More Awesome Than You!

Creating a clean custom neighbourhood

Index:
0) Required mods
1) Preparing
2) Creating a new neighbourhood
3) Subneighbourhoods
4) Populating the 'hood
    a) Batch-creating townies and downtownies
    b) Creating custom townies and downtownies
    c) Pets
5) NPCs

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This tutorial will explain how to create a custom neighbourhood with unique townies and NPCs, rather than the default Maxis ones. To make sure these new Sims are as unique as possible with skintones, clothes, hair, eyes etc.., you can follow the links/tutorial by Zarkan (http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/smf/index.php/topic,6174.0.html).

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0) Required mods

Before you start creating a new neighbourhood, you have to get some mods. Get Pescado's "anti redundancy" to prevent unnecessary NPCs from being generated. If you do not want random townies/dormies/downtownies, also get  Pescado's No Townie Regen and No Dormie Spawn mods. To prevent strays from being created, get No Spray Respawn.

Other handy mods are the Lot Sync Timer and a teleporter, like the Ingelogical Teleporter Shrub.

All FFS hacks are available through http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/ffs (http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/ffs). For a teleporter, look in Peasantry or at MTS2.

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1) Preparing — cleaning out templates

Go to where you have installed The Sims 2. This will be C:\Program Files\EA Games\The Sims 2\ by default.
Browse to the UserData Neighbourhoods folder: The Sims 2\TSData\Res\UserData\Neighborhoods
Rename N001 to N001-bak to disable it. This prevents the default townies from being created.

If you have Pets, go to your Pets folder (C:\Program Files\EA Games\The Sims 2 Pets\ or wherever you installed it). Browse to the Neighbourhood template folder \Pets\TSData\Res\NeighborhoodTemplate\P001 and do the following:
-Back it up. I just zipped the entire folder so I can restore it if the Pets patch comes around, or if I ever want it back.
-Do further cleaning: delete now-unneeded the \Character, \Storytelling, and \Thumbnails subfolders
-Replace P001_Neighborhood.package with an empty version. This prevents the standard Pets and Pet NPCs from being added to every 'hood. It also prevents the two families from magically appearing in your new 'hood's family bin.

If you have Seasons, go to your Seasons folder (C:\Program Files\EA Games\The Sims 2 Seasons\ or wherever you installed it). Browse to the Neighbourhood template folder \Seasons\TSData\Res\NeighborhoodTemplate\ and do the following:
-Back G002 up. I just zipped the entire folder so I can restore it if a Seasons patch comes around, or if I ever want it back.
-Do further cleaning: delete the now-unneeded G002\Character, G002\Storytelling, and G002\Thumbnails subfolders
-Replace G002_Neighborhood.package with an empty version. This prevents the standard townies and Seasons NPCs from being added to every 'hood. It also prevents the two families from magically appearing in every new 'hood's family bin.

If you plan to use any of the premade subneighbourhoods for your new 'hood, now is a good time to clean them out as well. Read the instructions in this thread (http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/smf/index.php?topic=4306.0).

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2) Creating a new neighbourhood

Open The Sims 2 and start a brand new neigbourhood in the normal way. Do not create any Sims in CAS! at this time.
After creating this 'hood, alt-tab or exit to Windows and check your new neighbourhood character folder (If this is your first custom neighbourhood, this will be My Documents\EA Games\The Sims 2\Neighborhoods\N004\Characters\). This folder should be empty. If it is not, you have not done step 1 right. You should probably start over at this point.

DO NOT USE THE DELETEALLCHARACTERS CHEAT: this corrupts the neighbourhood and may prevent townie and NPC spawning from working correctly.

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3 Subneighbourhoods

Adding a default subneighbourhood (universities U001-U003, downtown D001, or shopping district/bluewater B001) will add a great number of default townies and NPCs, as well as some playable Sims. You can prevent this by replacing them with empty versions (http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/smf/index.php?topic=4306.0) (follow the instructions in the thread), or by starting from an empty terrain file.
If you use the cleaned out templates, make sure you have also deleted the templates' character subfolders.

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4) Populating the 'hood

First, decide if you want to create all townies yourself in CAS, or if you want to batch-create them. Batch creation will lead to a balanced neighbourhood setup, but your townies will not have any custom clothes or make-up. They will use the default facial templates (or overrides, if any) and default name list. The CAS method requires you to create townies yourself, and later edit them in SimPE.

There is not yet an easy way to make custom Pets into strays, asides from using SimPE. See section 4c for more info.

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4a) Batch-creating townies and downtownies

Create a Sim or family in CAS and move him in a lot. Immediately pause the game. Note: unless you had Pescado's No Townie Regen in place at this time the game will automatically create one townie.

Important: If you also want to fully customize your NPCs, buy the FFS Lot Sync Timer and use the Time Warp feature at this time to set the hour to 05:00 to prevent the paper delivery NPC from coming by while you're busy. If the clock approaches 08:00, reset it to 05:00 again with the Time Warp.

Enable the testing cheats in the console: boolprop testingcheatsenabled true. There are two ways to batch-create townies: the NPC and Townie maker ("Townie tree") or the mailbox. Both methods will work.
If you want to use the Townie tree, click on your Sim, and in the Spawn menu select the NPC and Townie maker. This looks like a dead willow tree. Choose "Create townies", and select "townies" again.
If you want to use the mailbox, shift-click the mailbox and select *DBG - FORCE Create Townies, and select "townies" again.
Townies will now begin spawning. At first the thumbnails will show NPC portraits, ignore this. It will report when it is ready.

Save the game and check the character folder when it is done, you should now have 32 Sims: your CAS Sim, the initial townie (unless notownieregen is in place), and the ~30 created townies.
This number seems to be increased in Pets/Seasons: I ended up with almost 50 townies by batch-spawning them. YMMV.

4a) Part deux: Downtownies

Downtownies can only be created using the Townie tree. First, select Switch to make downtownies (not needed in Pets), then "Create Townies" again - select "Downtownies" this time. Downtownies will begin spawning, without portraits in the upper right. Again, the game will report when it is ready.
From the mailbox: *DBG - FORCE Create Townies - "Downtownies"

Save the game/lot now.

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4b) Creating custom townies and downtownies

In CAS create as many townies as you like, of whatever ages, genders, and using any content you like.
No need to bother with names at this time. I simply named them 1 to 8 for each group.

My own setup is the following:
Group 1: males -- create 8 adult male Sims
Group 2: females -- create 8 adult female Sims
Group 3: Miscellania 1 -- create 2 elder males, 2 adult females, 2 teen males, 2 teen females. Set the teens as children to any adult female.
Group 4: Miscellania 2 -- create 2 adult males, 2 elder females, 2 child males, 2 child females. Set the children as kids of any adult male.
This leads to 32 townies: 10 male adults, 10 female adults, and 2 of each gender of the other age groups. This leads to an average spread of ages and genders. But you are of course free to chose anything you like.

Move group 1 in a lot, and pause the game. If you also want to make your own NPCs, refer to the note above about the Sync Timer in 4a.
Buy the Ingelogical Teleporter Shrub or Painting (or another teleporter such as the inSIMenator module). I use the Teleporter Shrub in this example.
Select Sim 1, and make them a townie using the teleporter. Repeat this for Sims 2 to 8.
Using the teleporter, summon the Sims from the other groups you created, and move them in using the shrub. Then make them into townies.
You should have no playable Sim left on the lot after you're done. Save and quit the game, and check the character folder. You should now have 32 Sims: all your custom townies.

Now open SimPE, and select all Sim Relationships you see. Delete them! You (probably) don't want your townies to have family relationships with each other.
Start naming your townies anything you like. If you like, also give them skills, jobs, and gender preferences. Note that if you do not give them a job they will get a random one the first time they're loaded, and their skills will be randomized accordingly.
Save the 'hood file, and you're done.

4b) Part deux: Downtownies

Make downtownies the same way you did townies, only select Make me a.../Downtownie for them. I created just 8 downtownies in my game: 3 adults of each gender and one teen.

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4c) Pets

You can create strays one-by-one with the tree. I have not yet found a batch spawner :(

You can make your custom Pets, but currently there is no teleporter which can make them into strays. You can use SimPE to put them in this family if you like.

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5) NPCs

Note: NPC creation using the tree may not work correctly in OFB, FFS, and GLS. This was fixed in Pets/Seasons.

If you don't care about customized NPCs, don't bother creating them. The game will make them as needed.
I recommend having Pescado's Anti Redundancy in place so no more than absolutely needed will be spawned.

You can use the Townie tree to customize your NPCs.
Make sure the townie/downtownie switch is set correctly (townies for base, EP1, and EP3 NPCs and downtownies for EP2; the switch is not needed in Pets), and set your desired age, skintone, and gender settings. Then create NPCs one-by-one. Select 'keep' once one is created. Do not chose invalid combinations: nannies must always be elder females, headmasters are always male, etc..
As of Pets you can create individual NPCs again, and Grand Vampires (Count/Contessa) are now under the NPCs menu.

If you want to spawn the "special townies" Vampires, Slobs, Diva/Mr Big, set the switch to downtownies (not needed in Pets), and spawn the special townies using their menu. 'Keep' them once done.

You cannot spawn the (OFB) reporter "special townie" (one reporter will be spawned whenever the game needs one). The special NPCs Death, Mrs. Crumplebottom, etc. cannot be spawned as these are unique: the game creates them as soon as a 'hood is loaded.

Notes: I have all expansion packs and shopping packs installed, so this was done on Pets code. It should work identically so on earlier, at least back to EP2 Nightlife. Uni and base-game only configurations are untested and unsupported.

Credits: Nec for the first tutorial (http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/smf/index.php?topic=4090.0), and the rest of the MATY crew for testing and advice.

This is excellent Jordi. My method has always been to make the townies one by one on a lot, using the Tree, then gussy them up using Christianlov's clothes rack, then make them a townie using Inge's bush.

Well, when I used townies, that is.

There are several ways to skin a hood, as it were.

Thanks for writing this!

Thanks for spelling it out for us. Must have been irritating to have to repeat yourself over and over again.  ;)

Thanks for this. I was getting so confused by the other threads.

I do have two questions. First:


Should you then leave the folder like that indefinitely? Or change it back after you're done with step 2?

Second: What if you plan to add a few custom townies, but not a whole batch of 30? Would it work okay to follow step 4a), and then plunk another half-dozen or so custom sims into the neighborhood as townies after all other steps have been completed?

You only need that folder if you ever want to regenerate the default neighbourhoods. Since I don't plan to, I'm leaving it renamed.

It is perfectly okay to add just a few custom townies, or none at all. The reason I recommend adding 30 or so is that this way the game won't generate them itself (I don't use notownieregen). And yes you can do step 4a at any time you like—I've done this before when I wanted a few more townies. Although in my current 'hood I have 34 townies and 31 downtownies, so I'm not adding any. When the existing ones have been married in or told to die of old age I'll let the game generate new ones.

Excellent find, Jordi! I'll try this tutorial next time I make a new hood. Thanks again for answering so many questions in the other thread that I couldn't answer. :)

So the fact we are renaming N001 folder to N001-bak it stops the game from adding the pre-made sims in the new hood?

Edited to remove horrible typos.

Yup!
At first I tried just renaming the N001\Characters folder, but that left the SDS, SDNA and relationship garbage in. Removing the entire N001 folder leads to a clean new 'hood.

Do we still need Sim-Pe to clean the memories or is it also clean of that?

And I guess as long as N001 is named N001-bak we can make as much new cc hood we wish with the same clean result :)

When we add a custom University or downtown (not maxis ones), can we still delete the characters the game created like in Nec tutorials without risk of FUBAR?

The hood is 100% clean: the only SDNA etc. is that of the default NPCs (Grimmie, Crumplebottom & co.). There is absolutely no more need to clean with SimPE.

I don't know exactly which Nec tutorial you are referring to… but deleting all characters should still be possible. Just don't do a deleteallcharacters or you lose the ability to use the Townie tree again.

I was referring to point #3 and 4 of that Nec tutorial:  http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/smf/index.php/topic,4090.0.html (http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/smf/index.php/topic,4090.0.html)

I am not sure what effects that would have. Looks it will leave a lot of SDNA garbage in your game… and you can't delete those.
Unless of course you add the custom 'hood before you start playing, then you can remove all SDNA.

Or just put notownieregen/nodormieregen in place and there won't be any garbage to delete.

This is very helpful.  However, I have a question ...

Is there a way of deleting individual Townies from an existing neighborhood (perhaps using SimPE)?  I have a lot of Sims in my neighborhood, and I fear it that Im going to hit the critical mass and my neighborhood will implode before I finish my ten gen Legacy.  Im not marrying in Townies or NPCs into the family -- its a Matriarch Legacy, so no one marries or moves in -- so I dont have the regen issue.  I just have a ton of Sims, and Id like to thin out the population.

If this is in the wrong place, I apologize.  I thought it was somewhat related to this topic, so I figured I might get replies here. 

Thanks.

Dor.

How many character files do you have?  The number of character files that can exist without bothering the hood has gone up considerably since at least NL, and perhaps Uni, so it would take a lot more to implode the hood than the 800 or so that used to limit it under the original game.

Will the no regen hacks stop the game from creating downtownies and dormies when you first attach a subhood?  I thought that the game still created the default downtownies and dormies when attaching a custom subhood even when the no regen hacks were installed.

Dunno. I use empty templates.

The empty templates are great, but I get sick of the same neighborhood terrains.  I'm hoping to find a way to create sub-neighborhoods with custom terrains to install without creating any characters. 

By the way, thanks Jordi for this tutorial.

Depends greatly on installed subhood.
All University subhoods spawn a full set of sims. Empty templates do not help
Only the first Downtown spawns a set of sims. Using an empty-template will prevent this.
Only Bluewater OFBs spawn sims.
The ZOMGPETZ!!!111oneoneone "invisible neighborhood" always brings in a full set of sims. It will add an NXXX_SuburbN file to your neighborhood. To be "clean", after this process finishes, you should save this file, restore neighborhood from backup, and insert only this file. This will suppress the default set of NPCs, including wolves and strays, and force your game to generate its own (or not at all, if you have norespawns).

...what?  Invisible neighborhood?  My game shows no invisible neighborhood.

What trickery (thatchery?) is this?

If the game showed it, it wouldn't be *INVISIBLE*, now would it?

I think it's in %DataDirectory%Res\NeighborhoodTemplate\P001\ but you won't see it in a dialog anywhere.

Ok, I'm a total dum-ass and completely non-awesome.  I just attached a bunch of custom terrain sub-hoods with the empty templates in place, and wouldn't 'ya know, no new characters.  I made a new custom neighborhood using Jordi's method, then attached sub-hoods with the empty templates, and SimPe is showing no sim descriptions aside from the normal therapist, reaper, etc., and no SWAF.  Don't know why I thought the templates only worked when attaching the maxis-made sub-hoods, but I was mistaken.  Apologies to all for my dumb questions.

Some notes on Pets. Once I get to installing it and playing with it I'll revise this if needed.

In my game at least renaming the Neighborhoodtemplates for the various sub'hoods completely prevents the game from pre-spawning service NPCs and townies (dormies, downtownies), even without Pescado's no respawn mods in game.
I renamed all the Nhood templates and created a new 'hood with all types of sub'hoods. This 'hood had no Sims in it asides from the objects.package NPCs. But ymmv.

I am not awesome-this method is not working for me.  I have pets, and the only custom material I have installed right now is the Pets director's cut.

Whenever I attempt to create a new neighbourhood after renaming N001, the game quits and the invisible "Pets" neighbourhood becomes visible (I can't do anything with it though).  I get a whole new N001, defaut townies and all.

Any idea what I'm doing wrong?

Jordi, have you done any testing to see if this method will prevent townies from Spawning in subhoods (like Bluewater) if you add the subhood AFTER you've been playing for awhile?

Zerth: did you rename the P001 folder?

Jelenedra: I haven't tested that scenario. Bluewater should not spawn extras (except perhaps a reporter), but NL and Uni might. I really need to test if renaming the templates is enough to stop this.

Should I have?  Because I renamed the N001 folder (double checked, tried it a couple times), and remain unawesome.

If you have Pets and don't want default Pet crap, apparently yes, you should.

Well, the default strays don't bother me that much.  But trying again, renaming both folders...crashes.  Creates a new "N001" folder.  The invisible pets neighbourhood becomes visible. So, no dice, at least for me.

You must not be following the instructions correctly.

Alright. I reset everything and tried it once more-and I know there's no point in arguing "I followed the instructions"-"Then why doens't it work".  But it crashed again. 

For the record, it always crashes when generating "Pets".  I'm going to give it a rest before I FUBAR something important. 

Pretty weird…

I'll have to do some more checking. You can do what Pescado recommends: leave P001 in place, and make a backup of your 'hood in SimPE (or just copy the package) before first loading the 'hood with Pets. Then replace the neighbourhood package file with the pre-Pets one.

SimPE it is.  Thanks for the quick replies.

(EA did not have to make this so hard.  Townie creation should be a box on the create neighbourhood screen.  Though they probably would have messed that up, so eh.)

Agreed!

They should have given us the option to import defaults, or start with new custom townies.

They could have had a collection of theme sets for the lazy people-retirement community, young community, "hip" district.  And new randomized townies.  Instead, we get weird noses, plaid shorts, and in the case of this moron, constant crashing

We're in an abusive relationship with EA!

There must be something I'm not doing right, as well. I'm running Pets, for reference.

I have tried renaming the Program Files... Neighborhood N001 folder to "N001-bak" and "N001 -bak", and both times, the whole boatload of instant character files came with the custom hood. I put both the "no townie regen" and "no dormie spawn" mods in my downloads folder, but the files were always there. I tried using "deleteAllCharacters", but the pop-up said they'd be regenerated when I visited the first lot, and they must've been, because the tree generated the 30 townies it was supposed to, but there were 280+ character files when I saved and checked. The instructions say the mods will stop the spawning, so I added one each of the sub hoods (all blank terrains except Bluewater,) and don't advise against waiting, so I went ahead and added them.

Are the character files still being generated stray pets? I don't mind, if that's the case, but I'm not skilled/alert enough to tell the difference between types. But my favorite neighborhood is fast approaching its fiery ball of death threshold, and I'd prefer this new hood be as clean as possible for the clones. I've tried the directions three times, and it's getting really frustrating.

Okay ... I have a CC hood, created from Nec´s tutorial, and it works fine, so I now want to add my own CC pets to the hood ( I have installed the EP, but haven´t loaded my hood yet, so I guess that it´s not harmed yet) .. so how do I prevent that the game fill my hood with a lot of unwanted dogs and cats ?

Do I do the Rename-N001-Folder thing
or
do I use Pescardo´s No Stray Respawns thing

 ???

And what is that with some invisible hood  ???  ???  ??? ... I did a seach and couldn´t find anything that made sence ... or maybe it´s just that I´m danish ... or both  ::)

Rose

Pets is not well tested and therefore unknown. The above is only valid for XP3 and the two SPs, XP4 is an unknown factor.

Okay, thanks :)
I´ll just wait then, and keep playing my other hood :)

Rose

Zadan: saw it, and linked to it.
Nice collection of hints.

Zadan? Where is Zadan? I don't see anything... *whistles*

I have the same exact problem.  I'm pretty sure I am doing everything correctly.  This was working perfectly before I put pets in last night, now the game crashes upon creating "Pets."  What seems strange to me is that I haven't renamed anything related to pets.  I renamed the N001 folder, and have put in the empty templates.  This does not happen with previously created neighborhoods though.  The game is able to create "Pets" and with no problem.

What about creating a new hood with the "New Hood" button?  Guess I need to do an experiment here...

BTW, I'm getting more and more corrupt Groups.cache and Accessory.cache files since installing Pets... so if your game suddenly quits loading past the first splash screen -- just delete those and all will be well!

Just thought I'd share my experience with Petz.
I renamed the Program Files\...~...\Neighbourhood Template folder, and installed 'no stray respawn', hoping that my game wouldn't spawn the usual bunch of strays. The results were somewhat interesting. The stray part seems to have worked, so far I have not seen any strays on any of my lots. No wolves were present either, my game generated one after about an hour of gameplay.
Some parts were less succesfull; the Crittur and Roseland family had been spawned, and the standard 3 animal cops and 2 obedience trainers too. Also, when phoning the pet adoption, I got the same list op pets as in my other hood, where I had not renamed the Neighbourhood Template folder.

EDIT: Sod it, karma is a bitch. Renaming that folder seems to have FUBAR'ed my hood. 3 sim minutes after loading my lot, lo and behold, little black doggie Grace walks by, the same friggin stray that all my other hoods have. Apparently all strays did spawn I was just lucky enough to not see them for a long time. But it gets worse. Pissed off, I load a different hood, one that had already spawned all petz stuff whilst the folder was NOT renamed. And my bloody game starts creating all that stuff all over again! Now I have two of everything, strays, Critturs, and those blasted pre-made families in their fugly houses  >:( RAAH!

I have Pets and I tried to do this last night...I renamed the correct folder in step 1 but I still ended up with a whole slew of character files. Maybe Pets changed something?

I thought about this after you left the chat last night -- did you check the character files in SimPE?  I'm wondering if they're the default pets and strays the game creates....

No, I haven't checked them yet...I have the game open right now but I'll check later. There are a *LOT* though...IIRC around 165  :o

Hmm, that sounds like way too many -- if memory serves, there's only 80-something created when you load a new hood that pulls from the N001 template. So it may be them plus strays....

/me double-checks

k it's actually 157 files...still way too many.

Warning added to first post. Even if it does not always corrupt 'hoods, it is nonfunctional under Pets. :(

I believe the thing to do, then, would be to:

1) Follow Jordi's pre-creation instructions (http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/smf/index.php/topic,5861.msg169555.html#msg169555), installing SaraMK's empty templates (http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/smf/index.php/topic,4306.0.html) also if desired.

2) Run OFB using Numenor's BaseGameStarter (http://www.modthesims2.com/showthread.php?t=107015), and create the new neighborhood according to the rest of Jordi's instructions. Add subhoods based on the blank templates as desired. Save and quit.

3) Undo the file and folder changes from step 1.

4) Back up the new neighborhood.

5) Launch Pets, open the new neighborhood, wait for it to generate animal spam, then save and quit.

6) Per Pescado's instructions upthread (http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/smf/index.php/topic,5861.msg173454.html#msg173454), find the new NXXX_SuburbN file that was created in the new neighborhood in step 5. Pull that single file out of the neighborhood; replace the neighborhood folder with the backup from step 4; then add the NXXX_SuburbN file back in.

That ought to work, right? My custom neighborhood seems to be okay and this process was what I went through, with the exception of step 2 (instead of using Numenor's tool, I created the neighborhood under NL before ever installing OFB and Pets).

Using those steps, do you have any strays?

I have no animals whatsoever, just yet.

Disturbing… as there is no spawner yet either. Thanks for testing in any case.

"Disturbing"? :o Should I be worried about this neighborhood? Should I have followed some instructions other than Pescado's?

(It'd be easy enough for me to load my pre-Pets backup and just let Pets install the 50-odd characters it tried to add to my custom hood...and I presume one could thin some of those out later in SimPE...)

I've follow the step with the OF. While having pets. Everything seem to work well. All strays were created again.

Okay this is weird. As I said, I have Pets. I tried the renaming method the other night and still ended up with a folder full of character files, so I assumed it had not worked and later deleted the hood without playing it. I forgot about renaming the N001 folder under Program Files back. Yesterday I created another new hood, thinking I was going to end up with the usual Goopy and Ben. First odd thing I noticed was that I was getting different NPCs. No Dagmar or Pao delivering the mail, no Maura or Neil the fireman. Eventually I realized that it must be because of the folder being renamed. So, maybe this *does* work for Pets, but you still get loads of char files? :P Maybe all of those were just animals...I didn't think to look at them in SimPE before I deleted the hood.

I did get strays and wolves and skunks without having to spawn anything btw, and at least some of the strays are the default ones (Scout the little black dog and Allegra the grayhound or whatever she is).

They obviously don't bother looking for "P001" like they do with previous EPs. They just dump whatever data is in the hood template folder to your documents hood folder?

I've just managed to get a clean neighborhood with Pets installed - no chanracter files whatsoever. It's a combination of doing what Jordi, Kevin & Pescado said.

1) Downoad the empty templates & follow the directions
2) Do Jordi's Planning stange & rename the N001 template files
3) Download Numenor's Base Game tool
4) Start the Base game tool & create a dummy neighborhood - this will be N001 under the "The Sims 2 - NL" or whatever name it comes up with when you picked your Base Game options
5) You need to know how what the correct next number a custom neighborhood will have in your Sims game, in mine it was N005, so I had to create another dummy neighborhood in the base game tool & then finally the Neighborhood I wanted - so three in all, 1 for Pleasantville, one for N004 which I already have & then finally N005 - my new neighborhood.
6) Ok then just exit from the Base game tool, and copy the N005 neighborhood from it's folder into your proper Sims2 folder under My documnets
7) Start TS2 & choose the new neighborhood. It will generate the pets.
8) Exit the game, go to your N005 folder & delete all of the folders & files except the N005_Suburb001.package
9) Copy the N005 subfolders & the N005_Neighborhood.package & N005_Neighborhood.png from the Base Game tool folder to your normal Sims2 folder.
10) Now start TS2 & add whatever districts you want. ** the empty templates do not work with the Base game tool, you have to add the districts to the actual game, but the empty templates work perfectly.

Then start creating sims per Jordi's instructions.

well... you can try to delete the characters in
my computer/drive * (*= the drive your game is in)/programs/eagames/thesims2pets/TSData/Res/NeighborhoodTemplates/P001/Characters
howeverthis may muck up the game unless someone edits the P001_Neighborhood file, !testing is needed for this theory!

Now, let me see if I have got it right  ???
Right now I have Uni, NL, Gl, FF and OFB installed ... and my CC hood still runs fine.
If I, after creating a back-up of my hood, install Pets, load the game + hood, exit game, remove all in the hood folder except of the N005_Suburb001.package and add the nostrays hack, copy my back-up to the hood folder ... then I should be able to play with my CC hood, without any of EA´s strays showing up, right  ???  ???  ???

Rose

only if the suburb_001 is the only suburb you have. You need to copy the latest created, that's the one that's added with petz. If you already had a suburb you'd just be copying your old one.

eeeeeh ... I don´t understand. Sorry!

I thought that the Suburb001.package was something that came with Pets ... is it not  ???

Rose

Maybe I'm alone in this but...

When Pets came out, I created my neighborhood by renaming the character templates for Uni, NL, and OFB. I originally tried to rename the Pets templates, but it caused crashing when creating a hood. I restored the Pets templates and removed "nostrayrespawn" and tried again. This time, it created the neighborhood just fine. I then spawned my townies but never got around to playing.

After reading this, I checked my character files. All I have are the strays, the one sim I created, and the townies that were spawned. Nothing extra.

So as far as MY game is concerned, this method works abeit without being able to get rid of strays.

If you have OFB every new shopping district you create makes a new suburb_00X file. So if you had 2 OFB districts before you installed pets, pets will create a suburb_003 file. That's the one you need to copy. If you don't have any OFB districts than the suburb_001 file is the file created by pets.

Okay ... I get it now ... and I do not have any Suburb00X yet ... Thanks :)

Rose

Okay...I've got something worrisome in my neighborhood now, after following the steps outlined above.

The hood was animal- and additional-sim-free after following Pescado's instructions for upgrading to Pets. It is still additional-sim-free. But SimPE now shows a grand total of 57 Unknown sims.

(http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v440/KevinTMC/Unknowns.png)

All of them appear identical (all but one, which has a "Life Section" setting of "Unknown" rather than "Adult"), and none of them appear to contain any actual character data at all in any of the panels of the SimPE character view.

How did this happen? How bad is this? What should I do?

Any insight would be greatly appreciated.

I followed Kevin TMC´s advice and installed Pets, loaded my hood, exit game, removed the hood files ( - Suburb001) added my backup and have played all evening. There were some strays, even with the nostrayrespawn

Originally there were 156 character files

In the folder I removed after installing Pets, there were 223 character files.

In the folder that I added, there are now 172 character files

I don´t know if this is useful for some of you, but now you know ... I haven´t looked in to SimPE, I wouldn´t know what I should be looking for  ::)

Rose

well I got another idea.
you could
A: with the base game tool follow the instructions to make a neighborhood in page one plus subs, then make your NPCs and townies then check the amount of characters
then play with the normal game and let the game spam some pets in then delete the unwanted npcs and pets till you get to the previous number of character files eg. if you had 45 characters and the game gave you a mere 25 more then delete the 25 till you get 45  files left
Or
B: get rid of them damn files in the drive

I've done A. If I can find those instructions for cleaning up templates, I'm going to try to clean P001. I still need to find a way to generate strays on demand though.

simple. just spawn it with the mail box or using the townie tree

Animals are already generated on demand, if you don't have norespawn.

Including strays? Good news.

Giggy: maybe I'm blind, but I can't find PETS on there.

If you actually want your neighborhood populated by dozens of random animals, you could just leave nostrayrespawn out. The randomly generated animals are actually quite acceptable compared to the horribleness of townies, but on the other hand, you may not necessarily want a bunch of critters wandering around all the time, causing spammed memories and relationship markers everywhere. Better to leave them in the adoption pool for you to pick.

its under EP4

Good people of MATY: with the attached empty template you can now safely create Pet-free neighbourhoods without having to use the corrupting deleteallcharacters cheat.

Info on mass-stray spawning on demand will follow once it has been found.

Thanks so much for awesomely excellent tutorial Jordi.... It worked great for me   ;D

But, I do have one prob i think i should fix

When i created my townies i didn't give them proper names at the time.... the first group was "one" and the first simmie was "one".

I made 12 groups of townies, "one" to "twelve" and named the simmie in each group "one" to "eight".... Before i teleported the simmies into the hood, i opened Simpe and changed all the townie names....

but i've noticed now when i get an error log or an error pops up with debug on, it doesn't say the sims simpe name but the sims cas name.   :-\

Is there a way to fix this??? Open up something else in simpe??

What language settings are you playing with?
I have run into this before myself.

I play with UK English (locale 2), so I set my SimPE to the same locale. It seems that a side-effect of this was that changing a Sim's name only took effect in that locale, not in all of them. And since some parts of the game seem to always use Locale 1 (US English) this caused issues.

To avoid this, make sure your SimPE default language remains at US English (Preferences - SimPE Settings - Default Language).

Well.... I'm assuming that i'm using the default language on both  ???  US english is the default on both??? how do i find out what the default language is on the sims 2.

Where would i fix it in sims 2???

ta

Not. The only time you can "choose" this is during install (there are registry tricks though).

If you play in English and have a 12-hour clock, you use the US English locale. If you have a normal clock, you have the UK English locale.

There might also be an option in SimPE to globally change the strings (gets rid of all locale specific info).

Yeah, default language only. But that requires you to open the individual Sim package, not the nhood browser.

I want to get this in the same style as some of the tutorials at MTS2... anyone think this is worth the effort? I have no idea how many people really play with fully customized neighbourhoods.

I think a new version of this with screenshots, offered in MS Word or PDF format may be best.

If people play the game for more than a few hours, they're going to want to customize their neighborhoods. I think it's worth it.

Jordi,  I would very much appreciate it if you would publish this.  What drew me to this site to begin with was the fact I needed and wanted help.  I spent months reading here, and very nearly put up the same tutorial as your first one on this subject.  I had the rough draft.  If I came here seeking such help, I would have been grateful to find an easily searchable document.  If you do publish, it will give me a souce I can send others to, directly.  *raises hand to vote 'Aye'*

Just to let you know I am working on a PDF version. I am giving it to someone to proofread now, and if the instructions are clear enough I'll run it through my PDF printer at work some time next week probably :)

It's just slightly rewritten from this thread's first post, and has a few screenshots.

I have an unawesome question about universities. If I do everything that's said in this tutorial and also have installed the "no dormie respawn" hack, does it mean my dorms will be half-empty with only the playable students living there? Or can I make custom YA townies and have them fill up the vacancies somehow?

Thanks for this tutorial, I'm so sick of the butt-ugly townies!

You can make your own dormies. Just make some young adults, and make them a townie (NOT downtownie) with the teleporter. Don't assign them rooms, instead just mark them as townie and remove them from the lot. They will reappear to claim the room.

Thanks Jordi! I'll give it a try this evening :)

A quick question: I made a custom hood following the tutorial, and I'm on step 3. I checked after creating the base hood, I had no character files. So I added a uni lot. And now I have 98 character files. Is this supposed to happen?
*I chose to delete the template folders where it says in the tutorial, rather than rename them, by the way.

Same thing happened to me. I renamed the template folders for UNI and NL but when I created the sub-hoods... a whole bunch of characters! I tried downloading the empty templates but it says the file cannot be found or something :(

My issue was that there was no premade Maxis Neighborhood to use anymore. No buildings, no nothing. And I want all those lots, but I don't want the characters.

Did you also replace the Pets template?

On creation of new hood:
-all townies from the N001 template are imported
-all pets+sims from the P001 template are imported.
Creating subhoods simply calls the normal generator (no default imports), or uses pre-existing Sims in the templates.

With all-empty templates (including P001!) and a removed or renamed N001, I can create a new 'hood with 0 character files.

I did as instructed in the whole tutorial. But now I just read Pescado's response:

And now I'm okay with the young adults, if it's only them, I've accepted. I did everything else and now have a perfect neighborhood :)

Having the empty P001 template and renamed N001 folder still made character files for me.

I just followed the directions in the first post and everything worked perfectly. I have zero character files. Well, actually I made one change. I deleted all the uni folders instead of just the first one. That part confused me. Could you explain why only one uni folder needed to be deleted?

What I ended up with was a neighborhood, university, downtown, and shopping district but each was made from a blank template chosen in game, without a single building.

I don't mind the neighborhood as I just drop in houses from the lot bin, and businesses can be built to suit in the shopping district, but I really hate to think about recreating a downtown. It would be functional, but boring.

Is there no way to do this with buildings left in place? If not, then after I add buildings to each of my new subhoods, is there a way to save them or make them the default template so that I can reuse them whenever I create a new neighborhood in the future? I haven't added any Sims whatsoever at this point.

Mmoon: I have no clue what I was meaning with that paragraph. Unless you actually add one of those premade subneighbourhoods, they have no influence on the game. Edited!

I use the empty templates myself, so I get all the predecorated subneighbourhoods with houses, objects, etc. intact.

I started to do it that way, but I noticed that those "empty" templates came with quite a few character files. From what I understood from that thread, these are the "playable" Sims that came with those sub-hoods. I really didn't want those in my game. If it was just the special NPCs or characters (Grand Vamps, Death, etc) it would be ok, but that is not how I understood it. Since you used these templates, can you tell me if that is the case? If so, would deleting the character files from the folder before using the template be ok, or will it leave garbage behind?

How do I save a newly made subhood template after adding buildings so that I can use it in future new hoods?

So if I understand correctly, I don't need to make any changes to the NL, OFB, UNI templates any more? Did you edit that part out? Or do I have to just replace them with the empty templates (I have to add, I never use Bluewater ar any other maxis-made neighborhood, I always create my own)

As mentioned in the empty templates thread (http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/smf/index.php/topic,4306.msg199650.html) you replace the template itself with the cleaned out version, and you delete the entire characters folder for that template.

If you do both you get just the empty neighbourhood with houses and decorations intact, and no premade characters at all.

I installed Bluewater Village and Downtown in a throwaway hood so I could pack up all the lots for use in other 'hoods.

Edit: I then open each package with Clean Installer and delete all the Sims, leaving the empty lots.

Just to doublecheck...

I'm going to be doing a custom 'hood tonight, no townies. I'm looking at the most recent walk-through for this (the one a page back) and I'm wondering one thing (and sorry if someone already said something about it and I stupidly missed it):

What about Pets? Is there a safe way to a) Keep the pets npcs/data in the game or b) restore it later? Is having no strays due to deletion in SIMPE a VBT? Am I going to have to uninstall Pets before cleaning everything up and re-install it later?

*goes to re-read the walkthrough a few more times before she tries this tonight*

I did the whole clean neighborhood thing using the empty templates. But I wanted a few of the special characters. I used the mailbox to spawn a dead tree which allowed me to spawn some of these.

But the Grand Vampyres (sic) are strange. I can only get males. And some of these are dressed strangely rather than having the regular vampire costumes.

Is there a way to spawn a few Countesses?

Also, I removed nostrayrespawn from the game for one load session so that it would generate the original strays for me. Then I replaced it because I don't want more strays after these are "used up".  Does doing this also spawn the Leader of the pack? I ask because in my old hood he showed up on most lots to put my Sims into aspiration failure. But I've been playing several days now without seeing a wolf so I need to know whether I need to add them manually. I saw the skunk immediately in the game, so I know that was spawned.

I believe that it does spawn the Leader of the Pack when you take out the nostrayrespawn and then put it back later. I did this for a 'hood I created and made townie-and-stray-free (the bad way, shhhh). First, however, I played the 'hood for a few weeks with the nostrayrespawn in place and enjoyed the dearth of strays and their annoyances. The only reason I took the nostrayrespawn out temporarily was because I wanted to get the LotP for a specific sim. Well, also I was ready to learn to deal with all the strays again.

Actually I think that I left the nostrayrespawn out for a few sessions before I remembered to put it back. I remember that the first time that the LotP came onto a lot the game froze for a few minutes to create the character. The game also froze when I called the adoption agency to adopt a pet (so that it could create the adoption pool, I'm sure). After I had those characters I put the nostrayrespawn back into my downloads folder and all has been well for the time being.

Oh, thank you, thank you!  I've had this happen half a dozen times, and each time I uninstalled and reinstalled Pets.  The next time it happens, I'll try your idea.

I tried this method and it worked pretty well.

I followed all instructions and installed all the blank templates.  I loaded the game, and created a character which I installed in an empty lot.  When I went to look at my character folder there were a dozen or so files there.  The files where the strays.  I haven't figured out how to remove them.  I might just keep them, because how bad can a few strays be? <cross fingers>

Anyway, the one thing which makes me wonder was the additions of 4 unknown characters.  The character files are missing, but something is pointing to them in the neighourhood file.

Anyone noticed those?

The Unknowns are stuff like the Grim Reaper and the RC car.

The Reaper is there and accounted for.  Dunno what the RC car is.

I have no idea where the Unknowns come from either.

I did the same - clean hood with empty templates, made my peoples and counted the character files as they were made. No room for unknowns.
So I load up SimPE: the Grim Reaper, Crumplebottom, the Hula dancers, and the Therapist are all accounted for with their names and thumbnails. There are no unknowns in the hood at this time.

So I load back up and start to making my townies/downtownies. Carefullt watching the character folder. All created townies accounted for - no room for unknowns.

Close it all down, have a peek in SimPE. I now have a few unknowns. hm. Oh well - I decide to play a bit. So after a few sim days go by I decide to have a peek in SimPE again.
At this moment I have 12 unknowns.

All the strays are showing up in SimPE with names and thumbnails. All the adoptable pets are showing up in SimPE with names and thumbnails. All the townies and downtownies are showing up with names and thubnails.

Unknowns leave me baffled.

so the number of unknows is growing ?  Hmmm, that's a real worry.  Sounds like BFBVS in the making

One of the unknowns is the remote control car, one is the robots (apart from servos) and I have heard that the 3rd one (added by pets) is the wormrat cage.

If you look in the unknown's memories in SimPE you'll see they have gossip memories if you haven't used the lot debugger to clear all gossip.  This may help you to track down where that particular unknown is, and what object is creating these unknowns.  12 does seem a lot. 

At one time I had sentrybots in my front yards to zap gnome stealers.  I noticed in SimPE that the second unknown had gossip memories that related to activities that had happened in the front yards of the lots they were at, such as promotions, first kisses, etc.

Unknowns:
-Remove control car
-Riding robots
-Flying robots
-Birds

And if you use the echo carnival set one more is added. I think this is the clowns.

Ok, so they are harmless? Just not recognized by SimsPE as of yet?

BTW, thank you for the instructions.  They worked quite well, apart from one bit, but that was due to my own stupidity.

I am toying with the idea of keeping the downtownies and just doing a massive makeover spree using sims surgery and just regular fidling.

Right now I am using SimsPE to export all my current characters and recreate them all in my new neighbourhood.  I wonder if I could simply zap all the memories from some of my characters, save them as a family, and then import them in the new game.  I know this method doesn't bring along any extra character files, but could it have unforseen negative effects?

When I saw someone mention the wormrat was an unknown I figured the bird had to be one, too. I wonder if some of the others are the Leader of the Pack and maybe wolves?
I haven't played enough with Pets to know how any of that really works yet.


And yes thankyou, Jordi, for this tutorial and SaraMK for the empty templates. baaaaah!

I won't touch the question about importing a family. Someone who knows what they are talking about will probably answer that ;)

No, the LotP and the wolves are actual characters.  You can actually 'tame' and adopt them, though they'll still keep much of their wolf-like behavior.

Thank you for the great tutorial! I just followed your instructions and set up a fresh and clean neighborhood. I even downloaded some new CAS faces and was getting ready to create some downtownies via the NPC and townie tree when I noticed a strange thing: When I create downtownies the game seems to spawn some "premade" faces which look totally different from my CAS replacement faces. In fact I even recognized some of the "standard downtownies" being spawned. How can that happen when I deleted all their characters and replaced my CAS faces with prettier ones? Are those ugly downtownies somewhat "hardwired" in the game? ???

I think I'll switch over to making normal townies for the moment - they ARE using my CAS replacement faces. ;D

Exactly.

Make townies, and then use the Teleporter Shrub to turn them into Downtownies.

Thanks, I'll do that! ;D I noticed the same thing happens when I create NPCs via the NPC and townie tree. So what, I'll just wait for my game to create the NPCs when needed. ;)

Interesting. I have no more ugly townies when I used this tutorial and CAS replacements. All have pretty, upturned noses instead of the flat ones I used to get before. They had to be regenerated of course.

I, too, must be unawesome. The same thing has been happening for me. Multiple times. Have reset and retried using empty templates and renaming.

 BUT wait, right in the middle of posting this this reply I went back and did yet another re-read and lo and behold --- I am truly unawesome. I must confess I read the directions wrong.

This may have happened to you, too, Zerthimon. Did you perhaps change the name of N001 in .../My Documents/EA Games/The Sims 2/Neighborhoods instead of C:\Program Files\EA Games\The Sims 2\TSData\Res\UserData\Neighborhoods?

Although it pains me to admit it, that is what I was doing wrong. As soon as I fixed that little problem it worked beautifully!      So Thank You Jordi!

Thanks to these wonderful instructions I do not have problems with creating a clean NBH  :) but
after carefully reading through all posts, I just want to clear things a final time for myself concerning custom Campus-subNBHs.

If I understood correctly there is - at the present time - no way to get a clean Campus?
Empty templates do not work according to JMP (besides - the link seem to be broken, there is only an unusable .7z file there)
and renaming the U001 file does not work either (at least for me, I tried several times and each time 97 characters were created).

No other way out?

As far as I know there is no way to absolutely prevent the Service NPCs from being generated while creating a campus, as well as at least one dormie.
So that means as an absolute minimum you get the following Sims:
24 professors (one male, one female for each major)
1 cow mascot
1 llama mascot
1 cheerleader
1 food server
1 sports trainer
1 dormie for the SS
----------------------+
30 Sims

If you do not have antiredundancy and no dormie respawn, you will get more. 3 of all (non-Professor) Service NPCs, and IIRC 20-odd dormies.

The empty templates work for me. I always add an empty U001, U002, or U003 to my 'hoods.

What do you mean "unusable .7z?" You simply need to unzip it with WinRAR. It's a fairly standard compressed format, like .rar and .zip.

Jordi covered a lot of this, but anyway....

JMP is slightly misleading. Empty templates work far better than not having empty templates installed. It is true that Uni will generate a great number of sims even with empty templates installed, but at least they will not be the ugly default sims that would normally get dumped into your neighborhood as soon as a Uni is attached. Instead, they will be generated as needed (professors generated immediately, dormies when room in a dorm is available, NPC's when needed, etc). If you don't use the empty templates, the second you attach a Uni you get 3 cows, 3 llamas, 3 coaches, and 3 of every other crap, plus dozens of nasty-looking dormies, dumped into your neighborhood.

Here's what happens when all of the available empty templates are installed:

Create a custom neighborhood = ZERO sims are in the neighborhood. ZERO pets, too.
Attach Downtown = ZERO sims in the neighborhood.
Attach Bluewater Village = ZERO sims in the neighborhood.
Attach a Uni = ZERO sims in the neighborhood.

See? Everything that can be attached is attached, and there are NO SIMS. Period. Any sim that the game generates after this point will be a unique sim, and will be generated as needed. Of course, the game thinks it needs 24 professors... nothing you can do about this kind of nonsense.

Here's what happens once you actually play the neighborhood, assuming you use all the "stop crap from being generated" hacks, which is to say notownieregen, nossrespawn, nostrayrespawn, nodormierespawn, and antiredundancy.

Moving in a family of two sims and playing for 2 days without leaving lot = 2 playable sims + paperboy + gypsy + mailman + bus driver = total 6 sims

Sending an adult sim in a taxi to a community lot for 6 hours = 2 req'd NPC's (clerk, bartender) generated = total 8 sims

Sending an adult sim in a taxi to a Blue Water community lot for 6 hours = 0 sims generated (same clerk reused) = 8 sims total

Sending an adult sim in a taxi to a Downtown community lot for two days = 5 req'd NPC's generated (cook, waiter, host, dj, grand vamp... same bartender reused) = 13 sims total

Sending a teen to Uni  and moving into an 8-room dorm = 1 req'd NPC created (cafeteria worker) + 24 professors generated = total 38 sims


I think Pescado might need to tell us what precisely he meant by "do not help," because his definition may be different than mine. I personally think that having the game generate fresh NPC's only as needed is a huge help. Using all the hacks mentioned in this post can keep your NPC/townie population very low indeed.

So, honestly, I don't know what you people are doing wrong. If you installed empty templates and you are still getting 97 (or however many) characters dumped into your neighborhoods, you forgot to delete everything from the Characters folder. Try reading the instructions again.

Jordi:
Thanks for your help! So my problem seems to be that I cannot get at the empty templates yet (except your upload of the pets template, which works perfectly for me).

SaraMK:
When I come upon a file I do not know I usually test if anything on my PC will open it - and I am very familiar with .rar and .zip files. But .7z is unknown to me, and my WinRAR simply does not recognize this format (keeps telling me its an empty file). So I need your help how to set on this problem!
Besides - I read ALL instructions VERY carefully (and yours are very precise - thanks for the great amount of work you put into this project - and would even help a complete dummy to do it right - which I am definitely not), but as I cannot get at the empty templates, I have not even arrived at the point of deleting anything in the characters folder ... :(

Are you able to to right click on the file, select open or open with, and then choose WinRAR frmo the list? If so you should be able to check the use this program every time box and have it recognized from then on.
Odd that it is unrecognized!

___

A double checking for stupidity question regarding the clean templates: Do the old game hoods need to be restored before updating to a new XPack or Stuff pack?

Definitely unrecognized - with rightclick as well as when trying to unpack after opening winRAR (allready verified by a second tester).
Error notice by WinRAR: " Unknown format or corrupted file".
PS: WinRAR is German version. Perhaps 7z is only recognized by english WinRAR versions?

EDIT: Problem solved. Found 7Zip and downloaded - all files properly unzipped  :D. Thanks for helping!

I'm glad you got that straightened out. I'm guessing that what might be the problem is that your WinRAR is not associated with the .7Z file format. You can create that association under WinRAR's Settings (should be Options --> Settings --> Integration --> check the box for 7 Zip). Technically it should have still recognized it when forced to open it... I don't know. Could be a difference between versions, I guess.

So rumor has it that Seasons adds another new hood full of store bought sims. Any confirmation on this yet?

Yes, Seasons installs a new hood (G001) *not subhood, and gets loaded with all NPCs, sims, etc. I will check if you can create a custom hood using the Riverblossom template.

When I installed Seasons, I changed my EP templates to what they were before but I forgot to change the N001 template in the Sims2 directory (had it named N001-bak) and I didn't have a problem installing.

Yup, it installed a new 'hood.  Thankfully it doesn't seem to pollute your main hood though.   I'm going to try to delete it tonight.

I tried it out to check out the new stuff.  I had to laugh at the one household I tried. Name was McGreggor and he's sporting kilt and beard.  The funny thing is they made him a fortune sims.  A lil' dig at the Scots methink.

Unfortunately, however, the game dumps two store bought families into your hood.  One is an indian couple.  They didn't look too horrible from the familly snapshot.  However the other family looks like a bunch of inbreed hicks.  Ouch.

I'll try to see if renaming the neighbourhood template prevents this dumping of unwanted fuglies in our pristine neighbourdhoods.  I suspect this won't work and we will need to come up with a template.

Good to know. I was worried it was going to be similar to Pets, adding a slew of new townies and/or NPCs to the base hood.



Most likely. Thanks to this fabulous tutorial and SaraMK's previous work with it we know how to do that now.

Are they simbin sims or sims in occupied houses?

If they are in occupied houses, they would not be with the neighborhood template.

Sorry, I don't actually have the EP yet, but if they did it like they did with the Pets housebin families and the other EP's empty houses, it should be something like: C:\Program Files\EA GAMES\***SEASONS***\TSData\Res\UserData\LotCatalog

Make a backup just in case and then delete everything in that folder. However, this will delete any empty houses that came with Seasons, so if you want to keep those you might want to poke around in SimPE to see what's what.

Bah.  A bit of bad news.  I checked my neighbourdhood file and apart from the two ugly families that were generated, I appear to have a reappearance of the fuglie townies.  It's not the usual suspects, so Seasons must be generating them.

And just when you thought it was safe to start your game over ....

Edit:  No Sarah, they are not lotbinned.  Those you can delete safely I think.  I deleted them from Pets and I never saw their character files in the game.

These new ones are actually in the sim bin and have corresponding character files.

I'll have Seasons in ... about 13 minutes. And then I'll find and kill whatever is generating any ugly townies.  We can't have that nonsense, can we? :P

I knew I could count on you Sarah :)

Done! They were being dumped into our neighborhoods by way of the stealthy new subhood. The new Riverblossom neighborhood itself does not need to be modded.

Download here: http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/smf/index.php/topic,4306.0.html

Wow, fast work! Thanksandbaaah.

Does the Teleporter Shrub still work with Seasons? I'll hopefully get my copy today and I'm going through my hacks weeding out all incompatible ones.

Should work from what I can tell.

With my game recently imploding, and now having seasons, I decided to have a go at making a clean custom neighbourhood.  The game imploding was my primary motivation, but as it's given me the chance to start everything fresh and new I'm considering this as positively as possible.

So far things are progressing well but slowly.  I had my neighbourhood set up with no sims at all, and have just completed my first batch of townies for my primary neighbourhood.  A few things I'm not completely clear about though.  I have multiple downtowns attached so when I make my downtownies do I have to make a set for each downtown, or does the one set get used by all?  I'm guessing I also need to make a set of townies for my OFB district when I attach it?  If so then how are these made distinct from the other townies/downtownies? 

I'm also intending to create my own custom NPC's.  I wasn't too sure if for NPC's like the mailman/paperboy etc. if I would have to create these for my main neighbourhood, and each sub-neighbourhood.  Having read what SaraMK posted earlier in the thread about NPC's being re-used I think this may be wrong, but I'm not completely certain.

As far as pets are concerned, if I leave nostrayrespawns in place then the game will create a Leader of the Pack, some wolves, and fill the adoption pool?

ps.  I was considering using the pre-made sims that came with Seasons after having modified their appearance etc. as they're completely new to me unlike all the other pre-made sims.  Is this worth it though, or are they just too horrible to bother with?

Sorry if some of this seems obvious to others, but I'm just trying to make sure I get it right first time around.   
   

One is used by all. If you are planning to use the NPC tree to create Downtownies, don't. They will all be based on the ugly source sims. Create Townies instead and then use the teleporter shrub to make them into Downtownies.


There are no special townies for the OFB sub-hood. That was just a "special feature"  ::) of NL.


Basic NPC's like mail/paper/pizza/etc. delivery people, and maid/gardener/etc. service NPC's are used by all sub-hoods as well as the main 'hood. A University will use the same mail delivery people, for example. You SHOULD get Pescado's antiredundancy so the game won't create a billion unnecessary NPC's, since it tends to do that if allowed.

Some NPC's, however, are tied to a particular sub-hood and may or may not be able to appear in other ones. Grand vamps, Uni mascots, etc.


I had the game pop up an error when it attempted to generate a stray in a neighborhood that had zero strays and had Pescado's nostrayrespawns hack installed. I don't know if this has been fixed. If it has not been fixed, I recommend creating a single stray animal using the NPC Tree.

Adoption should be fine. Leader of the Pack/wolves are NPC's and are not affected by the hack.


Up to you. I think all Maxis sims are ugly and wouldn't want them in any neighborhood of mine, but that is only my personal preference.

Thanks for all the answers.

A lot more work to do on creating the neighbourhood, but at least I can now proceed with everything clearer.  I'm really looking forward to playing it when it's complete: everything new and most importantly no ugliness  :)

I'll make up my mind about the pre-made Seasons sims when everything else id done although if they are used then they will be having some plastic surgery first.

Get the 5 templates Nailati has done -- she's (he's?) fixed the worst of the ugly Sims, so your Townies and Dormies will be better looking.

Updated for Seasons with a note on G002. Looks like no further changes are needed.

Batch creating STRAYS is possible, and I found out how.
You need to have a non-stray pet, and turn on the pet control cheat, and debug mode as well (the maxis debug mode...)
Shift-click on the mailbox, and under NPC there's Make NPC - Stray Pets - ALL

There you have it. Batch creating Strays.

This is probably a really simple question, but how do I create the empty neighborhood package-files that i need to replace the old ones with?

Don't have to -- just download the ones you want from here: http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/smf/index.php?topic=4306.0

If you cross reference between this tutorial and SaraMK's clean 'hood tutorial, the game will automatically generate your Townies, Downtownies and Dormies without all the ugly Maxis created ones.  If you get Jordi's betternames mod and Nailati's replacement face templates, you'll actually get some decent looking ones with interesting names (and fewer repeats).

This tutorial was really useful :)

But there's something I'd like to ask, when creating NPCs, you said that I could tweak them as I wish. Face, gender etc. But how can I change their clothes? ???

Thx

You can't.

The Tree only has settings for species, skintone, age, and gender -- not for outfits. If you want a fully customized neighbourhood, create your townies in CAS! and spawn default NPCs with the tree. Then use an external tool like Paladin's NPC replacer to change the NPCs as you like.

Get Paladin's tools from http://www.simwardrobe.com/ (direct links don't work on his site).

I am not familiar with the program but I hear it works well.

First of all I want to thank Jordi for this tutorial and SaraMK for the empty templates. You rock! I created my first custom hood after Pets and it was a success. No ugly townies or dormies, no annoying strays etc.

I have a Seasons related question. SimPE hasn't been updated for Seasons yet and according to some people you shouldn't fiddle with the memories and relationships with an outdated version of SimPE. So how can I create new townies if I can't wipe their memories and relationships in SimPE? I was thinking that I'll create all townies one by one in CAS. That way they would only have the memory of moving to the lot (before I turn them into a townie with the shrub) and no relationships. Would this mess up my game? I don't feel like waiting for a SimPE update before creating a new hood since there's no sign of it yet.

Apply for the QA program on the SimPE forum to get access to a Seasons-compatible version of SimPE. I think everyone gets in if they ask.

Creating your own townies by making them in CAS is perfectly safe. Just make them, use the shrub or painting to mark them as townies, and save. Because of how the game works, they will automagically get careers and skillpoints the first time they are called as a townie.

Thanks Jordi! Ok, I'm off to creating a new and improved hood :)

The tutorial says that you don't need to use a clean template for adding a downtown if you use a blank terrain. I tried it and it isn't true- using a custom terrain instead of the default downtown will still give you all of the default downtownies (including the dead ones, based on my observations with the census tool). Just so everyone knows.

I read elsewhere that the Downtownies are created from a very limited set of templates, so even if you don't get the original Downtownies, you'll get their close relatives.  At least with Jordi's name hack (baaah!  baaah!  baaah!  baaah!  Thank you very much for that!), they'll have different names.

I had Nailati's face templates and Jordi's names, so I have a slightly different assortment of downtownies and townies for once. Some of them, I can still recognise who they are meant to be, but it's not nearly so bad as normal.

Yep!  Gotta love those two!

I followed this tutorial scrupulously after doing a clean install, and still got all the original Pleasantview townies and 3 of every damn NPC...

You forgot to rename N001, and did not get no redundancy.

Thanks for the quick reply, Jordi.  I'm ripping my hair out right now.

Actually, I do have antiredundancy, and I even checked to make sure that custom content is enabled properly.  It is.

I renamed N001 to ".bak"  When that didn't seem to work, I zipped it altogether.  That also didn't work.

Maybe an obvious question, but did you rename the right one?  You want the one in C:\Program Files\EA GAMES\The Sims 2\TSData\Res\NeighborhoodTemplate, not the one in your game directories in My Documents.

Back from work now.  Doublechecked.  Yup, the right one is renamed.

*sigh* Other things aren't working now.  Time to start over again.

My bad -- I meant C:\Program Files\EA GAMES\The Sims 2\TSData\Res\UserData\Neighborhoods -- just not to confuse anyone else reading this thread. :P

I'm new to the thread (and the game), but have been following this for a month or so, and just created my first clean/custom neighbourhood this week.  Thanks Jordi for the excellent tutorial. 

Unfortunately, I have the same problem as a couple of others here, that when I rename N0001 to N0001-bak (and delete the characters in the Characters folder, etc.), the game still generates all the Pleasantview townies in my new neighbourhood.  I tried deleting the N0001 'hood altogether, but that seems to simply make my new custom neighbourhood N0001 and gives me the same townies again (I have only the base and uni installed).  This happened about 4 times consistently.  Finally I built my neighbourhood and used "deleteallcharacters" (only once).  I don't use the townie tree for townies anyway, so hopefully nothing bad will happen.  If it does, hey ho - my favourite sims are all cloned anyway.

I'm wondering if I missed a step, like using empty template N0001 (just picked that up now).  I'll try that if I decide to start a new hood again (or if I'm forced to). 

It's a fair bit of work, building every single townie by hand (only 14 townies in the neighbourhood so far, but they're all ones that I'm happy with).  The noregen mods are fantastic for keeping indigents out.  Thanks MATY for those as well.

Did you rename the folder, or just the package? The entire N001 folder must somehow be displaced (renamed, deleted, moved) if you want to prevent the default townies. Renaming just the package will likely not work.

Ahhh, success.  Followed the same copied set of directions, but this time it worked perfectly.  Don't know what I mucked up, but it must have been something.  :(

I am having a little trouble making my custom neighbourhood. All went well, and I imported my first 8 townies. I then generated NPCs. After that I creates more sims in CAS, and tried to turn them into townies. All seemed to go well, until I reloaded the hood. Only my first 8 townies were showing up as townies, the rest could be summoned by the inge shrub under the 'default' menu, but they were not in the Sim Bin. I can remake them into townies, but they always go back into the 'default' group upon a reload. I can't seem to commit ANY data to the hood now. A created sim will simply disappear and silently go into the 'default' group. Hood scenery will placed will also disappear after a reload. SimPe shows only the original 8 townies and NPCs. Is it Fubar, or savable? Could I put the sims I created into a fresh unbroken hood?

[EDIT]
I apologise, this is now occurring in all hoods, I guess it must be CC... any other ideas what it might be?

Some hack which does not work.

‘Default’ is not a valid group, it's only used for dead Sims and the like. You have some hack which destroys the townies.

Found the problem! For some reason my Sims 2 folder had become read-only. Windows is weird.

I renamed the entire folder in the "my documents\EA Games\Sims 2\Neighborhoods sub-folder as per instructions - rename N001 to N001-bak.  I also tried deleting the N001 folder altogether.  Nothing seemed to stop the Meadow Thayer, Tosha Go, Goopy etc. townies from generating. 

*sudden thought* Does it matter that my first custom (not cleaned) neighbourhood remained in the neighborhoods folder and had all those townies already in it?  I mean, the game must be getting the blighters from somewhere, and if not Pleasantview, then where?

Anyhow, in the end, I DACed the thing and deleted all relationships, memories, sim dna, and SWAFs with SimPE.  That cleaned it, and I populated the place with home-built Sims.  All seems to be good so far, with total playable/townie population at about 40 Sims (including dormies at the university).  I think more may be necessary if any romance types want the 20 loves at once LTW.  Very tough when everyone is on a lot at once (especially without a jealousy hack).

Wrong N001 folder. Try C:\Program Files\EA GAMES\The Sims 2\Neighborhoods\N001 (or whichever folder it's actually stored in, can't be bothered turning on external drive to check).

Alrighty then.  That explains that, and I learn something I didn't know about Windows as well.  Now, I just need to wait until either I get bored again, or my current neighborhood goes foom, and I can give it a try.

Cheers.

First of all, thank you for this awesome tutorial, I was getting sick of Goopy, Benjamin, Brandy etc  ;D

I did everything right until step 4, my characters folder was empty and all. Then I created a sim and moved her in, wrote boolprop cheat code, but when I clicked on my sim, there was NO spawn menu  :-\ Should I have shift+clicked or something?

Jordi (or anyone else reading this who knows  ;)) I want completely clean neighborhoods, but I am not sure I understand what you said in your first post.

I have Sims2, Uni, N/L, OFB and Seasons.  No Pets and no stuff packs.  Do I need to rename N001 to N001-bak and also do what you posted under the part where if you own Seasons -- the G001 things?  I mean I understand I must do what you posted under "If you have Seasons part, but should I first rename N001 to N001-bak?

I have just finished completely uninstalling and reinstalling all the games I have and I have not even gone in to play Seasons yet, so the game should not have generated anything yet.  Although I did open Seaons' version of bodyshop, just to make sure it works, then closed it up again.

I have downloaded 90% of JM's director's cut for Seasons along with a few of TwoJeff's mods.  I went and downloaded Inge's Teleporter Shrub (yea, the one that can make a sim into a townie or downtownie -- hope it still works with Seasons.) Other than that, I have absolutely no custom content in my game yet.   Oh yea, I have the SimPE for Seasons, got that yesterday I have never been very knowledgeable about SimPE but one step at a time.

Anyway, I want to thank you for this tutorial, I think it's great!  And thanks in advance for trying to help me.

Yes, you need to do both portions. Renaming and replacing N001 prevents the game from creating those same ol' Pleasantview townies into your new custom neighborhood. Renaming and replacing G001 doesn't prevent any specific townies, but it prevents these sim-bin families (one of which has majorly borked genetics) from being dumped on you.

Basically, if you have any of the files you are told to replace, do it.

Thank you Zazazu.  I figured that's what I was supposed to do, but wanted to ask to make sure. :)

Yes, I think shift+click on your sim should give you the spawn option.  If that doesn't work for you, try using the mailbox (shift+click on the mailbox) and follow the instructions for that in Jordi's tutorial (also in step 4, I believe).  That should give you your full set of townies.

Also the P001 folders for the Pets families in the SimBin.

I just followed all the instructions and all is working well. :)Thanks Jordi and Sara. I just wanted to know, does the game generate townies, downtownies, special npc's when needed, or do I have to spawn them myself using the townie tree? I do not have any noregen hacks installed but I do have antiredundancy.

It will generate townies etc. as needed (at the rate of one per lot, until the limit is reached), but the process is fundamentally flawed. You're likely to end up with a townie population of only male teens for example, as the game only checks for total number, not age and gender.

Ok, thankyou :) I will use the townie tree. I was just feeling lazy as usual :D

*Sorry for the double posting.

Okay, I did spawn all the townies and downtownies. I only spawned one of each gender for the special NPC Downtownies, is that ok or do I need 2? Will the game spawn replacements for these special NPCs if I move one of them to be a playable sim?
Sorry for the daft questions, but I just need to know before I start playing and get too attatched to my neighbourhood ;D

I have just one grand vampire of each gender, seems to work fine.
The game should autospawn a special townie when it calls one and none is available -- I know this works for slobs, so likely also for grand vampires and Mr.Big/Diva.

Thanks for the quick answer ;D I'll keep it as is then ;D

I didn't need to do anything for Crumplebottom then? Does she just spawn when she is needed?

She's actually stored in one of the files with the objects except for her relationships with other Sims and NPCs.  Also Father Time, Grimmy, and Baby New Year. 

For safety, you'll want to get the vampwerefixes hack and make all .package files in subdirectories of C:\Program Files\EA Games readonly.

Thanks miros. I have the vampwere fix.

I'll go away now and stop asking stupid questions... ;D

When creating custom townies/dormies, will they only wear Maxiswear???

While I was too caffeinated to sleep and too tired to really play last night, I decided to add to the population of my university and bodyshopped a couple of new YAs to move in as dormies.  Got to the Uni hood, went in to CAS and got my newly created sims out of the bin, dressed them nicely, and moved them into the dorm.  Using Insim, I moved them right out as dormies.  As happens, they just wandered off the dorm site, which I felt was very normal and well adjusted of them.  The new YA woman came back onto the dorm lot a few seconds (real time) later and was wearing a different top.  I noted that she had "changed" out of a custom download beadwork blouse, into a Maxiswear white tanktop.

Is this normal?  I'm assuming that the change is as a direct result of making her a dormie, since she arrived on site wearing what I originally dressed her in.

/me creeps into thread again

Sorry, I'm back and I am sure I am doing something really wrong. I used the tree to spawn townies and downtownies, and I ended up with about 3 clones of each sim (they all had different names though) I'm not sure I am choosing the right option on the tree. I am seriously confuzzled. I generate townies-that is fine and there are 30 of them. (When I first move my sim onto the lot in my main n'hood there are about 15 character files that are created-I am assuming that these extra characters are stray pets) I then spawn the tree, click on make townies and choose the 'townies' box. When that is done I do the same but choose 'downtownies' It then creates 30 'townies' (what is says in the pop up box). I then create 1 of each gender of the special NPCs but after I make one it pops up the box saying 'creating downtownies' I know I am doing something really wrong. I add my sub-hoods before making my sim in CAS. Help! I do not have noregen hacks.

I have the empty templates for N001,U001,2 and 3, D001, P001 (and now G001-thanks Sara :-*)

EAMaxis made it so that any NPC spawned with the tree will use a downtownie template since Pets. And the downtownie templates are severely limited, so you will get many near-duplicates. :o

On the second menu of the tree there's a switch to make townies or downtownies -- make sure it is set to TOWNIES, or it will use downtownie templates even for townies despite your choice in the dialog.

I skipped creating downtownies completely in my current 'hood. Normal townies show up downtown anyway, and I just marked about ten of them as DTs with SimPE to allow for walkbys.
I don't use notownieregen nor the nopets thing, but do use completely emptied N001, P001, and G002 templates. When I first load a lot, there is one townie autogenerated, that's it.

Emma, I'm fairly sure that what you're seeing is normal. Annoying, but normal.

I doubt this will help, but here's a tree tutorial:
http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/smf/index.php/topic,4306.msg205277.html#msg205277

Thanks to what Jordi mentioned above, it may no longer work properly after Pets/Seasons.

Thankyou both so much! That was the trouble, I wasn't making any downtownies just 2 sets of townies :D Silly me.

/me goes away to try this thing again.

[edit] Just popped back in to say everything works properly now, and I don't seem to have a single clone! Thanks again ;D

OK, another person here trying this for the first time and having weird things happen. I set up my neighbourhood last night as per the tutorial and everything seemed to work grandly. I only had 36 character files, no more. Today I finished off naming my townies and nuking the family connections in SimPE. I am not very experienced with SimPE so I thought I'd mention it just in case I've buggered something up at that stage.

So, I go back into my hood and start adding my subhoods. I'm lazy and don't want to build new ones, so I've added the Maxis hoods (downtown, bluewater etc.) My understanding is that now I've added the blank templates, these shouldn't generate any new townies, right? Well, I now have 119 character files and there are 2 families in my bin (Gieke and some twin one. Jason and Jane?) and I noticed some Gilscarbo chick taking a stroll past my house. Where did they come from all of a sudden?

You either forgot to delete the characters folders when you emptied the templates, or you replaced the wrong ones.

You have to go to the folder where you installed the expansion(s), not "My Documents\EA Games\The Sims 2\", and then replace the neighbourhood package with the empty version, and remove the characters subfolders.

At minimum you need to do this for the following:
P001 (Pets) -- this one adds the strays to all 'hoods, and Pets families in the Simbin.
G002 (Seasons) -- this one adds all the Seasons NPCs, and Seasons families in the Simbin.

You also need to rename or remove the N001 folder to prevent the default set of townies.

If you plan on adding a default uni (U001, U002, U003), the downtown (D001), or the bluewater district (B001), you also need to empty those templates. Replace the neighbourhood package, and delete the characters subfolders.

If you skip any step you will get some or all EAMaxis defaults in your new 'hood.

He's right, you know.  Make sure you replace, rename, or delete the N001 folder in your program files Sims\neighborhoods\ folder, not just the one in your "my documents" folder.  I failed on this step at one point and was justly chastised.  :-\

The Gilscarbo chick could also just be a randomly generated townie, unless you downloaded Jordi's name hack (can't give enough thanks for that one). The game only uses a limited number of weird first & last names.

Just so I can make sure - I definitely replaced all the folders in the tsbin install path as per the tutorial, but are you saying I need to do the same with the N001 folder in My Documents as well? Because that one I didn't do. *edit* sorry, reread your answer and I understand now. Must have missed a step with the expansions.

Does anyone know which expansion the gieke family in the bin are attached to? That would explain which expansion I missed a step with.

*baaah* Thanks for taking the time to help, much appreciated.

Gieke family came with OFB so you need the B001 empty template.

Something I discovered... when I installed Seasons, 8 files appeared in my formerly empty P001 folder.  So double check before creating a new hood!

I've done a clean custom 'hood.. added one CAS sim (Agnes Nutter) and went to check the Character Files via SimPE... and there's TWO sims listed. Agnes Nutter and some bartender chick. I thought it was odd, opened the Character Files folder in MyDocs/etc.. sure enough, there's TWO files there.

Am I safe to delete Random Bartender? Agnes hasn't left the Sim Bin, so I'm not sure why the game chose to create a bartender.

I've been slowly making my custom hood, and by slowly I mean over the last few months.
I've just added an empty uni neighborhood. To add my own uni students do I use the shrub and selected make me a townie? Will this make them uni NPC students and dormies (if needed)?

I've also been wondering, I like to use less townies and downtownies then the game likes to create for you. If I create them and have the required hacks in place to stop the game making its own townies etc will that stop it or will the game create more to make up the required number the game likes to have. I hope this last part makes sense.

If you create your own YAs in YACAS, and mark them as townies with the shrub, they become dormies.

To prevent townies and dormies from being created, use Pescado's notownieregen and nodormieregen hacks. With these in the game, no new townies or dormies will be created at all.

Thank you. I already use those hacks, just wanted to be 100% sure.

Stupid question, but I can't figure out the answer. If I download SaraMK's clean Pleasantview template for custom 'hoods and follow those directions, would I still need to download the anti-regen hacks so the game doesn't create the standard townies (Goopy, Sandy, etc.)? Or would I just go ahead and create my own custom townies/downtownies (with the townie tree)?

If you use a clean template, it won't regen the same Pleasantview townies. Without using notownieregen, it will create randomized townies as needed. They'll use the Maxis name list, so you will get Goopy and Marcela, etc, but not with the same looks and not with the same last name. If you've made your own townies beforehand, you shouldn't regen many, if any.

Unless of course you also use a namelist override hack.

Marcela? I haven't ever had a Marcela :D What does she look like?

Ha, thanks, that answers my question. And no, I've never heard of a Marcela, either.  ???

There's a Marcella in my avatar. :D

Well, I don't have them anymore :) One was married to one of the Test spawn...William? Eh, doesn't matter. She was black, can't recall eye color, and had black hair that was in that chin-length cut that kind of flares out a bit. Wore one of those dresses with the hoodies. & yeah, namelist override rules all. Well, namelist override, default replacement eyes & skin tone with other geneticized skins in between. Plus default replacement face templates....most of my townies are cuter than my playables (excepting Jasmine, she's adorable, got a good mix for gen 10).

I figured out how to do everything but this: for the subneighborhood templates, why is the file type ".7z"? I don't know how to open that, either.

It's a 7-Zip file, and is generally used because it has a higher level of compression than ZIP or RAR. You can open it in WinRAR or 7-Zip.

Hey! This looks like a great tutorial, but unfortunately it seems to require SimPE to create custom Townies and Downtownies and NPCs and I have a Mac. Is there any way to do this without SimPE? It sucks because I'm trying to create an all-female Amazon neighborhood, so I want everybody to be female, and thus need to custom create them.

Then you're limited to either creating them one at a time in CAS, or using the lot debugger (or insimenator?) to change their last names.
Or you can spawn a townie per time with the tree (set gender to female), but then you have no control over name and clothing.

Jordi, using a combo of blank college template and nodormie regen, does that mean the only dormies you would come across on community lots SHOULD be SS members?

Yes - one dormie will be created for the SS, the rest should be blocked from generating.

Thanks! I guess I'll try those.

OK, I don't understand this.  I used blank college template and nodormieregen to create my uni.  I created a number of custom dormies (about 30 I think).  However, when a playable Sim goes to a community lot at the uni, they run into one SS member, but the other dormies there are not SS members.  In fact, my game did not generate a third SS member (necessary to allow for induction/abduction of the playables) and I had to designate a third SS member using InSim.

Jordi, are you saying that, if there are no other dormies at all (i.e. if the uni stays "dormie free" and clean), the game will create one SS dormie, even with nodormieregen?  Would it create a second and third SS dormie as well?

The way it should work:

Nodormieregen prevents the game from spawning dormies.
Nossrespawn prevents the game from arbitrarily spawning SS members.

Since you need to have one SS member at least for the SS to function, nossrespawn will attempt to turn one existing dormie into an SS member. If no dormies exist, one will be spawned.

On the first visit to the SS lot, the SS will be filled up to the limit (20? 30? Not sure.) with existing dormies. If you have less dormies, no new members will be spawned until all existing SS members are graduated from college, or dead.

During the SS abduction the SS member with handcuffs is actually a cop. If you already have a cop in game, he or she will be used for this purpose. Upon arriving on the lot, true SS members take over.

So how do you get the three SS friends to join the society? Do you have to just randomly pick your own playables?

That's what I did (sort of). I have 20 dormies (non-playables) in total, and set three of them in the SS with the pie menu.

I recently started a new 'hood, so I only have one playable family as of yet. The oldest child has just entered college (but the father I started with began as a YA, so I have it already setup).

The downside is of course that all dormies are now SS members so as soon as my Sim has three friends, he's in :/

That was my solution as well.  I had to set at least one as SS member with the pie menu or Insim.  Now I'm just waiting for an abduction.  I'll be interested to see how many of my other nonplayable dormies end up in the SS when that happens.

All of them, likely. Once the SS starts filling (is first visited), it will fill the roster up to the limit. And that limit is at least 20 and may be more (I have no idea of the exact value).

The only time I had 20 non-playable members of the SS was when I was playing around with the MaxNumofVisitors line in my userstartup.cheat file.  I normally have it set to 8, but I set it to 20 for a party.  Forgot to change it back once and a student was abducted - there were 20 SS members on the SS lot.  Normally I have 8 SS members.

If you've created your own dormies, then the SS members will be taken from the dormie pool in order of character creation.  This is the same way that the dorm fills - with dormies from the pool in order of character creation.  So for those of us who create our own dormies, the SS members will always be the same as the dormies in the first dorm.

Oh right, that's the limit then. I should remove that entry from userStartup.cheat -- I'm using Paladin's hack to get unlimited parties anyway.

I reckon 8 SS members is about right for my game, for the moment.  I don't like to run more than 8 Sims on a lot at a time anyway as it seems to slow down gameplay quite a bit.  Might have to look into those dual core processor solutions offered in one of the other threads.

My winrar doesn't seem to be able to recognize 7zip files, was there an update?

You might need to set the association in WinRAR's preferences.

Hmm, no 7zip in the file options. Mebbe I do need to upgrade.

Edit: Problem solved. Winzip upgraded. Squee.

I have a clean hood, and that isn't exactly what happened in my case. I didn't create any non playable characters other than four Grand Vamps. NPCs were created by the game as they were needed.

I started my playables in an empty Uni hood and placed an SS lot.  I kept a careful watch on each character that was created and only Profs and a dorm cook were created when I moved my first Sims into a dorm.

Afterwards it dawned on me that there was really no reason for the SS lot if I didn't have any SS members. So I attempted to create some with the townie tree (I think. It might have been mailbox if tree didn't have the option). But I could only get it to create one and not any more so I left the lot without saving, deciding I was actually happier without dormies anyway. I figure that if I ever want to use the lot, I'll assign a few playables to the SS status via TJ's college adjuster and work from there.

Yay! Having the right program to extract the files makes it sooo much easier to do this!

Also, there still isn't a way to choose the clothing for NPCs is there?

I.e. if you're making a medieval neighborhood, you can't make the NPCs in CAS and then use the tree to make them a NPC, right?

Nope. But I think there is a program to replace NPC clothing over at Simwardrobe.

Thanks!!!  :D

Okay, I'm ready to give this a go -- thanks, Jordi and Sara for making this a whole lot easier.  I've just read through this in its entirety and there's just one question I have before starting.  I'll be making my Sims in CAS and using Inge's teleporter to create townies.  Should I be doing this with or without Pescado's "notownieregen" hack in my game at first?  ???   I'm figuring I'll probably create a smaller townie pool than what gets generated by the default N001. (And I don't have Pets, if that matters.)

Thanks for your help, guys

Max

If you want the only townies in the hood to be your custom townies then you must use notownieregen.  Usually I just generate some using the tree (or the mailbox), and I also use notownieregen to prevent unwanted extras.  But I did choose to create custom dormies and change them into non-playables using Inge's teleporter.  Both methods work perfectly with JM's hack.

Thx, invisigoth.   Would it be possible to use a combination of both?  Use the tree or mailbox to generate some, then create the rest myself?  That way, I could be a little bit lazy  :P

Max

Sure, that would work. Notownieregen just stops the automatic regeneration -- nothing is preventing you from using the spawner (or CAS) to create your own townies.

I use the exact formula given in the first post for my townies -- I now have about 35, and about 20 dormies. That's more than enough breeding material and employees for the next few generations.

  Yes, I would say so!  Now, there's just one more thing I'd like to clear up Re NPC's.  The game will generally generate 3 maids -- 3 workers of each type in N001?  With "antiredundancy", will only 1 of each get generated?  If more were wanted (for variety), can they also be generated via the tree or mailbox? 

Max

No, only as many will be generated as needed.
Thus if you have a maid as visitor on the lot, and the maid is needed, a second is spawned. With drivers -- suppose the schoolbus and carpool arrive at the same time: two drivers.

And yes you can use the mailbox/tree to pregenerate more as wanted.

I don't get the SS situation. Sorry, read the thread but just not clicking.  I've never done the SS so maybe that's the problem.

I want my Sim to be taken "naturally" as in without forcing it.  With the totally clean templates and all the noregens. Do I need to make three dormies via the shrub and since those are the only three choices, they are automatically SS members?

Basically I wanna know how many dormies I have to make in a totally blank neighborhood so that the SS works.

Three, if you want the induction to be possible. Any valid dormies will become SS members up to the lot visit limit (usually 8).

I had the problem that with nodormiespawn, nossregen, and ssfriendcount all loaded, my game was not creating 3 SS members necessary to trigger an abduction.  I finally had to use InSim to make one of the other non-playable dormies an SS member.  Following the abduction, everything worked out fine and 8 SS members were drawn from the available non-playable dormies (all dormies were CAS created).

(n00b alert)


Couple Questions : If I make custom townies with the teleporter shrub, why exactly do I need to edit them in Simpe later?  Just to adjust relationships/names? I can skip this, right?



ALSO:  obvious questions regarding newest EP..... I presume all we await is a no_tourist_regen hack and blank BV templates?

Thanks for this tutorial, btw, it's great !

I can answer your first question. The teleporter shrub doesn't make townies, but will allow you to take Sims that you made in CAS and make them into townies or downtownies. A quicker way to accomplish this is to spawn the townie tree and click 'create townies'.

No matter which method you use, there is no reason to dig out SimPe unless you are trying to do something special or want to check to be sure you did things right. If you create your own Sims in CAS to be made into townies, they will have no jobs or skills. So I use TwoJeff's college adjuster to "randomize skills" just before I realease them into the wild (make them into townies with the teleporter bush). If you use 'create townies', they should already have random skills and jobs, plus you will not need to use the teleporter bush as they will alredy be townies.

In BV, there is no townie tree, it's a Townie nerf gun or something .. heh

aaanyway I actually wanted to make Townies myself so that they could have custom clothing (I want to do a vintage neighbourhood with everyone wearing clothing from the 30s-40s!) .  So I make them in CAS and then use the shrub to send them out into the wild.  What happens to their names? Are they given Townie names?
(I do have HP's townie name mod. I would actually rather use that than have to come up with 30 unique names myself. Yeah I'm that lazy.)


To Clarify: Adult townies WILL or will not have college degrees by default? Or is it random?

thanks again  !

You have 2 choices to do what you want.

1. Make at least one Sim and move him onto a lot. Spawn the townies with the tool. All of these townies will be given the same last name on the teleporter bush (such as Hanby) but they will use the mod to choose actual first and last names so that they won't have the same last names. They will be given random skills and jobs. I don't think they have diplomas, but they might still have a job that requires one normally. I'm not 100% positive on this point. You will need to summon them all to the lot, although you don't have to summon all of them at once. Then, using either Dizzy's mirror mod, JMP's clothing tool, or Christianlov's clothing rack, dress them appropriately for your theme. Once they are dressed, just de-select them and clear them from the lot using the teleporter. You may have to use a money cheat to buy their clothes.

2. Create your townies in CAS. If you want them each to have a different last name, then you will have to create them one at a time. You will be dressing them in CAS so you don't have to dress them afterwards. This method takes a long time. After you are done, move one of them into a lot then summon the rest, a few at a time. Make them selectable and using TwoJeff's College Tool, randomize their skills. Otherwise they will have zero skills when you move/marry any of them into your playable households. If you never plan to move any in, then you can skip this part. After randomizing their skills, make them into a townie. Repeat until all are done.

Actually, once a townie is first loaded by the game (as a townie -- thus not when teleported in) s/he will be given a random job and skillpoint distribution.

So are you saying that if I choose a Sim with 0 skill points and make them into a townie, they will be given a random job and skill points so I don't have to use the skill randomizer? I know townies that were made as townies already get skills and jobs.

yes

Is there a way to spawn new vacation townies who are dressed in their proper clothes? I nuked all the ugly vacation townies as well as tourists by moving them in (via the shrub/cat) and then killing them with Rodney's death creator. Then I tried the Townie and NPC creator to spawn new vacation townies (it's not a tree anymore, now it looks like the repoman's gun), but they always came up with normal clothes. So I had them move in, change their appearance with the clothing tool, made them into townies and then into vacation townies with the repoman gun townie creator. From that time on those townies walked around in their fancy clothes, but they didn't behave like real vacation townies - they didn't know the proper bow, for example. So I'm not too sure if this method works correctly ... ???

It would be great if someone came up with a better idea how to spawn correctly dressed vacation townies - until then my sims won't go on vacation anymore ... :D

I thought the correct clothes were available from CAS or bodyshop.  If not, can you not use the make clothes available interaction in CAS?  Should be able to do that in the same way you can create a townie in maid's clothing.  No?

I create my townie/downtownie one by one using the T of L&D, upon creation with that tool adult sims indeed do get random skill points.

My question, I have been given them all a job and then made them townie or downtownie using Inge shrub.  Have I been wasting my time?  Will they keep the job I gave them or will the game reset it and gave them a random one?

I made a townie out of a MATY sim, and gave him a job just like you.  When he fell in love with a playable and moved in, he had an entirely different job than what I set him up with.

So I'd say you're probably wasting your time as far as jobs.  I think they keep the skills you set, though -- I don't think those reset.

Yes, they are. It's no problem to create a CAS sim that looks like a vacation townie - I'm just curious how I can transform him into a vacation sim who behaves like one! ;)

Oh, that's weird, because I experienced the opposite thing! :D I always create my townies just like MissDoh said, creating them in CAS and then making them into townies with the shrub. I always give them jobs and randomize their skills, and when they move in with my playables later they always keep their jobs. I write everything down in an Excel table, this is why I'm so certain about this ... ;)

I can confirm your statement about the skill points, though - they never reset in my game either. ;D

What is it I'm doing wrong? I made all the sims I needed, dropped them into two lots, Towniefied all but one test family, went into SimPE and selected everything under Sim Relations (or somesuch) and right click, Deleted. Opened the town back up, and not only does the test family all know who they are, random several of the random passersby, when made selectable, remembered the child/teen they were assigned in CAS.

Oh, and everyone remembers meeting whoever was in the lot with them, all assigned a child/teen have "Met, kissed, woohooed so and so" about the mystery parent of their child.

I have everything but BV, and I'm using the clean templates.

In order to de-relate Sims (even if you've made them into townies) you need to do more in SimPE. You need to remove the relationship under Sim Description (which is what it sounds like you did) by setting them both to unknown and unticking the related box and again under Family Ties (by deleting the relationship at both ends - ie from both Sims). It is much more sensible to create them as adults and then age them back down to children or teens when townifying them. Just remember not to leave the game running while doing this as their school grades will be attrocious and the Social Worker is likely to come a visting.

Also townie memories are wiped on move in (in my experience) the same as adoptee memories, so they will keep all those useless pieces until moved in or editted.

Nyaha. See, it only said something along the lines of "delete all relationships", didn't go into any kind of detail, so I thought "deleting" them was enough. I'll go through again and untick everyone. Should I delete the SWAF as well?

I don't have anything to do with Sim Wants and Fears. I know nothing about them. If the aim is merely to make the Sims unrelated then you don't need to touch them. Although you may wish to go into the Sims memories and delete those you do not want this is also unecessary in this instance.

Mostly I was curious because those listed as Parent had Parental spam in their wants. "Child becomes Overachiever" etc.

Thanks for the help, my test 'hood is now set up! :)

On the surface, yes.  I tried that once and got lovely adult sims in the hood.  Aged one of my favourite clones down to teen and suddenly she had a head floating above her body (no neck).  Tried all kinds of mirror fixes, etc. but there she was.  Quite a neat effect, but not one I wanted to live with.  As this was the beginning of my hood, I simply scrapped the whole thing and started over with new clean hood and new clone of the sim already as a teen.  Naturally, in CAS I had to give her a "parent", but once they were both townified, I deleted relationships, family flags, and (very important) all memories they had of being parent or child of the other.

..... >.<

Where.. how.. and have I doomed myself to a future explosion since I've been playing a family with disconnected flags and NOT removed memories of being parent/child...?

EDIT:

I'm a non-awesome idiot and I actually worked out how to do it myself. Thanks for this tut!

Not sure about doomed since I have not had a hood blow up (at least not for this particular reason). In the sim description for a sim, SimPE gives access to memories.  I just went in and deleted the ones that said things like "gave birth to [name of sim]" and suchlike.  I'm not sure it's that important in the long run, but it does avoid garbage memories - I was finding that the game was having difficulty reconciling the idea of a sim that was not related to another sim with a memory of having given birth to the sim in question (if that makes any sense).  At one point, the game recreated the relationships I had deleted to reconcile this (or so it seemed - I had to delete the relationships again, in any case).  Removing the memories of the relationship cleaned things up nicely.

I wonder if that's what caused the one playable family to resprout family ties after I'd deleted them in SimPE.. I'll have to go back in today and wipe out the mems. Thanks! :)

Hello! That's a wonderful tutorial, thank you so much! But I have a problem with the DownTownies I've created after I've done all the steps. I have new face templates and color binned custom hairs. The Townies I created using the tree are fine, they have new face templates and hair but DownTownies always end up having the maxis face templates and and none of them has custom hair. I couldn't figure out why. Could you help me please?

I have Uni, Nightlife and Seasons.

Hello everone ! I'm new here and I'm french so I hope you'll understand my english and will excuse me for asking this question (perhaps someone had asked it before but it's really hard for me to read all the 11 pages in english and understand everything without reading each post twice :-\ sorry)...

What if I don't want to "de-relate" my newborn townies ?

Let me explain to you... :D

By the way, I use only TS2, Uni, NL, OFB and Seasons and have installed notownieregen/nodormieregen and anti redundancy mods.

I made cleaned neighborhoods without problems (great tutorial Jordi !!!) but I want to create my own townies and I'm wandering if it will be possible to not delete all the family bounds in simPE because I want that my townies and my sims still be related...

I have a lot of families to create in my 'hood and I realize that it will be very difficult to play with all of them... but I can't delete those pretty sims and want to use all of them anyway... So I wanted to make some of my sims become townies and downtownies to concentrate my efforts on a few sims only for playing...

But what if I make a "Test" family with three sisters (Ann Test, Bea Test and Cat Test) and want to play only with Cat and transform Ann and Bea into townies with the teleport schrub ? Will they stay related to Cat as sisters ? Will they keep their family name ? It will cause any damage to my game or to my saves ?

Thank you very much for all your help and answers ! :D

It shouldn't do, as far as i know. I do the same thing myself without noticable effect. That said, I tend to scrap hoods every few generations when a new shiny concept enthuses me, so take that into account. Short-term, it's no drama. Long-term, I couln't tell you.

Ce n'est pas un problem.  Par example, j'ai une femme sim et sa fille dans mon neighbourhood.  La femme est playable, mais sa fille est une townie teen.  Elles ont encore leurs relations intacte.  Il n'y-a aucun mauvaises resultats pour les saves.  Ce pourrais etre un situation ou la playable sim devrai age et sa fille serai encore une teen, mais cette situation n'est pas un problem pour le game.  Je n'expecterai pas des problemes dans la situation vous avez decriver, sauf que les soeurs ne devraient pas plus vieilles.  Le nom de famille ne devrai pas changer a cause de ces actions et va reste intact.

(SVP excusez mon trez mauvais francais, et la manque des accents sur les mots)

English summary:   There should not be a problem with keeping the relationships between the sisters, or the family names intact, other than the fact that the playable sister will age and the townie sisters will not.  I have done this often and it has never caused game errors or save problems.

Thirst of all, it's very kind of you to write in french and I understand everything, thank you very much :D

So I imagine I can make a few families with grand father, father and son, and transform into townies the granpa and the father to play only with the son. I'm right ? By the way it's weird that the townies don't get age...  :-[ It's a lack of realism... But it won't be a problem. I suppose that if my playable sim fall in love with a townie girl and marry her, she will become playable too and begin to get older, didn't she ?

I can do the same thing to make downtonies for the downtown, and to make townies for the university 'hood (I read in this topic that I must create young adults and transform them into "townies" to do that), but in what neighborhood must I be ? In my main neighboorhood ? Or in the Downtown one (for donwtonies), or the University 'hood (for the young adult townies) ?

In fact I don't really understand if the townies I will create are exclusive to the neighborhood in witch they have been created... and I don't find the words in english to make my question more precise ::)I hope you'll understand... :D

Exactly right.  Only the sims you are playing get older.  If you leave sims in on a lot and never play them, they will not age either.  If your sim marries a townie, the townie becomes playable and will age when you play that family.


To make young adults (etudiants pour le universite) you must be using the CAS for the university - you must enter the university sub-neighbourhood that is attached to your main neighbourhood, and create students.  It is not possible to create young adults in the CAS in the main neighbourhood.  Young adults are not related to each other.  You can create groups of 8, transfer them all to one lot, and export them as townies from that lot.


Yes - the townies you create for your neighbourhood will only exist in that neighbourhood.  If you start a new neighbourhood, you will need to create new townies for the new neighbourhood.

Youpi ! I understand everything ! ;D

Thenk you very much for all your answers ! And have a good game ! :D

EDIT : Hmm... Juste a little thing... When I want to create downtonies I must be in the Downtown neighborhood or can I be in my main 'hood ?  ::)

That's perfectly normal - downtownies don't use custom face templates or hair, but always the Maxis ones. If you want downtownies you should create regular townies and transform them into downtonies with the teleporter shrub! ;)

You can do that in the main hood as well - but beware, downtownies don't use custom face templates, so your downtownies will get the normal Maxis faces ... :(

Thanks for your answer ! I'm using a pack replacement for the default heads so I think it wouldn't be a big problem :D

But it's a godd thing to know ! I will not waste my time making awesome downtonies so ! ;D

But I didn't understand what you've said about this : You mean if you want fully cvustomed downtonies, without Maxis elements, you need to first create simple Townies and then make them downtonies ? ???

Voyez page 1 de ce thread ci - le tutorial de Jordi, parti 4b (Creating townies and downtownies).  Vous avez besoin de utiliser CAS pour faire les custom sims et les installer dans le neighborhood.  Moi, je cree seulment 1 ou 2 sims par fois, pour eviter les relations de famille (le tutorial utilise un method pour faire des changements des relations avec SimPE aussi).  Quand les nouveu sims sont tous dans un "lot", c'est necessaire de les exporter utilisant "make me a downtownie" (ou quelque chose comme ca - les menus sont un peu different avec la townie tree, Insim, ou teleporter shrub).

Thank you very much for all this help and for the kindness of this community :D

Well.  That's something you don't see every day.  ;D

I know, right? Think we should get that post bronzed or something ;D

Catioucha, bienvenue a MATY! La raison que nous rirons (?) un peut est parce-que si quelqu'un est une espece de guignol ici et n'ecoute pas, nous ne sommes pas de tout sympathiques. Mais si vous avez une questionne, and vous pensez et essayez comprendre, les personnes ici peut etre tres sympathiques. Je suis heureux que jolrei peux vois aider! Et je regrette ma francais horrible. Je sais qu'il est du merdre (^_-)

[English: Catioucha, welcome to MATY. The reason we laugh a little is that if someone acts like an idiot here and doesn't listen, we're not very nice at all, but if you have a question, and you think and try to understand, people here can be very nice. I'm glad jolrei could help you. And I'm sorry for my horrible French. I know it's for shit (^_-)]

My original Pleasantview finally turned into a BFBVFS.  I'm planning to start all over and would like to use this method to play a 'clean' Pleasantview.
My question is:  should I use the Seasons instructions if I have all EPs through BV and all SPs through TSS?
I've never tried anything like this before and just don't want to waste my time seeing if it screws up before I ask.
Thanks!

From what I've heard, TSS seems to think it's an expansion pack and not a stuff pack. I would try the Seasons instructions myself, but I wouldn't shocked if TSS messed it up somehow.

Yes, you need to follow the instructions for every EP you have, unless you want the additional families added by these EPs (such as the Ottomas family from Seasons, the Traveller family from BV and the Katt family from Pets).

Did I miss the instructions for BV in this post?  (I easily could, was up all night llast night with the $%@% tornadoes.)

I'm going to do a fresh install.  So I could easily follow the instructions after BV and then install TSS.  Or probably better yet, wait until the next EP comes out before installing TSS.  It is still sitting on my desk in the box where it's been for quite some time.

The BV clean template is buried mid-thread, here (http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/smf/index.php/topic,4306.msg264144.html#msg264144).

You might find it helpful to read the discussion that starts on the page before that post.

Kyna, you are a dear.  Thank you so much for your help.

I have posted an update for Bon Voyage here: http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/smf/index.php/topic,10798.0.html

I use TS2 Enhancer. It's unusable on clean custom neighborhoods, either ones I've created myself via the steps here and empty templates, or 'empty' neighborhoods I've downloaded from MTS2. It returns an "index out of bounds" error on just about any operation.

It doesn't happen on any of my old/non-'clean' neighborhoods. It happens whether or not Townies have been batch-spawned or NPCs generated.

I'm not expecting support here for TS2 Enhancer, obviously, just curious if anyone has any theories about what might be different between a 'clean' neighborhood and one that has auto-generated its own townies etc that would make the program choke on virtually anything I try to do (usually minor operations on individual Sims..."index out of bounds (-1)" upon attempted save.)

Thanks for any thoughts. I understand that the answer is probably 'don't use SimEnhancer', I'm just curious.

I think I've used up my edits or something. In addition to the error above, I forgot to mention that the neighborhood .package file is fatally corrupt afterwards.

For posterity's sake: in the end I had to reinstall the game from scratch. (Bottom line was that I couldn't open any clean neighborhoods (my own generated via clean templates, or downloaded clean lots) in SimPE or make edits with TS2 Enhancer.) My best guess is that I somehow screwed one of the steps in my initial clean-template setup.

I just wanted to know a couple of things.

1.  I read in the posts, that if we create townies, we can make them into downtownies and use the teleporter shrub.  (I am not sure what I have to do with this step). Can someone clarifty what I have to do with this?

2.  What about the townies that come with Seasons.  Do I batch create them, or do I make them singularly or what?

Okay so it worked for me, it deleted all the families in the neighbourhoods, was that meant to happen?  No Lothario etc...

But let me say, that forcing creating batch townies, was excellent, the townies are all good looking, default CAS face replacements, and their names are awesome as well.  I used Jordies mod to replace name. 

Thanks.  Such a pity I lost my usual sims.  I loved them.  Not the townies.

It is designed to change the creation of new Neighbourhoods and will not affect existing ones (other than if they are un-upgraded hoods for which you add an alterred template before you upgrade them).

Alright I'm already confused on step one.  ???

It says: "Replace P001_Neighborhood.package with an empty version. This prevents the standard Pets and Pet NPCs from being added to every 'hood. It also prevents the two families from magically appearing in your new 'hood's family bin."

The same goes for G002. But where do I get this empty version? It wasn't really explained...

Because I am a nice person. I will not point and laugh.

I will merely point.

You get empty neighborhoods from the thread named Empty and Cleaned-up Templates. [UPDATED] (http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/smf/index.php/topic,4306.0.html).

Which is, like, three or four threads below this one. AND linked in this very thread, in the instructions you were reading.

No, please do laugh. I just found that myself.  :-[
Thanks anywho!  :)

First you need to read this post (http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/smf/index.php/topic,7437.msg208014.html#msg208014) in the FAQ.  Pay particular attention to the "How NOT To Post" part of the post.

Then you need to familiarise yourself with the search function on this site.  We don't spoonfeed people here, not even when they're new.  If it can be found by searching the site, we expect people to do so for themselves.

Since I'm feeling nice today, I'll save you the trouble of searching for what you looking for.  You need to read this thread (http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/smf/index.php/topic,6205.0.html) to find out how to delete sims.

As Kyna suggested, read and follow the "Deleted 2" procedure.  If you have over 200 townies, this will take the rest of your life.  How many character files are in your neighbourhood folder anyway? 

If I had a "200 townies and I can't stand them anymore" issue, I would delete the whole hood and start over.  Sounds like you need notownieregen.

What part do you need help with?  You're going to have to be more specific.

Well, my guess would be that you're missing some empty templates. Make sure you have empty templates for each expansion you have, including the new ones.
Links for all clean templates, install as you have installed the others:
Base-Seasons (http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/smf/index.php/topic,4306.msg120424.html#msg120424)
Bon Voyage (http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/smf/index.php/topic,4306.msg264144.html#msg264144)
Free Time (http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/smf/index.php/topic,4306.msg317272.html#msg317272)

I installed Free Time before the empty template for Free time came out, and I was finally infested with Goopy!!! Oh noes!!!!!

And make sure you are installing the empty templates into the proper directory/folder.  These are all in [drive letter]:\Program Files\...  and not in the My Documents directories.

For example, to avoid getting default townies, you need to install your Pleasantview empty template to:
[drive letter]:\Program Files\EA GAMES\The Sims 2\TSData\Res\UserData\Neighborhoods

I have a quick question.

Is it safe to delete the neighborhoods I don't want from the main menu? OR, should I download the empty templates first, and THEN delete them. I don't wanna mess up any code or anything, and I'm wondering if the latter is necessary to ensure that.

You can delete hoods from the main menu at any time -- those are stored in your "My Documents\<etc, etc>\Neighborhoods" directory, and deleting them doesn't affect the original templates.  It just removes them from your current game.

^Thanks for the quick response.

So, okay...in order for me to have a totally clean hood when I start a new one, I would still have to overwrite all the templates with clean ones though, right? I hope I'm not making this any more confusing than it has to be lol.

Right.  It would probably be wise to make backups of the original templates somewhere first, in case you ever want to restore the original hood.

"Original" as in Pleasantview and such with those hideous Maxis townies and such? I'll pass :P, but it is good to have backups just in case I bump my head and want it back one day. Thanks for your help!

Backups are also necessary in case "oops I fucked up and I have to start over" happens.

OKay, I tried this tut and apparently did something wrong. No prob....off to try again.

Do these instructions apply to Free Time the same way as well?

BTW, for those that don't know, the FT patch is finally back up again, nice and shiny (hopefully).

Berney updated the tutorial for BV here (http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/smf/index.php/topic,10798.0.html), but the process is essentially the same even in FT.

Okay, thanks. However, I do recall reading somewhere not to delete the /Lots folder in FT.

I have a question, Jordi. Let's say I follow your instructions, and I actually like the results and want to keep my townies for future hoods. Can I take all the SDNA and DNA and Characters from my hood I like, I'll call it N004, copy it back over into N001, then put N001 back, and in this way have it spawn my "cool" townies from now on in any new future hood?

I'm not Jordi, but no.  Don't do this.  It will screw up both your 'hoods.  There is information inside each of those character files that pertains specifically to the hood you took them from.  Making a new 'hood template is not as simple as copy-pasting.  If it were, we'd have a lot more of them, and they'd be a lot better than the borkedness EA ships.

Does anyone here know if these instructions still work okay if you have all expansion packs installed up to Mansions and Gardens?

I followed the instructions to the letter right now, and it completely stopped my game from working. I got an error message saying that the game was corrupt or had been uninstalled.

Any tips?

Hello everyone newbie here. Please forgive me for being ignorant but in the first step do i have to rename the N001 FOLDER? or the actual N001.package FILE inside? Also I read somewhere that the game loads all files in A-Z order. Do my hacks need to be in a specific order for it to work? Thanks in advance.  ;D

I have also apparently failed at this as well... when I created a new neighborhood, it didn't quite work the way it should have. At least, it didn't work the way it *sounded like* it should have.

I renamed the N001 folder, then opened the game. It didn't show Pleasantview, which I assume was correct. I clicked 'create new neighborhood' and got a warning that it was going to make a neighborhood with no townies/NPCs. Okay, fine, that's what I wanted. Click. New neigbhorhood. I went to check in my Neighborhoods folder, but instead of creating N004, it created a second N001. Not only that, it had characters in the Character folder even though it *told* me that it wasn't generating any. I didn't select a downtown or a university, so it shouldn't have spawned those characters. (I only have UNI+NL.) I didn't even create a lot, so there shouldn't have been NPCs.

So, figuring that it did not work, I quit everything and dumped the duplicate N001 folder, then restored the name of the original N001.

When I reopened the game, I still had no Pleasantview, and the slot for it was still named for my custom hood, with the custom map and all -- even though I deleted that entire folder. Like, it is wiped from my hard drive and yet the game still thinks it's there. And I can't get Pleasantview back, which isn't a massive crisis, but I had been using that hood exclusively for building and I had a few houses I'd really like to keep.

Any way to fix this without reinstalling the game? I have a Mac, so most of the useful applications are not an option. :(

Try removing NeighborhoodManager.package from your game and let it regenerate.

That worked, thanks!

And a random, related question: Is there a safe way to move a household from one neighborhood to another without CleanInstaller or something similar? I want to move my legacy family into my custom 'hood where the townies don't look ridiculously out of place (now that I've got it working) but I know it will drag all their memories and such with them even though it wipes their relationship histories clean when you put the occupied lot into the housing bin.

katalina, what you did wrong was that you renamed your playable Pleasantview/N001 instead of the template N001. The folder you should rename will be at the install location, not in your "saved games" location. The location of the template N001 should be (install location)\The Sims 2\TSData\Res\UserData\Neighborhoods, as stated in the first post. I would assume this folder structure is the same on a Mac.

Also, I think the only safe way to "move" a played family from one 'hood to another is to clone and recreate them all, and I don't think that can be done without SimPE.

ahh, okay, I see where I went wrong. The folder structure is basically the same, but the wording led me astray as there is no "program files" folder. I assumed that was the equivalent of the EA Games folder in Documents that houses the user data, but it's actually the one in the Applications folder. Makes much more sense now. Thank you!

And I figured as much on the moving Sims around... oh well. I might just back up my stuff and reinstall to get rid of all the fragmented Sim bits.

You don't need to reinstall for that, just make a new neighbourhood. Good luck. :)

This says it's "updated for Seasons"; do these work for Apartment Life? I'm assuming so, but would like confirmation. Are there any changes I should be making to the procedure?

ETA: What would happen if I didn't add the recommended hacks? Would the game just spawn townies and such on its own?

Updated for Seasons just means that the tutorial's been updated to include Seasons-hood-specific instructions (G002, etc).


Yup.

Okay, it's mostly working. I still have Apartment Life social-group townies, though. Any way to get rid of them (beyond just summoning them and having a massacre?)

Yes. Find an empty template for the AL stealth hood somewhere in this thread (http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/smf/index.php/topic,4306.0.html). To avoid new ones spawning, you'll need the notownierespawn hack, but you'll still get them if you make apartments (although Cyjon (http://drupal.cyjon.net/node/42) has a mod to make regular townies live in empty apartments instead of social group townies).

I followed all these instructions to a T, and all went great until I decided to batch create a set of downtownies for my new hood. I ended up with 30, which wasn't bad, but 15 of them were duplicates, I had 5 sets of 3 sims with the same look just different name. 

Anyone have any clues as to why this might have happened? It's sure a first for me. As I was creating a new hood I emptied out my downloads folder save for the 3 hacks that were mentioned in the first thread. (The hood was initially completely empty of sims, clean templates yadda yadda).

It doesn't look like any harm has been done, and those 15 sims now are in my latest cemetery- still, be nice to know for future reference.

That happens a lot with me too.  I would assume it's because downtownies are based on premade templates.

It is. The game doesn't check to see if it's already used a template, so if you're unlucky you can end up with quite a lot of duplicates (or even triplicates or more). I always used the townie tree/gun instead and made them one by one, saving between each and exiting the lot without saving if I got a duplicate (DON'T just discard them, as the game will leave a stub file in your neighbourhood). Tedious, but I think it's the only way to avoid doubles.

Also, quite a few of the downtownie templates are based on the broken face templates 21 and 25, and having Argon's fix in won't help that. Be especially wary of Face 1 looking teens.

Where do I get, or how do I make an 'empty version' of it?

Sorry if it's been asked before.

Have you tried, you know, looking around a little bit? Like say... stickied threads... very close by...

I am currently over a year into my clean custom neighbourhood, and it's working fine, no new townies or NPC's added without my say-so.

However! I have just installed University and am having trouble with the spawning of tonnes and tonnes of secret society members. I have nossrespawn hack to limit this, but so far it has created about 20 ss members.

Does anyone know the limit at which the game will decide that it has enough? Is there a limit at all, or will it just keep creating more and more of them?