I hope it's okay to ask about this here. I came back to TS3 after playing just TS4 for a bit and I wanted to try and play a whole world in TS3. I did try playing with the included story progression in TS3, but some sims I cared about just vanished or had randam babies added, who looked nothing like either parent. That's not what I want.
I am not sure, if that would stop with story progression disabled. I used to play with nraas SP and I wouldn't mind to keep that, but I just want a light story progression. It would be great, if sims didn't get married, vanished, were imported or had babies on their own. I'd like for them to keep aging, add some skills, maybe get promoted and it would also be okay for them to change their relationships, as long as their wouldn't move or get married on their own. It would also be great, if pregnancies continued, when I switch families. And I don't want them to add pets on their own either.
Basically, I'd like to control when a sim or pet gets added to a household or when a whole family moves. I've been trying to figure out how to set up nraas SP to achieve that, but I am not sure, if I did it right, because it's kinda hard to test.
Does anybody play like this or with similar settings?
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That's what I follow, and it works great.
Btw, it looks more complicated than it actually is. It's just very thorough to make sure you don't need to ask any follow-up questions.
I would never try to play ALL of the households in a given world, most of mine are far too heavily populated for that to make sense to me. Hence the option to protect a caste (subset) of households from unwanted forms of progression while they are not actively played vs. the rest of the town doing whatever they want, within reason. Other players engage with more lightly populated worlds and have different takes on this.
Perhaps you could bring any more specific/advanced questions you have along the way about the Rotational settings to us at NRaas? Helping players find their way through the mods and how they can be leveraged is kind of what we are there for.
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I did go read through that Caste-Setting link @Turjan and you are right, it is a thorough explanation, but I really do want to play the whole town at least to some degree. Seems like NRaas is still the way to go for this, though. And I love how flexible those mods are, but I don't always understand what to change to get the result I want. And sometimes I'm not even totally sure what result I want, because there are so many different possibilities.
But I did just start a test game last week to fiddle with the settings and try out the caste system and the relativity mod, which is amazing. The game is probably twice at much fun to me at half the speed.
I'll go and ask more specific questions at the NRaas site, when I figure out what they are.
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I play very slowly as well. Aging is supposed to have roughly a sim day for each month of their lives. So each sim lives nearly a 1000 days. And Traveler is not in use, but I did forget about the vacation worlds. The sims there would just grow old and die without having babies. I'll play around in my test game some more to figure out how I want it to work and I'll go an activate that account on Nraas for more specific questions.
Having said that, I've seen you mention many times here in these forums about how you have a mod(s) that let us TS2 lovers do rotational play in TS3. So here is what I want:
* Create my own town
* Create my own founding families
* Play those founding families rotationally, aging each family up 5 Sim days
* The families I'm not playing don't age, get promoted, have babies, move - just remain frozen until I play them again
Basically TS2 type play. Is this possible with your mods? Keep in mind I don't understand how mods work and had to have a good bit of help for my TS2 mod I finally got installed.
So for the entire town, a modified version of the strategy outlined in Option One here, or perhaps consider Sarah's Option Two. Instead of doing up a custom caste for Rotational households, you could use the built-in Not Active caste to make the protections you choose to put into place while families are not being controlled happen more automatically upon switching households. Five sim days is a bit short for a rotation, I find that I lose momentum for longer-term goals when my rotations are shorter than two sim weeks. It also depends on how long the life spans are to be. In the mid to high hundreds or thousands, five sim days is almost nothing as a percentage of each sim's life. With shorter lifespans, the five sim day period is a more significant part of each sim's life. But that's more a matter of strategy and player preference than anything technical.
https://www.nraas.net/community/Story-Progression-Rotational-Caste-Settings
What you might want to do first though is experiment with SP, with its progression enabled, on default settings in a test game, so you get a sense of how the mod works without the Rotational Play element. This is all considered an intermediate to somewhat more advanced application of the mod's feature set. I would also say that SP is not the easiest mod to become accustomed to if one has never used mods before. You might want to consider starting with MasterController, which actually on its own doesn't do anything to or for the game other than provide its collections of menu commands on sims, lots, and City Hall for the player to use on demand as they wish. SP is more like set it up and then watch it take over and see what happens (or in the case of rotational control, what doesn't happen).
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It's hard to stop.
Having said all that, it might be fun and different to have those 6 founding families but let other families live in the town. This will give match making choices.
I'm pretty techy so reading your description of SP Rotation makes sense in terms of basically stopping any progression on any family I'm not playing. I understand that they are still around which is kind of how it is in TS2. I've had family events and invited family that I wasn't working with so it was kinda cool to see them show up while I wasn't playing them.
I assume once I install this mod, I can use it on a particular town I create, and choose not to use it on other towns like my existing legacy challenge town.
One more clarification: if I understand correctly, if a Sim is pregnant, you can't stop that progression. Correct? This was how I first learned about TS3 when my Sims were having babies without my control, being auto-named, etc.
Point is, the mod settings you put into place exist only within the saved game, within the world-specific nhd file.
The mods are also removable if you don't like them and the saved game can be played forward without them. Once a game that has seen, let's say StoryProgression, has been played and saved without the mod in place, the mod settings are erased going forward. There are a small number of things to be careful of when removing mods should this be necessary, such as yanking Traveler out when your sims are visiting a custom vacation world will result in them not being able to get back home, taking out a modded career/school while a sim is working/going to that school will leave them doing something undefined, etc. But none of these really apply to SP. If SP is removed from an ongoing save or if it's progression is disabled within its General Options, then either EA's story progression takes over or there will be no progression (to the limited extent that actually helps at all) as per the Game Options checkbox as if the mod had never been there.
Pregnancies are challenging to control when playing rotationally, but many of us see that as a welcome challenge. I take it you do not want your sims to become pregnant or impregnate others while they are not the active household. But you can allow them to be pregnant so that a pregnancy formed but that has not yet come to term when it's time to move to the next household can remain. The baby will be born when you aren't playing the household though as the pregnancy will continue to progress even if aging is off for that household unless you stall/pause the pregnancy (this is what I do) using MasterController. The MC Cheats module is required to pause pregnancies. There are other mods that can do this as well that are compatible with NRaas, such as CmarNYC's Pregnancy Controller mod from MTS. I haven't missed a birth among my many controlled households in years, and even then it was due to user error on my part -- I forgot at the time that MC Resetting the world, which I did for other reasons, removed the stalled state from one pregnancy so I just had to correct my mistake and replay a couple of sim days.
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I see this note:
Pregnancy: Allow Participation = False
Note: If one of your sims to become inactive is already pregnant, you will need to set an exception for them on the Sim level or else SP will terminate the pregnancy.
So if I understand that correctly, unless I have other mods installed, if my Sim is pregnant and I rotate out, it will cancel out the pregnancy. Correct?
What I specifically don't want is for a baby to be born while I am not actively playing the family
I believe the exception you want to set on Sim Options for a sim who has become pregnant while you are playing them, so that they stay pregnant after the household is no longer active, is Sim Options > Pregnancy: Allow Can Be Pregnant > True.
If the pregnancy is to be continued when the household becomes inactive, and it is not terminated, again MasterController is required to stall the pregnancy or else you will miss the birth. Unless you want the pregnancy to be terminated so that you do not miss the birth, because then there would be nothing to miss?
The other perhaps simpler way to approach this is just not rotate out of a household where any sims are pregnant; extend your rotation and wait for the birth(s) to happen. Pregnancies in my game are 7 sim days long so that would be really inconvenient for me if conception happened near the end of my rotation cycle, but I could see feeling differently if pregnancies were the standard 3 day length.
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I played TS2 just like that. I think I started with 5 families, but I ended up with more than 200 and I still rotated through all of them and some Uni rotations thrown in. I did play that neighbourhood for many years, though.
My test is still running. It's not quite working the way I want it to yet. There are still pregnancy announcements and I didn't want my sims to get pregnant through SP, but I am not using the caste system. My two caste system test household hasn't been up to anything that was reported through stories, while I played other families.
Good luck with setting up your rotation.
The second is if they are sneaking in some Crazy Drinks (LN) on you when you aren't watching, but the effects of those beverages are supposed to be temporary. I don't think I've ever seen a sim order one from a LN bar autonomously though, they always seem to order generic drinks on their own.
The third is if you have SP set to Disallow traits on purpose by way of Sim, Household, Caste, or Town Options. Or if you have it set to Force specific traits on them (SP Extra add-on module for both of these options). But by default, none of this should be happening.
Okay, there is a fourth way. If your sims have empty trait slots, SP will fill them up for you when a sim becomes inactive as per its settings on General Options. But that's not changing existing traits, that's adding new ones to the empty slots.
Might any of these be matching up with what you are seeing happen?
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Edit: Not sure whether it matters, but the "story" was in all three cases one of hanging out with a bad person, SV's Sandi French in this case.
A teenager with five traits (four base plus one social) has no empty slots. The Uni one doesn't count (unless you have sent them through Uni by way of the Traveler mod and they graduated?) and the fifth base one doesn't count because it doesn't yet exist for them. We can use MC to shove more traits on a sim than that which they have slots for, but that's the reverse of what you are describing.
I'm assuming you do not have a mod from another source in play that increases the number of sims' base trait slots? The only NRaas mod capable of doing so would be Retuner, but it would be virtually impossible to have done this by accident.
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Maybe, I should disable the two University mods (one for enrolling students, one for adding missing professors on repeat visits) that mess up world generation in other scenarios.
I'll have a look at the exact stats of the concerned sims first before I post more.
Sim1 YA (3 days in): Excitable, Eccentric, Brave, Dramatic, Dislikes Children, Bookworm (S)
That's the right number of traits, and she got "Dramatic" on aging up. I would probably have to look at an old save what was replaced by "Dislikes Children"
Sim 2 Teen (11 days to transition): Unlucky, Excitable, Evil, Ambitious, Loves the Outdoors
Should have a social trait instead of a fifth base trait. Not sure which trait got replaced, either.
Sim 3 Teen (11 days to transition): Slob, Excitable, Ambitious, Dramatic, Genius (S)
Right number of traits, and Slob replaced something.
Alternatively, the sims all lost a trait during some game glitch, as the fourth sim in that age range had a similar issue last time. It's also weird that it's all the same family. I guess I should leave it at that and hope it doesn't repeat. MC to the rescue.
Sim 2 had all of his traits except one replaced at some point in the past.
The entire point of Rotational Play is that nothing significant, subject to the player defining what "significant" means, happens with households that are not in active play. Hairstyles getting messed up just as an example by comparison is not significant to me and those are easy to put right with no real impact on gameplay. Traits changing can be pretty significant under just about any definition.
Nothing interesting being reported on by way of Overwatch or ErrorTrap script logs?
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The sims in question are former IF's, btw (but not the ones mentioned in the logs). I removed their occult state via MC. They were out of lockstep with their "real" friends due to ITF.
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Edit: Which reminds me that that butler last worked for the same family with those trait issues. Hmm. Maybe, I can try some console resets.
Edit2: And stay with this out of this thread
Is there a particular order I need to go into get these all setup properly so I can start rotation? Do they ALL say 1? Or should they be consecutive numbers for each family set to caste:manual?
Also, while playing my test city, one of my supposed "paused" family had one of the Sims get a job while I was playing my first family. Is that a setting I can change? Alternately, I assume that once I play that family who had someone take a job, I can quit the job and put them in the one I want and/or register them as self-employed.