Townie family generation, curious

@Jyotai I am so with you on my loathing of the makeup issues. When they put that ridiculous clown makeup on dark skin it really does look so bad. I usually just delete those townies.

I have not seen this family generation pattern at all. But that might be because I have so many babies born in-game through MCCC that there are always more than the minimum number of required children, teens etc. Perhaps the game generates these families in order to meet a quota for children?

Yes, the game does create a parent for children that are created by the in game adoption feature. It does tend to throw unrelated sims together as a family, as well. I know this because I use MCCC to pull townies from a pool I created in my library for that purpose and have seen it assign random sims as a family from it, it does change their ages. The game does not use genetics for this or any townie families it creates, as far as I can see.
So, I delete game generated families when they appear and add in my own, either ones I DL or have saved from my games. That way there are genetic families as townies as well as my played sims. I do have the occasional adoption due to MCCC though.

"derevaun;c-17905489" wrote:
Do you have MCCC? On its default settings it's like it's obsessed with broken homes and non-sequitur affairs. It renames families patrilineally by default. Looking at NPC family trees can be a rude awakening!

omg you are so right. It splits the families I put together with kids and will split the kids between the parents. I need to figure out how stop it

"verlainem;c-17927218" wrote:

"derevaun;c-17905489" wrote:
Do you have MCCC? On its default settings it's like it's obsessed with broken homes and non-sequitur affairs. It renames families patrilineally by default. Looking at NPC family trees can be a rude awakening!

omg you are so right. It splits the families I put together with kids and will split the kids between the parents. I need to figure out how stop it

For me it never makes new families from existing randos I've had around. BUT... over time It will slowly have people divorce and if I made a couple where one adult is a biological parent and other a step parent MCCC seems to prefer giving the step parent custody... like, 100% prefer it so far. But my sample size is limited to 3 here because I've only just started giving partners to single parents and the cases where I made the other parent a step parent rather than using genetics to 'fabricate dad' were fewer.

I use the 'WW' mod (Wonderful/... Whims) and I think it is this mod that turned the whole new 'likes' system from Dream Home Decorator into an attraction system... so when I make the 'magical dads' I go in and give each parent a stack of likes based on the other parents appearance, fashion, hair, etc... then I visit the family once with a played sim so everyone 'loads' their relationships - that seems to be preventing MCCC from causing those couple to divorce but it also means I have an unusually high number of 'way too happily compatible' couples...

Like MCCC thinks you either need to be each other's obsessive dream boat fantasy, or it's straight to divorce court if you so much as don't like how much milk to other person puts in their coffee... (I can turn this off BTW - I only turned on MCCC's relationship decay last week, and now that I see how it ends up working I'm thinking of turning it off, because even though I thought I tuned it very low it's over-doing it in the results).

That said... I've tuned down a LOT of MCCCs default "fixing" settings because they "break" rather than "fix" for what I'm seeking. And I've then gone and turned on a LOT of it's other settings - like the ones to clean out makeup and piercings because the game seems to think my Sims is set on the stage of a Drag Queen show in Portland in the 90s... Sooo much glam and piercings in Sim4 default CAS townie creation it's insane.

MCCC is great, covers over a LOT of flaws in the base game; but I'd prefer if they had everything 'turned off by default'.

Thought you were in my video game save for a minute :o Yes, I.K. These names, they are very common, I have around three or four of some of the mentioned. Don't think they are related, mine never seemed to be.

I think Maxis is just trolling me at this point.

The past 2 "Thursdays" of my game have seen piles like this get added:

https://i.imgur.com/9oOWRbS.png

Only after this thread has my game suddenly seen multi-parent townies.

If I wanted kids in my game, I'd finally have things good.

But before these 2 game weeks, I'd never seen anything but a single parent, and only once not a mother.

I'm basically about to delete all 4 families here because what I really want is a mod to disable kids completely... and I started wondering if by manually aging them up I was telling some algorithm that these were the kinds of families I wanted to mess around with.

"ncisGibbs02;c-17904154" wrote:

"mightysprite;d-990644" wrote:
Salim Benali has been starting to get a little friendlier with his good friend Tanvi Savalani, who I think is a randomly generated townie. He knew she was a stay-at-home mom. I moved Tanvi and her child Sai into an apartment so that Salim could go visit them. In the process, I noticed another Savalani household with a dad and a child.
https://i.ibb.co/dmwPkCH/savalani.png

I didn't want to peek at Tanvi and Sai's relationships and family tree, because I don't want to know anything Salim doesn't know about them just yet, but I wonder if they are related-- perhaps divorced-- as the children do look like a mix of both parents?

Then I got curious and looked through the other households. I found some Gotos who don't look like each other at all
https://i.ibb.co/pb6VrX9/goto.png

some Mahajans who look like sisters (one of these is Salim's neighbor)
https://i.ibb.co/ngqdQXx/mahajan.png

and some Acharyas and Hashimotos who are like the Savalanis, separate households but the kids look like a mix of the adults.
(Or well, on second thought, maybe the Acharya kids don't resemble the adults from both households as much as the Hashimotos and Savalanis do.)
https://i.ibb.co/zRGHs48/acharya.png
https://i.ibb.co/ynn8jKB/hashimoto.png

And then I noticed something odd. No townie families with kids have 2 parents in the home, except for the premades. It's all single parents.

Can anyone shed any light on this?

I’ve never had 2 parents either.
The odd townie families I get are always a mom, teenage girl and boy child. No variation.

The only different families are ones I make or come with packs I.e. Jang family in City Living

Sometimes I’ll get couples but most of my townies are elder Sims who stomp round my town angrily until I go through the townie pool and delete them.

I’ve not had the same family name duplicated though.

I often wonder if the game tries to balance out people. I did get a family with 2 parents, a child, and a teen in the beginning. I haven’t got a two parent family since then, but I have a large rotation.

@mightysprite Most of the time that 'third parent' turns out to be a teen. In fact in a lot of the single parent families when I went in to edit them the one that was the mother and the one that was the teen was backwards from it looked like in the preview. My CAS settings have gotten weird at times.

@ncisGibbs02 This 'real life week' is the first I've ever seen the toddlers, and also the first time I've seen more than a single parent. Maybe a stealth patch changed something?

Regardless - I've just been deleting them now because I'm getting overwhelmed with editing to taste.

I've been using MCCC and 'Sims 4 Studio' to fix a lot of outfit issues. blocking some items, and changing what categories things are on.

I've noticed a LOT of mod clothing makers don't set the flags for things like color, occults, outfit style (everyday, athletic, etc) properly or even at all. They just instead remove the 'random' chance and call it a day.
- that for me really sucks because the whole reason I grab most of that clothing is to have more interesting townies. And setting the color and fashion style is now very important due to the changes from 'Dream Home Designer' that some fashion and romance mods have also added in to their attraction systems... So... if an item looks 'red' on my screen but is flagged as 'grey' in Sims 4 Studio, things get weird... And so I've edited several dozen pieces of CC clothing in the last few weeks to sort it all out.
- and making everything random has meant some of my townies have gotten really bad fashion, until I go in and fix the flags for those items. :)

Slowly but surely my random townies are looking better as I tweak more and more settings. But it's not 'there' yet. :)


And yeah, some of the patterns in how it tries to balance things out are just really weird.

@derevaun no, I don't use mods. That sounds like it would be very chaotic!

Now and then I go into Manage Households and combine the households with the same last name, then edit their relationships. This is why.