Looking for ways to diversify townies

You could try the #simself tag. Those sims usually look unique and totally natural! Those are the best looking sims in my opinion :wink:

Not that I am a great creator or anything, but I have a tip if you want to make some of the townies yourself and want them to look different from the Sims you usually make: just use a real human as a template. I don't like making celebrities, so I will Google search the most generic thing that comes to mind like "handsome African man" and pick a picture. Since you are not creating a lookalike, your creation does not have to be exact, but if you follow the shape of their features you will inevitably create a different looking sim every time.

"keenow;c-16799325" wrote:
You could try the #simself tag. Those sims usually look unique and totally natural! Those are the best looking sims in my opinion :wink:

Not that I am a great creator or anything, but I have a tip if you want to make some of the townies yourself and want them to look different from the Sims you usually make: just use a real human as a template. I don't like making celebrities, so I will Google search the most generic thing that comes to mind like "handsome African man" and pick a picture. Since you are not creating a lookalike, your creation does not have to be exact, but if you follow the shape of their features you will inevitably create a different looking sim every time.

Thank you I didn't know that was a tag. Both great ideas.

"Netzspannung;c-16799335" wrote:
Not that I am a great creator or anything, but I have a tip if you want to make some of the townies yourself and want them to look different from the Sims you usually make: just use a real human as a template. I don't like making celebrities, so I will Google search the most generic thing that comes to mind like "handsome African man" and pick a picture. Since you are not creating a lookalike, your creation does not have to be exact, but if you follow the shape of their features you will inevitably create a different looking sim every time.

I'm not the original question asker, but found this tip to be very helpful and I will most certainly be using it in my saves. Thank you :)

I often add gallery finds to my games as townies, I particularly like when they have a bit of a back-story attached to give me gameplay options.

In the early days, finding gallery sims was pretty easy, but as time has passed, I have found that avoiding sims which are: sexy, handsome, cute, beautiful, hot, etc., is more difficult. Due to the fact that a lot of sims in the gallery also have #'s that are not labeled correctly to garner more searches. I find this frustrating because it makes searching much harder.

So, here are some #'s that I have found that target average/normal looking sims more or less: townieswap, averageisbeautiful, simder, redditexchange

Also, you might want to check out any CAS challenges you run across here in the forum or elsewhere. Some of the daily themes make for pretty good townies. Here are some #'s that I have used in the past; packcasenmassechallenge, marchcaschallenge, aprilcaschallenge, mdsmalecaschallenge

Another tip that I cannot take credit for, is to use the genetics in CAS. What you do is find 2 sims, and while in CAS, you use the genetics option to create a child. You then delete the parents and age up the child. This gives you a random game generated sim that you can edit to suit your needs, I have used this one to create love interest sims to add to my games.

@kalaksed I only fave a lot of gallery items bc I follow others who fave a lot of gallery items I like ;)

For physical characteristics: I do the trick that @sunblond mentioned and create a child from 2 random parents that I delete. I make the child a teen when I'm creating them so I can see what they'll look like. When I'm choosing which child to keep, instead of looking for the one that's the most beautiful (which usually leads to having all sims that look alike), I choose the one that looks the most realistic. Realistic sims will usually have some flaw that makes them unique, so you end up with a more diverse and interesting group of sims. BTW, their flaws always look more extreme in CAS than when you're playing them.

For personality characteristics: There are a lot of free online dice sites. You can choose the number of sides your dice have and then roll the dice. Go to one of the personality options in the sims, count how many options there are, and then roll the dice. Pick that number trait. Do that for all 4 of the personality option categories (I'm assuming everyone has 4 categories and new ones weren't added in expansions I don't have). Then, to give yourself a little bit of control, since you can only have 3 personality traits, throw out the one you like the least and keep the other 3. It's a little more work, but worth it if you want things to be more randomized.

I created all of my townies myself, but most of them were just randomly generated sims that I found interesting enough to use as a base, took them into CAS and did some push & pull without changing any of their default features. I find this is a good way to create townies that I like, while also allowing for variety between the townies and the sims that I create from scratch.

Half the sims that populate my world come from the Gallery. I hate creating families.

Saw a new reddit thread started earlier this month using #redditexchange as the hashtag. The OP of the thread waa tired of seeing lookalike Sims so the hashtag is for unique ones. I searched and there were some cool ones there. Give it a shot!