How to make the game randomly generate certain types of townies/household?

Sigh, I’m trying to post a reply to you, but it won’t let me post for some odd reason due to some kind of “span style” 🙄 Whatever that is? 🤷🏻‍♀️ I’m so tired of the new forums for so many reasons.

Edit: Okay this on got through. Maybe my reply was too long, I’ll try to cut it up into smaller sections.

Edit #2: Now I can’t post the very last part of my reply as I’ve apparently exceeded the limit of posts I’m allowed to make.

Edit #3: I’m really sorry that you might come back to your topic thinking a lot of other players have weighed in on the issue to find that it was just me spamming the thread, because it wouldn’t let me post my reply in neither one nor two goes.

Edit #4: Finally managed to get the last part of my reply to upload - whew!

Here goes:

Sorry for the delay, but testing took a while 🫠 And better make a cup of tea or coffee, because this is going to be another long post 😉

As for my game having generated households with more than one sim, I don’t think this happened because of the latest event, some of these households just happened to be generated during, and I have a slight feeling that it might have been due to the bug where if any of the sims in your household would use the computer, a household with a style influencer would be generated. But I haven’t checked if they are in this line of work and I don’t have MCCC installed at the moment so can’t use that to check either. On the other hand, the sims in the household in my son’s save abolutely love the computer and will autonomously use it almost all the time, and there weren’t any variation in the types of households with more than one sim in his save apart from those generated through Jungle Adventure.

So on to my tests. First off, I started back in the copy of my son’s event save again to see if I could get other/more households to generate apart from the 6 with a single mother, a teen daughter and a child son. I sent the boy from the played household back to the playground on Sunday in game, however, I can’t remember the exact time, but I think it was right after lunch. At first it was just the premade children, Vivian Lewis’ adopted toddler and the 6 newly generated random boys taking turns, but sometime between 6 and 8 PM (maybe between 7 and 8 PM, it was quite close to 8 PM when all the children leave) a new kid spawned. I checked the unplayed households and sure enough yet another household consisting of a single mother, a female teen and a male child had been generated. During the ingame week, I sent the boy back to the playground a couple of times after school, and the adults to the salon, the bar and the museum in Oasis Springs (they live in Willow Creek) and no new multi-sim households were generated. Then when it became Saturday, I had the boy go to the playground again where he spent almost the entire day. And once again towards the end of the time slot where children will hang out at the playground, a new boy spawned, same type of household as the rest of them, but there are now 8 of these randomly generated households in this save. I was tempted to play through another week and see if I could get another one or two of them to spawn during the weekend, but it would most likely just have been the same type of household again instead of a new constellation.

Next I tested the copy of my save where I remembered to put down a playground this time 😆 I had my sim go there a couple of times during the week, but only for a couple of hours each time, and no new households were generated. The only children and toddlers who came there to play were from the premade households. During the week she was also asked out on a date to the bar in Glimmerbrook and that generated a bunch of new townies. However, all of them were single households. So I sent her back to the playground during the weekend and Sunday I made her stay until the kids left (sorry, I’m awful at testing, because I get caught up in the gameplay and my sim had a lot of visitors all week long 🫣😌). Once again it was just the premade kids that spawned and no new multi-sim households were generated.
I saw that you had asked to test first on a playground without any lot traits and then with any traits that would make children more likely to spawn, but there aren’t really any except for teen neighborhood which makes teens more likely to spawn. Most of the lot traits either boost certain skills or a particular moodlet. So I didn’t test with any added lot traits.

Instead I did a very short test on another save that I have which I haven’t played yet as it’s still under construction. It was meant to test something else and then I got sidetracked 😆,  but in that save I have deleted a lot of the premades and downloaded a bunch of households from the gallery. From those downloaded households there are 4 toddlers, 4 children and 4 teens (and 1 baby, but they won’t show up on playgrounds so…). However, there are still 7 premade children and 8 premade teens making the total 28 all included (in comparison in the copy of my event save there are 2 toddlers, 17 children and 18 teens from the premade families and the 26 babies due to neighborhood stories and no longer any random households with kids for testing purposes).
So I plopped down a playground in Newcrest chose one of the downloaded families with a child and had him go to the playground. Seeing as it was the first day of the game it was a Sunday (perfect timing) and I had him stay there all day. Initially, it was only the already existing children and toddlers (premade and downloaded) that showed up, until it got close to 8 PM then a new boy spawned. And yes as you have probably already guessed he was from a household with a single mother and a teenage sister 🙄😏 It’s getting a little repetitive to say the least. And something definitely seems to be off.

I don’t know if someone with knowledge of how to look at the coding would be able to check if playgrounds are set to only generate households with this type of family, i.e. a single mother with a female teen and male child? Because if the case is that this type of lot will only generate this type of household then that’s not only quite boring but also rather problematic for players with mainly base game.

I took a peek at some of my old saves and even though there were a lot fewer multi-sim households among the unplayed randomly generated townies than I remember (by far the majority still consisted of single sim households), there was a lot more variation than what I’m seeing now 🤔🤷🏻‍♀️

Thank you so much for sharing your findings! Sorry for the late reply as I’ve been unwell for the past days🥲. Finally I have a bit of energy to reply and also endure the bugged reply function here🤣. Been having the issue almost every time I’m replying to anyone here, regardless of how long my post is. My workaround was to copy my reply, refresh the page and paste it again to send. Sometimes it works but sometimes not, so when it’s not, I will just try to reply on another day🥲.

I was worried at first when I noticed the lack of variety in randomly generated households but couldn’t find any recent reports about it, so I thought it was my game issues or it was by design for people with base game only🥲. At least now I’m relieved to know that regarding randomly generated child sim’s family when visiting playground or park, maybe it was by design, and in need of feedback🤔. As I have been playing on the save before the playground lot was introduced, so the kids only have park to visit, and it only generated the single mother with teen female and child male type of household.

But for other types of household, I still cannot guess how it works, since last time when I deleted everything except the premade households, in hopes of the game will generate a new sets for me, it just generated single sim households, and that single mom, female teen and male child type of household when i visited the park🥲. At the time I was a bit tired so couldn’t test more, but now I have a gameplay idea on how to keep my test interesting, so  I will start a new save file again, since there’s another different issue that I need to test.

Come to think of it, on why I couldn’t find much about others experiences regarding the randomly generated townies, maybe it was that usually people will just play with sims that they made, and some packs do introduce new premade households, so they don’t feel the lack of variety on the randoms. As I myself only started to notice the lack of variety when I have lesser premades, as they have merged with each other throughout the generations, and need to rely on the randoms to continue the legacy😅.

I will continue to update my findings here, in case other people got curious too. Or if anyone else have old abandoned saves that are unmodded, or at least no related mods that control the sims population, I’ll gladly appreciate if you can share what kind of multi-sims households randomly generated that you have😊 (as you mentioned that your older saves have more variety, so maybe recent various updates have changed something for newer saves). I only realized the existence of starting a new game does not erase your previous world early this year, excluding a few save files that was used to test this issue, I only have 4 other saves but 3 of them was modded🫠.