More Awesome Than You!

I am starting a new neighborhood and am using the NPC Maker tree to fill out the townies and NPCs, but I'm running into a couple of issues. The first is that the "Set Skin" option does not appear to be working at all. It took far too long for me to create a light skinned Grand Vampire because no matter how many times I selected "Lightest" from the menu, I kept getting dark-skinned vamps. The other options for age and gender are working without issue. The other problem is that all of the NPCs I create are using the Downtownie templates (heavy makeup, glasses, etc.) instead of the seemingly more random plain Townie templates. It's been quite a few months since I have played TS2 but I don't recall having these issues the last time I created a set of NPCs. Was I just unobservant back then or is this something that is new/broken with Pets and its subsequent patch?

Before you can properly use any of the "skintone," "age," and other options, you need to select Create Townies or Create Downtownies. Choosing the wrong option causes the tree to ignore all of what you selected and to just make random choices.

If you are creating a vamp and you see "Switch to making Downtownies" on the trees, you need to click on that first. A pop up will say something about "Now making Downtownies." Then you need to select all the options like skintone. And THEN create your vamp.

I don't know about your makeup problem. That only happens to me when I'm actually making Downtownies, which is why I always create townies and then make them downtownies using a shrub.

As of Pets, creating some NPCs also toggles the downtownie switch. If you continue to make NPCs after the switch has been flipped, they will be based on the downtownie templates, not random Sim templates.

Set skin/gender/age only works for individual Sim creation, not for batches.

That'd explain why my paper delivery kids were turning out weird, I noticed it eventually corrected itself once I moved on to make some other NPCs. The skintone thing is still being wonky for me though, sometimes it listens but most of the time it does what it wants. I've double and triple checked all the settings on the tree and the only one it isn't following is the skintone selection. I don't create in batches anymore, the last time I did I ended up with a neighborhood full of men in shorts and sandals. *shudder*

Is there a hack or gizmo that will make one singular Stray?

I think you can make a stray with the mailbox debug menu.

You can make single strays with the spawned tree as well.

Thanks for the info!