Please give us a townie pool feature

I have found that setting likes for Townie Sims can help them to end up where I want them in the game. So for example I give some all the Mixology likes, Wellness and Fitness likes. I've found that I'm then more likely to see them teaching a Yoga class if I've given them Wellness related likes or at the Gym if I've given them Fitness likes. I've had mixed results with Mixology and Cooking likes for bartenders and hired caterers. But then there is a reported problem currently with bartenders carrying out their duties. I gave unplayed  Zoe Patel the Wellness likes as an example and she's now a regular at my spa doing treatments or teaching Yoga when she wasn't there before.

This is what makes a toggle worthwhile in game. 

Not everything in the game needs toggles but this!

Thanks so much for sharing your experience, simsplayer818​ ​ . I play on PC myself, so I don’t have direct experience with the limitations on console, but I really appreciate you explaining just how severe the Townie generation issue can get on that platform. I can only imagine how frustrating it must be when deleting Townies ends up causing even more to spawn, each one looking stranger than the last.

Even on PC, I’ve felt how overwhelming it can get, and I agree that a lot of the randomly generated Townies look terrible and completely break immersion, I always try to keep up with deleting them or editing them. It's annoying when you spend time creating or downloading Sims that fit your vision, and suddenly a Sim dressed like they got lost between six different fashion packs and a Halloween costume party shows up. I'm so tired of it!!

Another possible part of a solution could be a feature that lets us assign specific Sims to key NPC roles — like mail carriers, handypeople, maids, bartenders, etc. I wouldn’t necessarily need that feature for its own sake, but it would be a practical way to stop the game from constantly spawning more random NPCs. And many of us probably already have favourite Sims we’d rather see in those roles anyway. 

I’m sure there are many other threads about this too, but the more people speak up, the better chance we have of change. 

Townie generation can be a real problem on console. I'd love to be able to toggle it off altogether. Even on my next gen Xbox Series X, which is pretty fast with a huge memory and loads of available capacity it can cause a massive lag and even crash if I don't keep an eye on those new Townies. I reported after adding For Rent that suddenly I was getting excessive new Townies appearing. If a console player has a lag I always tell them to clear some of them.

I used to do a game cleanup every Sunday and go right through Other Households deleting some, I started doing that after Cottage Living because of the extra Townies. By comparison since adding For Rent on it's release, I now need to do that daily. The other day I moved Penny Pzazz into a new apartment, for about 15 minutes of gameplay I playtested it because she's only a background character. I sent her to a food stall and I got about 6 new Townies after such a short playing time. I deleted all of them.

I get to know which Townies fill essential roles, so I know the postman, vets and bar staff, I know the gym instructors and the yoga teachers and spa staff. I'm careful to avoid deleting those. These new Townies being generated are just random and without roles. They are also generated with all accessories which was reported and tracked as a bug. So that adds to my annoyance. I don't want to see an elder in a bikini top and gloves with a multitude of piercings, socks and flip flops.

So I really really want a toggle. I have more than enough Sims to populate my worlds. On console we don't have the benefits of MCCC.

This would be a nice feature in the game. 🙂