How do I control two families with NRaas Story Progression?

xyxnix · July 2015

I just learned how to mod my game and I want to play two families at once. How do I tune the Story Progression options and what extra mods are required?

Karritz · July 2015

As far as I understand it you play one at a time.

Or, you could try the trick I tried for a while. You need a few mods to make it work and I'm not sure what they are but @igazor will know.

What I did was get a big lot, put a big house on it and divide it in two and overstuff it. With the right mod combination you can have more than 8 sims to a lot. But you computer might struggle with it.

xyxnix · July 2015

That is a great idea @Karritz but what I want to do is that some of my sims are moving out (3 sims and 2 are staying) and I want to be able to control them on different lots so I can have control of jobs, relationships, etc.

Karritz · July 2015

xyxnix wrote: »

That is a great idea @Karritz but what I want to do is that some of my sims are moving out (3 sims and 2 are staying) and I want to be able to control them on different lots so I can have control of jobs, relationships, etc.

The usual way is to swap households. But story progression will take over the other households as soon as you move. I find it usually gives my sims unsuitable jobs. So I try to make sure they all have self employed jobs so they don't get sent out to work at some weird job every day while I'm playing a different household.

xyxnix · July 2015

Oh, okey so NRaas Story Progression is like another player more advanced than the AI included with the Sims 3.

Karritz · July 2015

xyxnix wrote: »

Oh, okey so NRaas Story Progression is like another player more advanced than the AI included with the Sims 3.

Yes. But it has huge numbers of settings so you can control exactly how it does it. However, it is a big learning curve and it is all a lot overwhelming at first. I'm still quite close to the beginning on its curve.

Once you master NRAAS story progression you can make you game to anything.

TadOlson · July 2015

I've been playing multiple families in a single game for a while and have an issue with schools.I might have to work around it with Master Controller until somebody can fix something so the issue isn't so bad.

IreneSwift · July 2015

You can play multiple households at once if you have the household buy the houses for the ones moving out as additional homes. The game will consider the main house to be home to all of them, but you can lock doors, assign beds, and cancel the carpools and the push to go home after work or school, and have them use their own transportation to go to their homes on different lots. They can't cook everything on the other lots, or open bookcases, and the food that goes into the refrigerator at one house is available to all of the houses. They can click on the stove to prepare cooked meals, but they can't prepare autumn salad, sushi, fruit parfait, or other uncooked foods. I've done it before, but it's a lot of work to keep track of them all at once.

Another thing I've done is to place the main house on a large lot and build other houses on the same lot. Although they were officially one household I played them as separate households. It was easier than having them spread all over the map.

IreneSwift · July 2015

Not only that, but a friend of mine has recently made a single house for several households of the same family, consisting of separate apartments with a single hallway connecting them. You could do something like that, either spread out like my friend's house, or in multiple stories with a different family on each floor.

TadOlson · July 2015

I do household castes and assign each household to it's own caste and play rotationally with the game and each family is on it's own lot and is it's own household.The only things that happen are things like food spoiling in the fridge and sims getting promoted on their jobs while I'm playing other families.I'll return to them to find their fridge is full of spoiled leftovers.

xyxnix · July 2015

What exactly is a caste? @TadOlson

Karritz · July 2015

IreneSwift wrote: »

Not only that, but a friend of mine has recently made a single house for several households of the same family, consisting of separate apartments with a single hallway connecting them. You could do something like that, either spread out like my friend's house, or in multiple stories with a different family on each floor.

I found this can be made to work if all households have their front doors on the same level. Once I tried a multi level apartment block with houses on top of each other the sims living upstairs would route fail a lot when trying to go and use their own shower or kitchen. They'd shout about not being able to get into a downstairs house. I gave up on that in the end.

This is the way I was setting it up with 4 families per level all with identical mirror image apartments. No I didn't use any of EA's Apartment lot type settings. It was just a normal residential lot.

TadOlson · July 2015

Castes are a group assignment in story progression under caste options and there's a secection for adding a new caste which is one you name and assign to a household with custom settings to make sure the inacive family dosen't make unwanted changes while you're not playing them.I would make one of the castes for each family in town and set things up so they can't have babies on their own or adopt pets without you directing them to do that.It can also be set to stop them from moving or breaking the family up.

igazor · July 2015

Not all, but many of us who have tried things like the above to emulate playing multiple "households" at once (depending on the setup, usually it's really still all one household) have since given in and split the households the usual way. But with NRaas StoryProgression, you can arrange settings on the inactive one(s) so that, while you can't control them, you can play them rotationally. They don't do important life-changing things in your absence or things you had never intended for them to do like change jobs, form/break partnerships, move, pick up skills you didn't want them to have, etc.

Here's how I do it, there are variations that other players prefer especially when it comes to aging:
http://forums.thesims.com/en_US/discussion/comment/12992304/#Comment_12992304

xyxnix · July 2015

@igazor My NRaas doesn't have the SP option.

igazor · July 2015

xyxnix wrote: »

@igazor My NRaas doesn't have the SP option.

NRaas is a collection of 39 mods, plus we host a few others by a mod developer who retired a few months ago. One of the NRaas mods is called StoryProgression (which I've abbreviated to SP for short). Not quite sure what you mean by "your NRaas" as I wouldn't know which ones you have installed.

igazor · July 2015

Oh, or if you what you meant is that you have SP but do not see Caste Options on City Hall -- that means SP progression is not enabled on the General Settings menu and SP is not actually in control of your town.

xyxnix · July 2015

I meant StoryProgression when I was talking about my NRaas. Sorry about that. :lol:

igazor · July 2015

So then you do see the options I've mentioned on City Hall?

xyxnix · July 2015

Does anyone know where the caste options are?

TadOlson · July 2015

That's when you select NRaas>Story progression and caste options are at the top of that main story progression menu.

igazor · July 2015

Trying again. On City Hall (or an in-game computer),
NRaas > Story Progression > Caste Options

xyxnix · July 2015

I've pulled up every menu, but it can't be found. The version is 229. Did my mod get install incorrectly?

igazor · July 2015

v229? Whoops, that explains it. That's a very old version of StoryProgression from before castes were even implemented. Are you playing on Patch 1.47 and, if so, is there a reason you are not patching up?

The current version of StoryProgression is v267, and is meant for Patch 1.63 or higher (1.67 recommended).

xyxnix · July 2015

I'm playing on patch v 1.42 and I recently installed Generations, Town Life Stuff and Master Suite Stuff. I didn't even know that the patch was that old.

igazor · July 2015

The Launcher should have been offering you later patch versions all along, but that's not always reliable. If you want to patch up all at once, the best way to do that would be to use EA's SuperPatcher. It's a huge download, but the process itself is painless.
http://help.ea.com/en/article/the-sims-3-super-patcher

And then you would have to update your NRaas mods (plus any others you might have that have different patch versions) to the higher patch level.

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How do I control two families with NRaas Story Progression?

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