Whoops! Yeah, I completely missed the important part of the question there. It's what I get for posting without being properly caffeinated. *facepalm*

I didn't even consider making a spawnable (making new words, there) templates as a possibility. If it IS possible, I'd be keenly interested myself. I hate doing the song-and-dance for my BV locals and I'm half tempted just to leave the damn things empty these days.

The information can be found in the clean templates discussion in the middle of the 23 pages here: http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/smf/index.php/topic,4306.250.html

From what I have discovered (someone please correct me if there is a newer method), the only way to generate new BV locals in the game is to make them CAS characters, make them townies, and then turn them into Vacation townies. There is a hack by Argon that will make the Vacation townies have the correct local information (so they can teach gestures and such.) Get it here: http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/smf/index.php/topic,9684.0.html

The method is described in detail on the threads I linked, but the short version will be to load your custom sims into CAS and make them a family, then get onto a lot and use Inge's shrub (or an alternative townie-maker) to townify them, and then turn them into Vacation sims with the NPC/Townie Maker object.

On my old computer, which hated anything and everything I ever ran on it more complex than a web browser, I eventually had all the expansions up to and including Seasons. My install order was funky... it was something like base game --> Uni --> Nightlife --> Seasons --> Pets --> OFB. My system performance remained about the same (albeit crappy) until I installed OFB. It made the game damn near unplayable for me. I don't know if it was OFB's fault, or just stacking it on top of everything else that did it, but I had serious performance issues after installing it. For reference, my old specs were a 1.2GhZ AMD processor, 896 MB RAM, and 128 MB video card.

On my new computer, I have all EPs and SPs save K&B, and on max graphics settings I have no system troubles. I'm sitting at 2.2GhZ AMD processor, 2GB RAM, and a 512 MB video card.

For neighborhood start-up, Pets and Seasons will both add some time to the load screen when playing a neighborhood for the first time, but should load normally after that. Winter in Seasons can be somewhat stressful when it snows, but you can change around the seasons how you like in a neighborhood, and remove winter if snowfall causes too much terrible lag. (Which I do anyway, because I freaking hate winter and its useless bonus.)

From what I've observed, Seasons is a lot more system-intensive than Pets. I've had six pets on a lot (on my old PC) with several Sims, and performance stayed the same even after I whittled down the pets on lot to two. I've also never noticed my lots with pets responding any slower than my lots without.

Individual mileage will vary. OFB was my personal downfall, but I'm guessing most people didn't have issues with it.

If you like animals and/or the notion of playing a simulated dog/cat breeder, Pets is a great addition. I like playing with breeding characteristics and I personally like animals, so Pets hasn't been a waste of hard drive space for me. If virtual animals aren't your thing, then the expansion is of debatable worth. Strays are highly annoying and require you to take some precautions to protect your yards (and are irritating regardless). Werewolves I haven't really gotten to test yet, but they seem more interesting than zombies and less high maintenance than vampires, so take that for what it's worth. But, really, if you don't put any animals into your households, you won't even notice Pets is installed until some stray comes and makes himself at home in your yard/garbage/front porch. (I highly recommend getting the cleaned templates to rid yourself of strays if you do get it.)

Oh, and I do believe it was the Pets expansion which added the option for Custom Paintings on the easel, which allows you to add your own artwork into a folder and have Sims paint it in-game. I play a lot of artist Sims, so I love that option to bits.

On the SPs, I know nothing about K&B. H&M is good if you aren't someone (like me) that downloads 8183491 pieces of custom clothing, because -- for EAxis -- a lot of the clothes added are decent, and are a definite step-up from the base game stuff. Celebration is something I "acquired" recently, and what tinkering I've done, I don't know how I lived without it. It's possible make a presentable weddings and birthday parties now. Teen, predictably, adds some new stuff for teens, though all I've seen so far are the new collections and furniture. I'll use it, I'm sure, but it's not something I'd say is worth buying.

Just my lurking two cents. Though I'm on the bandwagon touting Seasons as easily the best EP. It really does alter the whole game, rather than being a tinker-and-forget like most of the rest.

Thank you for the responses pioupiou and Pescado!

I've never heard of the simdna cheat. I think I followed your directions, but I'll find out when I go try it out and see what happens. It sounds useful, though! I did suspect that in correctly color-binned hair the genetic line didn't have a meaning, but I was hoping someone else had encountered this as well.

At least it's easy enough to start a Sim with Maxis hair and get them to a mirror first thing and give them something preferable. In the meantime, I can get to work on binning my custom hairs and checking them to make sure all the genetic information passes right.

I really don't know what's up with my eyes. I may do some research on how to make defaults and just hash together my own set. I'm afraid I'm not sure how to check the ones I have to be able to tell if they really did replace the defaults properly.

So, first, I'm having to drop my lurker status. I feel exposed.

I don't post much, as I've found that with enough googling and site digging I can find anything I want to know given enough time. However, after four hours of digging last night (intermixed with some "ooh, shiny" downloading impulses) I STILL haven't quite found the answers.

I discovered for the first time last night that custom bin hair only geneticizes itself. I already knew it didn't geneticize how it was supposed to, but I hadn't realized just how badly. I knew there was some mysterious way to color-bin it and fix custom hair for genetics, though, so I went internet diving.

A few hours later, and I'd figured out color-binning and genetics, and I'd even picked up some new skintones to add genetics to so I have a wide variety of possible skin tones in breeding, yay.

Now, the thing is when I looked at some correctly color-binned custom hair, the genetics said 0. Which means it's always dominant, right? So after suffering a minor breakdown to thing that I would not only have to fix the genetics on all my stupid custom-bin hair I have laying around, but my color-binned styles, too, I ran some experiments in CAS.

I used a Maxis black hair sim and bred them with a color-binned blonde and red custom hair sim. Now, with the Maxis genetics, black hair should dominate most of the time. However, both the custom hairs had a genetic reading of 0 -- which meant they should have dominated 100% of the time, no matter what, from my understanding. Instead, while I think the red/blonde hairs still appeared more than they should have, the black hair occured at least 60% of the time.

So, first question: are color-binned hairs automatically geneticized, regardless of what the genetics field reads? I found several posts inferring this was the case, but never anything that came out and said it as the posts always had to do with something else.

Next, I ran a custom-bin hair sim with a color-binned custom hair sim; for reference, the custom-bin hair was black (though God only knows what it was based on) and the color-binned hair was blonde. The offspring (predictably) had the custom-binned hair for about 10 results, then it switched to all blonde. I am confused. Now, this IS a custom-bin hair I attempted to geneticize, but hadn't thought I'd done correctly at that point; if I actually did do it right, would it really result in the first 10 offspring having the exact hairdo, though?

Then I tried a color-binned black-haired sim with a color-binned redhead and blonde sim. The results were about 50/50, so I'm suspecting my custom hairs (at least the majority) are being treated as dominant.

Now, I only did 15-20 rolls on these, so the results might not be 100% accurate. I just want to see if my genetics are at least working mostly how they should, as I know the genetics engine can be pretty damn random. (And by 'random' I might not random at all.) Because if I have something wonky going on, as I suspect, then I'm having to restrain myself from going on an Inquisition-style purge of every hair mesh and recolor I have and starting from scratch (which sucks, because I'm not too much of a downloading fiend, but out of my 1000 downloads, about 700 of them are hairs) so I can color-bin/geneticize as I go. I really don't want every hair color to be dominant where a brown-haired/red-haired sim is as likely to give birth to seven redheads as have a brown-haired child.

Oh, and as a side-effect of all this experimenting, I discovered my custom default eye set has every color labeled as dominant. (I figured this out because I had some custom blue eyes I had with a genetic reading of 2 for recessive, but when paired with my default green eyes, the blue never showed up at all. I also had a default-brown and default-blue set mixing, and they had 50/50 results.) I love this set to death, but there seems to be no way possible I can edit them, at least not in SimPE. Are there any suggestions for how I can correct the genetics, short of just making every color dominant (which I don't want to do) or, as an alternative, any good default eye sets with correct genetics? (I really don't want to switch to using geneticized custom eyes, because I generated all my townies with the custom eyes -- and I really don't want to go back to Maxis eye horror!)

Okay, that was a very very long-winded way to ask a few questions, which is why I rarely post. I talk too much.

Thank you for your patience. Halp!