More Awesome Than You!

This is such a mess, I need advice.

I wanted to get a former newspaper girl NPC into the neighborhood as a playable.  What I did was this:  First, I ctrl-shift-clicked her to set her age to be one day from birthday (It's one of the options under Sim.../Aging.../)  The next time I invited her over, she was a teen.  I did the same thing again.  The next time she came over she was a YA.  At that point I invited her to move in. 

That very same evening, she transitioned again to Adult! 

Okay...  That was a little unexpected.  It turns out that if you do this to grow up NPCs, they age transition a second time after you move them in.  Something to remember.

I changed her back to YA with Simedit and saved her.  But there was a new problem, or one I hadn't noticed before.  She was still listed as a high-school student, albeit one with a part-time job.  I sent her off to join the Criminal Career.  She did that fine.  But she was still listed as a High School Student with grade C, and with a job.

If she weren't a former NPC, I could fix this myself by just changing her to teen wotj Simedit and then aging her up again.  However, BECAUSE she used to be an NPC, I don't want to do that because aging down to teen will lead Simedit to change her traits.  She will get her fifth trait back after aging back up to YA, but I doubt she will retain whatever Papergirl-ish special traits she may have had through this process.

So, please advise me:

1. Was there a less painful way to age her up?
2. Is there any fix for the High School thing?  Can I get rid of that without using Simedit?
3. If a special NPC's traits are changed with Simedit, are unlisted NPC characteristics roached?  I assume they must be.  If so, that defeats the whole purpose of the exercise.

You could try using the birthday cake to age her up.

Here's how I would do the workaround:
- Find the hidden traits. The fastest way to do that would be using Twallan's supercomputer, list sim by traits, figure out what hidden traits there are. I don't know of any for paperboy/girl. I found all the rockers, burglars and more in town this way. You may have to switch to another house to get her to show up in the list.
- Go to editsim, change the age back to teen
- Back in game, use CTRL-SHIFT-click to age up to YA
- Use CTRL-SHIFT-click to adjust regular traits
- Use addtrait to add any missing hidden traits

Again, I have not seen any hidden traits associated with paperboys/girls. This should work with any other hidden traits. Good luck!

I think your sim might be a little bit mentally subnormal.

This is a little confusing. Are you saying you went through all this in order to get a special hidden trait the paper boy/girl might have?
If so, I'm just going to say that there is and has never been found a hidden trait from the paper girl/boy, and there's been plenty of time for some one to have found it. I couldn't list the special traits of the top of my head as I didn't care to remember them. Three I can remember are; immune to fire, pyromaniac, and a burglar one.

Why you age them to move them in? I add newspaper kids in everytime my hood become short of playable kids and I do it by "add to family". They don't lose their NPC characteristics and should be much easier for you to find out what they are hidding. Maids included this way, when they die they get the maid status back instead of "unemployed". Looks like Inges teleporter from TS2.

Another thing I noticed in my game all the NPCs look exactly the same.  Give this one to the fire gods and try with a new papergirl? 

I have moved in paperboys and I did not ever see them acting differently or showing signs of any special traits.

In my game every time I start a new instance of Sunset Valley, Dustin Langerak--a married adult with two children--is listed as an elementary school student. I haven't attempted to do anything about it because the first time it happened I was interested to see if he'd try to ride the school bus with his children. He didn't, and I was kind of disappointed, but nothing else unusual happened, either. Dustin was able to get a job and go to work on schedule, and the "elementary school student" thing went away on its own. The next time I started a new version of Sunset Valley I checked in on the Langeraks again, and sure enough, Dustin once again believed himself to be an elementary school student, and once again, the situation fixed itself without any intervention from me. So you might want to save the game--just in case--and try playing the sim through a few days to see if it'll fix itself.

Oh well... I understand there isn't supposed to be any hidden traits or behaviors of ex-newspaper-carriers, but I wanted to see for myself.  It just intrigues me that there are some NPCs in this game that have fewer traits than others.  It makes you think something must be going on there, but I guess in this case, there isn't.

I'd still like to graduate her from high school though.  I guess down-aging and up-aging is the way to do that.  She's not part of the chosen family anymore (I moved her out, into her own house), so maybe I'll just let her live the rest of her life as a high school student.

I think the fewer traits that some NPCs have are just random. Like how sometimes if your have a near perfect pregnancy you can pick two traits and then you'll end up with five later on, or if not just four.

Do you have the indie mod story mode? If you do try removing it for a while. I had an elder going back to school when I used it and after removing it everything was normal.