More Awesome Than You!

Let me set one thing straight; I hate some of the new townies; especially as some of them look like they'd be more at home in a Star Trek episode. I decided, however, that I could live with them...after all...how many can there be?

Lots. Apparently. After checking my character files it seems that these new pests are spawning approximately once every 20 minutes! I've stopped playing my neighborhood in the fear that it will become overrun with character files and if the subsequent bugs don't get in my way, the hundreds of ridiculous names will.

I'm someone who hates townies with a passion, and the only reason that I don't kill them is because I know that more of them will spawn if I do. -_-

Unfortunately, this situation has me worried and I'm playing a different neighborhood until the official patch (haha) arrives which will probably cause more trouble than it is worth. Does anyone yet know if the 'No Townie Regen' hack will work on these rats?

No idea of that hack works but i guess i am going to have to try it as i already have 160 new townies since installing AL

Well... how else did you think they were going create 'neighbors' that move in with our sims?  After uni and bv, I could tell this was exactly the way it would turn out.  :-\  I hate every gorilla faced, darkskinned, blond mohawked abomination it throws my way. 

No townie Regen is in the al directory, so it should be compatable... It's worth a shot to see :-\

Notownieregen hasn't worked for me. I've been killing off the ugly new townies. Every time I'd load a lot, a new character file would pop into my Sims 2/Neighborhoods/N004/Characters folder.

Well that is just f**ed up! Why on earth do they let this happen with every damn EP? And by them I mean EAxis. You'd think they'd check their codes or whatever after the whole tourguide hassle with BV.

Mine seems to have stopped at a total of 21 new character files (does not make me happy to have any but the witches...my goal for this 'hood was to absorb the 30 I had). I do have notownieregen, nodormieregen, nostrayrespawn. I also deleted out the contents of both Characters subfolders in the AL game files.

For three sim days, about four game starts, the only new character file I had was to make the landlady. Who is an unmitigated bitch, by the way.

No Townie Regen NOT working for me with these AL townies

In the space of 2 simdays play it has created another 16 townies with the hack in the game

No townie regen does not cover the Social Group Townies. I will consider making it do so, though. I already researched what needed to be done, I just haven't figured out whether disabling it will break the game.

What purpose do the Social Group townies serve? It just seemed like they were townies that dressed similarly.

Being completely ignorant of the logistics of the Social Group wankery, I'll ask anyway. Is it possible to alter somehow the character files of the townies you already have in order to induct them into the Social Groups, thereby eliminating the need for the EAfug swarm? Thinking, it would probably require an updated SimPE or similar, but would such a thing work in theory?

This is what EAxis should have done, the dumbasses.  I don't really care that I have ugly townies (I make "pretty" Sims, so I need some variety in the gene pool), but I hate that the game is creating MOAR character files for a feature that I haven't used or seen.  Where the hell ARE these new townies?  I can't get more than 2 or 3 people on the same community lot most of the time, and they're usually the SAME 2 or 3 people!

Just put some of your other townies into one or more of the social group families.  I think 0.71.13 is probably ok for doing that.

It wouldn't be too bad if they weren't all so gosh darn ugly and had such rediculous names; Zaitarrio Pearson anyone?


@ Dragon Slave

Creating new neighbors is fine, but it should only occur if and when they are required. My neighborhood doesn't even have any apartment blocks yet, and already I've seen over 50 of the cretins.

I agree that the townies look absolutely dreadful, and the makeover station only helps with hair and makeup. Changing appearance takes so long with SimPE for each individual sim, so at the moment I've been making them selectable and using the DIY plastic surgery station career reward.


@ Solowren

Killing them must be good for stress relief, and I've been sorely tempted to cow-plant a few of them myself, but doesn't killing them force more townies to respawn in their place?


@ Sarimar

Yes, but this is EA. I noticed how they go through the BBS with a fine toothed comb, warning or banning anyone who does so much as sneeze; I wish they took that attitude with the actual game. -_-
I was warned yesterday for mentioning that a mod to remove the green skin and sparkling skin of witches was available at InSim. Apparently I'd mentioned adult content. o.0


@ Zazazu

Hmm...so if notownie regen doesn't work, I wonder if the nodormieregen does? Perhaps, as they live in the apartments, they are being grouped with dormies?
Glad to hear you haven't been having problems though.


@ Celestra

2 sim days? That's...um...

I think a sim hour is a minute isn't it? So that's 48 minutes...and that means approximately 20 new townies are being spawned every real-time hour! That's even worse than I thought. O_O

I would advise everyone to backup their neighborhoods, that way if there is a townie influx then we can always roll back when a patch is released for the problem. The only other real option is to stop playing our favorite neighborhoods, which doesn't really appeal to me. :-/


@ J. M. Pescado

I know that it's always a concern, especially as some ARE needed. Would it be possible to set a capping-off point when the game has reached a particular number of townies?

But didn't you also report earlier that the townie spawning was just an illusion? Still, I'm thankful that people like you exist to fix mistakes that EA should have remedied before the game was released; especially as it's a mistake they've already made once before.


@ Kutto

They really are just townies, with a hint of secret society members in that each social group has their own style of dress, special greetings, and rewards. It also depends on the 'class' of the apartment as to which social group will appear.


@ Liz

That's a really good idea. I just wish that EA had taken that into account. So now we have the same old ugly townies, plus a whole host of new ones. It would have been nice to make the existing ones more useful. Unfortunately, I'm not entirely sure if it would work or not, as it would be quite complicated (at least for me).


@ ALL

Thank you for your replies. It's nice to meet all of you.:)

According to the code I've scanned, the spawning is already limited to what is necessary to populate your apartment buildings. You shouldn't be getting an enormous influx unless your apartment buildings are massive.

That's the thing, I don't have any apartment buildings at all yet in this particular neighborhood. o.0

I ran the game (Belladonna Cove) in windowed mode and checked the neighborhoods/E001/characters directory:
every time my Sim went from one comm-lot to another 2 new character files were created. And upon returning home, 1 additional was created.
I already have more 520 files in the character directory  --  without any CAS Sims or subhoods!


This is far more than "what is necessary to populate your apartment buildings" I think?

Most definitely not what's happening. I have seven more this play session for a total of 28 spawned by AL. The only apartment lot I have in play has four total units, one occupied by playables.

I'm not sure if this is a bug or not but I was playing it a custom hood which was brand new.. I sent my sim to a community lot in the hopes of meeting a witch.  He did.  As a matter of fact while he was talking to the super duper evil witch a second super duper evil witch appeared.  The 2 witches shot spells at one another and then gabbed like bestest buddies.  The only hax I had in at the time were maty-al.zip ones.

One thing that might have caused the second witch to show up was I had clicked on the first as soon as I saw her.  I wasn't sure if she would do a "ninja" and I wanted my sim to try out the witch craft stuff.  Since I was focused on my sim I have no idea how long the witch had been on the lot but she was still standing next to the phone when I selected her and set the command to greet her.  By the time my sim made his way over to her she had moved to the sidewalk and set off a storm.

I'm guessing that having 3 of each type of witch is normal but I thought, like the vampires, you would only see one of each unless something happened to them.. death or a change of status?

Indeed it does, which is the issue at hand. I want the uglies DEAD, and I don't want new uglies once that is accomplished.

@ Leo

Absolutely, I agree completely. They know that overpopulation can cause problems and yet they insist on creating huge numbers of new townies. -_-
I'm glad that you did research though. Perhaps we could present those results on the BBS? They've just opened a bug reporting thread.


@ Zazazu

I don't have any apartments yet and I've already counted 50 new ones. I'm just happy that I backed up my neighborhood before I installed. I'll probably end up rolling back when a patch comes out.


@ Mistymage

The witch problem happened to me too. I was playing a custom hood to avoid overpopulating my favorite one, and two good witches appeared on a community lot at the same time. :-/ I didn't have any mods in my game at that time. I'm not entirely sure why it happened but I guess it's just another bug to add to the endless pile. I think EA sent Sims 2 out with a bug rather than a bang.


@ Solowren

I suppose we should feel sorry for them. They've certainly received many a beating with the ugly-stick.
Shame we can't just imprison and torture them. Oh wait...we can. Hehehe!

Shouldn't antiredundancy prevent multiple witches of the same alignment?

Well I don't have the anti redundancy mod in my game (*gasp*) but I would have imagined so. That's a good point. Perhaps it was only checked for conflict issues, but not updated to cover the new NPCs?

I only mention it because over at Simbology someone told me antiredundancy is still allowing three landlords to spawn. Apparently it's "supposed" to be like that.

I don't like a lot of the game the way it's "supposed" to be- that's why I use hacks!

Haha, good point. The sickening thing is that EA has even admitted that overpopulation will cause huge problems, but they have done nothing to prevent massive (and unnecessary) population boosts. I only have 23 sims in my neighborhood and it has 695 character files. o_o I'd also like to know why the game needs so many damn repo-men, I noticed that in the past. -_-

It can really put me off playing the game if I fear that my neighborhoods will become overrun and stop working. :-/

fyi: there are 5 social groups, every consisting of around 10 members. but their purpose is far beyond me. all, what it seems, you get, is +10 daily relation (in addition to normal daily relation shift), when you choose the correct greeting gesture, and further +10 daily relation, when telling the correct story, when interacting with a member of a group. multiple uses within one interaction cycle dont give multiple boni, it even seems, you only get these boni for the first interaction cycle only. so only useful for socialy incapable sims, imho, and not that much. right gesture and story, are quite hard to guess.

so long,

I appreciate the correction and additional info, but 5 social groups multiplied by 10 equals 50 new townies. How do you justify the hundred others that I experienced?

Oh, I agree with you there, and by no means do I think EA has an excuse for the train wreck they created.  I just didn't expect any better from them, because they've been so shitty with us in the past.  My expectations for TS3 are low indeed. :-\

I personally don't mind ugly... because I play realistically and there are ugly people in real life.. so, it all works out... but it's the same archetype faces over and over again.  I breed my sims to townies, I want to keep the gene pool diverse.  How is this possibe when they all bear the same faces over and over again?

What really kills me is the randomness of it all.  I've never seen a fish lipped, tan skinned, orange corn rowed man in a kilt named Holden Tang in real life - I don't want to see it in the sims.  On the other hand, I liked the Nightlife downtownies - why can't they design more template characters like those? 



I see the social groups as a way of creating cliques.  I've tried to do this on my own in the game for years but it never works the way I want it to as they're always bringing home sims from the wrong group (cheerleaders jump off the bus with my goth kids. >:().  So I had some hopes that *maybe* I could turn this in my favor - except some of the groups are kinda strange.  (Gearheads ???)

I don't know if you're interested or not, but I recently downloaded Spookymuffin's face templates (available here: http://www.insimenator.net/showthread.php?t=75472) and they solved this problem for me. They're diverse enough to be realistic, but aren't as drastic as the default ones. Of course, the downside is that only new Townies will be affected by them.

This is what multiple sets of default replacement sets are for. I have five, plus one that is a melding of the five sets. At least I remembered to switch them out before these dumb neighbors and social group losers were spawned.

Say you have just 300 townies/NPCs in a game (typical player with just a few playables and not using noregen hacks). There are 27 face templates. If they were distributed evenly, that's 10 of every face...which is already a lot of redundancy. But they don't get distributed evenly due to the nature of randomness, so it will be even worse.

probably not, only premade sims, part of "special" households, react accordingly to gestures and stories (script driven), but they dont mind to befriend other sims as well. in addition no member of a group knows another member of the same group.

Methinks I see attention seeking fuckwits who think spelling a word is more important than understanding the context and meaning of the sentence it forms a part of.  I can remember when idiocy in Maty was restricted to the Idiotboard.  How on earth did it spread into the Podium?  No wonder I don't post here anymore! Oh the irony! :P

The too many character files issue seems to come back with each new EP.  JM did a fantastic job fixing it last time, long before EA launched their patch.  No doubt he'll do the same again.

Feel free to return to that state.

Now that you mention it, I *HAVE* spotted what I thought was a phantom extra landlord, but I wasn't paying too much attention cuz I was hunting the cooking skill bug. I will investigate this and squash it.

Ugh - I don't really want any apartment townies, let alone hundreds. I have my favourite hood set up the way I like it, without any EAxis townies.

I already have the game, but I'm probably going to hold off installing for the moment, just in case someone makes a no-spawning hack and a hack to create your own apartment townies.

If I do install it, I don't think I'll be playing that hood for a while.

Is that safe to do after you have played your game with AL installed? And also, is it safe to delete the Characters subfolders from other expansions? I have 1200 character files in my favourite (custom) neighbourhood and would love to get rid of at least some of them, but according to what I've read here so far, simply deleting character files is a VBT.

No, you cannot simply delete the character files. You must also purge all the internal save references to those files. See "Deleted 2: Electric Boogaloo!".

Thank you. I read the "Deleted 2: Electric Boogaloo!" thread twice yesterday, but then saw the reference to deleting Character folders here and wanted to double-check. From what I've read so far, the BFBVFS is approaching... as I have also moved sims between neighbourhoods in my game. Wish I had discovered MATY earlier.
One more question: is it safe to pack a house (after you have evicted the family) and then install it in a clean neighbourhood?

Why bother?  Just pick it up and stick it in the lot bin.  When you place it down again, a copy will remain in the lot bin which you can stick where you like.  I keep a custom neighbourhood with copies of all my own builds in it.  I go in pick up what I want, put it back again immediately, and use the copy in the lot bin to place elsewhere in game.  Then delete from the lot bin when I'm done - because I like to keep the lot bin fairly empty.

 ;D I guess after over 50 hours of reading about all the supposedly innocuous things that can - surprise! - turn your game into a BFBVFS one becomes quite paranoid...

From C:/ProgramFiles/...etc? If so, I borked the last two EP. Ah well.

Mmm...is that you granting me permission to do so?  Did I miss something?

It used to be that the Podium was the place to ask questions to JMP - not get torn to shreds over spellings by people you weren't even addressing the question to. Which brings me back to the real issue in hand;

Is the AL situation with character files so dire that the best advice is to delay playing that EP until a fix is posted, or is it a minor problem, that really depends on how good/fast your pc's processor is?  I estimate that with nothing restricting spawning, it would still take several months of non-stop play to reach the maximum number of character files; I remember you (JMP) saying as much in a thread that must remain dead somewhere around here.

Great! I spent the last two hours thinking about a tool to do that.

I am not sure if it will stop the respawning though. Generally, I never had a problem with newly generated townies, it very rarely happened, not even when I moved some townie teens to university. But now I see this massive increase in population and I need a way to control it. I started the game, loaded a residential house and began writing, I did not play at all. When I minimised the game I noticed that the folder with the character files was still open and there was a new character. I have mainly played Strangetown so far and it already has ca. 30 more new characters than Pleasantview, about 10 of them were created last night. I really do not want to go through the hassle of deleting all those sims, so I begin to worry about playing my game now. It does not seem to be a problem for everyone, but my apartment dwellers (I have two apartment buildings in Strangetown) are invading the hoods.

That doesnt explain then how i added one single appt block to my neighbourhood with 4 flats in it and now i have an extra 206 characters in my char folder and looking in clean installer they are ALL pictures and names of new social townies

1. Download newest notownieregen, as old single file wasn't the shinier stomping version.
2. ???
3. Profit.

You know, blue collar factory-worker types.

To me a gearhead is someone who is into cars/engines/big machines.

My personal strategy for this EP was to start a new TS2 folder to play from. When the spawning issue is worked out I'll do the necessary and return to my legacy family with a cleaned up Apartment Life template/game

That's from South Park's Underpants Gnomes isn't it? LOL Sounds like a good business strategy to me!


Frankly I think that the techies are very strange. Most of them dress like Star Trek rejects for a kick-off. The one thing I don't like about social groups is that the apartments are restricted to certain classes, but my houses are not. I really don't want to see gearheads walking past my ultra expensive mansions at the best area in town.

Oh my goodness gracious yes, I think AL generates more townies every time you move a Sim into an apartment.  I believe I've already started to see identical (weird) looking townies with different (weird) names.  Oddly, it seems there are rather more elders thrown into the mix, not just adults.  I think my newly minted good warlock brings home a newborn townie from work every single day.  Why he couldn't just bring Benjamin Longnose or good old Goopy or someone like that, is beyond me.  So far I haven't seen any child or teenager "apartmenties" though.

Since I "reboot" the game very often, usually at least once or twice a month, it probably won't get to be a problem.  But I'll take the advice and get notownieregen, as well as looking into nopedostalkers (which JMP advised me takes care of some of the annoying crap that NPCs constantly do, getting in the way of necessary controllable Sim activities, such as taking out the trash and going to work).

As for the ugliness of the townies, I use the InSimenator to grab hold of practically every male and at least 50% of the females, and then beautify them.  Presto, no more frog lips or beak noses.  Even the rather pretty NPCs usually have incorrect proportions of their facial features -- eyes are almost always too large, for instance, and mouths too small, like anime characters.  But this feature of the InSimenator requires UNI as it seems to work off the career reward, only without giving those nightmarish "failures."

Has anybody's sim brought a pregnant friend at home from work? I'm pretty sure she's not a pre-made playable sim. I'm unable to check atm since I'm trying to figure out a bug. None of the pre-made Belladonna cove families have Blond pregnant sims yes?

I've had sims bring home pregnant playables before AL.

The only blonde pre-made in BDC is Jessica Peterson, and she's not pregnant.  If you're not running with empty templates, it could be Samantha Ottomas (she's blonde), who was added to the SimBin with Seasons.  She starts out with a job in the Education career and is pregnant with twins.  I've had sims bring home sims from the SimBin before.

BTW, I think you misinterpreted the title of this thread.  This thread has nothing to do with the possibility of pregnant townies.

No I did noy misinterpret anything. I was just wondering wether the game is spawning pregnant sims since people are complaining abot the game spawning the new townies even when it's not necessary. I was wondering if this is something else borked in the spawning system.

Yes, you're right it is Samantha and now I understand why I got a message about not being able to call her 'cause she doesn't have a phone. Incredibly annoying.

Yeah...no.  ::)

The only way for a townie to be pregnant is if you take a pregnant sim and use hacks to townify them. In an Apoc 'hood of mine, Samantha Ottomas was a fully pregnant zombie townie.

Oy, what a barrel of fun she must have been. Imagine the cravings.

Just to clarify to all the people that won't read the whole thread: Notownieregen now stompinates all the extra townie spawning?

Grilled cheese. All grilled cheese. I replaced one of the UI files so that brains are now yummy cheesy goodness.

As far as I've tested, it seems to.

That delights me far more than it should. Think it's about time I finally played a Grilled Cheese sim. Or a zombie. Perhaps both at once.  :D

Does not the aspiration dialog (when you are looking at the LTW) just scream zombiness to you?

In a past 'hood, the Oversoul dealt with all Romance sims by making them GCZs during The Cleansing.

And in my hood, Zazazu IS a romance sim who subsists on hot dogs because she has neither stove nor cooking skills.

Well concidering all the things they break in the game it wouldn't surprise me if that happens. I just saw her bringing her home and she's pregnant. And she wasn't from one of the premade families and I couldn't phone her so I figured messed up townie. At first I thought she belonged to another appartment (not as playable sim but as npc neighbour) and they sciprted her to get pregnant or something.

Then I thought what if they left somethign somewhere in the code that would flag certain female sims as pregnant?! I know, I know it sounds kinda silly now but I was just trying to make sense of it all and never thought about the simbin. I mean how could a townie be pregnant unless she was spawned that way?! That's what I was trying to figure out.

*glares at Jolrei*
Those had better be veggie dogs.

As far as I am aware, J. M. has not confirmed that yet. The last I heard from him earlier in this thread, he informed us that it did not yet work against them.


I don't think that you need to worry too much. Most hot dogs contain all sorts of crap but you can safely bet that pork isn't one of them.:-p
I'm not a vegetarian myself but, admittedly, I prefer the veggie dogs; I consider them to be the safe option. :-p

JM confirmed in another thread that his DC notownieregen had prevented the swarms of characters the rest of us are experiencing. notownieregen is now also in the AL folder, I believe.

Update and test.

Why can't you just make a hack that allows millions of character files before it becomes a BFBVFS?

That wouldn't be a hack -- that would involve modifying/reprogramming core game files, in particular the .exe.  Not something anyone other than EAxis is likely to do (other than removing the suckrom checks, anyway).

I think that in a lot of cases, people aren't concerned about too many townies, but they DO NOT WANT them.

It would've been easier if they just gave us a towniemaker. I mean townies are cool for when you just start playing the game but other than that they're just annoying. With all the famillies I make I have plenty of random sims walking around the neighbourhood. Aslo I don't get whay townies should spawn. As in when you marry them off and such. NPC's I get cause you'll need someone else to take their job but the townies are just useless and cluttters up the hoods.

We do have a townie maker.  Townie tree in earlier EPs, townie gun in later EPs.

Townies are useful fodder for romance sims and as employees & customers for businesses, which is why townie respawn can be useful and why some players (including myself) create more townies when existing townies are married in or killed off.  Although now I have AL, I'll probably stop creating replacement townies and let the townie pool run down.  The new social group townies will provide sufficient townies for the needs of my romance sims and business owning sims.

NPC respawning is not as useful as townie respawning - if you have three maids and you marry one in or kill one off, you don't need a third maid to respawn to cover the one that married in/died as you still have two maids.  If you don't have noredudancy that third maid would respawn.

I'm about to try this because I'm getting sick of defuglying these social townies.  Is it just a matter of adding sims (regular townies) in the right social family?  I came across Trif's family instance #s for the different social groups.  And then these refamilized townies will have the proper greetings and tell-stories and such? 

In two of my last 'hoods, I aged townies on a schedule. So after a few generations, they would die (and really, I pretty much ignore elder townies). I also start 'hoods with one sim. So if I didn't create more, my sims would become genetically stagnant. Actually, they'd die off.

Now I'm not aging the townies. I'm absorbing them. Additional townies are offensive.

Precisely. For me, the thrill of building small communities comes from my sims being able to see and socialize with their neighbors while out and about in community lots. Instead, my playable sims hardly ever appear anymore because of the swarms of new townies. That, and when I return to my other sims, I find that they've accrued about ten million new 'I met' memories because of the new townies who insist upon greeting anything that will stand still long enough. -_-

Your liking of the spawning really depends on how you want to play.  I let mine spawn for a while but put a plug on it once I hit almost 1300 because that is about the size I wanted for now.  I run mine to be more like a booming city, with the playable sims being the suburban folk (though I'm looking to expand apartments into a second downtown lot just for them to give a sims livin in the city sensation).  The townies serve for me as the mob of civilians you see in commercial areas that you most likely will never get to know, either because they're from somewhere completely different or just don't live in your neighborhood or work with you.  I may have to check out that townie gun though if I start to run down, because if I remember, removing notownieregen does bad things.

Anyways, some like to keep it specifically their playable sims, especially if they have a decent sized 'burb going.  Townies to them get in the way of keeping it just familiar faces.

Although it might be fun to let townies spawn endlessly at a constant rate to create a social experiment of rapid overpopulation in Sims 2.  Pleasantville populated by 10459 townies and counting!

My pc just had a melt-down at the mere thought. Thanks.

Seriously, over ten thousand townies?! My rig starts to splutter as soon as I get anywhere near 200 sims.
My first reaction was: How on earth are you going to marry all of them into your families. That's what townies are to me, folk you breed into your families until the gene pool is large enough to sustain itself.

I just started playing Apartment Life yesterday (after spending a while moving CC in and out to find some hack that was causing a problem) and I noticed the obsession with greeting. If you cancel it out of the queue, they are trying to greet again moments later. Annoying.

It would be way MORE than just reprogramming or modifying core game files. In order to support more sims, you'd have to change the entire system of 16-bit values and rewrite EVERYTHING.

back-up at different points  may be a way to go shortly.

but, making sims-trap lots to pitfall the extra sims for Holloween flavour :D  can be a way to go...  the guns, the bombs, the knifes, etc... or simply lure the "innocent" extra sims into a swim-pool without ladder... let them "quit" automatically... or with mods to remove them fast.... :D

You'd still have those character files in your game, though. Best way is to Deleted 2 all you can, or those long dead.

Coggeshall Village has 153 files right now. I'm not particularly happy about those extra files, but most of the bloat are those damn college professors, multiple waiters spawned by a lot I'd downloaded and not realized had too many spawners, extra chefs and clerks for the same reason, and those 30 extra AL townies I got before notownieregen was fixed. They annoy me, but I guess it's okay...the 'hood is semi-urban. My secondary 'hood, Onoway, has 21 character files. 21. Yay.

My game is spawning a new townie everytime I load it and I haven't even played with the sims yet, just building. Silly EAxis.  ::)

It's time for me to stop being lazy and download updated hacks and put them back in my game.

I'm glad to hear that this problem has been successfully resolved. I can finally get back to playing my favorite neighborhoods. Thanks everyone. n_n

Please forgive my stupidity, but I am still not 100% sure about how notownieregen should be working from now on. I don't want any townies in my game at all, but even with a clean template, the game is generating new random AL townies. Is there any way to stop them breeding completely? I have about 65 character files, with 1 CAS playable - seems pretty high since someone else said they only have 21. I'd uninstall this piece of crap expansion, but I just want the ceilings, dammit.

That's exactly what notownieregen does...exactly what it's named. No townies generated by the game, with extremely few exceptions. AL townies will generate, but just enough to fill any NPC apartments you are playing. If you aren't playing an apartment, you won't get any of those.

You also want antiredundancy. That will drastically cut down on service NPC bloat, giving you one of each type, again with few exceptions. If you have a restaurant with two chef stations or sinks (waiter spawns) you will get an extra NPC to man the spawn point. Also, if you are playing with Uni, you want nodormieregen. Why oh why they give you approximately 50 dormies is beyond me.

I'm actually up to 25 now, just because two of the marry-ins had new hobby memberships that were given and the maven spawned for them.

I don't know if this would interest you.  I decided that I didn't like the completely empty BV locations and decided to make some local townies of my own.  (perhaps I should say Little Carping was made with the empty templates and all norespawn hacks).  I converted all the extra NPC spawn I had at the time in Little Carping into these locals.  I didn't have quite as many as you but it seemed to me a good way to use the character files.  What I did was various: I started by adding to family (the Jack Thompson family - he's a fortune zombie who lives on his own in a shack and is dirt poor and where it's always winter.  He's useful for this sort of thing though).  Then I simsurgeried, agesim cheated, SimPE'd (changing sex etc., adding skills, etc.) and batboxed (changing names) the sims until I got what I liked before I townie-gunned them to townies - well, BV townies in this case.  I thought it was a way to deal with the extra files without deleting them, Deleted 2-ing them or killing them off.  Little Carping has 244 files but it's a big neighbourhood and most of the NPCs have spawned as needed as I've played it.  Also, I added some students as I got bored with the empty rooms.  Townies do make for moving scenery.  But I feel like I'm in control of the NPCs rather than the other way round so I'm happy enough.  It's the same hood I had when the game came out though I cleaned it up in a major way about 2 years ago.  I think 244 sims (including universal NPCs) is not bad.  Anyway, NPC conversion is always a possibility.

What's currently considered a reasonable limit?  I know it went up substantially several EP's back but I can't remember the specifics.

I think Pescado said way back sometime that you could go as high as 10,000 without to many issues.  Personally, I'd hate to see a hood that big, but there ya go. :)

I'm playing one of my hoods with notownieregen and antiredundancy both loaded for AL.  Windoze Explorer indicates that there have been 94 character files created since Sept 6 (when I first started testing AL with this hood), but only 4 since September 7 (when I realized that notownieregen was not loaded and put it back in).  I'm gonna keep checking back to see, but my extremely cursory researches so far suggest that the hack is working.

I'm at 30 in Onoway, but I know who they all are. 12 generated townies, 5 born playables, mailman, papergirl, business reviewer, 5 hobby mavens, 2 wolves, 3 pets for the adoption pool. Hack cocktail is 100% effective.

Yeah, what we'd been talking about...notownieregen. Make sure to get empty templates from Peasantry (or make them yourself, but be careful what you delete).