More Awesome Than You!

Since a lot of you are very wise and know a lot about the game I turn to you for this question.

Since I don't play Veronaville or Strangetown, I was wondering if there is way to have those pre-made townies in a custom neighborhood I create instead of always end-up with the ones of Pleasantview.

I know we can deleteallcharacters and with boolprop create new townies and NPC but since I don't play the pre-made ones in Strangetown nor Veronaville I thought it could be fun to have them in a custom neighborhood I make.

So is there any way to do that or is my best and only option is "deleteallcharacters"?

You can move any pre-made family from Strangeville and Veronaville, with their houses, to any custom hood you make. They will lose all their friends, but when I met them at the first time, they didn't have many - mostly enemies.

I build a special neighbourhood, named GruntVille, and moved there the Grunt family. I reached there 4th or 5th generation, without any problems. Later I added to them the Burbs from Pleasantview (after I moved them to a house).

The problem begin, if you marry a pre-made sim to a townie, or NPC, and then move their house to a new neghbourhood. Now the simulator will be puzzled, because there will be 2 Kaylyin, 2 Lucy, 2 Remington, etc, and it won't be able to decide who is who...:). And in this case you will get a lot of freezes, weird bugs, and even you will not be able to control the sims (grayed pointer).

Thanks for your reply but I should have been more precise.

I don't want to play the pre-made families in those neighborhood I simply want the townies and NPC of those neighborhoods, by default the game always gives me the ones of Pleasantview and it is kind of boring having the same ones over and over again.  So I was wondering if there is a way to have the townies and NPC of Strangetown or Veronaville when I create a custom neighborhood.

I can use deleteallcharacters and use boolprop to create new ones but it would be so much easier and less time consuming if I could have a way to use the ones of Strangetown or Veronaville instead.

Is there a way to tell the game to use the default townies of a pre-made neighborhood other than Pleasantivew ones?

Sorry, I don't use "deletecharacters", but:

You don't get all the townies of Pleasantview. In Strangetown are the same townies, but sometimes with different names, but the same face. For instance - in Pleasantview I have a teen named George McArthur, but in Strangetown the same face appears as adult, named Abhijeet Cho. I remember that in my custom neighbourhood Meadow Thayer didn't appear.

Usually, all the townies appear in different neighborhoods. That's what I have tested when playing.

I think the best way is to delete all characters, and let the simulator to regenerate new ones; it will be safer than moving townies from one hood to another (which you can do only if you move them in, tell the other sim to find own place, and then move the house to another hood. But then you will use the Insimenator to make them back townies - great "mish-mash"...:)

One possible solution might be to create the neighbourhood which contains the townies you want, then simply copy their files over to the neighbourhood you want them to appear in.  If they haven't interacted with anyone, they shouldn't bring any crap with them.  This doesn't work for established characters (I think because of the neighbourhood.package file), but it might work for townies.  Worth a try, but BACK-UP first!

What Ancient Sim said should work. Just make a new neighborhood, create one character, delete all characters. Then copy the character files over from your neighborhood. You just have to figure out what character # the one you made is, so if he or she is 0083, then don't copy over 0083 from Veronaville but copy the rest over.

Oh well it seems to be getting too complicated for no reasons now, lol.

I guess since I would create a neighborhood, which will be for example # N006, that I would also need to rename all the character files N006 for the game to work properly, and afterall I will still be stuck with the pre-made families I am not interested in playing with.

Well my best bet will be a "deleteallcharacters" and just be patient while the game create new ones.

Thank you all for your replies.

If you want, you can generate new ones all at once. That's what I do. There's a tool to generate them if you do boolprop testingcheatsenabled true in the console and then shift click on the mailbox.

I'm working from memory here so let me load up the game and check...

*edit: yep, it's the mailbox, shift click on it with testingcheatsenabled on, then do more and there's an option called DBG - FORCE Create Townies and another one called DBG - FORCE Creat all NPCs. This will take a few minutes, but it will get you a fresh set of new townies and npcs for the regular neighborhood.

University should automatically generate new (and quite ugly :p) ones when you hook up a uni to the main town and the default Maxis downtown with NL also already comes with downtownies, which in this case thankfully don't look so bad!

Oh I did that not long ago and delete them all including the downtown ones.  You can create townies and NPC for each part of the game actually there is a new option on the mailbox to specifically create downtown townie and NPC. You can also if you wish create all the University townie when you are actually using boolprop in the college neighborhood but if you choose to create NPC while there it will create a second batch of maids, gardener and none of the Unviersity ones.

I never was a big fan of boolprop but I started using it very carefully not long ago and find it way more easy to use than I thought.  I am no longer afraid of this tool, though I use it mostly to change the zodiac signs or create townies so far.

If you open a Command Prompt window you can rename a whole batch of files at once with the 'rename' command, because it works with wildcards.