Neighbourhood Stories: What Are Your Settings?

It’s been much better now that I only have stories going for 1 week at a time. When I’m ready to turn it back on again, I go through the Other Households that actually live in a world and I decide if I want to revoke their baby-making or pet adoption privileges. I also try to spot elders so I can let them retire, and YAs so I can split them from households. I wish that screen would show us their ages because it’s hard to tell the difference between a teen and a YA. I suppose I will end up loading CAS to find out.

I decided to start quite carefully.

Neighborhood Stories off for my own households since I play rotationally and want to micromanage my own families.

For other families I allowed only starting a career, retirement and adopting a pet. I guess I'll try later to allow more options but then to keep it on for just a while.

Exceptions were other families with specific role (sages, Father Winter, Knox etc.), those I customised to have Neighborhood Stories set off.

I wonder if the frequency of some of the things is tied to how many sims/pets you have in the game.

When I first enabled the stories, pet adoptions were through the roof. At the time, I had no pets in any households anywhere in my game. I'm now up to a total of like 40 dogs and 4 cats due to neighborhood stories, and it's slowed down a bit. I still get 1 or 2 adoptions (usually dogs) every night, but it was 3-4 at first.

When I first enabled stories, births were happening, but not frequently. Like 1 every couple of days. I'm now up to over 700 total sims in my game and haven't had a birth in over a week.

Deaths...on the other hand, have been constant. I am only turning on "accidental deaths" in the households which consist of just elders. They are my retirement homes, basically. Neighborhood stories is guaranteed to kill off every single elder I put in these households within just a few days.
When I first turned on Neighborhood stories I had about 40 elders in my game. Within less than 2 sim weeks, that was down to 5...and those 5 were still in regular households where accidental deaths were not turned on. The game killed off ALL elders that it could.
Now, once per sim week I move all the elders which I don't care that much about from "ancestral homes" into retirement home households and MCCC auto-moves all the other elders, and always within a couple of days they are all killed off.

I turned off babies and adoptions for unplayed households. It's undermine my mccc settings for birth control. And somehow I can't delete all the ghost pets. However, although I don't get the news for the accidental deaths, but when I scroll through the household, I see it's working. Many households are now under the allowed max of 8 sims.

"Stormkeep;c-18083921" wrote:
I wonder if the frequency of some of the things is tied to how many sims/pets you have in the game.

When I first enabled the stories, pet adoptions were through the roof. At the time, I had no pets in any households anywhere in my game. I'm now up to a total of like 40 dogs and 4 cats due to neighborhood stories, and it's slowed down a bit. I still get 1 or 2 adoptions (usually dogs) every night, but it was 3-4 at first.

When I first enabled stories, births were happening, but not frequently. Like 1 every couple of days. I'm now up to over 700 total sims in my game and haven't had a birth in over a week.

Deaths...on the other hand, have been constant. I am only turning on "accidental deaths" in the households which consist of just elders. They are my retirement homes, basically. Neighborhood stories is guaranteed to kill off every single elder I put in these households within just a few days.
When I first turned on Neighborhood stories I had about 40 elders in my game. Within less than 2 sim weeks, that was down to 5...and those 5 were still in regular households where accidental deaths were not turned on. The game killed off ALL elders that it could.
Now, once per sim week I move all the elders which I don't care that much about from "ancestral homes" into retirement home households and MCCC auto-moves all the other elders, and always within a couple of days they are all killed off.

Being an Elder myself, that makes me kinda sad …

:lol: I'm no spring chicken either, @GalacticGal.

I'm probably going to turn that accidental death thing off again at some point; I've just been using the elder population as a testing grounds for it. It is really overtuned, though I"m curious if it would be as aggressive if I wasn't already basically at the upper end of the limit to total sims in the game.

Disabled it completely till marriage is an option. Using MCCC Story Progression till then.

"Stormkeep;c-18083991" wrote:
:lol: I'm no spring chicken either, @GalacticGal.

I'm probably going to turn that accidental death thing off again at some point; I've just been using the elder population as a testing grounds for it. It is really overtuned, though I"m curious if it would be as aggressive if I wasn't already basically at the upper end of the limit to total sims in the game.

Mine is a very recent save. I got it started about a RL week prior to the first date of release for MWS. I always choose to have 200 Sims, because I like large families. Nowhere near that number so things are slow in the Neighborhood at the moment. But, that's okay. I finally got around to setting things up. I even marked my one household for retirement. All five kids are nearly on their own. The first four will be off to Britechester-U a short time after the Wedding takes place. Almost there. Just trying to decide if the newlyweds should take a very short honeymoon in Sulani or elsewhere before I send them off to prison er, higher learning. I shall be taking seven Sims through again. All living in the same dorm, after I alter it in map mode, that is. I decided not to have all three Cantrell boys marry into the Golden family. So only Kayleigh will be attending. She's got an A whereas her triplet sisters let down. Dad can only afford one kid at a time, so the other two may never get to go. (They aren't my active household.) I have returned to the original Astrid Tischler and Sandi Beeches. Both have beginning relationships with Joey and Aaron, respectively.

I'm hitting the tender age of 67, soon. :) Age is just a number to me. I strive to become 104, if that's possible, before I leave this Earth.

I've noticed that accidental death might be a little bit too powerful. I have a dozen houses that are exempt from Neighborhood Stories but family members are disappearing. What I think much be happening is when one of those Sims shows up as an NPC Townie, it's open season for the Neighborhood Stories to deal with them. That said, I also use mods which could be conflicting with the settings.

What I'm doing in the meantime is I just turn Neighborhood Stories off for a few days and then turn it on for a long session. I have several houses full of kids, toddlers and babies since the update so i need to give them some TLC to see what the new stories are going to be. I'm loving a lot of my born in game sims in this save. Really fun.

I have it turned off for my played household, but on for everyone else. The only thing I switched off was adopting children. My game is experiencing a massive baby boom! But so far I have no deaths at all. Some sims have also gotten jobs and moved out of their homes. No one has moved into the vacated homes yet. I think the baby boom thing needs some adjustment. I'd like to have a limit that I could set (like in MCCC) where for example Sims will only have max 2 kids. Anyhow, loving the feature overall.