At first Neighborhood Stories sounded like a way for EA to enhance gameplay. However, it appears this new feature has not been play tested at all.
For example, after playing the game for a short time, I discovered that every town sim and/or their families had a lot of brown (?) newborn babies along with toddlers and pets in their household. While I expected to hear about some changes. I didn't expect this kind of extreme change. Some households had almost three newborns at once. All of which would be unrealistic in real life.
So thus far, it has definitely made gameplay worse as I had to click on all these households and try to delete all these unwanted additions. Btw, you can't delete the newborns in CAS and still not sure if it worked since after I disabled the feature for all households, I got another message that mentioned how the Delgato family in Brindleton Bay recently added more babies to their household, lol.
Let's hope EA fixes this as I'm starting to think this whole concept already needs a lot of tweaking or overhaul.
Always be your unapologetically and authentic self
9
Comments
I like the concept. Keep in mind you can 'tweak' it. For "Played" (Heck no for me, stays off!), For "UnPlayed" (Have it on, but all features off). For each household then you can customize it. At the moment, the only household I have customized with a few of the features is "Harris" in Evergreen Harbour.
So yes, I have not playtested it yet. Good to start with one household.
With base-game, no packs, no mods, had that issue of things going insane when I first started playing.
I only had pet and child adoption, plus having a baby turned on for a few Townie families (most of my Townies are single Sims) and I never saw any traction with it, but my understanding is that's affected by traits. I'm guessing the Sims I was allowing it for didn't have the right traits.
I boot out nearly all the premade Sims too when I start a new save, so I don't have a lot of unplayed households living on lots either. And I had it turned off on the ones I kept, because I'll want to play them at some point.
He is not sad about her being gone, there is no urn, no trace that she ever existed. She doesn't even show up in his family tree as a sim that has died. That bums me out, a lot. She's not in his relationship panel at all. Completely scrubbed. I'm going to have to play his household just to make sure he remarries and has a nice life. I feel bad for him, I was hoping the game would make them have kids but nope, it just erased Eliza all together.
Btw, a bug makes a lot of babies dark skinned despite not actually being that. It has nothing to do with this patch.
Right now, accidental deaths kills far too many sims too quickly. It completely wiped out the entire elder population in under 2 sim weeks when i set all elder households to allow accidental deaths.
Pet adoptions adopts pets at the rate of a couple per day which, at the rate pets age, will eventually fill up every household in the game with pets.
Baby births does not create new births at the same rate as sims are dying (especially with accidental deaths on) so it is not sufficient to maintain populations at the default tuning, yet child adoptions is through the roof and would completely displace all genetic offspring if left on as it is tuned significantly higher than births, apparently.
Meanwhile, joining careers needs to be disabled because it can break your game and cause the error code 0 save issue.
So, basically, the entire feature needs adjustment, and sadly they didn't give us the tools to do the adjustments ourselves. A simple "on/off" option is insufficient given that the entire population of the game and the rate at which it ages (or not) can be adjusted.
MCCC is much better for literally every feature that Neighborhood stories offers except pet adoptions, because MCCC lets you tweak the tuning values not just turn things on/off. The only thing Neighborhood stories does better than MCCC is the pet adoptions and the ease with which features can be turned on and off by household.
The Winters family Tree --- My Mods
@Stormkeep I agree. Fine tuning the chances should be there for it. Like MCCC.
Female Simmer from Australia (she/her)
I had one of my Sims marry the Grim Reaper & now they have a lot of kids.
This reminds me of a show, I think it was called ‘Missing’ and there was a team who had to find out what happened to the missing person. Sure Eric Close was in it.
Also if a Sim suffers an accidental death why doesn’t an urn get generated? 🤷🏼♂️ Does the Grim Reaper only appear on an active lot? Is he required to register the death in game? Maybe that’s why there’s no urn? 🤔🤷🏼♂️.
Maybe in Options, a master report we could go through if wanted that tracks everything that changed. 🤔
He generally only appears on active lots, or a lot where actively played sims are gathering. Urns used to automatically spawn though even if a death occurred away from an active lot. Even in my game where I technically have two grim reapers, urns would still spawn on unplayed/non active lots. If this is no longer occurring then it's either a glitch or something the devs have decided to change.
Female Simmer from Australia (she/her)
I had one of my Sims marry the Grim Reaper & now they have a lot of kids.
As for "too much" it's just a matter of being aggressive in what you allow and not. I edit per family, turning every feature on and off depending on my preference. So if a family has two-three kids I tend to turn it off (though I am letting the Bjergsens run wild - they have six now, I am wondering how many they'll have as now the older kids are starting to head to uni leaving space for more babies.) I have also turned off adoption for more or less everyone (but will turn it on if I have a family where it fits).
I find that it's better to allow it for a large number of sims at a time, at least then there's the gamble who dies and who gets babies etc. Also the game only gives pets and babies to sims who live in a world, so that narrows the pool and makes the pets/babies pile up.
Updated with Werewolf Diaries (1)
This is a shame. I was hoping to use neighborhood stories to breathe some life into all the automatically generated single-sim households, but if they won't have babies unless they're in a relationship, and won't adopt babies or pets unless they're moved into a house, there's not much they can do.
> Adoption has gone totally nuts in my game so I turned it off for most households. I am disappointed that I have no idea what happened to Eliza Pancakes. I couple sim days ago she was there and then it was like she never existed. I assumed she died but I didn't get any kind of notification on the neighborhood stories updates. I don't know if it was because I was playing a sim that didn't live in Willow Creek or what. I visited Bob. The house seems so big when he is there by himself.
>
> He is not sad about her being gone, there is no urn, no trace that she ever existed. She doesn't even show up in his family tree as a sim that has died. That bums me out, a lot. She's not in his relationship panel at all. Completely scrubbed. I'm going to have to play his household just to make sure he remarries and has a nice life. I feel bad for him, I was hoping the game would make them have kids but nope, it just erased Eliza all together.
Omg I lost Mortimer Goth the same way! No urn, no nothing! He was completely scrubbed from the game, poor Bella is a widow and she doesn’t even know it, it’s bizarre, I mean where did he go??? It feels like a glitch
I am really enjoying the update, but for a rotational player, a setting to adjust the frequency would be helpful. If multiple Sims get pregnant at once, then you can't really play out all their pregnancies, you have to just choose one. I think there should be time to play out a pregnancy before there is another one added to the game.
I customize individual households. I turned off accidental death, move in and move out, quit and get new jobs, retire, because what I like is just all the new babies and pets being added. And I went to every Sim who quit their job and put them back in their original job. I didn't see how their new job was more suited to them. It seemed sort of random.
My baby/pet rules are this: whoever is single can adopt a pet so they don't get lonely, whoever is an adult or young adult couple can have a baby, same sex couples can adopt, elder Sims couples can adopt if they don't already have a lot of children and grandchildren. So far this balance is working much better for me, so it's not just babies and adoptions everywhere or all in the same household.
I check the mailbox for daily notifications, they only happen once per day, and if someone gets pregnant, adopts, or has a pet, I will check on them and decide if they can have another. If not I will switch the feature off for them. I get about 2-3 updates per Sim day and the changes feels easier to manage now.
It's so deadly right?! You can't even get Sims wiped out like that with the plague in Strangerville.
The Winters family Tree --- My Mods
I can get activate “have baby” or “adopt a child” for a few households at the time. Then when a few children have been added turn it if again. I often look at the stats for my population so that would be ok.
Something that I do not approve of in any way, shape or form is sims dying and they are just unknown in the save. I don’t know if it is a bug or intended that a wife or husband can die due to story progression and there is no urn, no family tree and they are gone from all panels. I cannot allow that in my game.
Currently I am offline so I am just reading about the new features in the forum. It could be very useful if it gets a bit more work.
I had 4 deaths in one Sim day. every sim day at least one Sim dies and others are expecting, delivering or adopting.
I'm having to turn it off fully or extremely edit the settings. Turning it off in my manual age saves is all I can do or homes look like baby mills.
I have been offline since August 2021.
It has been interesting reading about these new features and bugs...I'm not sure when I will ever update... I might not have a choice as I might have to reinstall my OS soon. I'm planning to change my motherboard.
If that happens, I'm pretty sure I will disable all of this new stuff. Neighborhood stories seems way too random for my taste with sims adopting babies and pets for no reason and sims getting deleted as part of a "story" progression.
Is there any logic to which sims that will be affected or is it just random generator like the horrible outfits that gets generated for townies?