Killing off townies to make sims game load faster?

Seems like a sound theory to me. It's fun to kill townies anyway and it keeps them out of your way; I'm fairly certain they've all plotted against me to block my sims from getting where they need to be by crowding around every door. Gotta Thanos them every once in a while.

I use Master Controller to totally annihilate Sims I don't want. I recently opened a game that had become unplayable due to lag and error 12. It had started as an empty player made world. I added one overstuffed household to a huge building and put in lots of decor and objects. Then I added a second lot they owned across the street and gave them a huge garden. I assumed I had broken the game by putting too much into it but decided to get rid of a few from the household by annihilating them. But I chose the wrong commands and ended up with a very long list of every Sim living in the world that was not in my household. This list includes a massive number of stray cats and dogs and wild horses plus a huge member of Sims. I annihilated all but the grim reaper. Then the game added back the role and service Sims it needed. The game runs extremely smoothly now.

Edit. I think all of the Sims I got rid of would have been homeless as there were only 2 or 3 houses in the world

It depends on what we mean by "killing" sims. Killing digital creatures and just getting rid of them can be a few different things.

-- Arranging so a sim dies with a "proper" cause of death either by in-game actions or using a mod is okay (but sad). That leaves your town with a dead sim on its hands.

-- Evicting households from Edit Town and hoping they just sort of wander away should be okay, but don't be surprised if these sims show up again later, somewhere else in-game (not something that can be counted on).

-- Using NRaas MasterController to Totally Annihilate sims is okay. This doesn't kill them, it arranges things so it is as if they never existed in the first place and adjusts others' family trees and relationships so again it is if they were never there. Note that some family trees and relationships will become broken or at least change quite a bit if a mid-level related sim is TA'ed so that there is no longer a relationship between, for example, a grandparent and a grandchild. Typically for more safeguards I would suggest not TAing too many sims at once although players do have success with this when attempting to empty out entire worlds, and would strongly suggest having ErrorTrap in place (and of course Overwatch) to clean up any residual useless bits of data that might be left behind. Some of the cautions are probably more relevant to games that have already been played and progressed for a very long while as by then each sim will have much more data associated with them.

-- Testingcheats shift-click to delete a sim of any kind as if they were an object is never okay. That only deletes their bodies, their data will stay in the game and can cause all kinds of issues leading up to total game corruption.

There was/still is a myth propagating around that even properly getting rid of pre-made residents from EA worlds will somehow damage the ongoing game. This is not true. Certainly some worlds may progress differently if the Altos, Landgraabs, Crumplebottoms, Hemlocks, etc. are not there, but them not being in the world does things no harm. Not sure where this idea started, but it may have been one of those holdovers from TS2 if such things were to be warned against in that game.

@SPARKY1922 - If you meant Hank/Shirley, that's fine. You can all call me anything you want, except late for dinner (I think this joke is around 200 years old by now?) ;)

Pre-made sims are no different from newer or player created ones in this regard. Total Annihilation can be run from the Town menu on City Hall to potentially wipe out an entire world, individually directly on Sims (MC > Sim > Advanced) or on subsets of them at once like so many other MC commands. Yes, one can always revert to a prior save to make it so this never happened.

As for things about this game I do not know, yes there are plenty. I'm always learning (or relearning) things about the game when I do actually get to play it and even more so from reading threads and chatting with other players like right on this thread. That's more a testament to how much there is to this game and how deep it all goes in so may different directions, and why it still has such a strong appeal to so many players all with or still finding their own individual playing styles. :)

@Karritz - No, of course that's not supposed to happen. Sounds like NRaas Register's Animal Control wasn't working or you don't/didn't have the mod present. There can be quite a surprising number of animals showing up in the world who are never on screen though, the ones populating the slots for adoption and at the Equestrian Center for breeding if you have one are all considered Service Sims as well as the strays we do occasionally see on-screen. These sims don't typically add anything measurable to the game overhead though, they are usually just tiny (furry) bundles of data waiting to be called upon someday. Sort of like the somewhat less furry taxi, school bus, and carpool drivers. They are sims, but they aren't really doing much in our games and can't be interacted with.

But I have to admit I would be tempted just for a moment to turn my game into some version of Animal Farm where the animals take over everything and push the humans out. Just look at the mess we humans have made of this planet, the animals in charge can't possibly do a worse job. o:)

@igazor I do have Register (I just checked) but I've never looked at Animal Control.

The world I was using is Chocolate Cake Island. It comes empty - with only a few rabbit holes and 1 or 2 houses. I have a Big Game where I started with a family of 15 children and their parents and I added sims from my library until it grew too big to have in one world so I ended up taking your advice and learning to use Traveler to move sims to a variety of worlds. As a result I now am up to generation 4 of that game and there are babies, toddlers and children who are first cousins who have never met each other.

For a few years I've been adding a boarding school to my worlds where I place a few young adults who are responsible for training the toddlers, children and teens of the world including townies.

Then one day late last year I got a brainwave - boarding schools were messing up my worlds due to them being so overstuffed so I built a boarding school on Chocolate Cake Island and moved the toddlers, children and teens to it for their training. This means the cousins all get to live together in small groups and they get to know each other.

Then the supposedly empty Chocolate Cake Island quickly became unplayable. I thought I had too many in the boarding school even though I'd had more in other worlds with no problems.

In the meantime I've been making videos with other games and the one I'm working on this week is the story of Oscar and Louise. I did a few chapters on Louise growing up in Riverview. I plonked Oscar as a Young Adult in Hidden Springs and said he'd had a tragic past. He started out in a loving large family and due to a tragedy, as a child, he lost his entire family and went to live in different worlds until he ended up in Hidden Springs where he met Louise after she ran away from home in Riverview as soon as she aged up to Young Adult. The story continues with them getting married and having a LARGE family.

But - as this was going along I wanted both Oscar and Louise to have more genetic variety in their children due to them going to have so many of them. I'm thinking 15 or 20 or so.

To achieve this I needed Oscar to have parents in his family tree so I aged Oscar down to child and placed him in Erewhon and recorded some video. I managed to family tragedy and added a social worker sim (one of mine that I control) to take him from Erewhon to another world. Then I remembered my boarding school in Chocolate Cake Island. I wondered if I could somehow get him into it. Initially I just wanted the building.

But I sent the social worker to Chocolate Cake Island and back to Erewhon. Then I copied the Chocolate Cake Island nhd file from my Big Game to the Oscar's childhood save. Then I sent the sim back to Chocolate Cake Island. It took a bit of fiddling but I eventually managed to get them into the save and working. It crashed a few times in the process but in the end I finally got it working except for the lag. I decided to eliminate all of the current residents of the boarding school. This would leave Oscar there alone with his one social worker sim who had no skills as she was a new sims I made recently. As I was thinking of having to add children and others to the save for him to have some companions I decided to just eliminate a few of the current residents. The others could be treated as townies as they no longer had any connection to my Big Game. But their family trees are still there it is just the pictures are blank. I was surprised about that.

Anyway when I wanted to get rid of a few of the residents of the boarding school I used town hall for some reason - can't remember why now - and got Master Controller up and got a list of all Alive sims in the world. But that list excluded all sims in the boarding school. I was shocked at how many sims were there so I decided to get rid of them all. I was tempted to keep the few that had relationships of some sort with the household I was playing but then I decided to get rid of all of them as I was still planning on getting rid of all of the sims in the household too except for Oscar and his social worker.

I did know there were a lot of horses in the world though as I'd previously seen multiple small herds of wild horses. The lots are mostly empty and the horses were easy to spot. But I was shocked at the numbers of other animals.

Then I must have used their computer next and got the household up and at the last minute decided to keep most of the existing toddlers, children and teens as Oscar's companions. Easier than making more to take their places. And the ones who are already in the lot are mostly fully trained already. I just got rid of most of the townies from Barnacle Bay and one of the nannies - who I now think I should have kept but I didn't so she's gone. However, in the Big Game, which is where they all came from, they are all still there and will eventually be returned to their own families in the various worlds.

Of course, being me, I started thinking of moving their families to Oscar's save and over-complicating it as well. But I resisted - so far.

All I want this save I've just set up for Oscar is to get a bit of video of him at the boarding school then I'll age him up and send him on his way to another world and get a bit more video and then he'll travel to Hidden Springs where he'll meet Louise.

So that's the background to why I did what I did when I chose to annihilate the whole town.

When I get back to the Big Game I'll probably go into the boarding school world and get rid of the horses and strays as doing that seems to have made the world totally smooth with no lag at all whereas it had become unplayable.

Hi @igazor

Yes I was meaning Hank/Shriley as a little joke from the other thread but what do you know I even got one of those names wrong I am so Duh at the moment-) Dinner you have time for dinner :) I love your idea for animal planet I have just spent 5 hours discussing these sorts of issues about the planet and our place in it with friends tonight and we always go away trying to think up various ways we can do more but honestly I already think it's too late...we are our own worst enemies.. :/

@Karritz

I love reading about some of the things you try some of them I would never dream up so you give me ideas lol I am shocked at the amount of animals you mention as well as I am assuming it's these sort's of figures that cause so much lag yet we don't know about them.. :)

@SPARKY1922 I'm glad I can give you some entertainment. I never know what I'll try next. But - if you have master controller you can find and get rid of all those animals. That's how I did it.

"Chazzzy;c-16637043" wrote:
Yes but keep in mind whenever you do something new in your game and there isn’t a townie available for that job, the game will generate a new townie.

For example, if you go to the bar in Selvadorada for the first time if you have Jungle Adventure, the game needs bartenders, market vendors, tourists, etc. So the game will make new townies to fit those slots.

While I am sure that's true, perhaps you could have chosen a different example to use? This isn't the TS4 section of the forum, so we have to assume those on it are playing TS3.

In TS3, sims are generated to staff role giving objects like bars and cash registers whether our own sims (or anyone) ventures over there or not. They don't have to be residents though, and homeless NPCs do not add the same kind of overhead to the game that residents do. With NRaas Register, for those so inclined, one has more control over who these Role Sims are and which objects are staffed vs. allowing to remain unstaffed.

Or one could take away some or all the role giving objects. Newly started out worlds set in some colonial era centuries ago for example probably aren't going to have bars, restaurants, and shopping malls. That's why most of us with time machines in our bedrooms (oops, too much information) choose not to go back there very often. :p

@Chazzzy

lol I used to be the same when i started playing 2 as well as 3 forgetting what forums I was on-)