Is there a game limit to the number of homeless sims generated?

Good question...

Quick answer is that it'll keep generating new sims, but at one point, the game starts culling old unplayed unfavorited sims. The 200 you have only includes safe-from-culling households (played and/or favorited).

The number? That goes up with every expansion pack that comes out. I don't know the latest number, but it's definitely over 1,000.

Thank you all for answering my question. Just the thought of 1,000 homeless sims makes me weak. LOL

I appreciate the link to a mod that works to simply stop more homeless from being generated. I think that is the route I will take. My 200+ homeless sims should be plenty to fill all the roles needed, so I will simply flag them as "do not cull" along with the other sims I want to see in my game, indefinitely.

I do use MCCC to make my favorite sims immortal and never culled. But I want to keep my total sim count in game under 600, including animals. I have always played with aging off, but I also do not want my sims to ever die, from any cause. I have never enjoyed story progression. I want a totally static world (which is the way it used to be back in the day, like I think maybe for Sims 2), and that is why it is important to me that sims are generally pleasant looking.

The only sims I want changing are the ones I am actively playing, and fully control. If I want another family to change along with my active family, I will rotate play between them.

Knowing what I now know about the way the game is set to work, I am going to organize my worlds differently. I will delete all venues I do not actually use on a regular basis. I will never need a bar in every world, for instance. And I will rethink what I want venues to do for my sims, so that means deleting several EA venues and building my own. I will also rethink which EA pre-made families I want in each world, because it might be better to keep my game under 500, including pets.

Well, to be informed makes all the difference. I'm off to do some rethinking, repopulating, rebuilding, and a LOT of deleting. LOL

There's an option to limit the number of sims protected before culling happens in Options. This number also shows on the Household Manager UI at the bottom. This doesn't stop more being generated if your system can handle it, though. It does limit the number you can protect by adding them to My Households.

Unfortunately it jumps from 200 (capped) to unlimited, and if you play with premade sims then there are already more than 200 across all worlds, so the setting has to be used on unlimited to keep them all safe.

With MCCC, not only can you limit the number of extra sims generated, but you can also limit how they spawn: You can draw sims only from your tray, limit sliders so you don't get fat/thin/muscley sims, limit outfits by only having townies spawn in pre-saved outfits, clean townie outfits by banning specific items etc.

Saving them to your Library doesn't really do anything unless you use MCCC and have it populate from your Library. The game doesn't generate the same sims for every save. It's completely random, as far as I know. You don't have to waste your time giving them all makeovers and saving them, unless that's how you prefer to play the game. I usually leave them alone or delete them.