Anyone else have a problem with 'Sims 3 launcher is running in the tray' recently? (It happened to me just now for the first time in months; I wondered if EAxis had changed anything recently.)

Check the tray. Probably just minimized the launcher and forgot about it. Happened to me a lot early on.

I did download and install MasterController. I think I got it set up to keep the "dreams" of the sims but I have not tried to jump between familys yet.

How does one make those sparkles appear that lead to the triggered event in tomb making? For example, in EA tombs, a switch causes gold sparkles that lead to the door it unlocked, but it's not doing the same in the tomb I'm making.

EDIT: Please, anyone! I have an obscene amount of links rn..

Omg there are so much useful answers)

If you turn off story progression, will there be immigration?

Not sure what you mean exactly by immigration but NPCs and tourists will be generated as usual, and Sims will still be assigned NPC roles.

I want an empty town except for the people I choose to move into it. Not sure what I'm going to need to make that possible, or if it is possible.

Yeah, same. That kind of has me stumped as well.

You can empty a town using NRAAS MC+cheats by clicking on city hall, Nraas->MC->Sim->advanced and then either total destroy or make ghosts out of all of them by kill all.
I use a special "jig" world of nothing but lots with a bare wall to make my town populations in edit world. That way I can alter sims without having to deal with the sims that hide inside the house. I craft them, make relationships, assign jobs ect. Then you can save the lot of them with NRAAS porter and pack 'em all up. I have witch, vampire, alien/science populations and all that. These can be unpacked into other towns. Please note that last time I tried, NRAAS Porter cannot pack plumbots!
To get rid of homeless sims, I use NRAAS Story Progression to stop immigration and get rid of homeless and require my townies to take the jobs. You also need NRAAS register to prevent other sims from being immigrated for things like register positions and to shut off tourists. The way NRAAS SP works tho is not the default EA settings. If you don't like all the hyphenated names like Smith-Jones and Jones-Smith, you have to change the default settings. And it floods you with "stories" to make it seem "real", which as an engineer I find makes the message info worthless. I shut the stories off for all but blood related sims.

Can you disable all SP functionality of NRaas SP? I specifically run my current world so that I have TOTAL (emphasis: TOTAL) control over everyone and everything. The less autonomy, the better.

I know this sub-discussion didn't really start out to be about NRaas in particular. But it's a shame there isn't a site available somewhere for folks to discuss their experiences with the various NRaas mods, meet the developer, get tips and tricks from the management team and other very experienced players. Oh well, maybe one will just kind of materialize some day.
https://www.nraas.net

Is there an Nrass mod other than those already mentioned that sounds necessary? (I have all of the ones mentioned.)

And make a new account for a site I'll never use again when I'll get the answers here anyway? No thanks.

You can't disable all NRAAS SP (hereafter called SP) functionality. Some of it will change the game even if you decline SP when it asks the first time you start a game. SP is a commitment, you have to learn how to use it and it can be quite complex: like you might go directly to "immigration" from the main SP menu thinking you're going to enable /disable immigration. Nope! You go General->Lots->Immigration (iirc). Little bit of detective work. There is a lot you can do with SP tho, and with the many add ons. The NRAAS Website has a FAQ; I started playing with Sims 3 in windowed mode so I could quickly switch from the SP faq to the game and adjust settings.
Not sure what you mean by control over everyone; I had no idea there was a North Korea world.
You can skip NRAAS Porter, but porter makes it so easy to fill a whole town at once. You need NRAAS MC+Cheats to remove the existing population. Register and SP are needed to keep the EA engine from filling up your town with the necessary service sims. If you want to assign jobs to your population, I think You need NRAAS MC+cheats again, tho' I've not done that in while. and there may be something else to it. I always try to make sure that Lawrence Fletcher works the consignment store register, for example. That I can do with NRAAS register...

Eh, I'm a control freak. It's one reason I still play Sims 2.

You want them to post in chatter box and not under the appropriate mod right?
"You posted this in Site Help and Feedback. That is the board meant for issues and questions about this website, not about the mods or the game."
Nope, that's not right. Seems you get chewed out if you post there. It's just not worth the beating to ask questions there. I can't keep up with your rules, I posted under the mods and told I shouldn't and should post in chatter box, Now I see that's changed too...

Yep, you're right. We are mean spirited, evil, bad tempered, grumpy, we keep changing the rules and the forum structure (guidelines, actually not rules) around every couple of decades, and we like to annoy people. Such has always been our reputation. I mean Twallan himself used to stay up all night trying to find ways to be annoying to players, as you can still see from his work product, and we've done everything we can to uphold that tradition since his retirement.

I don't know to what extent the moderators here will tolerate this little outburst of mine, but let's find out. You have been posting this nonsense about our site and our efforts to be helpful over there, twisting my own words around on me, and quoting both me and the site itself out of context ever since I can remember. Not sure why I am being so sensitive to it today and all of a sudden, but could you possibly do us the favor of just knocking it off, already?


Now for the real response...
(sighs) Anyone who would care for a more informed and friendly discussion on NRaas mod-related questions that do have complex answers may still feel free to join us at NRaas. And if you post on the "wrong" forum board, the post will be moved for you just the same as for everyone else, now that we can actually do that as we couldn't on the old site.

So you're saying I need a mod that I don't like or want to be able to disable game functionality that I also don't like or want? All I'm looking for is a way to stop the game from spawning NPCs.

@AGuyCalledPi Just go and download one of the other mods that does that if you don't like NRaas mods.

@Emmett Brown I've not actually used the new Nraas site on account of not having Sims 3 installed currently. However, it looks like there's a discussion section for each mod, so you'd want to post there.
https://www.nraas.net/community/nraas-mods

Yeah. Bottom line. It can be done. Is it worth it? If I had known what was involved, I wouldn't have bothered but YMMV.

NRAAS is far more hospitable than that Awesome mod, and not every NRAAS person is touchy. Chain_Reaction is a great guy, and he puts up with excess abuse, imho. He's always been helpful me when I had questions.
But the rules do change about where to post. I got blasted for using the SP thread and told to use Chatterbox. I even quoted chapter and verse saying to post in SP. Okay, rules changed. Now I see people getting chided in chatterbox, go to the mod thread.
IMHO, Mod The Sims is a very nice place to ask questions, you hardly ever get called out for asking a question here and the various groups have a sticky saying what the board is for and what kind of post is wanted. A bit cheeky to slam people on MTS for not posting on NRAAS. It's just a question, after all.

You'd think right? But at one time, folks were told to post questions about the mod to chatterbox because that's where the traffic was. The mod threads were, it was said, for reporting debugging problems with the mod. I used to do that with new versions of various mods.
It just isn't a warm fuzzy feeling when you go there and ask a legit question and the first thing you get is blasted for not posting in the right area. I see now that chatter box isn't the right area anymore. Just saying, nothing to get mad about, but I can see why people post questions at MTS and not NRAAS.

Well, there's also the tiny detail that MTS has been here at the same website for a lot longer than NRAAS has been able to manage... MTS had one address change, when Sims 3 came out and it was decided that both Sims 2 and Sims 3 would be supported. I lost count of how many times NRAAS had to move. It's a lot harder to post at a website when you can't find it anymore. And they always ended up with rule changes when they changed sites, although I will grant that most of the changes were due to the nature of the site they had moved to. I suspect that the new ease of keeping track of new posts in each individual mod forum without having them buried under new threads in the Chatterbox is responsible for the new rule change about posting in the mod threads. It would help keep the site organized, and thus easier to use in the long run. (And easier to move again if/when they have to. After all, moving has almost become a traditional feature of the site, and who wants to mess with tradition? )

(And there was a time when MTS was just as bad at blasting you for posting in the wrong spot before moving your thread as your experience with NRAAS apparently has been. I used to avoid MTS like the plague, because I got hopelessly lost every time I came here. As you can see, I finally got better. )

But I do agree that NRAAS does often feel less welcoming. They aren't. They are actually just as polite and friendly as the folks you find at MTS. That's also a wonderful place to browse for answers to NRAAS questions, because you occasionally discover you're not the first one to have wondered about something.

That's not setting the bar very high, I hope no one minds me pointing out.



This.

The thing is, I can't figure out our friend Emmet's motivation here. He's been baiting me (and barbarat before she retired from NRaas) with this stuff for years, he got a somewhat emotional reaction from me today, that should make him happy now, right? It's not like he's done a thing to make NRaas a better place as a community minded individual might. It is a wiki after all, a community effort, and we're certainly open to constructive and sensible criticism over the way we treat members or the way in which the forums are organized now that we actually have some control over these things.

Yet we know Emmet is a nice fellow. Ever hear him talk about his dog whom he loves and cares for so well? He is very kind and helpful to his fellow players when he wants to be and very clever, creative, and amusing also when he wants to be. But this stuff about beatings, chidings, being blasted, slamming, chewing heads off is all so far over the top that it's downright lying. Or defamation of character, anyway. Maybe we should consider legal action, though that won't actually help anyone so it wouldn't be worth it. (Edit: Now of course I wasn't being serious when I said this, sheesh)

For now I think I'll go back to NRaas and beat up...I mean help some players who need it.

I was thinking about this, and the question was "how do I control my town's population". I pointed out that you can do it with NRAAS mods. I don't think folks are going to know to go to NRAAS and ask that question if they don't know this is something that you can do with NRAAS mods! I'm sorry some NRAAS people got offended but I don't think that was unreasonable.
It also looks to me that the chatter box traffic there is very slow, where here, I think you're more likely to get a quick answer.
I love NRAAS mods. I wish their "contribute" webpage worked.

I've never baited you. I've whined about Story Progression being difficult to figure out and having non-default settings. It took me a long time to figure it out because it is a powerful, option heavy mod with documentation that is a bit jargon heavy and sparse. I finally got it to do what I wanted it to do and now I'm happy.
I'm not sure why you took offense at that or regarded it as a personal attack.
As I said, the question was "how do I control my sim's world population" and I don't see why you expected that to be asked at the wonderful NRAAS.net website. How would they even know that they can do that with NRAAS mods? MTS is a great forum for such questions. I pointed out how I do it, with NRAAS MC+cheats, SP, register and porter. If they had known more about the mods, they could have asked in the appropriate NRAAS forums. First they needed to know the mods exist and what they were, tho.
If you know a better way, please help! I would like to know a better way too!
And yeah, I do think you're way oversensitive to these things. Just chill please. Simmers just want to have fun.

Fuck it. I'm done with you. That's just nuts.