Killing off townies to make sims game load faster?

SfarinaP · July 2018

If you eliminated several townie households, would that make the game load faster? Thinking that reduction in population to maybe 6 or 7 townie families would mean less data to save. Thanks

TadOlson · July 2018

It would be better to start playing an empty balnk world and just add the lots,place buildings on them and eventually move in a family and start playing to get them settled in and add others after the first sims have gotten settled in.I start by moving one family in and slowly move others in over the following years as the town starts to grow.

SfarinaP · July 2018

hey thanks for the response thats a good idea

ARRensch · July 2018

Seems like a sound theory to me. It's fun to kill townies anyway and it keeps them out of your way; I'm fairly certain they've all plotted against me to block my sims from getting where they need to be by crowding around every door. Gotta Thanos them every once in a while.

MRSMLOG · July 2018

Whenever I start a new game I almost always go into edit town first and evict and delete all the really huge households. Also any other townies I don't like (which is about half of them!) Sometimes I bulldoze their houses too. I think it makes the game load faster and run more smoothly.
Sometime I do what @TadOlson suggests and play the Rebuild the World challenge. You wouldn't believe how fast everything runs! It's great.

nickibitsward · July 2018

TadOlson wrote: »

It would be better to start playing an empty balnk world and just add the lots,place buildings on them and eventually move in a family and start playing to get them settled in and add others after the first sims have gotten settled in.I start by moving one family in and slowly move others in over the following years as the town starts to grow.

I have my own blank (except for commercial buildings) Sunset Valley template I always start in, I like that world best for the layout. It was a normal town with some modern/Victorian buildings but I've changed it all now to a future town with Lunar Lake and Oasis Landing buildings.

TadOlson · July 2018

I'm working on a Riverview makeover with the CAW terrain template and this one will be empty and require Riverview and just base game though it can run in any combo of expansions and packs as I've got all of them installed though I want more to be able to use this world.I love empty worlds and starting from scratch with my populations because it runs faster and I don't have to deal with a storyline I didn't create myself.I'm creating my own storylines in Evermore Falls,Deery Meadows and Storybrook County.

SPARKY1922 · July 2018

@SfarinaP

First of all I think killing off sims can cause corruption as the game still sees them as still being in the game as they did not die..maybe someone else could clarify this for me but I know when I was not aware of this in my earlier game playing days I caused myself some problems doing that..These days I have a vamp modified by mods and send him out to kill anyone and everyone I do no like in my game and because the reaper turns up I know they have been killed off properly

@nickibitsward & @TadOlson

I have just started making over half made or blank worlds so I can I can add all the types of lots and sims I like but of course as I was trying to do this without mods this last time I forgot the game would move sims I did not want into my lots so as @igazor, I mean Hank or Shirley suggested I have taken out all the fridges from my lots as (I did not know this) when the fridges are removed sims will not move into those lots.. I then created an 8 bed lot and put all the unwanted sims in there for the time being until I decide what to do with them

Karritz · July 2018

I use Master Controller to totally annihilate Sims I don't want. I recently opened a game that had become unplayable due to lag and error 12. It had started as an empty player made world. I added one overstuffed household to a huge building and put in lots of decor and objects. Then I added a second lot they owned across the street and gave them a huge garden. I assumed I had broken the game by putting too much into it but decided to get rid of a few from the household by annihilating them. But I chose the wrong commands and ended up with a very long list of every Sim living in the world that was not in my household. This list includes a massive number of stray cats and dogs and wild horses plus a huge member of Sims. I annihilated all but the grim reaper. Then the game added back the role and service Sims it needed. The game runs extremely smoothly now.

Edit. I think all of the Sims I got rid of would have been homeless as there were only 2 or 3 houses in the world

igazor · July 2018

It depends on what we mean by "killing" sims. Killing digital creatures and just getting rid of them can be a few different things.

-- Arranging so a sim dies with a "proper" cause of death either by in-game actions or using a mod is okay (but sad). That leaves your town with a dead sim on its hands.

-- Evicting households from Edit Town and hoping they just sort of wander away should be okay, but don't be surprised if these sims show up again later, somewhere else in-game (not something that can be counted on).

-- Using NRaas MasterController to Totally Annihilate sims is okay. This doesn't kill them, it arranges things so it is as if they never existed in the first place and adjusts others' family trees and relationships so again it is if they were never there. Note that some family trees and relationships will become broken or at least change quite a bit if a mid-level related sim is TA'ed so that there is no longer a relationship between, for example, a grandparent and a grandchild. Typically for more safeguards I would suggest not TAing too many sims at once although players do have success with this when attempting to empty out entire worlds, and would strongly suggest having ErrorTrap in place (and of course Overwatch) to clean up any residual useless bits of data that might be left behind. Some of the cautions are probably more relevant to games that have already been played and progressed for a very long while as by then each sim will have much more data associated with them.

-- Testingcheats shift-click to delete a sim of any kind as if they were an object is never okay. That only deletes their bodies, their data will stay in the game and can cause all kinds of issues leading up to total game corruption.

There was/still is a myth propagating around that even properly getting rid of pre-made residents from EA worlds will somehow damage the ongoing game. This is not true. Certainly some worlds may progress differently if the Altos, Landgraabs, Crumplebottoms, Hemlocks, etc. are not there, but them not being in the world does things no harm. Not sure where this idea started, but it may have been one of those holdovers from TS2 if such things were to be warned against in that game.

SPARKY1922 · July 2018

@Karritz

Your own story is why I have never tried something like that yet lol I was going to try the annihilation feature for the first time when i noticed EA filling up my lots with sims I did not want but even then I decided I did not want to try it just right now in case I got it wrong somehow-) I am glad the game sorted it in so far as your service sims coming back but if I had lost this family I have that I have invested so much time in I would be devastated lol although I assume we could go back to an earlier save with no bother?

@igazor

Thanks for that information again it is very interesting is there anything about this game you do not know

I am wondering when you say "Annihilate sims is okay. This doesn't kill them, it arranges things so it is as if they never existed in the first place and adjusts others' family trees and relationships so again it is if they were never there " does that mean the EA created sims as well or are they different in this regard to the sims we make in cas? Despite what I said about sending my vamp to kill sims to make the kill a proper death as far as the game is concerned I do not like losing my sims it actually upsets me lol I have everything on epic because I hate to see them go and I have saves that i can go back to when they were a younger age in the game-)

I apologize about my little joke as I had just been reading about it on another thread I hope I did not offend you in any way it was not my intention

igazor · July 2018

@SPARKY1922 - If you meant Hank/Shirley, that's fine. You can all call me anything you want, except late for dinner (I think this joke is around 200 years old by now?)

Pre-made sims are no different from newer or player created ones in this regard. Total Annihilation can be run from the Town menu on City Hall to potentially wipe out an entire world, individually directly on Sims (MC > Sim > Advanced) or on subsets of them at once like so many other MC commands. Yes, one can always revert to a prior save to make it so this never happened.

As for things about this game I do not know, yes there are plenty. I'm always learning (or relearning) things about the game when I do actually get to play it and even more so from reading threads and chatting with other players like right on this thread. That's more a testament to how much there is to this game and how deep it all goes in so may different directions, and why it still has such a strong appeal to so many players all with or still finding their own individual playing styles.

Karritz · July 2018

@sparky when I use total annihilation in my game I work through a list of names and only remove Sims I choose. That way I reduce the chance of accidentally removing a Sim I want to keep. It also lets me see just how many Sims are clogging up my game. Apart from the homeless Sims I didn't think I needed about 30 or 40 stray cats and dogs or about 40 wild horses.

igazor · July 2018

@Karritz - No, of course that's not supposed to happen. Sounds like NRaas Register's Animal Control wasn't working or you don't/didn't have the mod present. There can be quite a surprising number of animals showing up in the world who are never on screen though, the ones populating the slots for adoption and at the Equestrian Center for breeding if you have one are all considered Service Sims as well as the strays we do occasionally see on-screen. These sims don't typically add anything measurable to the game overhead though, they are usually just tiny (furry) bundles of data waiting to be called upon someday. Sort of like the somewhat less furry taxi, school bus, and carpool drivers. They are sims, but they aren't really doing much in our games and can't be interacted with.

But I have to admit I would be tempted just for a moment to turn my game into some version of Animal Farm where the animals take over everything and push the humans out. Just look at the mess we humans have made of this planet, the animals in charge can't possibly do a worse job.

Karritz · July 2018

@igazor I do have Register (I just checked) but I've never looked at Animal Control.

The world I was using is Chocolate Cake Island. It comes empty - with only a few rabbit holes and 1 or 2 houses. I have a Big Game where I started with a family of 15 children and their parents and I added sims from my library until it grew too big to have in one world so I ended up taking your advice and learning to use Traveler to move sims to a variety of worlds. As a result I now am up to generation 4 of that game and there are babies, toddlers and children who are first cousins who have never met each other.

For a few years I've been adding a boarding school to my worlds where I place a few young adults who are responsible for training the toddlers, children and teens of the world including townies.

Then one day late last year I got a brainwave - boarding schools were messing up my worlds due to them being so overstuffed so I built a boarding school on Chocolate Cake Island and moved the toddlers, children and teens to it for their training. This means the cousins all get to live together in small groups and they get to know each other.

Then the supposedly empty Chocolate Cake Island quickly became unplayable. I thought I had too many in the boarding school even though I'd had more in other worlds with no problems.

In the meantime I've been making videos with other games and the one I'm working on this week is the story of Oscar and Louise. I did a few chapters on Louise growing up in Riverview. I plonked Oscar as a Young Adult in Hidden Springs and said he'd had a tragic past. He started out in a loving large family and due to a tragedy, as a child, he lost his entire family and went to live in different worlds until he ended up in Hidden Springs where he met Louise after she ran away from home in Riverview as soon as she aged up to Young Adult. The story continues with them getting married and having a LARGE family.

But - as this was going along I wanted both Oscar and Louise to have more genetic variety in their children due to them going to have so many of them. I'm thinking 15 or 20 or so.

To achieve this I needed Oscar to have parents in his family tree so I aged Oscar down to child and placed him in Erewhon and recorded some video. I managed to family tragedy and added a social worker sim (one of mine that I control) to take him from Erewhon to another world. Then I remembered my boarding school in Chocolate Cake Island. I wondered if I could somehow get him into it. Initially I just wanted the building.

But I sent the social worker to Chocolate Cake Island and back to Erewhon. Then I copied the Chocolate Cake Island nhd file from my Big Game to the Oscar's childhood save. Then I sent the sim back to Chocolate Cake Island. It took a bit of fiddling but I eventually managed to get them into the save and working. It crashed a few times in the process but in the end I finally got it working except for the lag. I decided to eliminate all of the current residents of the boarding school. This would leave Oscar there alone with his one social worker sim who had no skills as she was a new sims I made recently. As I was thinking of having to add children and others to the save for him to have some companions I decided to just eliminate a few of the current residents. The others could be treated as townies as they no longer had any connection to my Big Game. But their family trees are still there it is just the pictures are blank. I was surprised about that.

Anyway when I wanted to get rid of a few of the residents of the boarding school I used town hall for some reason - can't remember why now - and got Master Controller up and got a list of all Alive sims in the world. But that list excluded all sims in the boarding school. I was shocked at how many sims were there so I decided to get rid of them all. I was tempted to keep the few that had relationships of some sort with the household I was playing but then I decided to get rid of all of them as I was still planning on getting rid of all of the sims in the household too except for Oscar and his social worker.

I did know there were a lot of horses in the world though as I'd previously seen multiple small herds of wild horses. The lots are mostly empty and the horses were easy to spot. But I was shocked at the numbers of other animals.

Then I must have used their computer next and got the household up and at the last minute decided to keep most of the existing toddlers, children and teens as Oscar's companions. Easier than making more to take their places. And the ones who are already in the lot are mostly fully trained already. I just got rid of most of the townies from Barnacle Bay and one of the nannies - who I now think I should have kept but I didn't so she's gone. However, in the Big Game, which is where they all came from, they are all still there and will eventually be returned to their own families in the various worlds.

Of course, being me, I started thinking of moving their families to Oscar's save and over-complicating it as well. But I resisted - so far.

All I want this save I've just set up for Oscar is to get a bit of video of him at the boarding school then I'll age him up and send him on his way to another world and get a bit more video and then he'll travel to Hidden Springs where he'll meet Louise.

So that's the background to why I did what I did when I chose to annihilate the whole town.

When I get back to the Big Game I'll probably go into the boarding school world and get rid of the horses and strays as doing that seems to have made the world totally smooth with no lag at all whereas it had become unplayable.

nickibitsward · July 2018

TadOlson wrote: »

I'm working on a Riverview makeover with the CAW terrain template and this one will be empty and require Riverview and just base game though it can run in any combo of expansions and packs as I've got all of them installed though I want more to be able to use this world.I love empty worlds and starting from scratch with my populations because it runs faster and I don't have to deal with a storyline I didn't create myself.I'm creating my own storylines in Evermore Falls,Deery Meadows and Storybrook County.

I do that too, create bio's for all my Sims that are all linked together.

TadOlson · July 2018

I've got a 100 baby challenge where they've been seeing dry weather since the year of 1553 started and it's mid-spring already.That looks like it might be the great 16th century drought in Storybrook and the residents are all building additions on their houses to get ready for when they start to try for babies.

SPARKY1922 · July 2018

Hi @igazor

Yes I was meaning Hank/Shriley as a little joke from the other thread but what do you know I even got one of those names wrong I am so Duh at the moment-) Dinner you have time for dinner

I love your idea for animal planet I have just spent 5 hours discussing these sorts of issues about the planet and our place in it with friends tonight and we always go away trying to think up various ways we can do more but honestly I already think it's too late...we are our own worst enemies..

@Karritz

I love reading about some of the things you try some of them I would never dream up so you give me ideas lol I am shocked at the amount of animals you mention as well as I am assuming it's these sort's of figures that cause so much lag yet we don't know about them..

Karritz · July 2018

@SPARKY1922 I'm glad I can give you some entertainment. I never know what I'll try next. But - if you have master controller you can find and get rid of all those animals. That's how I did it.

Chazzzy · July 2018

Yes but keep in mind whenever you do something new in your game and there isn’t a townie available for that job, the game will generate a new townie.

For example, if you go to the bar in Selvadorada for the first time if you have Jungle Adventure, the game needs bartenders, market vendors, tourists, etc. So the game will make new townies to fit those slots.

igazor · July 2018

Chazzzy wrote: »

Yes but keep in mind whenever you do something new in your game and there isn’t a townie available for that job, the game will generate a new townie.

For example, if you go to the bar in Selvadorada for the first time if you have Jungle Adventure, the game needs bartenders, market vendors, tourists, etc. So the game will make new townies to fit those slots.

While I am sure that's true, perhaps you could have chosen a different example to use? This isn't the TS4 section of the forum, so we have to assume those on it are playing TS3.

In TS3, sims are generated to staff role giving objects like bars and cash registers whether our own sims (or anyone) ventures over there or not. They don't have to be residents though, and homeless NPCs do not add the same kind of overhead to the game that residents do. With NRaas Register, for those so inclined, one has more control over who these Role Sims are and which objects are staffed vs. allowing to remain unstaffed.

Or one could take away some or all the role giving objects. Newly started out worlds set in some colonial era centuries ago for example probably aren't going to have bars, restaurants, and shopping malls. That's why most of us with time machines in our bedrooms (oops, too much information) choose not to go back there very often.

TadOlson · July 2018

I've played through two days in Sunset Valley2 just a short while ago and that game has hardly anybody in town as it's still a very new settlement and the chess tables are gone until the town starts getting new families moving in which won't happen for at least a few years.I've got story progression turned on there and it's the NRaas Mod version which is the one that works and manages the town very well as it leaves most of the work up to me to manage manually.

Charlottesmom · July 2018

nickibitsward wrote: »

TadOlson wrote: »

It would be better to start playing an empty balnk world and just add the lots,place buildings on them and eventually move in a family and start playing to get them settled in and add others after the first sims have gotten settled in.I start by moving one family in and slowly move others in over the following years as the town starts to grow.

I have my own blank (except for commercial buildings) Sunset Valley template I always start in, I like that world best for the layout. It was a normal town with some modern/Victorian buildings but I've changed it all now to a future town with Lunar Lake and Oasis Landing buildings.

Same here. It's nice to have a clean slate and add in who you like/need for what ever type of play you want for that save.

Karritz · July 2018

A couple of weeks ago I cleaned out Isla Paradiso. I annihilated everyone in the world then bulldozed all the houses and houseboats except for one that my one sim lives in. I haven't used it in a proper game yet. It is the version of the world fixed by EllaCharmed.

SPARKY1922 · July 2018

@nickibitsward

I just re-read your post I would love to see some pics of your lunar lakes/ITF combo world if you have any.. In fact I would love to see any player pics of the way they have kitted out their blank worlds..

SPARKY1922 · July 2018

@Karritz

I tried use EllaCharmed's IP world once and screwed up my folders doing something wrong (nothing new there then-) do those worlds make a big difference to their EA counterparts?

The Sims Forums

Killing off townies to make sims game load faster?

Comments