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Relationship Culling Destroys Lore
babajayne
Posts: 1,866 Member
We’re getting a lore/premade families update soon, and I’ve been exploring the existing premades lately since I never really got into them. So I played 15 households and during that time, I quickly discovered that relationship culling had destroyed what little lore there already is in the game. Sentiments for the more recent families were long gone by the time I played them, too. But I was expecting this because they are temporary things, although it would be great if they only decayed while the household was being actively played.
I’ll give examples of what I found.
Windenburg
Siobhan Fyres’ bio says that Sergio Romeo is her boyfriend. But they didn’t even know each other. Only the relationships within the household remained when I played the Fyres.
Mt. Komorebi
Teens Kaori Nishidake and Kiyoshi Ito don’t know each other, and no one in each of their families knows anyone in the other family, or anyone outside the household.
Henford-on-Bagley
Rahmi Watson supposedly had an affair with Lavina Chopra. The wiki has Lavina listed as Rahmi’s ex-girlfriend. But they didn’t know each other by the time I played them.
I thought culling was supposed to keep sims of boyfriend/girlfriend status - but were they culled because they were NPCs while I was playing the other families?
I guess relationship culling happens for a reason, but I think each sim should be able to keep a reasonable amount of relationships (while they may decay, it should take a long time to forget someone). Also, if we had a way of removing sims from our sims’ relationship panels, we could do our own culling. I’d clear out the randoms that butt into my conversations.
Unless they change the culling process, I feel like most of us rotational players are not going to be able to fully appreciate what’s added to the premades in the update and that just takes the fun out of it for me.
I guess MCCC is the only current mod that can tweak culling. Or does anyone know of a dedicated mod for it? The one I found broke in 2019. Do you use a mod to stop culling and has it negativity impacted your game or performance?
I’ll give examples of what I found.
Windenburg
Siobhan Fyres’ bio says that Sergio Romeo is her boyfriend. But they didn’t even know each other. Only the relationships within the household remained when I played the Fyres.
Mt. Komorebi
Teens Kaori Nishidake and Kiyoshi Ito don’t know each other, and no one in each of their families knows anyone in the other family, or anyone outside the household.
Henford-on-Bagley
Rahmi Watson supposedly had an affair with Lavina Chopra. The wiki has Lavina listed as Rahmi’s ex-girlfriend. But they didn’t know each other by the time I played them.
I thought culling was supposed to keep sims of boyfriend/girlfriend status - but were they culled because they were NPCs while I was playing the other families?
I guess relationship culling happens for a reason, but I think each sim should be able to keep a reasonable amount of relationships (while they may decay, it should take a long time to forget someone). Also, if we had a way of removing sims from our sims’ relationship panels, we could do our own culling. I’d clear out the randoms that butt into my conversations.
Unless they change the culling process, I feel like most of us rotational players are not going to be able to fully appreciate what’s added to the premades in the update and that just takes the fun out of it for me.
I guess MCCC is the only current mod that can tweak culling. Or does anyone know of a dedicated mod for it? The one I found broke in 2019. Do you use a mod to stop culling and has it negativity impacted your game or performance?
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Comments
I'm not sure what could be done to prevent the relationship culling to not destroy lore. I guess one solution is to add them as played households, there are quite a lot of premade sims in the game now though if you own all packs.
I realize if you plan to keep the majority of premades on the launch of a new game it is a sizable number with all the DLC. Whenever I make my personal family after slotting in a few library versions of favorite households it is always over 200 for me and not every computer can handle that.
My plan was to play all the teens. In the beginning, I played the Goths and at that point, I was exploring where all the teens lived and I moved the Chopras into a house. So they were under my Played Households but I can’t say whether that was from the very beginning or within the first 4 days (I played each household 4 days). And the Chopras had their relationships culled.
So, I suppose I could start a new game and favorite all the households I want to play immediately, and see if that makes a difference? But how would the average player know to do this (or which families they’d want to play)?
I cannot swear that they haven't increased the protection of the played household mark or swear that the favorite households will prevent relationship decay, but ever since they debuted this feature for protecting our favorite Sims any Sim I have even the remotest of interest in I have placed under it. I do play rotationally a lot of times and have not noticed any problems like what you mentioned, but it isn't impossible for me to miss it either. I suspect it is likely protected, though, because it sounds like the perfect detail to delete for performance which is why you are warned to not have too many protected households.
As for how you are supposed to know... *shrug* I imagine there is probably something you could hover over to explain favorited households, but since I have been with the feature since it was first implemented I have not looked in years.
I feel like I've noticed lately my sims relationships Do seem to be decaying faster too, even without lifestyles that can cause it, so I wonder if they tweaked it recently to try and help performance?
Also @Calico45 thank you for bringing up the favorites feature!!! I never knew it was supposed to help w/ culling, so that will come in handy
@Cinebar Those relationships exist when I first load the households. Siobhan is indeed in a relationship with Sergio, and has friends outside the household (Luna and Sofia). But no one would know that unless they played those sims first or favorited them, apparently. So the game does actually have lore, it’s just this mechanic that’s washing away the details before we even find them.
I could be wrong but I believe this is a design by choice because of how bloated sims 3 became holding onto all the relationships and memories.
I've even heard people complain about memories in sims 2 leading to bloat and corruption if a sim is deleted. Which is why I think we haven't got a memory system.
It's all to keep performance smooth 😎
In my last main save, I had about 8-12 households and the culling still happened between sims I played. The only difference now is that I’m clicking the heart. If this doesn’t stop the culling when I’m well under 200 sims, I really think the culling process needs to be tweaked.
It doesn't protect them, at least it didn't mine. The Sims don't get culled, but the relationships still decay fast. I had to cheat back up all my households and the unplayed ones around town, they'd all decayed to near nothing. The only one that hadn't was the one I'd actually been playing.
Yeah, that's why I don't mind the relationship culling too much. My loading times would be so long otherwise. It's good that we have the option to put them as favorite households but I do think that the game will sometimes clear their relationships too.
I am once again grateful that MCCC exists so we can configure this ourselves. I don't play households for very long these days so I have very slow relationship decay in my game.
As an aside, Wolfgang Munch and Rashidah Watson are a really cute couple.
So, I still relay to heir descriptions more than their actual relations. What's in my head is more important than what their relations panel says
You just gave them an extra chance to check that - yup, it was a final decision. Maybe they needed just that