After some trashing around over in the Indie Stone Mod thread, with some code insight by Lemmy about how ISM's new "immigrate from Bin" feature works, I think I *might* know the answer to a degree. But I'm still waiting for confirmation.  I still think a lot of people use "the sim bin" to mean totally different things. It probably made sense in TS2 but in TS3 it's just confusing to newcomers to the genre like me.

So with that preamble, I'm fairly certain, unless someone comes along and schools me, that "the sim bin" is really the "Household Library" in TS3.  By that I mean the first tab of the window on the lower right when you enter Edit Town mode. These households by default are a bunch of EAxis-created households of varying sizes. But as you create new sims in CAS and click the checkmark, they end up here as single-sim households.  And if you make custom households of multiple sims in CAS and click the checkmark, then they of course end up in this Household Library too. Finally, if you download any household .sims3pack files from the Exchange or whatnot and install them via the launcher, they end up here too.

All of these single- and multiple-sim households in this Household Library are physically stored as those .package files in the Library folder mentioned above. The ones with all the long resource names.

It's this Household library from which all the Doppelgangers appear. At least, they do if you haven't enabled the relatively new AwesomeMod option called "No Duplicate Names" or something like that, which aims to prevent Doppelgangers, at least ones that have the same name as the sims in the household in the Household Library.

It's also this Household Library that forms the genetic pool for the new Indie Stone Mod feature "immigrate from Bin", in case you're interested.  I think all they're doing is overriding the default behavior to pull households as-is from that library and instead grabbing any 3 sims at random (from among all the households in the library) and creating a second-generation child of sorts from the three randoms to immigrate into the game instead. So the sim actually immigrated into the game would be the first-gen product of two out of the three mated with the third to produce a second-gen progeny fully grown to whatever target age and then immigrated into the game. Kind of a neat and simple math trick in the code to prevent a bunch of lookalikes and namealikes from showing up in your town ala typical EAxis crapcoding, while giving you a small degree of control over the genetic diversity of your town population.

You want to evict a household from a lot so that you can either bulldoze it and put a different lot there, or you just want to hand place a different household in that lot (via Edit Town mode), or you want to do an in-game cellphone > Move into the now-empty lot.  Here's how (pretend the following bullets are a numbered list):

• Edit Town
• Change Household if necessary so that your current household is *not* the household you are about to evict from their lot. Strange things happen if you evict the household you're currently controlling. If you do need to change households, go back into Edit Town mode before continuing.
• Select the household that you want to evict, and in the household properties window that appears, click the Evict button. When asked whether to bring the lot too, choose the option that says Household Only. (Otherwise, you'll be stuck with their house lot too and will be constrained to only placing them on an empty residential lot.)
• The household you just evicted becomes a transparent white box in the upper left of your Edit Town window. This is called "the clipboard".
• Click that box and a household properties window opens for them. You now have a choice: either you delete them from your town or you place them in another household:
  
  • To delete them entirely, click the Delete button.
  • To place them in another household, click the Place button. They'll have a lot of money from "selling" their old home (don't ask me why they get all this money when you "evict" them, but hey, there it is), so you shouldn't have any trouble placing them in some unoccupied lot. After placing them and you're back in the game out of edit mode, you can optionally use the familyfunds command to reset their net worth to something you think is reasonable.

(Note: the title of this post is tongue-in-cheek. IRL I have lots of empathy for the increasing numbers of homeless in every city and town.)

Okay so you've used the listhomeless command and been horrified to learn that there are several named families running around homeless in your town, and a whole bunch of "NPC" homeless too.  What can you do about it?  Two things:

• You can just kill them outright with the destroyalltownies command. This will kill only the named households shown in the listhomeless report, and won't affect any of the homeless NPCs.
• There is no harm in letting the NPC homeless live, but if you really want to kill them, you use the destroyallnpcs command. This won't affect any of the named households shown in the listhomeless report
• You can try to force the named households to move into an unoccupied house with the runstoryaction Move In Household command. This won't always work, however, so you might have to kill the ones that this won't work on. This command won't affect the homeless NPCs. And this command might require some setup and futzing around to make work successfully.

Alright, you don't want to just kill your named households who are homeless, because you're a soft-hearted schmuck and can't stand the thought of cruelly gassing them to death.  How exactly do you force them to move into a household? As follows (pretend each of the following bullets is a numbered step. No clue why this forum has no bbcode for numbered lists).

• listhomeless, then write down their name, number of members, and net worth in simoleans (or just file the info in yer eidetic memory banks).
• Edit Town and look for an unoccupied house that contains a number of bed slots equal to or greater than the number of members in the household. It helps to select a house, then go into Build/Buy mode so that you can actually poke around in the house and count up the number of bed slots.  If you suspect the homeless family might have a pregnant women or an infant, you might want to plop a crib into the house while you're already there in buy mode, but you can come back and do this later if need be.
• Once you've found an unoccupied house where they should fit with enough bed/crib slots, write down how much money it will cost to move into, then leave Edit Town mode and return to the game. (Sometimes I've seen problems trying to use all the subsequent commands while still in Edit Town mode).
• If the household's net worth is less then the cost of moving into the house, then enable testing cheats (testingcheatsenabled true) and then enter familyfunds [househouldname] [amount] to give them enough funds to afford buying the target house. So if they are named Alto and the target house costs $85,000 and they have only $20,000, you'd enter familyfunds alto 90000
• listhomeless again to doublecheck that the familyfunds command succeeded and they really have the amount of money they'll need to buy the house.
• Now enable debug commands (setconfig enabledebugcommands true) and then enter runstoryaction Move In Household. If this will work for your target family, you'll see a success message. If you don't get a success message, try double-checking all the conditions listed previously, and especially check that a crib or two is in the target house in case you've got preggers/infants in the homeless family. Then try all this again. If you still can get a successful result, you're gonna have to gas 'em with destroyalltownies
• If you have more than one set of named homeless households, you rinse and repeat this process until they're all placed or you find that they cannot be placed at all.

Getting rid of the dopplegangers is easy enough with AwesomeMod. The trick I'm trying to learn now is how to prevent them from happening at all. I'm pretty sure the Exports folder is okay and the .sims3packs in there can be left alone, and controlling what's in the Exports folder is useful as genetic seed stock for the new genetic immigration feature of Indie Stone Mod. Very cool idea.

I'm also pretty sure that the SavedSims folder is the vaunted "sim bin" but am checking here to see if someone in the know can confirm before I go mucking around with it. I'm also not sure whether the files in there are indexed and need to be deleted from within the "Premade Sims" section of CAS, or whether it's safe to just delete the .sim files directly from the folder itself.

What I'm not sure about is whether any of the households created in CAS (or installed from a .sims3pack) in the Library folder have any effect on the immigration pool or not. For example, if I leave the Reapers household (all the sims from Dead Like Me) sitting in the Library folder, will the game eventually immigrate a new household using all the sims from the Reapers household sitting in the Library?  If so, I want to delete such households from my game too. Although I am pretty sure that the only safe way to delete custom households like this is via the Edit Town UI.

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Okay so to delete a doppleganger that does make into your town, you need AwesomeMod running and you need a house that is cheap enough for the doppleganger to afford moving into if it's currently homeless. The trick is to get the doppleganger into a house all by itself, then use Edit Town mode to Evict that sim from the house, then click the sim in the Edit Town clipboard, then click the trashcan to delete it for good from the town.

The hard part is finding the doppleganger. It might be homeless (use AwsomeMod's "listhomeless" command to see whether this is the case). Or it might be the named owner of a household (look at all the household tags in Map view or Edit Town mode to see). Or it might be a roommate of an existing household with a different surname than the doppleganger, and in this case I think the only way to find out is to use Edit Town > Change Household to examine every household on the map.

Since AwesomeMod enables you to split a single person from a household regardless of their age, if it turns out that the doppleganger is a roomate of people that you don't want to evict too, then use Edit Town > Split to move the doppleganger into it's own cheapo starter home, and then you can Evict it from the starter household.

Hmm, I guess I wasn't super clear in my original question, but thanks for answering what you thought I was asking.

I'm trying to figure out which of the following folders is used by the story progression engine to "immigrate" new sims into the town. One (or more?) of these is generically referred to as "the sim bin", which is holdover terminology from The Sims 2. My goal is to figure out from which of these three potential folders I need to remove specific files to ensure that I don't end up with dopplegangers in my town. For example, if I download and add the Stackhouse household to my game and then want to ensure that there are never doppleganger Stackhouse sims created through immigration, what do I delete? Likewise if I add Rose Tyler and The Doctor manually as individual sims: how do I ensure that no additional doppleganger Roses and Doctors end up in my town? From which folder should I delete them?

All this is complicated by the fact that the Exports folder is specifically used by Indie Stone Mod for a special type of genetically-directed immigration mechanic (for when I'm testing ISM).

Okay so to list the facts and terminology as i understand them. Which of these is "the sim bin"?

• The SavedSims folder (My Documents\Electronic Arts\The Sims 3\SavedSims) is where all the single sims that you *save* from within CAS show up. It's also where all the .sims3pack files that contain single sims only that you install into your game via the game launcher show up. In other words, if you put a .sims3pack file in your My Documents\Electronic Arts\The Sims 3\Downloads folder (either manually or by downloading from the Exchange), and then you use the Downloads button on the launcher to install that sims3pack, the resulting installed .sim file ends up in SavedSims.
• The Library folder (My Documents\Electronic Arts\The Sims 3\Library) is where entire households (not single sims) are placed, whether you manually built the household in CAS or whether you downloaded and installed a household .sims3pack. The files created in this folder are named with long resource-style names and there's no easy way to figure out which file relates to which household name unless you keep manual track when you create each household. I'd be afraid to manually delete any of these particular package files because they might be indexed somewhere, so I always delete them from within the Edit Town interface. The Library folder also seems to be the place where custom lots that you download and install from a .sims3pack end up too.
• The Exports folder (My Documents\Electronic Arts\The Sims 3\Exports) is where all the single sims and households that you "share with others" ends up. Each exported file is in .sims3pack format. Both single sims and households end up here.

I know that when immigrating new sims into the town (via the story progression engine), the game will randomly "grab sims from your sim bin", resulting in dopplegangers of your own created sims showing up in town suddenly.

I get this, but I don't get what folder is "the sim bin". Is it the Saved Sims folder in the My Documents path?  If so, is it safe to just delete the .sim files directly from that folder, or do you need to delete them via the in-game CAS function where you're looking at your custom sims?

Ah, yes that makes sense. Sorry 'bout that

To answer the OP's main question, they're talking about it over on Mod The Sims in the Modding Discussion forum, but I don't see how such a thing could really be accomplished other than by careful coordination between two core modders ala the comment I posted up above. Pescado explains behind the link why it's even possible to consider that AwesomeMod and ISM might be adapted to play nice together. This possibility won't exist with every core mod.

Well except that Pescado is in fact working with the Indie Stone guys to see if there's a way to make AwesomeMod and the Indie Stone Story Progression Rewrite mod play nice together.  Hit the link and scroll down to see what Pescado says about it.  No promises!

http://www.modthesims.info/showthread.php?p=2685311#post2685311

They will if you subsequently force them to move into a house they can afford (and which has enough slots for them) by using "runstoryaction Move In Household". You need to have EnableDebugCommands = True for that to work though.  I did it just last night to the one homeless family that was in my game.

Thanks, that explains the why. Her game must have done the deed before she got the AwesomeMod version that prevents sims with duplicate names from being created.

Question is, how do I find the clone and nuke it? I'm afraid to use console commands on her to do something like force a move-in or whatever because it might do something bad to the instance I want to keep.

Is there a way to target a specific instance of a sim and wipe them from the face of my town without affecting another sim of the same name that I want to keep?

My wife imported my sim into her game, plopping her in a different household. My wife's Sim is Karasu Mfume and her household was the Mfume household.  So she makes friends with my imported sim Fushi Greywalker, who's in her own Greywalker household right after import.  After a day or two, she asks Fushi Greywalker to move in with her and Fushi Greywalker accepts.

So they've been living in the same Mfume household for a couple real-world weeks now, and they are engaged but not married. So Fushi Greywalker is still her Sim name, but she's living in the Mfume household.

When I do ListHomeless in this case, the Greywalker household appears as a homeless sim with $50,000, which is the amount that my wife motherloded here when she first imported Fushi.

----

Now I did a mirror image thing in my game, where I imported my wife's sim.  Both sims have different last names just like in my wife's game: Fushi Greywalker and Karasu Mfume. The only difference is that Fushi Greywalker was the original household and she eventually asked Karasu Mfume to move in with her. As in my wife's game, they're only engaged at present and have been living together for several real-world weeks.

----

So any clues why her game thinks the imported and then moved-in sim is "homeless" but mine doesn't?  Is there a way to use cheat/debug commands to find and zoom in on a specific named sim so that I can try to figure out whether she somehow managed to make two copies of Fushi Greywalker in her game, and one of them is roaming around homeless somewhere?

Then again, as Pescado states, the above hygiene practices might have the same weight as knocking on wood. Go figure.

What finally brought the Voodoo Crash completely under control for me was the folllowing hygiene steps:

1. Every time I change/add any package to the game, I always delete all four *Cache.package files before firing up the launcher. This practice alone has made it so that no voodoo crashes have happened for me since I started doing it.

2. What also worked for me before figuring out #1 above was to simply flip the state of the enablescripterror.package.  If the Voodoo Crash occurred, I'd just remove that package if it was present, or add it if it wasn't present. This would always stop the Voodoo Crash for that particular combination of mod packages.

I am now full of learnings and gratitudes

Perhaps I'm stating the obvious and you already know this, but this problem is easily fixed by installing Falcoknight's enhancements of HP's skins.  http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/smf/index.php/topic,15523.0.html

I have searched every string I can think of globally across all the forums here, but I can't find mention of something I'm sure I read something before about other people reporting this here. I vaguely recall a reference to "the star people" problem. But damned if I can find it again with any search of this site.

So I just started using ListHomeless to see whether I need to do any manual cleanup (giving them money, trying to force a move in, making sure there are enough empty houses with beds, etc.). But I see only 2 people with a named household ($20,000) and 35-ish people with the household name "NPC" and only $5000. What's the deal with those "NPC" people listed by ListHomeless?  Is it save to nuke them? And how?  I look all over the map and every sim I find out in public is named.

Help a brudda out here with some learnings!

The forum software here lies; I cannot actually edit the OP in this thread despite the forum teasing me and making me think I actually can.

So quick correction to the preceding: After further testing, it seems that AwesomeMod is not responsible for the 8-hour default meal buff duration; that's default EAxis behavior, and as with many other shitprogramming/shitQA issues that made it past release and the first game updates, EAxis made the Dirt Defiant reward extend the Squeeky Clean buff from 7 hours to something like roughly 26 hours, but they neglected to make the Hardly Hungry reward extend the Good/Great/Excellent Meal buffs from 8 hours to something reasonable.

If Pescado ever decides to add some intelligent handling of the meal buffs (only Sims with Hardly Hungry get the duration upped) to AwesomeMod, you can yank this mod from your arsenal. In the meantime, I think it makes having Hardly Hungry worthwhile.

+++ What This Mod Does

This mod increases the duration of the "Good Meal", "Great Meal", and "Excellent Meal" buffs from the default 8 hour duration of AwesomeMod's "MotivePerkRebalance" option to either a 24- or 36-hour duration depending on which package file you install.

You should generally install this mod only if you have already taken (or plan to take ASAP) the "Hardly Hungry" lifetime reward on the Sims that you actively play most often. Nothing bad happens if you don't have Hardly Hungry on a Sim; the net result is an uber permabuff for the meal buffs on every Sim that doesn't have Hardly Hungry.

A weakness in both the EAxis default game code and in AwesomeMod's current "MotivePerkRebalance" option is that the default duration for the meal buffs is not dynamically increased at all when you take the "Hardly Hungry" lifetime reward. The net result is that you suddenly end up with many many MANY hours when you are running around without this very nice buff. So to keep these good meal buffs active most of the time, you must manually feed your sim when they're still practically full, and thereby risk stuffing them to the point of weight gain, especially if you're using the AwesomeMod options that don't allow your Sims to rebound from bodyshape changes.

NOTE: Pescado might eventually update AwesomeMod to compensate his default 8-hour meal buff duration from the "MotivePerkRebalance" option when you give Hardly Hungry to a Sim. This would be useful if he can apply it intelligently on a per-Sim basis. This mod is a blunt instrument workaround to make Hardly Hungry useful and desireable in the meantime. You should remember to yank this mod if Pescado ever updates AwesomeMod as I've described. Remember, your active Sims that don't have the "Hardly Hungry" lifetime reward will essentially be permanently meal-buffed when this mod is installed (but your Sims that do have Hardly Hungry will have useful buff durations).


+++ Which Package Should I Use? the 24-hour one or the 36-hour one?

Once you take the "Hardly Hungry" lifetime reward, your Sim will go for 48 hours before it becomes hungry enough to autonomously eat again. So choose the package that gives you the amount of unbuffed time before your Sim will auto-eat that you feel gives you the best gameplay value. The following list can help you decide:

Decay rates when you have the Hardly Hungry reward:
* By 24 hours after eating, the motive bar for hunger will be at the 66% mark.
* By 36-hour after eating, the motive bar will be at the 50% mark.
* By 48 hours after eating, the motive bar for hunger will be at the 33% mark,
  and the Sim now has a high chance to autonomously eat.


+++ What Might This Mod Conflict With?

This mod is a simple XML tuning of the Cooking_0xdfd048952e802db0 resource from the GameplayData.package. Therefore, it can only conflict with another mod that uses the same resource.

* This mod is compatible with AwesomeMod as of 7-July-2009. Pescado does not not use the same resource, and his
  custom logic to handle the "MotivePerkRebalance" option does not conflict with the XML tuning in this mod.
  IMPORTANT: This non-conflict might change in the future so keep your eye on further changes that Pescado
  might make to MotivePerkRebalance, and yank this mod if he mentions that he's now dynamically compensating
  for Sims that have the "Hardly Hungry" lifetime reward.

* This mod is compatible with Czezechael's "Faster Cooking Slower Eating" mod. None of his packages from
  that mod use the same resource.

* This mod does not conflict with any mod I see listed on ModTheSims as of 7-July-2009


+++ Installing This Mod

Hopefully you know the drill, but just in case:

1. You must have a mod framework for TS3.

2. Copy only ONE of the packages in this zip file to your ../Mods/Packages folder.
   Install both and TS3 go boom.

3. It's always a good idea to delete all four *Cache.package files from
   your ../My Documents/Electronic Arts/The Sims 3 folder when you add
   any new mod to your environment.

+1

Second that.  I've tested for certain that if you just tell both sims to Relax in Bed, once they're relaxing you can tell either of them to initiate WhooHoo. It's possible they might need to be engaged or married (only tested this on engaged sims).