How many residents does my town have?

@PalmArrow Nraas>MC>Demographics >Population, hit the check mark, click all, and should get the breakdown of households, residents service etc and can just add those up. Not sure how to get a total other than adding those up.

@PalmArrow When I want to check my population I do as @bekkasan says but I don't hit the check mark, I hit the cancel (X) and then it shows me the breakdown of the population.

@bekkasan , Nraas>MC>Demographics >Population was exactly what I was doing but it just gives me a list of names of everyone in town! I will try and see what happens if I hit cancel instead as @Mikezumi suggested. Many thanks to both of you for answering!

Bit late to see this thread and the page into it, and yes "X" to dismiss the filter is the way to do that. You can also get a helpful reading on lots usage by doing Nraas > MC > Demographics > Lots > "X" to dismiss, but sometimes actually empty lots show up as regular unpopulated ones because there is an object on the otherwise empty lot someplace and the game is seeing the vacant lot as not really empty.

And now a required word of warning. I love crowded worlds myself, but overcrowded worlds beyond a certain point are bad, 'mkay? How much overcrowding a world can tolerate depends on the world itself, its design, and the player's system. But to take Sunset Valley as an example, I would never want to see more than 180 or perhaps 200 residents there, performance would suffer and Error12s would be around every corner. Other worlds are smaller or have less usable space to begin with, some can withstand much more. I've taken Riverview up as high as 275. But a world, any world, with "a million bazillion" residents would not be playable, especially so if StoryProgression is in use.

We once had a regular member at NRaas, seems he's since moved on from the game, who for years played his worlds with upwards of 800 residents. But he had a system to play on that would be the envy of most medium-sized country's defense departments, his worlds were I believe custom designed by him, and he spent almost as much time servicing his game files to keep things moving and under the 32-bit 3.7 GB RAM usage restriction as he did actually playing the game. For him this was fun, for others it would drive them crazy I'm afraid. :/

@igazor , thank you very much for answering!

I worded my OP about a million billion zillion residents flippantly, but i'm aware that too many residents will make my game unplayable. I regularly cycle between playing at least five or six different saves, each with a completely different playstyle and goal. In this particular save my main goal is to observe the population of Sunset Valley through generations, like a mad scientist growing a tiny civilisation in her lab. I'm interested to see how large it can grow, and I've accepted that this will cause problems at some point and then the save will end. In my regular saves SP is off more often than on, and I don't use up all the available lots, let alone add new ones.

@bekkasan , @Mikezumi ans @igazor , thank you again for your advice! I didn't know that clicking on the (X) could lead me to the information I was looking for! It looks like my town isn't going to explode from overpopulation yet, either:

https://i.imgur.com/kQwqsiJ.png

@PalmArrow I'm always amazed at how many service sims there are compared to the actual population! LOL

I had a population that looked very suspiciously like it had gone over 1000 resident sims once in Sunset Valley with over 300 students lined up and unable to enter the school after the door locked on the school for the day and that save got lost to corruption after Malcolm Landgraab got taken by the social worker after failing school.I had the EA bugfest on as I didn't know to turn it off at that time.
I play with story progression turned on though it's the NRaas version and my populations are a lot smaller and I likely have only a dozen service NPCs and no child abuse social workers unless you counted playable social workers.I also get very slow population growth as I play legacies in the 16th or 17th centuries and settlers of those towns would arrive slowly over time.

"Mikezumi;c-16685697" wrote:
@PalmArrow I'm always amazed at how many service sims there are compared to the actual population! LOL

I'm often surprised myself, as a proportion to the Residents. But the majority of them would never appear on-screen. The game by default keeps extras in the Service pools and the tally also I believe includes both human and pet sims waiting to be adopted, strays, and those in the equine breeding pool. Essentially "unused" Service Sims add next to nothing to the game's overhead, if we saw numbers over 1,000 there then that could be a different story.

@PalmArrow - Over half your Resident population are Adults and Elders. If you are running NRaas SP and below the population cap, if you have set a cap for this world, it will sense things are out of balance and should do everything it can for a while to foster pregnancies and adoptions. And then it will complain that it can't find anyone else to impregnate for you. :)

@igazor , I haven't set a population cap, and I've never seen SP complain that it can't find anyone to impregnate! :)
What SP does inform me of from time to time is that new residents would like to move in but there is nowhere for them to live, and then I always go into edit town and find a way to squeeze in one or two new houses.

What strikes me most about these figures is that I have 151 residents in 71 households. That's an average of 2.12 sims in a household, but so many houses in my town are equipped to house 6, 7 or 8 sims. I would like to join some of the smaller families together in large houses so that a few houses can be left empty, but every time I try that, SP separates them again almost immediately. Is there a way to join households and ensure that they stay joined?