More Awesome Than You!

I play with clean templates. I use the standard make townies cheat for regular townies and make my downtownies in CAS and then turn them into downtownies. That last bit's time-consuming even though I accept whichever face template CAS throws at me. I still name them and run a randomizer for aspiration, zodiac and turn ons and offs.

Is it possible to turn at least these downtownies into permanent downtownies (like the ones I deleted) so that they show up for all hoods? When I get bored with those, I could make new ones. This sure would beat making new downtownies every single time I make a new neighborhood. I don't trust the game to generate them on its own (I still wind up with doubles even without using the boolprop item).

I was never able to figure out where exactly the game pulls its downtownie templates from. The problem with generating them is that they're not completely random, like the regular townies are. The downtownies are instead pulled from a set of full templates, complete with looks, clothes, makeup/glasses/beard, and I think aspiration and zodiac sign as well. Only the name is random. I don't know if you can replace them, but that still wouldn't help you, because you'd still end up with duplicates when generating them.

One way of avoiding this, which is less time consuming than making them in CAS, is using the townie creator (tree or gun) to generate them one by one. Save after each one you want to keep, but when you run into a duplicate/one you don't want to keep, just discarding them isn't enough - you have to exit the lot without saving. Otherwise the game will leave a garbage file of the "discarded" sim in your neighbourhood. That's why saving after each one you keep is important.

If you do a search on this, you should be able to come up with a thread where this was discussed and there were experiments...

Ah, oops. Sorry. I should have searched first.  :-[

No big, I would've linked you, but I didn't have the time to do the search myself.