I just want no more puddings!  Remember "Notowniespawn" from Sims 2?

I carefully created 10 big 8-man famblies of my own genetics and last names to populate my hood, and I've tried 3 times now to fight the story mode to get them to thrive.

Jobs is easy, if the game needs people for jobs, it will take them from the neighborhood (completely randomly, but that's ok).

Births is easy actually also...when they are married!  They seem to have no problem producing 2-parent spawn when they are married.

3 parts that makes my legacy hood difficult at the moment:

1) Mating pairs - Do not happen often enough, the reason was stated by his holiness in another thread somewheres.
2) YA's getting away from mom and dad - The moveouts almost never make sense.
3) Random idiot townies moving in - STOP THEM!

Periodically I have to stop, turn off aging/story-mode, force match up as many singles as I can find, move them out on their own (kick out), and gas the fat-assed jobless retards that worm their way into my gated community like cockroaches.

I'd like a way to just trust the story mode to do this.

Check your "books read" stat in your writing skill page.  I believe repeated books don't count.  You will see the difference when you go to read a book, it will either be "Read XXX" or "Reread XXX".

Yes, your own books count, but only if you read them after you get them in the mail.

It did answer a question I had about reading books.

I guess, from the top parsing this data file presented as-is (hopefully close to original values).

*UPDATE* I parsed the original .xml and got a little more info, updated below.  Original questions still stand though.

Speed hidden stuff:
- Reading 50 books caps out your speed bonus, seems to be a very tiny linear speed progression per book read from 0 to 50.
- Writing 20 books caps out another speed bonus in addition to "Prolific Author" bonus.
- Writing skill (0 through 10) grants another small speed bonus.  Bonus is based on partial skill points, full skill points are not needed.  Reaching Level 10 doubles this bonus.

Quality (flop/hit/best-seller) hidden stuff:
- Hidden "Genre Skill" for each genre, goes up with every hit and best-seller, goes down with every flop (capped out at 60% bonus chance), also multiplies royalties.
- Sim can be Genre Novelist in multiple genres, regardless of what text says (confirm?).

Writing payments:
- Sim is paid every 20% of his book he completes.
- Sim is paid .5 simoleans/page completed (seems to be flat rate, though can be tweaked).

Royalties:
- A multiplier is added based on your writing skill. 1x (at level 0) to 4x (at level 10).  Its a smooth transition, doesn't require you have a full skill point.
- Royalties and book sale value are NOT tied at all to # of pages.
- Flops give 35% of the adjusted payment, hits give 125%, best-sellers give 160%.
- Hidden "Genre Skill", gives 10% bonus per previous book in the genre, maxes out at 200%.

Traits:
- "Supporting Traits" for each genre have 2 effects, increases royalties slightly and allows you to write some genres sooner than normal skill allows.
- The multiplier effect for supporting traits are cumulative when increasing royalties if they are applicable to the genre.


Open questions:
- How do you write a biography except through opportunity chance card?  No mentions are made for minimum skill, previous writings, or career level in any field.
- Is there a difference between Life Story, Autobiography, Biography, and Political Memoir? These 4 genres are mentioned separately, with only Autobiography mentioned as having a minimum requirement.

http://isohunt.com/download/99204285/Sims+3+prima.torrent

Just downloaded it, nothing dodgy, just the guide in .pdf when you unzip the files.

I successfully bred a firefighter into the family and got a single offspring from the deal.  He does indeed seem to have the hidden "Pyromaniac" trait, even with a full 5 other traits.

Flame Fruit Conversion - Works 1 time/day, he had this ability since he was a teenager.  Any fruit will do, turns the fruit into a "Flame Fruit", same as the one grown from special seeds.  Select a fruit in your inventory to convert.  Any fruit past the 1 time/day limit gets vaporized.

Set Fire ability - he has had this since young adult.  It hasn't worked at all for me, perhaps because he also has the "Friendly" trait.  The sim queues it up, looks around, and promptly drops the action.  Didn't work in his own home or on several community lots.

Car Alarm installation - boned doberman edition

Selecting the "install alarm" on a car causes your sim to drive off, then suddenly re-appear in the middle of the lot with the car in the driveway.  The alarm is not installed, but the funds are deducted.
This happened with 3 cars I tested (2 maxis download cars, 1 nightlife "standard") on a home lot.  Maybe it only works in apartments now, will test further.

No seeders in the swarm for AL...stuck at 5% with the other 300 schmucks...

Hi, first time poster long time lurker here,

I did this experience myself and I'll share my notes -

Experiment 1 -
Followed the directions SaraMK placed in another post carefully, but I modified them to make Strangetown into Downtown 2 and add Veronaville and Riverblossom as Shopping districts, in addition to Bluewater and the standard downtown. (makes for nice trifecta's on the subhood selection dialogues).  Everything went smooth as silk from the modified instructions and the neighborhoods loaded up perfectly.  I then backed it up when I exited the game.  Then I proceeded to play, made a sim in CAS and played him as legacy, messed around with a few Maxis families, added a university, and patched Seasons later that evening before I went to bed.

When I came home the next evening and loaded up the game, all the families had disappeared from all subhoods, even my legacy guy that was living downtown.  Oh well, restore from backup...same deal.  I blame the patch personally.

Experiment 2 -
Hoping to shortcut the process from the night before, I had sims create all 4 neighborhoods from scratch, didn't load any, and exited the game.  I converted all 3 N001, N003, and G001 neighborhoods into B00# templates (starting at B005 to make sure I skip past the borked numbering for OFB) and modified their properties with SimPE appropriately, assigning unique ID 25, 26, 27.

I fired up the game and with the help of the "Bluewater Button Killer" was able to see Pleasantview and Veronaville added to the list.  Riverblossom (B007, ID 27) was not on the list.  Reasoning 1 - even though the button was killed, the list still filled under Bluewater and there are only spots for 2 more templates, so Riverblossom didn't make it.  Veronaville made it in just fine as shopping districts and I added Bluewater for good measure, I didn't add Pleasantview because that was the root neighborhood.  Exited the game.

Did the same procedure, but converting N002 (Strangetown) to D004 (unique ID 28).  Fired up the game and tried to add it.  First off, the "button issue" is the same for nightlife, so a button killer hack for Downtown adding would be nice.  No problems though, yet.  The first "Downtown" I added was the regular downtown when I pressed the button.  The next time I added a hood, the downtown button was still there, but "Strangetown" loaded up instead in sequence.  Problem though - Strangetown had no people at all...totally deserted.  The problem didn't infect the other hoods though like the last time.

The second wierd issue I noticed was that although I didn't add Riverblossom, every time I switched hoods I got the wait screen "Loading X hood" and THEN "Loading Riverblossom".  The end result was that I had 5 copies of the Riverblossom maxis-mades in my sim bin, without ever attaching Riverblossom.  Doubleplusungood.

Experiment 3 -
I killed the Riverblossom template in the OFB hoods folder and left the other two alongside Bluewater as "known good" templates.  I reloaded the defaults again after killing the neighborhoods folder.  This time I launched the game and killed all but Riverblossom, and loaded it up as my main hood.  I successfully attached Pleasantview, Bluewater, and Veronaville perfectly from the templates I made in the last experiment as Shopping Districts.  I then exited the game.

First, I backed up my G001 folder in my Docs, and then went to work in the Nightlife templates folder where I had D001 (Original Downtown) and D004 (Strangetown).
- I put D004 on the desktop, then loaded the game and attached Original downtown and a dummy downtown.
- Closed down the game.  Used SimPE to rip out the ID from the dummy and then erased the dummy G001_Downtown_002.package.
- In the same folder, moved Downtown_001.package to the desktop.
- Used SimPE to rip out the ID from the Downtown template, loaded it into the D004 template.
- Took D001 out of the Nightlife templates folder, put in D004.
- Restarted the game, attached downtown (Strangetown), this time the Strangetown folks were all there, poked around the other hoods to make sure everyone else was there, all good. 
- Exited, then changed Downtown_001 (Strangetown) to _002, put back in Downtown_001 off the desktop.
- Used SimPE to change the ID of Downtown_002 to the one I ripped out of the dummy.

Everything works now, but only using Riverblossom as the base hood.

End result
Riverblossom Hills as Main Hood
Verona Village, Bluewater Village, Pleasant Village as "Shopping Districts"
Downtown and Strangetown as "Downtowns"
All 3 Universities also attached successfully.

Game plays well after mucking about, reloading, restarting.  Zipped backup file size 459MB (without Uni's attached)

Scientifical Conclusions
- Downtowns are harder to work with than Suburbs, very finicky with the numbering system.  Suburbs are very forgiving with just modifying them with SimPE (start with high unique numbers), no need to copy, add dummies, or rip to convert the anything to a template.  Downtowns require the whole "Create dummy-rip out ID-switch templates, load and quit repeatedly" routine.

- Killing the "Big Buttons" doesn't reorder the list of templates, and there's no scroll bar, so only 2 additional templates per type will fit in the badly designed "Add Subhood" dialogue boxes.

- Riverblossom makes for a crappy template no matter what type because of the latest big patch wierdness, suggest patched users use it as their base hood.  The patch does some kind of seek and destroy on the original G001 template to fix the Ottomas problem which borks any kind of template conversion to a different type of hood.

- Second suggestion is that patched users simply use the long way of doing things from SaraMK's thread, with or without modified instructions (I'll post these later) if they want to merge all their hoods.

- Seasons installation updates the ID's and "supported versions" of the original template files for Sim2 and OFB hoods/subhoods, but doesn't touch Uni or Nightlife templates...I have a strange feeling this is why they are so sensitive to SimPE fiddling.

Hope this helped somebody in some way - now to finally get started on my default servo replacement experiments.