I was just messing around in manage household in my current save. I just wanted to see what mayhem, if any, neighborhood stories was causing. Some is the answer. I'm 15 sim days into the save and already this has happened:
-Judith Ward adopted an infant daughter, Kylie.
-The Bailey-Moons have an infant son, Orion.
-The Goths have a toddler son, Carmelo.
-Katrina Caliente married Marcus Flex. They live in Partihaus, with Paolo, Jade, and Eva, they have an infant daughter Olivia, plus Katrina's adopted infant son Ehren. That household is the chaos theory in sims form.
-All three Sages have moved out of the magic realm.
Simeon lives in Sulani with his alien wife Rita and their dog Nova.
L. Faba married Michael Bell and live in Strangerville with their cat The General.
Morgyn is still single but lives in San Myshuno.
-None of the mermaids live in Sulani. All are still single and unemployed.
Paka'a Uha lives in San Myshuno.
Ukupanipo Hekekia lives in Mt. Komorebi.
Kalamainu'u Iona lives in Henford-On-Bagley.
Nalani Mahi'ai lives in Glimmerbrook.
While not mermaids, the Hoapili's now live in Oasis Springs.
@EmmaVane Thanks for that, I thought I was misremembering that feature. It's annoying having to toggle each townie individually to not move in, honestly think I'll just switch NS off entirely. @DaniRose2143 That happened with my mermaids too, they moved into the city. Where there's no water! lol
@Scrapdash I wonder how often they do that in other people's saves? In Paka'a's case they watched Splash on TV and were inspired to be like Madison and move to the city. Or at least that's how I work it out in my head. The other three, I'm totally baffled. I will how ever keep an eye on Nalani. If she loses her mermaid status, I will have her through the portal and made into a spellcaster so fast it will make her head spin. Which reminds me I never went into the Magic Realm to see who replaced the Sages. Random townies probably, but I'm still curious.
Morgyn, L., and Simeon are all still sages.🤔 In the past I thought if a sage married or moved out of the Realm they lost their title? Or was that only if they married a sim and joined a played household? I guess it works the same with moves too, they are in unplayed households so they get to keep their title? I wasn't expecting to see that.
Just another silly question: I read that non played households will get babies and pets. Will the SP check whether there is actually a married couple in that household, and if their relation is high enough, or will the game decide that all those houses will just *adopt* kids? Meaning DNA is rather random?
I'd prefer that an unplayed married couple had SP kids getting some of their DNA, but maybe that is not the case?
Single sims can only adopt.
Romantically involved couples (I think they have to be at least offically together as bf/gf) can both procreate (if biologically possible via CAS gender settings) or adopt, unless you change their settings.
I'm not sure if they have to be living with their partner, but from what I heard about unexpected pregnancies elsewhere on this forum, I don't think they do. If you don't want a played sim's unplayed partner to randomly get pregnant via your played sim, make sure both households have "Have a baby" disabled. You might like that unexpected drama, however.
I went to a save I hadn't played for a while. I forgot to turn off have a baby etc. And when I checked on my sims I had a few surprises. One off my sims is engaged, they don't live together. She was pregnant and ready to drop. So I played her until she had the baby. Then I checked and the father was her fiancé. They joined households and moved to a larger place. marriage is next.
I updated yesterday, the first time since Cottage Living, and decided to let neighborhood stories go wild for a week in my starter save - Everything on for both played and unplayed sims. The save contains ca. 70 played sims (mostly roommates, but also a handful of families), Morgyn Ember and Father Winter, no premades.
Details under the spoiler, here’s the summary:
- Everything felt organic and within reason for normal lifespan (my setting is aging off, though)
- No deaths, abductions or other weird stuff except from a dude in a bridal gown hitting on my active sim at the Spice Festival.
- I still cannot see me using this feature. The events were either character-breaking, because the game cannot see my backstory, or meaningless, because they occurred randomly without any buildup on my part.
- Every second stories message was about the game moving in one of its own households. As always Sims 4 created townies like mad, but even so the game very aggressively targeted played households for the story events. Not a single event involved a townie as the main actor.
I’ll repeat the process with a save_as of my old rotational save, that has more established relationships, and see what’ll happen.
Details:
Right after moving in the Farm household (Adult mother, teen son, YA married couple) adopted a small dog and the farmhand couple expected a baby. The baby was born with a little delay five days later, and the next thing they did was already making another one.
The Penthouse family’s (Father, mother, daughter, live-in housekeeper) gimmick is that they start in a large house with no jobs or skills. I sent my active sim over to persuade them to take up careers. While the husband was immediately enthusiastic about the idea, the wife refused on the grounds of not knowing me well enough. Their friendship bars with my sim looked about even, so there may be some chance involved.
A few days later the husband proudly told me that he is a Secret Agent now. The day after his wife was reported to have taken up the same job!
Meanwhile the housekeeper’s lovelife was picking up steam. First he called me, stating he was interested in dating a townie named Annika, who turned out to be an alien. Then he called again, stating that townie Judith asked him for a date. In both cases I left the decision to the game, and in both cases the housekeeper dropped the love interest. He is Family-oriented/Loves the outdoors/Hot-headed in case that matters.
Here’s the catch: Annika turned out to never have met the housekeeper, same for Judith, but she at least was barely acquaintance with the family’s child.
Even later the stories reported that the secret agents were looking forward to the birth of their new baby. Neither is pregnant though, and the other two expecting families had a different wording (“expecting a baby” Vs. “excited to give birth”), so I have no idea what is going on.
The “Police Co-workers” household adopted a cat. That household includes a cat lover, so I moved him and the furball out of the now full household in case he wanted more. He didn’t.
One of my cops quit and took up a job as barista instead. He very nearly got killed twice in the line of service in my regular play, so I can’t blame him that in this universe he got out while he still could.
A married couple with toddler had another baby.
A co-worker called me, asking if she should shoot for a promotion. The next day she informed me that she’d gotten it.
The “Police Androids” household adopted a toddler. This household is literally four androids living at a residential police station. They cannot “adopt”, at best they can care for a lost child for a couple of days. Well, they didn’t care, they wanted to keep it and now the Mayor has an (offscreen) mother to explain to why the androids won’t give back the child. Wonders of technology, ey?
In another household my preachy vegetarian took up a job as a restaurant critic. His evil twin took up a job in the Oracle path of the Criminal career. I’m both intrigued and intimidated by those choices.
An elderly painter retired.
When you’re on the run from the law and hiding in an abandoned warehouse in the docks, what would you think should be your first priority? Adopting, apparently. A female sim from the “Warehouse” household adopted an elf girl, and a male a human baby (that was looking stunningly like him, so I strongly contest that "adopted" and say "mother dropped the result of an affair off with the father". The male was already caregiver to the only child in the household. Seems they’re going Oliver Twist here, raising a little gang.
In my game, Geoffrey is a single dad of 6 now. 3 babies, 2 toddlers, and one child. Nancy and Malcolm are dead. I felt bad for the guy so I've updated his home for his brood. There are tons of other babies as well and a few pets in other homes. It is a bit ridiculous.
"You've got a face, I've got a face, it's all gonna be alright." - Noel Fielding
So I've had another play around with neighbourhood stories for a shorter time period than three ingame weeks, this time it wasn't as blood-thirsty.
Mortimer died this time, and the Goths moved out and had a biological baby (now they're out of worlders!?) their house is still vacant. One household had adopted 3 babies ontop of their two premade children.
The Nishidakes adopted a baby (they have absolutely no genetical relation and are as western named as you could think) but its just completely odd that elderly Sims are able to adopt at all. Although its also odd how most townies generate with city-livings names, but any born in-game Sims get thrown a basegame name leading to some mishmashes.
That one crashed plane Strangetownie man moved out to who-knows where.
Bob Pancakes adopted a cat, which seems fitting enough for him. Not twenty cats just A cat... Thankfully. The Pleasant twins also adopted a cat while still living at Britechester University.
It seems like most babies are always adoption however when that settings on and theres still seldom natural births... Which leads to some pretty bad connotations with the household portraits.
...So this time neighbourhood progression has spared most townies, but its moving people out with no rhyme or reason, and sometimes stuffing the most random houses with adoption rather than birth. Goths going from a nice Gothic mansion to... Nothing?
Theres also just not enough going on because of how Sims still don't marry, falling in love isn't exactly there either minus the call ones (which happen so often I feel its not actually doing anything) and nobody ever really feels like they're becoming enemies. It all feels like an awkward time capsule for some households
I haven't noticed anything in my game. Everything seems normal... I spend most of my time in CAS, though. Maybe that's why? I'll have to play a bit more and see how everything goes.
As always Sims 4 created townies like mad, but even so the game very aggressively targeted played households for the story events. Not a single event involved a townie as the main actor.
@EnkiSchmidt Do you have different settings for My Households and Other Households for the neighborhood stories?
Perhaps by accident? There are a lot of different places where the settings are located and it took me a while to find them all.
Options Gameplay screen: single toggle for the whole system
Household Manager: has what appears to be a single Neighborhood Stories button in the upper right, but it's actually two different buttons, one for My Households and one for Other Households. The one you are looking at depends on whether My Households or Other Households are currently showing in the household manager. (This is the part that took me the longest to understand)
Individual households in Household Manager also have their own Neighborhood Stories buttons on their square in the household grid. If you have ever modified settings in these, you will only be able to modify that family's settings on an individual basis forever after, the larger toggles won't affect them.
Features like this actually prevent me from buying any more packs. I'll not update my game until it is guaranteed that no played sim will get hurt. All my houses are actively played and there is no way I would allow EA ruin it all by randomness.
I have it entirely turned off for all played and unplayed Sims and have not had one issue. If it's switched off, it's switched off. So don't let it stop you if you want more packs.
This it what I resorted to as well after a long played hood got nuked by this in just one day of gameplay.
Fortunately, I always make a copy of my playing hoods at the start of each gaming day, because I know from experience that %#&! happens. This was a particularly nasty "feature" though. It totally wreaked havoc om marriages, living situations and future plans for a whole hood. Luckily I lost no more than one day of game play, which is bad enough.
How does it wreck havoc with marriages when it can't affect marriages?
I intend to turn the whole system off in my actual gameplay. For this testrun I left the settings for the unplayed household as-is (should be on by default), only opted out for Father Winter. Then I opted in for all played households. I didn't touch anything in the Gameplay Options.
Since posting this, I played another week in a different save, that has 210 played sims and about 30 townies. Again only the played sims got events. Maybe it is simply because of the disparity in numbers.
Something funny happened in the second test week: The household "Research" adopted a toddler. This is literally a genetic research station - Social Services should go check asap!
-Katrina Caliente married Marcus Flex. They live in Partihaus, with Paolo, Jade, and Eva.
She married him in my save too! Noticed it after my sim married Jade to get that inheritance and was visiting their place. Saw Katrina Flex and was like huh when? Cause it wasn’t in the notifications for ns.
-Katrina Caliente married Marcus Flex. They live in Partihaus, with Paolo, Jade, and Eva.
She married him in my save too! Noticed it after my sim married Jade to get that inheritance and was visiting their place. Saw Katrina Flex and was like huh when? Cause it wasn’t in the notifications for ns.
You just reminded me I have to go digging to find where I can enable notifications in NS. The notice I get is if a friend of my sim dies otherwise nothing. Everything I posted about my save I found by looking through manage households.
I've had a lot of saves over the last year or so where Marcus and Katrina hook up.
^ NS doesn’t marry people off like that so it must be MCCC. You can learn what happened through Neighborhood Stories through the mailbox, or there’s also a mod that displays them when sims gossip and similar things.
^ NS doesn’t marry people off like that so it must be MCCC. You can learn what happened through Neighborhood Stories through the mailbox, or there’s also a mod that displays them when sims gossip and similar things.
Yep. MCCC's story telling can make people split households and get married and divorced. Maxis' can't.
I just started a save with the storymode on. The adoption is off, but everything else is on. I started with a frog challenge and doing that at the moment. Im curious to see what happens. I placed all my favorite maxis sims there and some of my own. It shall be fun to see how they mix.
Im usually quite strict with mine....I turn off deaths, move in and quit job. I hate surprise deaths and sims suddenly being in totally inappropriate jobs or locations!
Then its just tweaking certain families if things get out of hand. The families for me that always seem to expand too rapidly are the Goths, Bergsonns? and Bailey-Moons.
^ NS doesn’t marry people off like that so it must be MCCC. You can learn what happened through Neighborhood Stories through the mailbox, or there’s also a mod that displays them when sims gossip and similar things.
Thank you. I knew there was somewhere to learn what had been happening in the other households.
Im usually quite strict with mine....I turn off deaths, move in and quit job. I hate surprise deaths and sims suddenly being in totally inappropriate jobs or locations!
Then its just tweaking certain families if things get out of hand. The families for me that always seem to expand too rapidly are the Goths, Bergsonns? and Bailey-Moons.
The reasons these families expand quickly is likely due to one of the sims being Family-Oriented.
Yes, I just lost one of my PLAYED Sims. I could swear I set my played households for job changes/retirement only. NO Death. Now, I'm uncertain I did all of that prior to my two-week road trip. Come home, start up again and I lose Thorne Bailey, as well as Jaylen Beeches. Face/palm. Going to have to spend time going through the entire list of households just to be certain I set things again, the way I believed I had set them prior. I am so vexed I could spit.
Comments
-Judith Ward adopted an infant daughter, Kylie.
-The Bailey-Moons have an infant son, Orion.
-The Goths have a toddler son, Carmelo.
-Katrina Caliente married Marcus Flex. They live in Partihaus, with Paolo, Jade, and Eva, they have an infant daughter Olivia, plus Katrina's adopted infant son Ehren. That household is the chaos theory in sims form.
-All three Sages have moved out of the magic realm.
Simeon lives in Sulani with his alien wife Rita and their dog Nova.
L. Faba married Michael Bell and live in Strangerville with their cat The General.
Morgyn is still single but lives in San Myshuno.
-None of the mermaids live in Sulani. All are still single and unemployed.
Paka'a Uha lives in San Myshuno.
Ukupanipo Hekekia lives in Mt. Komorebi.
Kalamainu'u Iona lives in Henford-On-Bagley.
Nalani Mahi'ai lives in Glimmerbrook.
While not mermaids, the Hoapili's now live in Oasis Springs.
@DaniRose2143 That happened with my mermaids too, they moved into the city. Where there's no water! lol
I went to a save I hadn't played for a while. I forgot to turn off have a baby etc. And when I checked on my sims I had a few surprises. One off my sims is engaged, they don't live together. She was pregnant and ready to drop. So I played her until she had the baby. Then I checked and the father was her fiancé. They joined households and moved to a larger place. marriage is next.
Details under the spoiler, here’s the summary:
- Everything felt organic and within reason for normal lifespan (my setting is aging off, though)
- No deaths, abductions or other weird stuff except from a dude in a bridal gown hitting on my active sim at the Spice Festival.
- I still cannot see me using this feature. The events were either character-breaking, because the game cannot see my backstory, or meaningless, because they occurred randomly without any buildup on my part.
- Every second stories message was about the game moving in one of its own households. As always Sims 4 created townies like mad, but even so the game very aggressively targeted played households for the story events. Not a single event involved a townie as the main actor.
I’ll repeat the process with a save_as of my old rotational save, that has more established relationships, and see what’ll happen.
Details:
The Penthouse family’s (Father, mother, daughter, live-in housekeeper) gimmick is that they start in a large house with no jobs or skills. I sent my active sim over to persuade them to take up careers. While the husband was immediately enthusiastic about the idea, the wife refused on the grounds of not knowing me well enough. Their friendship bars with my sim looked about even, so there may be some chance involved.
A few days later the husband proudly told me that he is a Secret Agent now. The day after his wife was reported to have taken up the same job!
Meanwhile the housekeeper’s lovelife was picking up steam. First he called me, stating he was interested in dating a townie named Annika, who turned out to be an alien. Then he called again, stating that townie Judith asked him for a date. In both cases I left the decision to the game, and in both cases the housekeeper dropped the love interest. He is Family-oriented/Loves the outdoors/Hot-headed in case that matters.
Here’s the catch: Annika turned out to never have met the housekeeper, same for Judith, but she at least was barely acquaintance with the family’s child.
Even later the stories reported that the secret agents were looking forward to the birth of their new baby. Neither is pregnant though, and the other two expecting families had a different wording (“expecting a baby” Vs. “excited to give birth”), so I have no idea what is going on.
The “Police Co-workers” household adopted a cat. That household includes a cat lover, so I moved him and the furball out of the now full household in case he wanted more. He didn’t.
One of my cops quit and took up a job as barista instead. He very nearly got killed twice in the line of service in my regular play, so I can’t blame him that in this universe he got out while he still could.
A married couple with toddler had another baby.
A co-worker called me, asking if she should shoot for a promotion. The next day she informed me that she’d gotten it.
The “Police Androids” household adopted a toddler. This household is literally four androids living at a residential police station. They cannot “adopt”, at best they can care for a lost child for a couple of days. Well, they didn’t care, they wanted to keep it and now the Mayor has an (offscreen) mother to explain to why the androids won’t give back the child. Wonders of technology, ey?
In another household my preachy vegetarian took up a job as a restaurant critic. His evil twin took up a job in the Oracle path of the Criminal career. I’m both intrigued and intimidated by those choices.
An elderly painter retired.
When you’re on the run from the law and hiding in an abandoned warehouse in the docks, what would you think should be your first priority? Adopting, apparently. A female sim from the “Warehouse” household adopted an elf girl, and a male a human baby (that was looking stunningly like him, so I strongly contest that "adopted" and say "mother dropped the result of an affair off with the father". The male was already caregiver to the only child in the household. Seems they’re going Oliver Twist here, raising a little gang.
Mortimer died this time, and the Goths moved out and had a biological baby (now they're out of worlders!?) their house is still vacant. One household had adopted 3 babies ontop of their two premade children.
The Nishidakes adopted a baby (they have absolutely no genetical relation and are as western named as you could think) but its just completely odd that elderly Sims are able to adopt at all. Although its also odd how most townies generate with city-livings names, but any born in-game Sims get thrown a basegame name leading to some mishmashes.
That one crashed plane Strangetownie man moved out to who-knows where.
Bob Pancakes adopted a cat, which seems fitting enough for him. Not twenty cats just A cat... Thankfully. The Pleasant twins also adopted a cat while still living at Britechester University.
It seems like most babies are always adoption however when that settings on and theres still seldom natural births... Which leads to some pretty bad connotations with the household portraits.
...So this time neighbourhood progression has spared most townies, but its moving people out with no rhyme or reason, and sometimes stuffing the most random houses with adoption rather than birth. Goths going from a nice Gothic mansion to... Nothing?
Theres also just not enough going on because of how Sims still don't marry, falling in love isn't exactly there either minus the call ones (which happen so often I feel its not actually doing anything) and nobody ever really feels like they're becoming enemies. It all feels like an awkward time capsule for some households
@EnkiSchmidt Do you have different settings for My Households and Other Households for the neighborhood stories?
Perhaps by accident? There are a lot of different places where the settings are located and it took me a while to find them all.
Options Gameplay screen: single toggle for the whole system
Household Manager: has what appears to be a single Neighborhood Stories button in the upper right, but it's actually two different buttons, one for My Households and one for Other Households. The one you are looking at depends on whether My Households or Other Households are currently showing in the household manager. (This is the part that took me the longest to understand)
Individual households in Household Manager also have their own Neighborhood Stories buttons on their square in the household grid. If you have ever modified settings in these, you will only be able to modify that family's settings on an individual basis forever after, the larger toggles won't affect them.
How does it wreck havoc with marriages when it can't affect marriages?
I intend to turn the whole system off in my actual gameplay. For this testrun I left the settings for the unplayed household as-is (should be on by default), only opted out for Father Winter. Then I opted in for all played households. I didn't touch anything in the Gameplay Options.
Since posting this, I played another week in a different save, that has 210 played sims and about 30 townies. Again only the played sims got events. Maybe it is simply because of the disparity in numbers.
Something funny happened in the second test week: The household "Research" adopted a toddler. This is literally a genetic research station - Social Services should go check asap!
She married him in my save too! Noticed it after my sim married Jade to get that inheritance and was visiting their place. Saw Katrina Flex and was like huh when? Cause it wasn’t in the notifications for ns.
You just reminded me I have to go digging to find where I can enable notifications in NS. The notice I get is if a friend of my sim dies otherwise nothing. Everything I posted about my save I found by looking through manage households.
I've had a lot of saves over the last year or so where Marcus and Katrina hook up.
I was checking the ns through the mailbox and there was nothing.
Maybe it’s mccc related?
Yep. MCCC's story telling can make people split households and get married and divorced. Maxis' can't.
Then its just tweaking certain families if things get out of hand. The families for me that always seem to expand too rapidly are the Goths, Bergsonns? and Bailey-Moons.
Right, the keyword being "off", Lol. Oh well. Maybe, EA will tweak the feature so it's more controlled and we don't have to turn it off.
Thank you. I knew there was somewhere to learn what had been happening in the other households.
The reasons these families expand quickly is likely due to one of the sims being Family-Oriented.
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