort from my point of view.

However, if you only mean clothes and shoes and accessories and hair then that'd be reasonably simple to do.

I suppose you just need to define what you mean by Base Game only.

Having said that I do have several Base Game Only sims in my library.

Some were made back when we only had a base game.

Others were made in an attempt to be base game only but soon found I couldn't actually do it without uninstalling all of my Expansion and Stuff packs. I wasn't prepared to do that so if the definition of base game only really is just base game everything then it is likely to be fairly difficult to do.

jillbg

I have used EA premade households that I've relooked without using any CC for the purpose of populating my world Twin Towns. I've changed their names and their history - both personal and the family one. You can download them separately or as bundles from my blog here. You can also download them from the exchange; the links are on the "map" pages...

Pictures of the households "in situation" are on the pages marked households, just click on the town (Falls Harbor or Fairview Heights) to unfold the drop-down menus.

You also have a download link in The Grey Witches, just click on my siggy and go to downloads.

Pary

re - Basegame , to prevent people missing out on items and what not from EP's or SP's that they don't have, I'm sure folks could manage to just make sims with base game clothes, items, hair and makeup. It's not hard to do, since BG items don't have an icon.

I don't know about sliders, or what people are comfortable with. If you try to alter a face made with sliders that you don't have, it will only bounce back into its original values anyway. Other than that I don't think they cause any problems.
It's not a requirement for anyone to participate if you feel it isn't worth the effort. It would just be a thread for people to post households and sims that we know are clean, and free from unwanted CC, and representative of forum-goers, so we can populate empty worlds.

People can share pictures of what everyone's sims are getting up to in their games or whatever they like.

Edit - I PM'd SGDrake and she is happy to sticky a thread for us if we want to make one.

jillbg

@Pary I'm in!

Scotsim

@Pary - me too. It will be quite the challenge trying to make a reasonable facsimile of myself with base game gear but I'm up for it.

Stdlr9

I've dl'ed some Exchange families in the past such as the Pleasants and Calientes as they appeared in TS2, but haven't done so lately.

Pary

It's the weekends here so I have some time, and I 'm going to write up a post detailing the sim / household share, so that Drake can sticky it.
Before I do, or go throwing my weight around with rules and guildelines or whatever ( ) I would like to know everyone's thoughts and feelings of using EP's and SP's in their households that they wish to share.

Hair and clothing etc, will be replaced by basegame items if the person downloading doesn't own the appropriate packs, but lifestates like Fairy, Vampire, Werewolf, Plantsim etc can't be replaced.
Perhaps a mixture of basegame & EP households? I like diversity, and I'm sure everyone else does too, but the whole idea was to be able to "pop and go" so to speak, and not have to edit or make adjustments or anything.

Absolutely no CC, I think we can all agree on that. It's the reason that we've been discussing making the thread - because of all the unknown stuff that floats about the exchange, turning innocent sims into horses, or elongated toddler horrors.
I'd just like to read people's thoughts on what they think is appropriate before we start

Goulsquash

What happens with traits that someone doesn't have? Should we stick to basegame traits only but ep clothes/hair cause it gets switched out?

Pary

I believe they get replaced too, though I'm not 100% sure so don't quote me. I have all the packs except Katy Perry and Movie stuff, so I've not encountered this issue before. It's also why I initially suggested base game sims only, to avoid that kind of thing.

Karritz

I have some base game Sims I made when we didn't have much. But most of my existing Sims could be a mix of anything. I could upload what I believe are base game only Sims but know from previous experience I can't make base game only Sims with everything installed and am not prepared to uninstall anything tobe able to guarantee my newer Sims are base game only.

Regarding store content and cc. It is a simple matter to rename the Sims 3 folder and make a new one that has no store content or cc in it. But getting rid of Expansion Pack traits etc is another thing that I can't do. The buy mode and CAS can be filtered out though.