How-to: Cleaning up the homeless scum in your town

[shannong]

(Note: the title of this post is tongue-in-cheek. IRL I have lots of empathy for the increasing numbers of homeless in every city and town.)

Okay so you've used the listhomeless command and been horrified to learn that there are several named families running around homeless in your town, and a whole bunch of "NPC" homeless too.  What can you do about it?  Two things:

• You can just kill them outright with the destroyalltownies command. This will kill only the named households shown in the listhomeless report, and won't affect any of the homeless NPCs.
• There is no harm in letting the NPC homeless live, but if you really want to kill them, you use the destroyallnpcs command. This won't affect any of the named households shown in the listhomeless report
• You can try to force the named households to move into an unoccupied house with the runstoryaction Move In Household command. This won't always work, however, so you might have to kill the ones that this won't work on. This command won't affect the homeless NPCs. And this command might require some setup and futzing around to make work successfully.

Alright, you don't want to just kill your named households who are homeless, because you're a soft-hearted schmuck and can't stand the thought of cruelly gassing them to death.  How exactly do you force them to move into a household? As follows (pretend each of the following bullets is a numbered step. No clue why this forum has no bbcode for numbered lists).

• listhomeless, then write down their name, number of members, and net worth in simoleans (or just file the info in yer eidetic memory banks).
• Edit Town and look for an unoccupied house that contains a number of bed slots equal to or greater than the number of members in the household. It helps to select a house, then go into Build/Buy mode so that you can actually poke around in the house and count up the number of bed slots.  If you suspect the homeless family might have a pregnant women or an infant, you might want to plop a crib into the house while you're already there in buy mode, but you can come back and do this later if need be.
• Once you've found an unoccupied house where they should fit with enough bed/crib slots, write down how much money it will cost to move into, then leave Edit Town mode and return to the game. (Sometimes I've seen problems trying to use all the subsequent commands while still in Edit Town mode).
• If the household's net worth is less then the cost of moving into the house, then enable testing cheats (testingcheatsenabled true) and then enter familyfunds [househouldname] [amount] to give them enough funds to afford buying the target house. So if they are named Alto and the target house costs $85,000 and they have only $20,000, you'd enter familyfunds alto 90000
• listhomeless again to doublecheck that the familyfunds command succeeded and they really have the amount of money they'll need to buy the house.
• Now enable debug commands (setconfig enabledebugcommands true) and then enter runstoryaction Move In Household. If this will work for your target family, you'll see a success message. If you don't get a success message, try double-checking all the conditions listed previously, and especially check that a crib or two is in the target house in case you've got preggers/infants in the homeless family. Then try all this again. If you still can get a successful result, you're gonna have to gas 'em with destroyalltownies
• If you have more than one set of named homeless households, you rinse and repeat this process until they're all placed or you find that they cannot be placed at all.

[Roflganger]

It should probably be mentioned somewhere that this requires AwesomeMod.

[chaos]

And that debugging needs to be enabled.

[Motoki]

Err, what if you have multiple families with the same family name? I moved several adult children out of a household not knowing that kick out made them homeless (hey the menu said it assigns them a random house but I guess awesomemod overrides that).

[minidoxigirli]

Err, what if you have multiple families with the same family name? I moved several adult children out of a household not knowing that kick out made them homeless (hey the menu said it assigns them a random house but I guess awesomemod overrides that).

Then it gives them all the same amount of money.  I found that out the hard way- my legacy family's money was set to the same amount as their homeless adult son.

[Motoki]

Err, what if you have multiple families with the same family name? I moved several adult children out of a household not knowing that kick out made them homeless (hey the menu said it assigns them a random house but I guess awesomemod overrides that).

Then it gives them all the same amount of money.  I found that out the hard way- my legacy family's money was set to the same amount as their homeless adult son.

Ah okay thanks. I can live with that. Parents should treat the kids equal anyway I suppose.

[Madame Mim]

What's good there is to cheat them enough to get into a home - which will give the parents a rediculous amount of money - then place the kids and cheat them a much smaller amount of free cash so the parents don't have all that extra un-earned hanging around.

[Motoki]

Are there other things you can do or other ways to access the homeless sims? The forced story mode move in action always gives me an error even when there are houses with enough beds and the homeless sims have enough money to afford them. It tries to randomly move them into a certain house it just doesn't succeed and gives an error.

[Zazazu]

There's a longer way about it that I used before runstoryaction. Take one sim, preferably one living alone. Make them the active family. With debug commands active, CTRL-SHIFT-CLICK on them and choose to make them know everyone. Now search out the sims who are homeless. This can take quite some time in fuller 'hoods. Pull the relationship bar up to the max (still on the relationship panel). Call the homeless sim and invite them over. Quickly get to "X is being sociable" by asking them about their day and gossiping. Then ask to move in. On the move-in dialog, move all of the homeless sim's family in. Then go to Edit Town. Split the household, after ensuring that the resulting household will have enough to afford a house. Now place the new household.


It's a pain in the ass and it's time-consuming.

[Motoki]

Argh. There needs to be some mechanism by which the homeless get housing. Right now AM and Indie completely ignore them. The dumb thing is they will create new sims to move in rather than moving in the existing homeless sims. Or at least Indie does that.

[Motoki]

I would not be averse to a homeless family getting a "state grant" so it can move into a house, automatically, instead of a random family being moved in.
It's after all what I had to do (using the same techniques shannong posts) to get rid of the homeless scum.

If Pescado takes such exception to that then give them a damned loan and just deduct it from their income until it's paid off.  

I mean hell that's what a mortgage is or else most people in real life wouldn't be able to afford a home.

Of course this assumes they actually go to work which is a whole 'nother issue.

[LVRugger]

I spent an hour importing houses (I suck at building so I used the EAxian ones that came w/ the game and some downloaded ones), used wandhere to depreciate them, familyfunded all the homeless so they could afford houses (some got 250k so someone should have moved into the now vacant Goth Manor). If I entered the runstoryaction nothing happened, I just got the error code. For a few nights in a row I got move in notices, but that's stopped and the game is still spawning homeless families. I have about 10 open homes ranging from $20k to $250k in value and the homeless have plenty of money to buy them. Arrgh.

[Motoki]

I don't really understand the error issue but something is preventing them from moving in even when I try to force it and it's not the family funds, because I've cheated them in enough. It's not the houses because I have vacant houses with enough bedrooms etc.

I don't know what the deal is but it's a problem.

[ingeli]

I had the same problem, Motoki. I was thinking there could be other demands for validating the houses for the families - are there? My semibunkers don't have windows for example. What are the specs for houses being suitable? Beds and cribs, anything else?

[Roux]

I've found that my preferred method is to always have 1 or 2 unoccupied homes that are very basic and cheap, but have about 6 beds and 2 cribs. Once I have a few homeless families, I use runstoryaction to get a family on a lot where I can actually see them. After a family's placed I take a look at the demographics, adjust funds if I'm so inclined, and evict and move them to more suitable digs.

There are 2 reasons I prefer this method. First, the families ultimately get placed in homes that fit their demographics (3 adults with unique last names need different accommodations than a married couple with a toddler). Second, my cheap move-in lots are always ready for the next homeless family that comes along. Sometimes Story Progression moves them into those lots for me, but that's pretty rare in my experience so far.

[ingeli]

Motoki, I just did some testing. In my fresh new hood, not used for hopping between AM and Indie, it works. So I think it's related to that.

[Motoki]

Motoki, I just did some testing. In my fresh new hood, not used for hopping between AM and Indie, it works. So I think it's related to that.

I don't know if it's specific to that per say, but yeah I suspected it was something to do with the neighborhood being kind of borked in general.

[nanacake]

Yeah it's unfortunate how it said it would move a kickout into a house, but they're definitely nowhere to be seen and in the homeless list now. It would be great to have a one in all command that moves every homeless family into a house that's under 20k even if they don't have a funds, as an alternative to gassing them. Because I like to kick out kids when they reach young adult hood but don't want to have to pick their house and furniture each time.

Edit:

When entering runstoryaction move in household I got this strange error, is it what you meant would happen if it couldn't work or something else?
http://img139.imageshack.us/img139/8937/errormsgt.png

[Aaroc]

What I do, or at least what I did when I still used AwesomeMod (I've moved on to Indie Stone) was to plop downa  few "homeles shelters" which were basically small houses with one big bedroom containing 8 single beds, a kitchen/dining room, and a bathroom. Without even using the wandhere function these houses were worth $11k on the smallest lot and maybe $14k on the biggest lot on Homeless Alley. Using the runstoryaction command worked fine to get them into those houses. I would then freerealestate and move them into a fitting house for their demographic. After that I would typically fund them down to about $5k or so, but most often I didn't bother.

Getting rid of all the homeless bums in my town, and/or making sure there was affordable housing for them made a huge difference in my 1am lag.

[lmind]

When entering runstoryaction move in household I got this strange error, is it what you meant would happen if it couldn't work or something else?
http://img139.imageshack.us/img139/8937/errormsgt.png

I get this same error, btw.  I have several homeless families who can afford several available 8-bed, 2-crib shanties (also with stove, fridge, sink, shower, and toilet).  The command worked once.  I verified the successful move-in and saved the game.  Then I did it again and got that Flagrant System Error.  Quit without saving; then reloaded.  Then the command worked again (once).  Then it failed again.  Quit without saving; then reloaded.  Command failed.  Q w/o saving; reload.  Command failed.  Q w/o saving; reload.  Command succeeded!  Verified move-in and saved.  Then the command failed again.  Q w/o saving; reload.  Command failed.  Q w/o saving; reload.  Command failed.  Gave up.

Something seemingly random is causing it to succeed or fail.

[chann]

I would not be averse to a homeless family getting a "state grant" so it can move into a house, automatically, instead of a random family being moved in.
It's after all what I had to do (using the same techniques shannong posts) to get rid of the homeless scum.

If Pescado takes such exception to that then give them a damned loan and just deduct it from their income until it's paid off. 

I mean hell that's what a mortgage is or else most people in real life wouldn't be able to afford a home.

Of course this assumes they actually go to work which is a whole 'nother issue.

I was going to suggest exactly this in the AM requests thread - charge the household the debt, and extract periodic repayments. Households are technically immortal so they'll have plenty of time to pay it off. The only complication is the player - there's not really a way to stop them from interfering in the system, and possibly exploiting it. Also, I remembered seeing Pescado's opinions on our financial system.

I agree that the mass homelessness is a pretty ridiculous issue -  but the root of it is in the game's underdeveloped economic system.

[nanacake]

I don't really mind the homeless existing if they'd just show up at the park more so they could be potentially brought back into society by singlets and have their kids taken away making the adoption pool larger. A 100% working move family into lot command, regardless of finances, that would be cool.

[Motoki]

I don't really mind the homeless existing if they'd just show up at the park more so they could be potentially brought back into society by singlets and have their kids taken away making the adoption pool larger. A 100% working move family into lot command, regardless of finances, that would be cool.

Yes this is a problem. Once a sim goes homeless they seem to be off the grid so to speak and never show up anywhere, unlike TS2s townies who didn't have a home but were all over the damned place.

I would like it if the homeless still showed up on public lots and such so that we could interact with them if we wanted to.

It wouldn't be a bad idea if they still had jobs too, like maybe they could keep lower end ones. Or maybe they already do that. I hadn't noticed. I just know in my games once they go homeless I never see them again.

[Motoki]

Hmm, maybe I haven't payed attention enough. I guess it's harder to find them when you are looked when you can't seek out their house and go knock on their door (or have the game magically tell you where they are when they aren't at home).

Can you put them on the radar with AM if they are homeless? I will have to try that if I come across one.

[Motoki]

Will test that next time I see someone. I'm restarting my 'hood, as ISM messed it up (there's a bug in 0.5a/b where it will flood the 'hood with duplicates of Simbin Sims, if you allow genetics imports from the Library, so my 'hood looks like it was overran by identical twins ).

Yep. I noticed.