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Neighborhood Stories: Where are all the settings, and What overrides what?
mightysprite
Posts: 5,889 Member
Now that we've all been playing with Neighborhood Stories for some time, maybe we can share knowledge about the different places where the system's settings are located, and what happens if we have conflicting settings at different levels.
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The overall toggle for the whole system is in Game Options -> Gameplay.
Don't forget to scroll down.
There is no way to set it for all saves at once. You have to load an individual saved game to use the Gameplay options tab.
Then, there are Neighborhood Stories buttons in the Household Manager, accessible from Manage Worlds.
The tricky part is that it looks like only one button, but is actually two.
My Households button appears when My Households are displayed in the manager
Other Households button appears when Other Households are displayed in the manager
Anything you set from the My Households button won't affect Other Households, and vice versa. If you want to set options for all households in your game, make sure you use both buttons.
In these options screens you can set which kinds of life events will happen. Green is enabled. White is disabled. There is also a "enable neighborhood stories" checkbox in the upper right which can be checked or unchecked.
In this example everything is disabled for the household
In this example the green events are enabled and the white events are disabled
In this example I have unchecked the checkbox, causing all types of life events to be greyed out. However, the green ones are still green and the white ones are still white. If all events were disabled I would have expected everything to turn white. Does anyone know if the green events continue to happen in this case?
Finally, for each household you can set a custom Neighborhood Stories configuration here
Now, what overrides what?
The overall toggle in Game Options -> Gameplay: According to @babajayne , turning this off does indeed override every other set of options, and doesn't even let you make changes to options anywhere else.
I notice a separate "Reset Custom Configurations" button on that screen. Does clicking that button clear all the household-level custom configurations? If so, do those households revert to having all options disabled, or to the My Households or Other Households settings? Also, do they continue to remain separate from any future changes made to My Households or Other Households?
If the settings under My Households or Other Households are different from the settings we created manually for an individual household, the settings for the individual household (also called custom configuration) override the My Households/Other Households settings.
As for the phone calls about life events: Currently no way to adjust these settings as far as I know.
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Wondering if anyone out there has additional insights?
Great idea. I’ve bookmarked this. The screenshots were helpful as I’m still learning. 😎
Is there a way to track which families NS chooses? The allocations are very bizarre! 🙄🤦🏼♂️.
In my current save Vlad and the Vatores are getting all the adopted kids/pets until all eight slots are filled. I remove the ones I don’t like but they’re soon replaced. Other families get them less often.
The same townies are joining then leaving those careers regularly.
I turn off accidental deaths, have a baby and move in/out options for everyone and only enable these on households I want.
I would turn on the move in functionality if Sims moved to an appropriate house based on their size and current funds. Maybe even using the decor preference as a metric.
I think the phone calls from townies you know, should be tied in with NS. Hopefully they can be at some stage.
The green events are disabled in this case. I think they remain green because the settings are retained until they are enabled again.
Yes.
You can’t, because the overall toggle doesn’t allow you to make changes there, in my experience.
I don’t know - I have not played around with this yet.
Yes, these are correct statements in my experience.
Loaded PlantSim completed scenario. This is 6 Sim days of game play in a brand new save.
Game options > gameplay > Neighborhood stories checked.
Manage Households > My Households > The upper right button to configure them is green.
When clicked Configure Neighborhood Stories, All Households in My Households, Enable Neighborhood stories on the right is checked.
Selected under that (green) are 3 things: Leave a Career, Retire From a Career, Join a Career.
This makes all MY Households Green. Then in two of my households, I clicked their icons and removed even those selections from them. (I wanted them to stay in the same careers.) And I have the blue circle on both of those households indicating that I have a custom configuration for them.
So for me, here is where it got weird. In one of those households with the custom config, I have no idea where the two males got to (it never showed up in the neighborhood information), but now one of the males from "Other Households" (Tim Wainscot) is showing up there snuggling the female's baby. Those two males should never have moved out or died or whatever happened to them...but they were living in Strangerville. I went through the "not in the world" section too and they are not there.
Now for the Other Households: I set the same overall configuration with only the careers selected. I then set some specialty configurations.
I allowed my version of the Newbies to also have a baby. At the end of 6 Sim days, the Newbies, who started with a puppy belonging to their old dog, now have a child (child, not toddler. 6 Sim days) son, and 3 babies. But the puppy is still a puppy, so the child aged differently.
Custom config for the Pancakes who I allowed to have a baby too, now have 2 babies and a toddler in 6 sim days.
Now that Wainscot family, I had Felicia W move in, so there was 1 adult male, 2 adult females and the two toddlers. I allowed them only to adopt a pet, no career changes or anything else. And there is no sign of Tim, there now. But I know where he went even though there shouldn't have been any change.
I kind of have a god complex and only want certain things happening or not. But to go all out and have 4 children in a 6 sim day period is a bit over the top. (I haven't checked to see if those are triplets yet.)
I hope this helps to figure things out right now. I'm probably going to turn off neighborhood stories though until something is figured out.
Did I get this right about what happened with your family?
You started out Felicia's household, a household you were playing, with a custom Neighborhood Stories configuration where all options were disabled.
Then two male sims disappeared from the household and from the game.
Then Tim Wainscot, who had been in Other Households, moved into Felicia's household even though neither Tim nor Felicia had a Move In option enabled.
Then Tim moved out of the household on his own, but he didn't disappear from the game. That leaves Felicia, one other adult female, and two toddlers in the household.
If that's right, then the part of it that could be caused by Neighborhood Stories is the moving in and moving out. But you had all those options disabled, both for My Households and Other Households. Now that's odd.
The families having and adopting lots of children in a short time has been startling to a lot of players but it seems to be by design, especially if any sim in the house has the Family-Oriented trait.
Your disappearing sims: If they are not in the Household Manager, even in the Not In World section that you checked, then they were culled or something. Other people have been mentioning played sims being unexpectedly culled lately. Maybe this is what happened to you. But it is a separate bug and not anything to do with Neighborhood Stories.
There’s been a lot of discussion about how Neighborhood Stories doesn’t split individuals from households (although MCCC does, do you have that?). And many people have said they wish it did, because when they have Move In/Move Out enabled, it’s the entire household that moves. It would make sense for YAs to move out of the family home, for example, but they won’t through NS. If you don’t use MCCC and they moved (rather than be culled/disappeared from game) it’s the first I’ve heard of that kind of thing.
I came here to say same about mccc.
I wasn’t aware that it was my mccc settings marrying sims off when it’s not even an option in ns 😅
I think people tend to forget that they are using mccc and blaming all weird things on ns.
I know I did...
> @mightysprite said:
> Thanks for doing that @NatalieCV !
>
> Did I get this right about what happened with your family?
> You started out Felicia's household, a household you were playing, with a custom Neighborhood Stories configuration where all options were disabled.
> Then two male sims disappeared from the household and from the game.
> Then Tim Wainscot, who had been in Other Households, moved into Felicia's household even though neither Tim nor Felicia had a Move In option enabled.
> Then Tim moved out of the household on his own, but he didn't disappear from the game. That leaves Felicia, one other adult female, and two toddlers in the household.
>
> If that's right, then the part of it that could be caused by Neighborhood Stories is the moving in and moving out. But you had all those options disabled, both for My Households and Other Households. Now that's odd.
>
> The families having and adopting lots of children in a short time has been startling to a lot of players but it seems to be by design, especially if any sim in the house has the Family-Oriented trait.
>
> Your disappearing sims: If they are not in the Household Manager, even in the Not In World section that you checked, then they were culled or something. Other people have been mentioning played sims being unexpectedly culled lately. Maybe this is what happened to you. But it is a separate bug and not anything to do with Neighborhood Stories.
Re the households-not exactly. I have set up a bunch of modified households in various neighborhoods including the Wainscotts; Nikia Wainscott, Timothy Wainscott-to be (fiancé to Nikia in my world) and the 2 kids, I then added Felicia as sister of Nikia and modified their house accordingly. But I wasn't playing them at the time. They were in "Other Households" but listed as unplayed and they were only allowed to do the three career options, no moving out or dying.
I was playing an entirely different household Connie Ir'land in Sulani for the plant sim scenario (not sure which details are going to matter, so pardon the longer explanations).
One of the other households I had set up, but had not yet played but are in "My Households", was the Branches in Strangerville. (sorry in my previous explanation I got it backwards) 2 adult females Branch and Reynolds; and 1 male Noriega, all military careers, all unrelated and only friends investigating Strangerville. They were not allowed to do anything re the stories. Sometime during playing Connie's PlantSim scenario, Noriega (m) and Reynolds (f) disappeared from that household. Tim Wainscot who was the fiancé of Nikia but not allowed to move out, managed to do so and moved in with Branch in Strangerville and had a baby. Again, specifically not allowed.
Now, I will go see if MCCC is updated and check out the settings there to see if there is any possibility that I checked things I don't remember that would be effecting this.
As for the life events phone calls; I wish there was an option to increase the frequency for that because I find that to be useful for my household sims and other stuff, like one of my household sims asked if they can get prego and I said yes and they autonomously whoohoo'd their spouse in the active household (I was mainly controlling one sim when this was going on, reincarnation challenge rule) and got prego, I was glad that they did that without me having to manually do it because they wanted to do it themselves without me having to actually control em, OR we can later have em story progress without the phone calls in the future? (optional feature) lol
Edit: Or set the cull system to only cull when the game is at population cap.
I usually put my population settings to unlimited since I like to overpopulate my game, more sims the merrier.