What Is The Deal With Ghosts??

Sha2520032003

Pre-Cats & Dogs patch, if you put a dead Sims' urn in your inventory it kept them from being culled & they weren't out roaming. & non-played Sims that died, I don't know where their ghosts went. But now, in my legacy challenge, I have had so many deaths of my own Sims plus non-played. There are so many ghosts in the 'Other Households' tabs & they're everywhere....community lots, walking in the neighborhood etc. This never happened before they changed how culling works. My teen Sim just met her grandfather for the first time and he died way before she was even born. She was at the nightclub with friends & his ghost was there. His urn was in his daughter's inventory and this is the first time I've ever seen him 'out at the clubs'.

So I'm curious how you handle ghosts in the game for your active Sims plus non-played? I don't want to see all these ghosts roaming around the city, but at the same time I don't want to lose my active Sims family ties on the family tree. Any thoughts or ideas?

paradiseplanet

I play a lot of ghosts, but all those ghosts I have in my households died before the C&D patches, and the new ghost culling system would seem to only work well with anyone generated after the patches. The next best thing I could think of to keep them at bay is that if you do still keep their urns, keep them in the household inventory. I believe it will keep the ghosts at bay, though I could be way wrong. Ghosts in TS4 and their mechanics confuse me to no end.

Cement

Well, pre-patch... Putting the urn in your inventory wouldn't prevent them from being culled, it'd just stop them from coming out and spooking it up on the lot when night came around. Non-played sims that died still existed, just without an urn. While they were still around, they would add toward the population limit until it reached the cap, then the game would cull them. The way the game used to cull sims was first ghosts, then unplayed living sims from oldest spawned to recent spawned from what I remember correctly.

Now the system is different and I don't understand the new culling mechanics.

As for ghosts, I've been slowly shoving my many ghosts into households by family to try and keep them sort of, "together"--But that doesn't really do anything but declutter my household management window. A few of mine still appear at clubs, but I have a lot of townies so it kind of rotates between living and dead. The dead usually come around when the living sims retire for work or go home LOL. I do use MCC so it changes the sims in the venues to work that way so I don't bump into the same sims everywhere.
The only way for them to not appear is for them to not exist, I think.

Most of my actively played ghost sims live in a haunted mansion aside from this dead kid I got from the Wishing Well. He lives a very spoiled life in my legacy's ancestral home :^)

paradiseplanet

That poor, dead child though.

SimsLovinLycan

I usually release the sim's spirit after they die to avoid random ghosts in every public venue around town. I know it's not the best option for people who may want to keep the ghosts of their dearly departed around as part of the family, but it works. Really, after my first experience with being haunted by ghosts in TS4 (shortly after they were added to the game), I realized that they were dull and just started releasing them. (TS4 ghosts really need more ectoplasm to them...)