Put a "Stop Generating Random Townies" Button in the settings

I learned that you can stop them from being culled by favoriting them and it will move them into "My Households" but they will remain unplayed households. 

Some form of townie control would be good. What I would like to see is specific townies for each world. I do not enjoy seeing townies from Willow Creek in Granite Falls or San Myshuno. I mean if they're on vacation or out clubbing ok. But it is the same ones all the time and I find that really boring and lazy, I want to see, for the most part, fresh townies when I visit different places. Just not excess ones. An example of that would be High School. My played teens should take precedence over townie and game generated teens. But they don't. I will have the active teen I am playing go to school, and their friends, my other played teens in other households, will not be there. Instead all of these random teens show up and my teen sim doesn't get to go to school with their friend. I can go delete the random sims and it might work for a while but then something happens and my teen will be alone in school again. At any rate, we should be able to control townie regeneration and population to some degree and it would really make for a better game experience. 

Side note 223angela​ Edit your empty houses and change the bed count to zero and that will prevent sims from moving in unless you move them in. All of my worlds are empty houses other than my played households. I have not noticed this being detrimental to my game in any way. You'll still have to deal with townies though as it doesn't lessen them. They just end up being generated and "not in world".

I actually just burst out laughing cause everything you mentioned has been my main qualm with this game for as long as I can remember. So relatable. I've also tried adding homeless, jobless, unplayed sims to the "other households section", and they still don't get used to satisfy roles. I've tried skilled townies, unskilled ones, young adults, adults... but no. Just generates a clown over and over. 

I certainly agree that we need some kind of NPC setting to stop the generation of townies. Imagine having 700 sims in your game and the game generates more to fulfill service jobs. I wish sims from our playable household could show up as the mailman for instance. 

they keep putting them in my empty houses if I haven't played in a while. it's annoying. 

It would cut down by more than half if it didnt create a fresh townie every time you went to a bar club or sauna but instead used ones already in game .  I cull mine every sim week ; keeping the decent ones and culling the fuglies and still have over 300 townies , i dont need that many 

I'm on xbox series x console and the random sim generating definitely needs a toggle because if I don't regularly delete the randomly generated sims in the other household section of manage households my performance gets really bad/game lags, and I experience a lot more glitches in save files that I don't regularly purge the randomly generated sims. 

This is exactly my feeling on it. I understand there was a need for them at the beginning of TS4, but at this point, we have so many premade sims that it simply clutters the game with sims in hideous outfits. I don't think the feature should be removed entirely because some people may still want them, but I know many more of us who loathe them and would celebrate an option we could toggle to prevent them from spawning. 

I would love to have an option to turn off randomly generated townies; I'd prefer to just make my own.

I really can't understand why we need so many auto generated sims when we buy DLCs with lots of premade sims that only gets bigger with each EP/GP and could definetly fill most roles but don't.