Add "Manage Neighbourhood" - Control Townie Creation, Assign Your Sim as NPC!
Do you ever create a neighbourhood with a certain ‘theme’, but get frustrated as the game constantly generates new townies who do not match? Maybe you are recreating a certain country, such as Japan, and want all of your Sims to have names and appearances that match. Or maybe you are playing the History Challenge and get sick of editing the inappropriate Party Outfits of every new NPC. You might like to recreate your favourite movie, book, or game universe, using only characters who exist within that world.
With the current system, the Sims 4 generates new townies at every opportunity. These Sims often have very similar body types and faces (especially female Sims) and mismatched outfits. If you don’t mod out culling, these Sims create an additional strain on your population that gets worse with every new expansion or game pack and its slew of new NPCs. (Restaurant employee applicants, I’m looking at you.) Even those of us who play with MC Command can’t fully stop the generation of inappropriate townies, and editing them every day to make them fit the theme can be tiresome.
But what if you had the option to tweak the settings that govern the generation of NPCs?
I’m proposing a setting found alongside ‘Household Management’ called ‘Neighbourhood Management’. Certain NPC roles would be ‘Core’, and the neighbourhood could not function without them. These would include jobs such as Postal Worker, Gardener, Maid, and Librarian, and for expansion packs, they could include positions such as Ranger, Bear, and Food Critic, for example.
The system would be like that in Sims Medieval - when you placed a new building, you had the option to customise your own Hero, or use one that the game randomly generated for you. In the Sims 4, when starting a new save file you could have the option to do something similar for NPC positions within your town. That way, for Simmers who are happy to have the game generate random NPCs, it would be very easy to let this system continue. This would work best as the default setting. But for those of us who want more control over who lives in our neighbourhoods, we would have the option to customise uniforms - and even to make one of our own Sims fill these roles.
How would it work to have your own Sim assigned as the Postal Worker or other NPC? It would be very easy! This would be a ‘rabbit hole’ career. It doesn’t even need to have any levels - simpler than even the Part-Time jobs for teens. Inspiration for this system could come from the Sims 2: Open for Business; if your played Sim got hired as a retail employee, they went to work from 9 to 5 with no questions asked. And when your other Sims visit the library, or have their mail delivered, you have the option of seeing a familiar face doing this work.
Do you want Cassandra Goth to work among dusty tomes in the library? Or Geoffrey Landgraab to lose everything and wind up cleaning your toilets? With this UI change, the possibilities would be endless!
With the current system, the Sims 4 generates new townies at every opportunity. These Sims often have very similar body types and faces (especially female Sims) and mismatched outfits. If you don’t mod out culling, these Sims create an additional strain on your population that gets worse with every new expansion or game pack and its slew of new NPCs. (Restaurant employee applicants, I’m looking at you.) Even those of us who play with MC Command can’t fully stop the generation of inappropriate townies, and editing them every day to make them fit the theme can be tiresome.
But what if you had the option to tweak the settings that govern the generation of NPCs?
I’m proposing a setting found alongside ‘Household Management’ called ‘Neighbourhood Management’. Certain NPC roles would be ‘Core’, and the neighbourhood could not function without them. These would include jobs such as Postal Worker, Gardener, Maid, and Librarian, and for expansion packs, they could include positions such as Ranger, Bear, and Food Critic, for example.
The system would be like that in Sims Medieval - when you placed a new building, you had the option to customise your own Hero, or use one that the game randomly generated for you. In the Sims 4, when starting a new save file you could have the option to do something similar for NPC positions within your town. That way, for Simmers who are happy to have the game generate random NPCs, it would be very easy to let this system continue. This would work best as the default setting. But for those of us who want more control over who lives in our neighbourhoods, we would have the option to customise uniforms - and even to make one of our own Sims fill these roles.
How would it work to have your own Sim assigned as the Postal Worker or other NPC? It would be very easy! This would be a ‘rabbit hole’ career. It doesn’t even need to have any levels - simpler than even the Part-Time jobs for teens. Inspiration for this system could come from the Sims 2: Open for Business; if your played Sim got hired as a retail employee, they went to work from 9 to 5 with no questions asked. And when your other Sims visit the library, or have their mail delivered, you have the option of seeing a familiar face doing this work.
Do you want Cassandra Goth to work among dusty tomes in the library? Or Geoffrey Landgraab to lose everything and wind up cleaning your toilets? With this UI change, the possibilities would be endless!
