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Townie family generation, curious
mightysprite
Posts: 5,878 Member
Salim Benali has been starting to get a little friendlier with his good friend Tanvi Savalani, who I think is a randomly generated townie. He knew she was a stay-at-home mom. I moved Tanvi and her child Sai into an apartment so that Salim could go visit them. In the process, I noticed another Savalani household with a dad and a child.
I didn't want to peek at Tanvi and Sai's relationships and family tree, because I don't want to know anything Salim doesn't know about them just yet, but I wonder if they are related-- perhaps divorced-- as the children do look like a mix of both parents?
Then I got curious and looked through the other households. I found some Gotos who don't look like each other at all
some Mahajans who look like sisters (one of these is Salim's neighbor)
and some Acharyas and Hashimotos who are like the Savalanis, separate households but the kids look like a mix of the adults.
(Or well, on second thought, maybe the Acharya kids don't resemble the adults from both households as much as the Hashimotos and Savalanis do.)
And then I noticed something odd. No townie families with kids have 2 parents in the home, except for the premades. It's all single parents.
Can anyone shed any light on this?
I didn't want to peek at Tanvi and Sai's relationships and family tree, because I don't want to know anything Salim doesn't know about them just yet, but I wonder if they are related-- perhaps divorced-- as the children do look like a mix of both parents?
Then I got curious and looked through the other households. I found some Gotos who don't look like each other at all
some Mahajans who look like sisters (one of these is Salim's neighbor)
and some Acharyas and Hashimotos who are like the Savalanis, separate households but the kids look like a mix of the adults.
(Or well, on second thought, maybe the Acharya kids don't resemble the adults from both households as much as the Hashimotos and Savalanis do.)
And then I noticed something odd. No townie families with kids have 2 parents in the home, except for the premades. It's all single parents.
Can anyone shed any light on this?
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The odd townie families I get are always a mom, teenage girl and boy child. No variation.
The only different families are ones I make or come with packs I.e. Jang family in City Living
Sometimes I’ll get couples but most of my townies are elder Sims who stomp round my town angrily until I go through the townie pool and delete them.
I’ve not had the same family name duplicated though.
They reuse the same last names often I've noticed. I wouldn't think anything of it.
That would make random townies more interesting 🤔.
I agree, there are a lot of names that are repeated with the randomly generated townies.
@Chazzzy haha yes I thought maybe it serves me right for playing so many nontraditional families in the first place, the game gave up altogether on trying to interest me in standard nuclear families
What do you guys think of the genetics though? Like, look at the little boy in the Savalani household on the right. He is the spitting image of Tanvi, the woman in the Savalani household on the left. And Tanvi's child Sai looks like a combination of her and the man in the household on the right.
And the little Hashimoto girl looks a lot more like the Hashimoto woman who lives alone, than like the father in her own household.
I love MCCC so much. I don't have mine set chaotic at all. I actually have it set so that only Sims in active romantic relationships can have babies together (generally that ends up being married couples). I did try to allow it to be more open but it quickly became ridiculous.
I'm having this issue too. It seems to be by design.
For me, almost all of these townies follow a specific design of single black mother with a teenage black daughter and a blond, blue eyed white child son. The daughter's features will look like they came from the genetics system but the boy will look completely different.
MCCC then goes in and assigns these to houses they don't fit in - and puts single townies into the big houses - that's a mod and I get that it can't tell house info even if I've labeled them...
But the game itself is making those repeated townie families.
Exactly once it's given me a single dad with 2 sons and a daughter - all teens that I recall though I might have aged one up to teen.
This pattern is very weird. I've been spending the last few days essentially "making dads"... Leaving a few families as single parent but filling out the bulk of them. And of course fixing what houses townies got assigned to if I like them enough to want them to stay around (most of my 'played' households began as random townies).
MCCC helps me avoid many issues in all of this - it limits the number of random homeless elders, but it can't seem to stop the generation of 'child' sims (I always edit those sons up to teen). And I have a pile of settings in it to go around my list of townies every week and clean out all the facial piercings, makeup, etc... because the game seems to love using extreme bright makeup on dark skin too look like some racist cartoon, and to give adult and elder sims every possible face piercing in my CAS library, even the ones I've disabled 'random' on... so MCCC is near mandatory for me or I'd have to hand edit dozens of townies daily to avoid going nuts.
I wish they would generate actual families that go out and do things together. It would make things so much more simple. Right now I usually download families from the gallery and make them townies. Then I make them be in a club so they will be seen around town doing specific things depending on what type of family dynamic I'm going for. It's so time consuming getting my town running and when patches break my game, it could take over a month to get it playable again.
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I have not seen this family generation pattern at all. But that might be because I have so many babies born in-game through MCCC that there are always more than the minimum number of required children, teens etc. Perhaps the game generates these families in order to meet a quota for children?
So, I delete game generated families when they appear and add in my own, either ones I DL or have saved from my games. That way there are genetic families as townies as well as my played sims. I do have the occasional adoption due to MCCC though.
omg you are so right. It splits the families I put together with kids and will split the kids between the parents. I need to figure out how stop it
For me it never makes new families from existing randos I've had around. BUT... over time It will slowly have people divorce and if I made a couple where one adult is a biological parent and other a step parent MCCC seems to prefer giving the step parent custody... like, 100% prefer it so far. But my sample size is limited to 3 here because I've only just started giving partners to single parents and the cases where I made the other parent a step parent rather than using genetics to 'fabricate dad' were fewer.
I use the 'WW' mod (Wonderful/... Whims) and I think it is this mod that turned the whole new 'likes' system from Dream Home Decorator into an attraction system... so when I make the 'magical dads' I go in and give each parent a stack of likes based on the other parents appearance, fashion, hair, etc... then I visit the family once with a played sim so everyone 'loads' their relationships - that seems to be preventing MCCC from causing those couple to divorce but it also means I have an unusually high number of 'way too happily compatible' couples...
Like MCCC thinks you either need to be each other's obsessive dream boat fantasy, or it's straight to divorce court if you so much as don't like how much milk to other person puts in their coffee... (I can turn this off BTW - I only turned on MCCC's relationship decay last week, and now that I see how it ends up working I'm thinking of turning it off, because even though I thought I tuned it very low it's over-doing it in the results).
That said... I've tuned down a LOT of MCCCs default "fixing" settings because they "break" rather than "fix" for what I'm seeking. And I've then gone and turned on a LOT of it's other settings - like the ones to clean out makeup and piercings because the game seems to think my Sims is set on the stage of a Drag Queen show in Portland in the 90s... Sooo much glam and piercings in Sim4 default CAS townie creation it's insane.
MCCC is great, covers over a LOT of flaws in the base game; but I'd prefer if they had everything 'turned off by default'.
Unfortunately the mod is behind a paywall. Fortunately though, a kind poster has posted a link to a download of the latest version in the Gameplay mods forum - bottom post of page 1 of this thread:
https://forums.thesims.com/en_US/discussion/989052/npcc-1-3-3/p1
Shake dreams from your hair
My pretty child, my sweet one.
Choose the day and choose the sign of your day
The day's divinity....
The Ghost Song - Jim Morrison
The key one for this thread would likely be 'No Randoms':
This is a Patreon page, but NOT a paywall one. It's freely on that page:
https://www.patreon.com/posts/no-random-41053263
Looks like this 'Assign NPCs Roles' is a tangentially related ALSO FREE even though listed on Patreon mod:
https://www.patreon.com/posts/assign-npcs-47253623
(I'm guessing a Pateron link is OK if the content there is not behind any requirements. But if not, these are by 'Zero' and likely findable with Google).
Note that these turn off townie generation, not fix it.
Personally I'd prefer an option to disable creating selected ages. I'd use that to disable children. Even a mod that auto-aged them to teen on creation would be enough for me. I'm not sure I'm ready to just disable all townie generation. Gotta think about that a bit. Key for me is knowing how 'townie culling' works. I've read townies also get deleted after a while - but how long is a while and do things like their relationships play into it. Is it only homeless townies or will ones in homes also get culled (to date I don't think that's ever happened in my game, but it could have happened to one I just didn't notice yet).
I'm fairly confident townies I have manually edited have been culled out, but not 100% sure. I would not want to turn off townie creation unless I also was sure I could turn off random culling.
... It's 3am, I came over to shutdown my PC and found this thread had been active, hopefully I managed a sane comment up there, shutting down the PC now...
Unfortunately though, EA has decided to remove it and go after the wrong person in the process.
Who did EA go after instead?
They removed the posts from the person/people who shared the modder's content, and issued a warning to that person, rather than going after the modder.
The past 2 "Thursdays" of my game have seen piles like this get added:
Only after this thread has my game suddenly seen multi-parent townies.
If I wanted kids in my game, I'd finally have things good.
But before these 2 game weeks, I'd never seen anything but a single parent, and only once not a mother.
I'm basically about to delete all 4 families here because what I really want is a mod to disable kids completely... and I started wondering if by manually aging them up I was telling some algorithm that these were the kinds of families I wanted to mess around with.
I often wonder if the game tries to balance out people. I did get a family with 2 parents, a child, and a teen in the beginning. I haven’t got a two parent family since then, but I have a large rotation.