More Awesome Than You!

I was just reading older posts about the First Born Effect and I just had a tiny little question.

People seem to recommend either using the Lot Debugger or refreshing in CAS in order to circumvent the effect.
But nobody seems to have mentioned just simply saving during the birth, birthing, exiting the lot without saving, and re-entering to get a new kid.
That's how I do it and I haven't had any issues. I get different personalities and such, just as you'd expect with the other two methods.

Is there something wrong with this particular method? Perhaps a potential gameplay issue of which I am unaware? Maybe the fact that you still have to birth the kid...?

How do you know that you get different personalities while the baby is still a baby without making the child selectable?

I prefer the Debugger because it seems less "cheaty" to me (and it works once per gaming session...very useful when I have multiple household birthing at once).

my understandng was that it's using a pre-randomized list of "random" numbers rather than generating based on time. If that's correct, wouldn't you just get the same effect, only using the second number on the list, rather than the first?

The method you describe is acceptable, but produces a relatively low degree of entropy, since saving and reloading by hand would only likely use the first few numbers of the generation sequence. This is enough to give you spawn with different personalities from each other, provided you always choose a different sequence number, but doesn't really SPIN the thing.

Well, I either make the baby selectable and check (then exit, re-enter, and do it again, just to be sure) or I age them up to toddler and check.
Or I don't check, play through the family and its next few births, then see whether any of them come out with the same personality.
The only time they do is if they pop out too quick and I miss my chance to save.


Yes. But I do the same thing for each birth, so I assume it continues to move right on down the list. Now if I forget, as I sometimes do, I'll end up with two siblings being entirely similar later on down the line (siblings 4 & 5 instead of 1 &2.)
Oh, I see. So continuing to do it for each birth should give me a different number, then?

If you reload N times for each birth, where N is the number of children already in the family, then yes you'll get a different result for each child.  You also have to watch the loading screen 2N times, once each reload to go to neighborhood and another time each reload to go to the house.  People who are fond of this method usually create their N random sims by going into CAS and clicking the dice button however many times.

Once or twice seems to do the trick. It seems as if the next child is always a copy of the one immediately before it, rather than of its eldest sibling. That being so, it doesn't seem necessary to reload based on the number of children in the family, as the sequence seems to start from the last born (maybe..??)

No, the sequence starts over from the beginning every single time you load your game up.  So if you go to the neighborhood screen without saving twice for each child and always keep the third version, you will have a set of identical children who are all at the #3 spot in the sequence.  In that case, you would only get non-identical children if you had twins, in which case the second twin would be type #4 for your breeding couple.

i think something changed in seasons. ima twit and always forget to "spin" and ended up having to alter their personalities, but i think when hair and eyebrows started coming up different so did personalities.
*will go check simpe

ok, i just looked at the last 19 births, first three are from pets the rest are from seasons.
pisces, virgo, virgo, virgo, libra, capricorn, gemini, sagittarius, gemini, libra, gemini, aries, aries, virgo, sagittarius, gemini, aries, gemini, scorpio.
it appearently doesnt vary much, but all of these are single births from different households. each birth was a new startup with out going to cas. plus i have 3 or 4 more babies in waiting in other houses.

Seems silly to go through all that messing about when all you need to do is click the Lot Debugger.  I use this for all my births and it has created some interesting progeny.  Fricorith Tricou, for instance, married another sim who was highly playful like himself (they are both Pleasure) and although their eldest child took after them, the youngest is totally different.  He has only 2 points in Playful and literally the second he turned to child he was straight to the auto-study bookcase.  By the time he went to Uni he'd maxed-out 4 skills and almost maxed-out 3 more.  All he wants to do is study and he's always ready for his next exam almost as soon as he's taken one. He's as different from his parents and sister as he could possibly be.  I've also had kids who were ultra-neat when both parents were slobs and several who were extremely outgoing/introverted when both parents were the opposite.  I like this element because sometimes kids do turn out like that, but you have to go quite a way down the line to get these differences.  They don't tend to come unless the randomiser is in the twenties.

On the odd occasions I've forgotten to use it I always come up with a kid who's a carbon copy of one of the parents and I hate that.

When I first started playing, I had three sim kids with the same couple, who were both very, very nice.  All three children were identical Aries babies with only one nice point.   :P  I don't see anything special about children who are wildly different from their parents because that was my first experience with the game.

It would be nice if Seasons did fix this irritating bug -- sounds like we need testers.  Is anyone currently doing the 10 kids challenge?

Oh, alright, I see. I usually play rather large families during a single session of play, without ever exiting the game. If I'm playing through one session which produces, let's say, 5 babies,no twins, then what should I be expect? That's with saving during the birth and re-loading the lot once or twice. Would that type of play be responsble for the non-identical children that I've seen so far?

Whatever the case may be, I've probably misunderstood something. So I'll have to check out my game again. Although, given what I've read so far, it does seem to be a lot less troublesome to just use the other methods.

when you are starting each gameplay session the first baby will always be a virgo. the next one will always be an aries, next is cap., so on an so forth. if the first birth is twins you will have virgo/aries not a virgo/virgo. i only refrenced single births to point out that all the births i had were first born in each session, and therefore they should all be virgos. if you exit and save the same number of times for each birth then you will have the same problem as not "spinning" in the first place. in order to get a variety you would have to exit 1 to 12 times, but why would you want to exit 12 times seeing as the 12 exit would bring you full circle to virgo again.

at least i think thats what you asked, time and  blurry contacts work against me here. if its not, just ignore me, pretend i am talking to myself.

Before I started using the lot debugger, my sim kids were almost always Aries.  I think the personality of the parents does have some influence; I forgot to use the debugger once fairly recently and wound up with a Pisces.

If your sims give birth to all of the spawn you're ever going to let them have within one play session, you don't need to worry about the firstborn effect.  The sequence only starts over when you start your game back up.

So, wait, if I'm reading this correctly, merely the act of exiting and re-entering a lot, even if you have not rolled the lot debugger or random sims in CAS, is enough to cause the number generator to skip minimally ahead in its sadorandomistic sequence? How would exiting and re-entering multiple times be preferable to lot debuggery or rolling with the CAS homies?

Not. Using the lot debugger will reload once, any other method takes far more time.

We're responding to someone who is quitting the game without saving when a baby is born, as many times in a row as it takes until the baby has a unique personality.  Thus a new sim is being "created" and discarded a few times, just like rolling up a few CAS sims or using the lot debugger.

did you have seasons for this birth?

I've found the first born in a playing session (if I haven't rerandomised) will have 6 out of the 7 personality traits matching one of the parents.  They are not always Virgo, or Aries, or whatever, instead it's based on the personality of one of the parents.

I've been using the lot debugger to rerandomise since the functionality was added.  I've had simkids that are an exact match of one of their parents, or a combination of both, or wildly different.  I like the variety.

My first ever couple in the game (before uni and way before I had any mods in the game) were going for 10 kids.  They got to 9 before they were hit by the bug that wouldn't let them woohoo or TFB - known as the original jump bug.  Two sets were twins and the rest were single births.  Since every birth was the first in that particular playing session, I ended up with 7 sims with one personality and 2 sims with another - the second born in each set of twins were identical to each other.  I felt like they were raising the same kid over and over again.

/end random waffling mode

Oh, no I've been saving during the birth, exiting the lot, and re-entering to get a new kid (or what I thought was a new kid.) The same way you'd do if you wanted a different sex. It hasn't been necessary to do it more than once or twice but I seem to be mistaken as to what should actually be happening.
 A lot of my Sims do turn out as Aries, but not with the exact same personality as their siblings. I assumed that's because most of the Sims I created were Aries, and this continues to carry down the line.

No, this was in OFB.  But thinking back, it might have been an Aquarius -- I remember being relieved that it was one of the personalities I like playing, and not yet another Aries.


Not me.  My sim kids tend to have personalities more extreme than their parents.  My base game kid sims were born to sloppy, playful, very nice parents.  They all were very mean, very neat, and had no playful points at all.   ???   I think they were 10 neat, 10 outgoing, 9 active, 0 playful and 1 nice, while the mother had 7 nice and active; the father was some lazy, sweet-natured townie.


Saving during the birth, saving just before the birth, and saving three days before the birth will all work exactly the same regarding the issue we are discussing.  I would have been clearer if I had said "quitting the game without saving after a baby is born."  It's not until the "stand by, creating a kid" message pops up that anything is decided -- well, I suppose the data is created a few ticks after the message comes up, but before it closes.

Since this a baby talk thread...

I randomize after starting the game and all that. I get enough personality variety that it doesn't get boring.

I'm curious though about just how random gender is--totally random or is it weighted in some way? I've got a same sex male couple right now. I let ACR  have its way with them (or let them have their way with ACR) for awhile because it's a new mostly empty neighborhood and they had five kids in short order.  All five of them are boys, all single births.

It doesn't bother me at all. I kind of like having all boys in this family, they look like something out of Pink Floyd, all headed out the door in their private school uniforms.

I've had similar families before, with long runs of same sex children. It doesn't bother me at all, I've never exited without saving to get the other gender. It just makes me curious when they have a bunch and they all turn out same gender, because that can happen in real life. Some guys shoot more sperm for one gender than the other. My folks had seven girls and two boys (Catholic and before birth control so, Yeah, really.)

But I suppose that would be too realistic and awesome for Maxis to pull off.

edit: to clarify what I was a trying to say or something

The game tries to even up gender balance. It counts every sim - townies, NPCs, dormies etc. in the game when it looks to see what you need. Then it's sadorandom.

Ah, that would explain it for this family. New neighborhood, playables and my custom townies are pretty balanced at the moment--but nearly all the NPCs are currently female. I like the effect, though; makes it seem more realistic.

So it's not even that each birth has a 50% chance of being male and a 50% chance of being female? That would seem to be the logical way to do it. Maxis must have been overthinking and trying to figure out how to balance out a profusion of CAS sims of a single gender, or something, to make the game more "real," which ironically resulted in less realness. Typical.

This makes me wonder if KnightSkyeKyte uses the pregnancy-for-all mod and if all her sims' spawn are female.

No one knows. Maxis is very closed-mouthed about the issue, and it is difficult to perform any conclusive experiments on the issue. Furthermore, for reasons unknown, Maxis is also very hellbent on making sure that the gender-selection process CANNOT BE TAMPERED WITH IN ANY WAY. While it's possible to completely influence the gender of townies, through a simple control bit, this control bit is ignored for unknown reasons when run through the Baby Generator routine. We know it's POSSIBLE to specifically force the result, as CAS's baby generator allows one to specify beforehand, but for some reason, the in-game interface intentionally does not allow it. Clearly something suspicious must be going on.

Heh, in real life, there's a whole host of factors which can influence things, such as that Y-chromosome bearing sperm have less mass than X-bearers, as the X chromosome is larger and heavier. It is thus possible to bias the results through centrifugal sorting, as well as a host of other potential factors. The process is otherwise entirely the male's fault, though, so kings replacing their wives because they couldn't get a son were not going to get any better results.

Different types of assisted reproduction favour different genders, too.

Apparently male embryos tend to develop slightly faster than female ones, so they are more likely to be put back first.  Giving IVF pregnancies a greater chance of having a male baby.

However, if male infertility is involved, the scientists need to catch an individual sperm and inject it into the egg (ICSI), this swings the balance back in the other direction as the female sperm (that sounds wrong!) are easier to catch because they move slower.