best way to make them know they're family?

[jennydeenyc]

Hi again all!

I'm coming to the point in my multigenerational Hatch family where keeping the extended family members living under one roof could cause problems as this newest crop of kids matures together. See, I have the children of cousins growing up together in one house, but they're relationship panel doesn't denote them as family (I guess because the game sees nothing beyond first cousins). I really don't want to have to break up the family into different households, just to avoid the future possibility of wants spinning up to have romantic attachments with each other! Is there a way to just denote all the extended family as cousins or something with SimPE, just so they don't get all hot for each other when they're all teenagers with raging hormones? I'd be willing to do this kind of thing manually for each additional child born to the family, just so that I can keep everyone co-existing nicely. TIA for your help!

[cwykes]

You can mark them as family in SimPE with undefined as the relationship. That's one of the easy things to do with SimPE and pretty much impossible to mess up.  I think you just have to check the box for one of the sims in sim description and the rest sorts itself out. I usually edit both sim descriptions cos I'm cautious.   Hope someone will tell us if you have to do it a different way.   I've done it for step fathers/fathers in law who were lusting after their partner's children.

[jennydeenyc]

Yeah, well, see, um...I shoulda mentioned that I did that already in SimPE with all the kids, and they still aren't noted as family in the panel. Are they safe, or does the family icon need to show up to be romantically-inclined proof?

[Renatus]

I've noticed that just checking the box marked family doesn't quite do it, you need to go into the family ties bit and add those there. If you have the 'keep consistant' box checked it means you only have to edit one of them. I think once you have one of the sims open in the family ties editor, you right-click the portrait of the sim you want to add ties to to get them in the box, then fiddle from there.

[Inge]

Sounds like that won't really do what she wanted - cos they're already related and presumably she doesn't want to actually change the family tree.   Perhaps what is needed is a hack that stops Sims in the same household initiating romantic moves unless they already have a memory of having done so (ie the player has to tell them to the *first* time).

[jennydeenyc]

The real problem is with the autonomous bed. If it has 2 sims with a high relationship & the appropriate gender preferences relaxing on it together, it can cause them to initiate romantic interactions on their own. This is exactly the feature I like most about that bed, but I don't want it thinking my distant Hatch cousins are all fair game for each other. Plus, the bed itself has nothing to do with the Want/Chemistry system itself, which might make the cousins want to interact that way in the first place. I don't want to have to pretend the cousins are all siblings, or otherwise alter the family tree (they all trace directly back by blood to the family matriarch). Does it help if you define the relationship (eg. as cousins) in SimPE as well as checking the Family box? I had checked the boxes but left the actual relationships undefined.

[ZephyrZodiac]

Well, I don't see why you can't mark all cousins, whether first, second, third, removed or whatever, as cousins.  Unfortunately you can't do it in Family Ties too.  As you may have noticed, both Angela Pleasant and Dustin Broke appear in simPE to be related as they are checked as Family so the game obviously regards that as unimportant unless a relationship is specified.

Stupid thing is, though, a while back I had a couple of teenage boys who were best friends and so were the father of one and the mother of the other.  The parents decided to move in together.  The boys living together and sharing a bedroom meant their relationship stayed almost permanently 100/100 and without any pushing from me they fell for each other.  This was fine until the parents decided to marry after which the two boys had all the relationship wants but couldn't fulfil them.  As soon as one grew up (this was pre Uni) I moved him out, and then when the other grew up I moved him in with his friend.  Now, I thought, it'll be ok, but it wasn't!  I didn't have simPE back then, so my only option was to make the parents break up (he was romance so that wasn't difficult - the difficult part was getting them back together afterwards!) which worked, The two sims were able to get joined, and adopt kids and everything worked out.  But for some reason the game must have decided they were brothers, but at the same time not brothers, it was extremely annoying to say the least!

[Inge]

Can't you use something like my security system to mark the room the bed is in as unavailable to the particular sims in question?   Or give them a "naughty bed" each, for entertaining their legitimate lovers and in each case use the security token to ban from the room those particular sims who they should not woohoo with?

[jrd]

If you look at Veronaville, almost all Montys and Capps are marked as family. I guess this was done to prevent autonomous flirting, but I'm not sure if this works.

[ZephyrZodiac]

As I said, just the family tick doesn't work, there has to be some other thing which makes them see each other as family.  And the family tick can remove itself - I had a family where Don moved in and married a sim with a daughter who was then a child, and Don treated her as family, friendly hug, family kiss etc.  This continued through teenage, but as soon as she grew up, different story.

[Brynne]

I have all my extended family marked as "cousins". It's worked so far for me.

[Ancient Sim]

I think probably the best way is just to mark them all as cousins.  It doesn't actually specify in the game that cousin means 'first cousin' - I think it does, but it doesn't actually say so.  The worst scenario with this problem though is that a great-grandparent and a great-grandchild don't show-up as related and the idea of a romantic liaison coming out of that relationship ... ugh!  I think the reason for this may be to stop the memories being passed on for too many generations, but with things like elixirs and vampires/zombies in the game, it's not exactly impossible for these generations to all be alive at once.  Even a great-aunt/uncle and a great-nephew/niece relationship wouldn't be something I'd want either, but as far as I can see there's nothing in the game to stop it.

I've had a lot of peculiarities with this in my game, such as half-cousins marrying, but not being able to get romantic with relatives of their spouse who aren't actually their relatives.  The system isn't really very sophisticated if you think about it.

[jennydeenyc]

Well, I'm trying the cousin designation out on one of my sims in the family today, we'll see how that goes. The reason I can't really use the security doors to keep certain sims from certain beds is because of the layout of the house. I have 4 of the autonomous beds in 3 rooms, and 7 single beds in 2 rooms. The children and teens all sleep in the single beds, and the 7 adults (only 2 of which are a married couple) sleep in the doubles. I HAVE to allow non-married adult sims to sleep in the same room and even the same bed simply to have somewhere for them all to be, and when the next generation grows up I'll have the same issue, only the game won't automatically see them as relations! Hopefully the cousin thing will make this a non-issue.

[Bangelnuts]

it works I use simpe all the ime to link cousins regardless of how far removed

[ZephyrZodiac]

How about small bedrooms with dorm doors?

[jennydeenyc]

ZZ, there just isn't logistically the space to break up all the rooms & still have any kind of windows in them all, and I like having them look like actual bedrooms & not prison cells, plus I want the teens to be able to relax on the autonomous beds with their non-family playmates & maybe get into a little InTeen-related trouble! You know what would be cool for all of us who play these kind of extended families? An object that sets the relationship to cousin/family in-game! Like a painting with a menu that says "Make me cousins with..." or something to that effect. I'm sure I'm not the only one that'd get good use of that!

[ZephyrZodiac]

Perhaps you could suggest it to TJ or Crammyboy?  I don't play large families, and find large houses just too much for my game to handle for long, so I tend to have kids go to uni then come back and get their own place.  But I'd still find a use for something that stops a great-uncle who is still an adult due to loads of elixir lusting after his great-niece!  Maybe he isn't technically a cousin, but at least if he thinks he is, then he won't get these unacceptablel wants!

[Ancient Sim]

Going back to what I said earlier, you would think the game would realise this would happen with the various things in it that prolong life.  Seems ridiculous that they won't allow sims to have sex until they're 26 or whatever it is they are, yet they can have it off with their great grandfather whenever they feel like it?  Something very wrong there.

[jennydeenyc]

I tell ya, it's bad enough when the non-blood relations don't see themselves as family! Lemme give you a little rundown of something that happened in my game last week:

Zuzu Hatch (I was doing a production of It's A Wonderful Life when I reinstalled & restarted my game) moved back home & got engaged to Destry Hanby. Her brother Pete was already back home married to Arianna Copur. After Destry moved in, Pete & Arianna started having kids, the oldest girl was named Annabelle. Years pass, Zuzu & Destry have 4 kids (Xander, Riley, Willow & Oz), and tie the knot a day before Zuzu becomes an elder. Meanwhile, Annabelle & her siblings have grown into adults, and she and her sister stayed on in the household. Pete dies, Arianna dies, then Zuzu dies. Lonely Destry, only a day from death when his wife passes, decides to relax on his bed. While I was off tending to the other sims on the lot, Annabelle joined him. Suddenly I hear the harp music signifying a love connection, and go back to the bedroom only to find Destry and Annabelle under the covers! Ewwwww! I know she was just his niece by marriage, but even still, this man was around when she was getting her diapers changed, and he was devoted to his wife his whole life, why go and spoil things on his last day alive?! I tell ya, when old Grimmy showed up the next day for Destry, I wasn't sad at all! The letch! The luckiest thing about it was that even though they were trying for baby, Annabelle didn't conceive! Now there's a family tree I don't want to be dealing with!

[ZephyrZodiac]

Very much so!  I don't think they had good sex education wherever they went to school!

[Bangelnuts]

Sims do not recognize non blood related relatives as taboo thats why that happens.much like some RL societies

[jennydeenyc]

I know that they're not blood related, and I don't force non-blood relations to see each other as family either, I just think that kind of thing is bad enough without having distant blood-related cousins getting in on the same kind of act.

Besides, even if it isn't illegal, and arguably not even immoral for Destry & Annabelle to have had their little fling, I'm still mad at him!

[Bangelnuts]

I know that they're not blood related, and I don't force non-blood relations to see each other as family either, I just think that kind of thing is bad enough without having distant blood-related cousins getting in on the same kind of act.

Besides, even if it isn't illegal, and arguably not even immoral for Destry & Annabelle to have had their little fling, I'm still mad at him!

Sounds like Destry was lonely to me

[jennydeenyc]

I'm sure he was, since his wife had just died...but if he'd only held out one dang day he coulda died too having been eternally faithful!

[Bangelnuts]

I'm sure he was, since his wife had just died...but if he'd only held out one dang day he coulda died too having been eternally faithful!

ahh but sims being the social creatures they are will always look for social comfort  regardless of how close they are to death or how close they were to their spouse while their spouse was alive