ARRRGH!! Sick of Blue Nurseries!!!

[ZephyrZodiac]

Well, my current neighbourhood has nearly forty households (some related) plus a few at Uni as the teens get their skills up and move there, it was an old, almost fubared hood which I revived and removed townies and dormies from manually, and has now reached 264 files (no Downtown actually added yet) and so far is running perfectly well, and there doesn't seem to be a problem with births all being one sex.  So my opinion, for what it's worth, is that adding a couple more CAS families won't drastically damage your game, but may well give you a better boy:girl ratio with future babies!

[angelyne]

If you are interested Krystal, I have saved my families before playing them, so I have a clean copy of them.  I have a family of 8 unrelated girls, every one prettier than the other.  They all have default skin, hair and eyes, so whatever you choose as default in your game would be picked.   

I also have a family of 8 unrelated males, but I'm sure you don't want that !  Another family is 7 teens, 5 girls, 2 boys and an adult. I have named them the Brains, the Brawns and the Bambino family lol.  They formed the basis of my new townie population.

[Kristalrose]

Aww, Angelyne, that's very nice of you to offer.    I do pretty well making CAS Sims: it just makes me nervous doing it after I've had to start over from scratch twice already.  LOL  But thanks anyway. 

ZZ:  That's about the number of sims I have in this neighborhood, also.  I have 292 total residents, which includes downtownies and other Maxis-spawned sims.  I have been keeping the population down because I want to see this one go past the 3rd generation, something I have yet been able to do.    But, yeah, one or two CAS families wouldn't hurt.  Just didn't want to go there.  I created two UNI students over the weekend and moved them into the dorm with my present group of students, and so far they are making friends and seem to be fine.    Maybe tonight I'll make a new family with some little girls. 

[Karen]

I pause and save the moment the sim goes into labour, then reload if the baby born wasn't of the sex I wanted. If it's still the same results after a few tries, I use the lot debugger, re-enter lot, let the labour proceed a couple of seconds from the last save, then pause and save the game again. Repeat if necessary. That usually worked for me before the new family member message pops up, and I've had the good fortune of not being stuck with a baby of the wrong sex and having to re-plan future marriages .

I usually do the same thing, but occasionally I lose patience with the randomize/quit/try again cycle, after I do it half a dozen times or more without success.  I have resorted to "sex changes" twice now, when I kept getting boys instead of the girl I wanted.  It's actually not hard, if you do it when they are babies.  Go into SimPE and select the baby using Sim Browser.  Make sure the "Treat as male/female" indicator is set the way you want.  Save changes.  Now open the baby's character file in SimPE and sort the list by type.  Go into each of the "property set" records and change the gender flag to what you want it to be.  Commit.  When you go back into the game, the baby will be treated as the new gender.

Karen

[Swiftgold]

I usually let them have whatever comes up, though occasionally I've restarted if I had one gender in mind for a plotline, and it's never straight-out refused to change. However, I have run up against the so-called 'randomizer' in a stretch of girls, then boys, and then fairly recently a run of Twins for Everyone!!1! So, yeah, I'm not too impressed by Maxis' randomizer, though that's a known issue. *grin*

A couple times, when I've forgotten to save before the birth and I reaaallly want a particular one, I've gone so far as to delete the 'wrong' kid and do a hacked immediate delivery pregnancy so I can restart if I have to, but I don't do that often since it's a pain to edit all the telepathic memories of every relative

[C.S.]

I have resorted to "sex changes" twice now, when I kept getting boys instead of the girl I wanted.  It's actually not hard, if you do it when they are babies.  Go into SimPE and select the baby using Sim Browser.  Make sure the "Treat as male/female" indicator is set the way you want.  Save changes.  Now open the baby's character file in SimPE and sort the list by type.  Go into each of the "property set" records and change the gender flag to what you want it to be.  Commit.  When you go back into the game, the baby will be treated as the new gender.

Karen

Interesting. I've tinkered with the "Treat as male/female" indicator once or twice just for curiosity's sake, but have never gone as far as to mess with the property sets. That actually changes the sex of the baby?? It grows up looking like the opposite sex? Or they just behave like the opposite gender?

[Karen]

Interesting. I've tinkered with the "Treat as male/female" indicator once or twice just for curiosity's sake, but have never gone as far as to mess with the property sets. That actually changes the sex of the baby?? It grows up looking like the opposite sex? Or they just behave like the opposite gender?

The child grows up as the new gender.  Absolutely indistinguishable from babies born in-game the regular way.  If you turn the baby from a boy to a girl using this method, as far as the game is concerned the baby *is* a girl, period.  I've done this twice so far, and the two Sims are elder and adult now, respectively.  They look and behave absolutely normally.  You would never be able to tell they were born boys.

Karen

[Jorenne]

Wish I read this properly last night lol.  I was trying to recreate a sim last night so I had his parents pop out a couple of kids. Eight hours later they had 72 girls and not a son in sight.  Now THAT'S inbalance.

[C.S.]

The child grows up as the new gender.  Absolutely indistinguishable from babies born in-game the regular way.  If you turn the baby from a boy to a girl using this method, as far as the game is concerned the baby *is* a girl, period.  I've done this twice so far, and the two Sims are elder and adult now, respectively.  They look and behave absolutely normally.  You would never be able to tell they were born boys.

Karen

So, just by changing a few values in SimPE, they become instant transsexuals? No need to fiddle with facial structures or whatnot? Amazing!! Sorry, still trying to wrap my brain around this new information .

[Karen]

So, just by changing a few values in SimPE, they become instant transsexuals? No need to fiddle with facial structures or whatnot? Amazing!! Sorry, still trying to wrap my brain around this new information .

Exactly.  If you do it while they are babies, you don't even need to bother with the Change Appearance afterwards to fix their hairstyles.  They grow up totally normal-looking. 

Karen

[C.S.]

Wow. This is just... wow. Glad I followed this thread long enough to find this out. Thanks .

[Kristalrose]

Wow!!  I had tried this before, but I didn't change anything except "Treat as male/female".  The baby never did change it's gender.  I didn't know I had to change the property set values on the character file.  Very interesting.  River Valley will soon have some females! 

[J. M. Pescado]

That is so not right. I would not want to end up with some of your "ladies".

[Kristalrose]

ROTFLMAO!!!!

[BlueSoup]

Uhhh, JM?  I hate to have to break it to you like this, but my Self-Sim was born a male.  Hope you can get over this. 

[J. M. Pescado]

Maybe once I horribly kill your sim...

[BlueSoup]

Uhh, just kidding?  Yes, that's right, I was just kidding.

Please don't hurt me. 

[ZephyrZodiac]

If you simply treat your male sim as female, I would imagine he will grow up looking male and have a female voice and be able to have babies.

[Dark Trepie]

99% of my births happen at around 3 - 4 a.m. because I usually make my sims woohoo before then go to bed.  The moment the mother starts lifting the covers off of her and starts getting out of bed is when I save.  I've had a lot of success with this.  Some sims are more stubborn than some, but they eventually bend to my will.

If its a second birth I randomize the sim generator with the lot debugger as well.  I've had a few families that had kids who had identical personalities before, and that was just boring.

[Karen]

Here is a picture of one of my Sims who had a sex-change as a baby.  As you can see, there is no way to tell she was born a boy.

[ZephyrZodiac]

Well, it's odd, but the first baby I had in this session was born to two romance sims, one Taurus, one Aries, his adult kids are Gemini and Leo.  The baby is Pisces, which I didn't expect at all!  And he was born about ten sim minutes after the third bump (although she'd been wandering around the hood to remind me about her, looking as if she'd already got it!)  Dunno what to do with her now, though - she has 3 LBs for fiance (the father) and two for his son!  Guess another trip into SimPE is called for!

[C.S.]

If you simply treat your male sim as female, I would imagine he will grow up looking male and have a female voice and be able to have babies.

Hmm, can the sim be considered a hermaphrodite in this case ?

[ZephyrZodiac]

I know this, if you treat as female when  they're half of a gay male partnership, so they can have their own child, whereas before they may have had 2-3 LBs for each other, while the "female" one is "female" there are no LBs, although they'll still happily woohoo, and still get the hearts etc.  As soon as the birth is over, and you change them back, the LBs return!

[C.S.]

Ooh, learned something new again. Makes me wonder what happens if you neutralise the sexual preference of the male partner, then flirt with the 'female', which direction would he lean towards, and if that would bring back the lightning bolts? Do you know?

[ZephyrZodiac]

Oh, I imagine that would work - after all all the other turn-ons would be the same!  I just never thought to do it when I treated one sim as female.  The interesting thing, though, was how many Romance sims among their friends and aquaintances who were hetero-oriented suddenly got the hots for him!