Restocking your Neighborhoods

[Moonshires]

Okay, so after looking around here and quite a few other forums, I've yet to find a tutorial or even full answers/help to my question so, here goes...

If I create a new neighborhood, or use an existing one (such as Strangetown), and want to completely restock my townies, what exactly do I do?

I'm fairly sure I've worked out how to do it in the standard neighborhood; deleteallcharacters, create the people I want to be townies in CAS, and use Inge's bush to add them to the townie pool.

But..does that work with downtown, the university area (dormies), and the new shopping district as well?  If not, what would I do to make sure to only replenish those areas with sims I've created and then be able to add them to the pool?

Also, NPCs such as maids, gardners, headmasters, etc are all re-created on a 'need' basis by the game so I'm not able to create custom versions of them as per above, correct?

Any help would be very tremendously appreciated.

Edited to add: Also, do I need to tweak their skills or will the game auto-assign skills and such once I've put them into their respective pools?

[Motoki]

Hi, I actually got your PM, sorry I didn't get around to responding until now.

I've done it before, but it's been a while. There's a cheat you type in in neighbhorhood mode "deleteallcharacters". ONLY do this on a new neighborhood though because it deletes EVERYONE. Then there's a townie and npc generator you can use by running in debug mode (Oh no w00lprop1111oneoneone) and then holding shift and clicking on the mailbox. You may have to hit more and scroll through a few menus but it should be there.

I did see someone say that the townie and npc generator was broken in OFB but I haven't tried it to verify.

[Moonshires]

Heya, thanks Motoki.  Yeah, after I'd sent the PM, I'd thought of a few more questions so I figured I'd just go ahead and post instead of constantly bothering you with it.

And I'd read about the boolprop way to restock, but I meant to restock with just CAS created sims I've made, no more butt-ugly game generated townies for me...plus...some of their swimsuits and pjs/undies are just plain hideous.

[Motoki]

You can do it with CAS sims but it's a bit of a pain as you have to do it one by one. Inge has a teleporter shrub plus at simlogical.com that will teleport any sim to your lot and let you move them out into the townie household. The Insimenator has something similar with it's family tree spawned sectional. You can also move them to the townie household with SimPE.

The generator actually is not a bad idea IF you combine it with some of the face template total replacements. Then any newly generated townies will be based off the new facial templates not the old hideous Maxis ones. There's several face template replacement sets here in Peasantry and also at MTS2.

Finally, if you want to manually fix ever townies ugly face that's a possibility although tedious. I've done this with my one neighborhood. It was already established so I couldn't use deleteallcharacters so I gave every townie and service npc plastic surgery. It took a while too, heh. To do this you can grab them one you see them and make them selectable via 'boolprop', the Insimenator or Merola's Mind Control Mirror and have them use the surgery machine OR you can get the DMA appearance changer for the Woohoo sims pack at valdea.com. It looks like a burglar alarm but is read and can be found under miscellaneous miscellanous. It will let you "change facial" (aka plastic surgery) on any sim currently on the lot without having to make that sim selectable. Very useful.

If you do this, beware when marrying them into your sims as the DNA the pass on to the kids is not the new face but the old fugly Maxis one! There's a way to get around this, you can copy their new appearance DNA to their old in SimPE and there's a tutorial for doing this at MTS2 in the tutorial section.

[Moonshires]

...

I think I love you...or least, would be willing to raise your children as long as you had them with someone else first. 

Thank you so very much for the information.  Now that I know there are several different ways to do it and most can be combined, I'm very very pleased.  And I'll be getting that DMA appearance changer to use in my already established hoods so I don't have to start them from scratch.

Again, thank you so much!

[Nec]

The way I did it was I created a new neighborhood, exited the game, then deleted all the files in the character folder. Then I went back in, made 24 sims in total (all ages) in groups of 8 (or whatever you wish), and exported them as townies with Inge's shrub. Correct,  NPCs will generate as they are needed. Exit, and check your character files. There should be 24 or 25 at this point (if you made it to the newspaper delivery) The character file numbers should be in numerical order. Also, all files will be created at the same time, so you can just delete all the new ones if you sort by date. Then, you can make a downtown, exit the game, and delete all the new files in the character folder. Then make more sims, and export them as downtownies. With Uni, I made students, exported 2 at a time, and killed off the townie students that were the same gender.

Before exporting all of them, I randomized their skills with the skills adjuster from the Insiminator, and gave some of them a gender bias. I also made them all dance for at least 1 sim hour so they don't suck at dancing ! The only thing you really have to watch out for if you do this is that the NPC vampires will go bite crazy and bite everyone, even if you export your own vampires as townies. I use the vampire fixes by JMP so that doesn't happen.

FYI, the number of towies I recommended seems to be the typical number created by default. The first neighborhood I made, I used the boolprop cheat to generate NPCs and it made 52 files, and the original number of files I deleted was 87.

[Renatus]

Keep in mind that putting sims into the townie pool will only make them show up in the regular neighborhood - downtownies have a seperate pool. I'm not sure if Inge updated the shrub on Simlogical, but there is a version of it in Peasantry that has an option to "Make me a Downtownie". Works fine.

[Motoki]

The Insimenator also has an option (via the family tree spawned sectional I believe) to move a sim into the NPC bin. Or you can do this in SimPE. You do need to be aware that some NPCs (like the nanny) have extra code and simply moving an npc into the bin will not necessarily turn them into an NPC, but it's good in some situations like moving npcs in to plan their outfits or if you resurrect one as a zombie and don't want them in your household.

[Moonshires]

Just wanted to let everyone know that after looking through all the face templates, I've mixed and matched them, then started a brand new neighborhood, letting the game generate the NPCs.

I'm loving it.  Not all of my sims are gorgeous, but none of them are so hideously butt-ugly that I feel a need/want to have them take up residence in local cemetary.   

Thank you everyone for your help and suggestions!

[Motoki]

That's kind of what I go for too. I don't want gorgeous, just somewhat realistically proportioned and not cartoony or completely outrageous looking. I don't even mind ugly if it's not a phony characiture cartoony ugly like the Maxis sims are.