I am playing the legacy challenge and trying to get to the third generation but there are barely any townies. The only townies I have are elders and all the lots are completely empty, in every town. They do not gain skills, grow in their career, or graduate university.
How do I get more townies? Like, A LOT more.
@valerie_palerie6 Hello! Are you playing on console or PC / Mac? The options you have differ greatly depending on your answer to that question; i.e. there are mods that can help but not for console, unfortunately.
For any platform, you first want to check your settings. Click on the three dot settings button in the upper right, then click game options. In the gameplay tab, check your maximum sim count. I play with the 150 sims max setting but you can up that to 200. I think if you set to unlimited you risk some issues like increased lag time. You might also want to check the "fill empty homes" box so you have more sims living in world as you play. It helps to have houses on your empty lots so the game has a place to put those homeless sims. If you don't want to build houses yourself, you can find premade homes in the library or you can download lots from the gallery.
If you want more control over which sims move in, you could look at the game generated households in the manage worlds, manage households menu. From the world view, click the icon next to the Gallery button in the upper right. Then browse households in the tab marked "other households". When you filter that to show unplayed households that are not in world, you can then click any of those to move into any of your empty houses.
Edit: Also, what @PoptartJuniper said. 🙂
