Are there tutorials on custom townie pools for subhoods? Is there a way to convert downloadable townie pools to use them in subhoods? I'm tired of seeing the same subhood townies but I'm not sure how to make a reusable pool. Thank you!

This is a matter of modding all the controller objects that bring visitors to lots: Community Lot Populator, Secret Hobby Lot Controller and maybe the residential Visitor Controller for residential walkbyes, and a few others for rare special cases. It is a conceptually simple problem if you know how to edit BHAVs in Sim PE. You designate a field for the home hood. In my game, I hijack one of the unused Interests in person data. It could also be a memory token, but that is harder to deal with. Then when visitors are selected you compare the global 28 "current neighborhood id" against the the saved Id. If the saved id is non-zero and different, you skip this person from the filter.

For Populator: 101A: "Non-Family Array - Fill with Eligible Sims"
For Residential: 1006: "Visit Generator - Can Person Visit?"
For Shobby lot: 1007: "Instance X People"

You also need a simple control object that will stamp selected neighbors with a home hood through an interaction. Making that one is not so simple. You really need to know modding. You can use the Party dialog to process a large number of neighbors. There are some technical cheat objects that do nothing useful and could be taken over.

I heard that there are hacked objects that seem to replace the big Populator with their own selection of people, but I don't know how they function. I'd be surprised if any of them have a preset setting for "localized population". When I mentioned this in the past, I got rolling eyes, shrug, and disagreement.

That's disappointing! I saw a cool alien townie pool and was hoping I vould use it to have an outer space vacation spot or "shopping district" or similar oh well.

Sure, I imagine a custom townie pool would just work like an empty template. There's no need to mod any BHAVs.

The townies of multiple subhoods mix together by default without mods. Like if you add Bluwater Village, the funny employees start to walk in Pleasantview because they don't know where they belong. The game only has a distinction for inhabitants of Downtown.

Yeah, if you don't want them, you need an empty template.

I'll try to be clearer about what I'd like to do.

I'd like to take an empty subhood template and create my own townies for it. I think this is possible like it is for regular townies, right?. Except I'm not really familiar with the process and what the best method is, what I'd need, etc.

However, I've seen some townie pools I would like to use. They're for main hoods. Would there be a way to make them compatible with subhoods instead?

I hope this clears it up. The issue is not how to get rid of subhood townies, it's how to create my own or adapt a townie pool.

There's only one townie family, and a separate family for downtownies, regular townies don't belong to any specific subhood in your neighborhood. If you only want certain ones to show up on certain lots, you'll have to manually ban all the ones you don't want with the VC or similar.

- Use empty subhood template (if possible), unless you also want to keep the original townies too (?)
- Create sims you want as townies
- Set them as townies
- ... profit?

If you want to reuse them without getting too technical, the easiest would probably be to create them as template sims in bodyshop, then put them into your game when you're starting out, make 8-sim families in CAS, move them into a lot, and then make them into townies with a mod. Alternatively do this once, backup the hood, and be able to use the backup as a starting point.

(okay, there are probably better explanations out there on how to do it, since this isn't something I dabble with too much - I prefer keeping my hoods mostly townie-free these days )

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I'm not entirely sure where you've found the "townie pools", but I'd imagine they're just regular downloadable sims, or already part of a downloadable neighborhood or subhood of some sort.

Wow, what is this sustained misunderstanding....

Anyway, if I'm understanding you right, noprobllama, you're trying to create a neighborhood for the game to pull custom townies from. The way I usually do this is to create a custom subhood template; instructions from the late Mootilda @ Tutorial: How to Create a Custom Subhood Template. Another option is to make a main neighborhood template with those custom townies, which newly-created neighborhoods will then pick up on; you can use more or less the same instructions, except the resulting template needs to be named N001 in the filesystem, and it needs to be placed in "(Sims 2 base game folder)\TSData\Res\UserData\Neighborhoods" (backup the existing one first!).

Custom townie pools?

For a moment I thought you meant a custom swimming pool just for townies. So I was wondering why they can't just use the same public swimming pool as all the playables.

... Don't subhoods like vacation hoods, university, etc. have their own townies?



Do I need anything special to set townies as subhood townies? And yeah, "townie pools" = sets of townies you can use to replace townies. Except the one I found works for N001 whereas I'd like to make it compatible with a subhood.




Thank you so much, this is it exactly!

Yes and no. The templates used to generate subhoods can have their own townies, service NPCs, etc. However, once they (or rather, copies of them) have been attached to a neighborhood, those Sims are folded into the main neighborhood's Sims (downtownies, vacation tourists, vacation locals, and social group Sims are simply in different families behind the scenes, and dormies are basically just young adult townies.)

Without mods, and barring an invitation or being on an outing/date with a playable, dormies will only appear on University lots, downtownies on Downtown lots, tourists on vacation lots, and vacation locals in their respective locales. There's not any way to designate non-YA townies, social group Sims, or service NPC as being part of any specific subhood, though; they'll appear on lots in the main neighborhood, Downtown, any shopping districts, and on secret hobby lots. You'll need further mods for that, and I don't have much experience doing so.

Happy to help.

Vacation locals and tourists have separate families, but they all exist in the same hood. You can use the visitor controller/etc. to allow those sims on any lot in any subhood, if you want. There's no separate family for dormies, they just go in the regular townie family.

Thanks for the replies but my issue isn't really about banning Sims from lots, basically how to add them to the behind-the-scenes families so they'll be vacation locals or tourists.

If you put them in the vacation local and tourist families, they'll show up on lots where vacation locals or tourists will show up. I think you should be able to put them in any family you want with any of the various teleporters. Which family you put them in mostly depends on which lots you want them to show up on. If you want them to only show up downtown, you put them in the downtownies family. If you want them to only show up in vacation hoods, put them in the tourist or vacation locals families. If you want them to be able to rent apartments but otherwise not show up anywhere, you put them in the AL social group families. I think that's basically the list.

Right, forgot about that in my last couple posts; sorry, noprobllama. Anyway, for a couple teleporters to start you off:

• Argon's Townie Brick (in the "Argon sorryitslate.7z" archive near the top): can make Sims into townies, dormies, downtownies, Garden Club members, and vacation locals; does not make them vacation tourists, however.
• Simlogical's Teleporter (specifically the "Teleporter for Apartment Life", near the top): This one can make Sims into vacation tourists, among other things, but may require some SimPE time to get them into the proper tourist families.

EDIT: Found what you need to edit for the vacation tourists. There are actually 12 tourist "families" (under the "Family Information (FAMI)" section in SimPE) with instance numbers ranging from, in hexadecimal, 0x00007FE5 to 0x00007FF0; the latter teleporter above, however, will put them in family instance 0x00007FF4. It's simple enough to fix, though (relatively speaking; obviously, back up your 'hood-in-progress first in case something goes wrong):

• In SimPE, open your neighborhood and select "Family Information (FAMI)" in the Resource Tree; this should list all of the families in your 'hood, including hidden ones.
• Select the family you want to make into proper tourists (preferably after making them into tourists via the teleporter in-game). You should see various information about that family: money on hand, family friends, etc.
• Under that, there should be a number of tabs for various things: the "Resource" tab is the one that interests us (see the attached screenshot for reference; there should be an arrow pointing to it).
• Now, just change the Instance number (highlighted in the screenshot) to one in the aforementioned range. Just FYI, the tourist families' instances are reversed relative to each other; the first one will be 0x00007FF0, the second 0x00007FEF, the third 0x00007FEE, etc., all the way to the twelfth at 0x00007FE5.

If anything about that (or anything else in the process) was unclear, don't be afraid to ask about it.