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Fill Empty Lots Change
Catzilla
Posts: 1,181 Member
From the patch notes:
"We have tidied up the Game Options menu a little by removing the Fill In Empty Lots option. This particular option has been superseded with Neighborhood Stories and the “Move In” functionality."
I have to disagree with this change. I like the game option to block rando sims from taking all the good lots that are left open intentionally. Also, the Move In option through neighborhood stories made me think that sims would be moving into existing households not taking empty lots I may be saving. In do want sims to be able to move into existing households but I do not want them filling empty lots. It would be nice to be able to fine tune this.
"We have tidied up the Game Options menu a little by removing the Fill In Empty Lots option. This particular option has been superseded with Neighborhood Stories and the “Move In” functionality."
I have to disagree with this change. I like the game option to block rando sims from taking all the good lots that are left open intentionally. Also, the Move In option through neighborhood stories made me think that sims would be moving into existing households not taking empty lots I may be saving. In do want sims to be able to move into existing households but I do not want them filling empty lots. It would be nice to be able to fine tune this.
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Comments
@chocolatefrosting I understand what you are saying, but I don't want to spend what little time that I have to play my game on just deleting random townies from households every 5 minutes.
I wish they would stop removing/nerfing things in the game that were options.
Because I can't; I keep all sigs turned off.
@VeeDub, I simply don't have several hours to do "clean-up" just to have some down time and play. I have very limited time as I work 7 days a week and only have a couple of hours to play during that time.
As I said in my other post, I just wish they would stop removing/ or nerfing features that were in the game or came with packs.
On the tab/button there for Neighborhood Stories, make sure that the buttons for "Move out" and "Move in" are Off/White.
Bam. No one will move in to empty households, because no one will move in at all.
And it will apply to all new households in new packs you get too, because you can make the rule global.
I would like to play the game, not have to spend my time doing this. I don't have the luxury of having hours a day to play a game.
What I'd like is to have is an alternative to all off or all lots get filled. BTW, Fill Empty Lots On/Off was very specific and clear what it's function was, the neighborhood stories Move IN/Out is not if you're looking to keep the randos from moving into all the good lots you're trying to save for later.
It's a good point that there should be different options for sims moving into a household and Sims filling empty lots. Perhaps a new option in neighbourhood stories like join households would be a solution. I think I will stick to having neighbourhood stories completely off.
No, you can change it globally for all Unplayed households. So all unplayed households will have the same behavior. You change 2 buttons once. Newly Generated Unplayed Households will all have the same restrictions.
Heck, you can turn Neighborhood stories off entirely with one check box.
It only becomes an issue if you want to have, say, the Goths and the Landgraabs move out and in, which I'm assuming you don't want.
Here, I don't have screenshots at the moment and won't be playing sims for a few hours, but here's the overview that Sims Community did on Neighborhood Stories
https://simscommunity.info/2022/03/16/the-sims-4-guide-to-neighbourhood-stories-customisation/
"Most of the customisation options can be found within the Manage Households screen. By default, Neighbourhood Stories will be enabled for the Other Households tab and disabled for the My Households tab so you don’t need to worry about any of your played Sims being affected by changes you don’t want.However, you can customise this if you do want your played Sims to progress in life when you are not actively playing with them. At the top of each tab in Manage Households, there is a new icon for Neighbourhood Stories settings. Click on it and checkmark the Enable Neighbourhood Stories box in the menu that comes up. This will enable all potential life changes for all households within that tab but you can customise this, too."
This was directly copied from that post on the neighborhood stories update March 16, 2022. It clearly states that it is enabled by default for all other households that you as the player are not playing. It further states in that post that in order to customize what stories affect which households, it has to be done individually.
As I mentioned before, there are approximately 93 premade households and not in world Sims in the start of a new game with all packs installed to date. There are also approximately 117 empty lots, empty apartments, and empty homes at the beginning of the game that according to @VeeDub you would just have to go into each one and eliminate (zero out) the beds in the lot info panel for all 117 lots.
This seems to be way more complicated and time consuming. I think they should have just left the option to fill empty houses where it was, and made the neighborhood stories for played and other households disabled by default. Let players decide whether they want to use the neighborhood stories or not and whether or not they want to have the houses filled or not.
Go to other households. Click on the little icon. Change what you want to change. It then applies to ALL Households. You don't have to change them individually. You don't have to customize them individually.
You *can* customize them further, but you don't have to. You can set everything at the global level and it will apply to all of them, including new ones the game generates. Example under the cut.
My settings
All I have turned off is move out, but you can set this any way you want. They start with all options turned on.
The settings of a randomly chosen "Not in Household" sim household created by the game
I didn't have to change anything, modify anything, adjust anything on this household. She appeared this way.
I have Neighborhood Stories turned off completely and no random sims have ever moved into houses in my game. The instructions given by @DaWaterRat would do the exactly same thing because you'd be turning that part OFF if you do use some parts of NS.
Because I can't; I keep all sigs turned off.
Did they even think about the players who don't want to play Neighborhood stories but may want vacant lots filled half way, some, one then turn it off and or leave it on all the time? No, obviously they didn't.
That is exactly what I was trying to say.
What mods and settings are you also using. Vanilla games without the unchecking the fill empty lots would fill up with random sims would take every empty house in the game.
That's just it. it was always technically an "opt in" rather than an "opt out" (even if effectively it was an opt out). The box had to be checked. Yes, it came checked, but the "zero" setting is off, not on. With the box removed, the setting is zero, not one. Off, not on.
Think of it this way. The option to turn it off is still there, they just moved it to the Unplayed Households tab of Manage households, and added a bunch of other options.
Before Neighborhood Stories came along I had the "fill empty lots" option turned off, so I never had to deal with random sims moving in anywhere. After Neighborhood Stories came along I didn't change any of my other settings, but I did use some mods to turn off the phone calls (those had nothing to do with move-ins; I just didn't want the calls).
After NS was updated to include many more settings and options I turned the whole thing off because I have no interest in any of them being enabled in my game. When the update came in which the old "fill empty lots" option was then removed because it was taken over by NS, I didn't change anything I was doing before, and I still have no random sims moving in (which is as I want it to be).
Because I can't; I keep all sigs turned off.