The more I learn, the more I realize what a noob I am...
sewinglady:
I lurked a long time around here, too...lots of good information to be found on this board and it's really not that hard to navigate...I've seen much much worse.
I've never played Maxis anything. Not from the first day of the first Sims1.
I make my own neighborhoods and using a hack from here, I kill all townies and they don't regenerate and I can play in peace with no Marsha Bruenig or any other annoying townie.
I also am a firm believer in TwoJeffs visitor controller...another game sanity thing for me.
I do have to admit that even though I once read here that the magic number was 800 sims before the neighborhood went wonky, I'd say that the number is much closer to 500...as my last neighborhood imploded for multiple reasons, but I suspect among them were that my sim count was closing in on 600.
But, I've also figured out that if you create ALL the sub-neighborhoods FIRST and THEN do the deleteallcharacters thing with the notownieregen installed...you get even fewer townies, so you start with a much lower number of maxis made characters.
In my experience hair is genetic period. Even custom hair binned under the asterisk will appear on a toddler. However correctly color-binned hair is the best way to go...gives you more options when it comes to attractions. When I create sims, I use custom everything, the genetic offspring will have one or the other, all custom.
Zazazu:
Heh, I'm hardly new to Sims (had Sims1 and all packs from the day they came out and same with Sims2 sans those waste'o'time stuff packs) and somehow I never knew about non-perv hacks until two months ago. I knew that neighborhoods could implode from messed up SWAF and deleting sims that have been played, but never about the 500-800 sim neighborhood limit. Considering my love for enormous neighborhoods with three colleges, 2 downtowns, and 3-6 shopping district/suburbs, I've been incredibly lucky.
The random fellow sheep at TSR who pointed me here for the baby/toddler spammage hack have my thanks. They started a disease.
Sagana:
I believe the number you can have in a neighborhood increased with one of the EPs and nobody has figured out the new top yet. So if you're treating your hood well it should have a nice long life.
The biggest thing that messes it up is installing any lot (from anywhere, including your other neighborhoods) with a sim in it - don't ever do that :)
Next on the list is deleting sims without properly cleaning them up (especially certain kinds of memory issues and Sim Wants and Fears which do funky things but I haven't actually see totally make a hood unplayable - yet). You want to use clean methods of deleting sims (Pescado's got explanations around, I think there's a link higher up in the thread, and someone can link you if there isn't (just don't have time to go searching from work :)
Killing (rather than deleting and cleaning up) doesn't help with character numbers as the ghosts still have character files unless you delete them and do the same cleanup as above.
The very bestest way to have your own townies and all, and to have the cleanest neighborhood (likely to have the longest life, as well as it just being IMO more fun) is to start with the empty templates. Those are wonderful :)
Edit: <blush> I put this part here in the wrong thread.
Have fun, it's a great game and this is a wonderful site :)
dragoness:
Wow, Assmitten, that little tour was exremely helpful! It's still a little wierd and confusing but hopefully I've got it now. (Also, my inner 12 year old won't stop giggling because I typed "Assmitten" and I'm not being rude. Assmitten! ...I'm done now.)
Okay!
So, after poking around the site, I've decided what I really want to do is start a brand-new neighborhood completely from the bottom up! (Gee, I'm not ambitious or anything for a noob, oh no... ;D)
So... what are these empty templates? And where would I get one?
Barring those, what I think I need to do isi nstall hacks like no townie regen, no pet regen, etc etc etc. so that none of the generated townies/strays will come back, and I can put in my own using the instructions that are... uh, well I can't find it anymore but I'll find it, there's some thread around here that tells how to make your pre-created sims into townies.
1. Do I do this for NPCs like the maid or the Diva or the mailman, too? I don't recall that part in the thread, maybe I missed it.
2. How about strays? I think they're auto-generated the first time I enter the neighborhood, are they removed by deleteallsims too, and replaceable somehow? I don't see the benefit to making my own pets as much, except maybe to have a few custom breeds in the pool of strays... oh, and maybe not having 3 dogs named Noodle...
3. I'm going to need new community lots too. I've made a few of my own, but I've always used the default shopping district and downtown with my empty main neighborhood, so I'm going to need a lot of new, interesting, fun lots. There are some from the defaults I'm very fond of... would it hurt anything to put them into the lot bin and put them in the new neighborhood? Actually, what I like to do is move them somewhere, put a smaller empty lot next to it, and go back and forth between the two, copying the parts of the basic lot I like and cutting out all the wasted space, rebuilding it to be smaller, load faster, etc. Would it be bad to do this in my main neighborhood? I could have a seperate neighborhood for testing stuff and rebuilding lots like that, unless I'll do more damage moving around unoccupied lots *between* neighborhoods than I will adding-deleting-moving lots within the *same* neighborhood...
myskaal:
Start here:
http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/smf/index.php?topic=5861.0
That's a complete tutorial on how to succesfully create completely clean neighborhoods and has links to all the related threads with added information on all the questions regarding townie customization you have been asking for. It's excellent work. Read it more than once. Bookmark it. Copy it into a .doc for offline viewing.
In case you miss the link in Jordi's tutorial, the empty templates and how to install them are here:
http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/smf/index.php?topic=4306.0
Good luck.
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