Since I'm completely unimpressed with TS4, and ITF seems to be good I decided to give TS3's yet another chance. Now that EA has mostly left it, custom content and mods should get even more amazing, just like it did for TS2 once it was "complete".

Thing is, I know that I'll never, ever like the enforced legacy play. I'd lose interest in a week. But I have heard some people have been playing the game rotation style with the help of mods. Mostly Twallan's. I have the idea to use it in conjunction with awesomehood (for its "sacred" sims/households feature, plus fixes of other annoying things like the books that disappear into thin air), but I still have a few questions:

-Is there any mod/method to have "homeless" townies and NPCs a la Sims 2? I would like to have a few sims I don't play to populate venues and as marriage fodder, but I absolutely despise the fact that they have to have a house. Those houses are for my Sims, and since most stuff were you'd need neighbours (like treat-or-tricking) is broken, I do not see any need to have them. A pool of 25 ageless townies would be enough for me, and that'd save on loading and save times.

-How do you use Twallan's mods to help with rotational playing? I used a lot of his mods in the last chance I gave the game, and while useful, they were so extensive I could not explore it fully, so I do not know if I wasn't using it properly for the way I want to play.

-Any mod to make the game only generate cat/dog strays, and not horses?

-Any general hints on avoiding corrupt saves? Even though I only have 4GB of ram, I could get by with short playing sessions, no other programs in the background, and the save cleaner utility. But since this will be multi-generational, I am worried I won't be able to get past 3 gens with the way the game works.

That's about it, although I am thankful for any other tips. If anyone could share their favourite custom small-medium worlds, I'd be thankful too, especially if they have Island Paradise features.

1. EA hoods come with homeless townies, but if you mean you want to make your own, you can do that with Twallan's Master Controller. There is a homeless household and I believe you can just add your sims to it.

2. I'm not super clear on what rotational playing is, but I'm guessing you want TS2 style aging and able to easily switch households? TS2 style aging can be done with Nraas StoryProgression. It's explained here: http://nraas.wikispaces.com/StoryPr...Q+Miscellaneous. If you want to switch households, Master Controller also does that for you. It adds a Nraas menu to almost every interaction. You can select a sim or house, choose Nraas, Master Controller, and Make Active. Awesomemod makes it even easier where you can just control-click on a sim or house to switch to it. Likewise, I think Awesomemod also has TS2 style aging settings as well.

3. Nraas Register has an Animal Control option that lets you disable specific species of stray animals like horses.

4. I don't think corrupt saves is a common issue with the latest patch. I have had old saves get to where they take ridiculously long to load, but with patience, they do all eventually load. Eventually a save will be corrupted and trigger an error as well as having a .bad extension, but deleting the .bad folder and trying again usually works.

Thank you. If Master controller lets me add homeless townies and control my strays, then most of my problems are fixed. For 2. I'll just use awesomemod, since the "sacred" function works pretty well for me. I really just want the families I want to remain static.

One more question, can master controller be used to summon sims to a community lot? I want this to solve the issue of empty venues, which I doubt has been solved in any other way.

I am going to keep tabs on this thread because even though I've been using Twallan's mods for years, they just kept getting more and more complicated and frankly I gave up trying to figure out all the options! But I would be interested in this style of gameplay also. I want to play my generations and maybe some other sims but the rest of the sims can do what they like. Sometimes I also let some of the offspring do what they like because I find it tedious to play every detail of every household. I find it fun to see who SP picks as a partner for them.

As for hood corruption, I suggest that you don't delete any sims but if you really have to, use mastercontroller for that, too. It cleans up leftover flotsam that I understand can corrupt your save. Also you might want to consider playing in a small or medium sized world if possible due to your 4 GB RAM. That may also help with populating venues, because part of the problem is how many sims your PC can handle at any one time in any one place. There are some nice user created worlds out there but make sure if you use one that has been working well for other simmers.

I get Error Code 12 using 8GB Ram when I have the game running for more than 4 hours or so.* I would save often and also use the Save As function every once in a while so you can always go back to a previous save if anything happens to corrupt your game (and an error code 12 will corrupt your game).

*But just so you know, I have every EP, SP, and most of the EA Store installed on my machine. :D

I am definitely on the lookout for small worlds, since if I can get homeless townies, I only really need a world big enough to hold my own playable families. I'll just add the ultimate spawners avaliable here so I can get all the collectibles. Not to mention I hate all the empty spaces of nothingness most EA worlds have, all it does is add to the Sims travel time. I am going to have the same game set up as you, and try to limit myself to bursts of playing for 2 hours only, so we'll see how that goes (I still need a lot of time to set up everything properly and get enough cc to get the game to my liking.)

I think that to delete sims, I'll just use awesomemod's apocalypse cheat so I can get rid of all of them at once. I wonder what I'll do for the ITF worlds and University world though...I suppose I'll try the same method of deleting them all and add sims to the homeless family with master controller, and see how that goes. Or at the very least use master controller to fix EA's pudding syndrome. I really wish there was an option we could use to summon sims to a venue though. I don't care if they're supposed to be at work, I want the festivals to actually feel like festivals.

Actually, I don't recall where I found it but there's a mod by Shimrod "Shimrod's townies out on the town" that I use to deal with it. Okay, looks like it's at Naughty Sims Asylum.

As long as you want to play TS2 Style completely, and rotate through all the families in town or they stay the same age, AwesomeMod is probably your best option. Go through the config options, and make sure you stop sacred sims from doing anything like gaining aspiration while they're not played, and you should be good. The only thing it won't do is keep money fixed, but it's easy enough to keep track in a notebook and fix it when you next play that household.

If you want to play some families in rotation and let others age on their own (which couldn't be done in TS2) then that's a bit more complicated to set up but I can go through the process if you need it.



NRaas Register is the mod you need here. There's a population control option for strays, and you can use it to set no horses if you like.

If I were you, I wouldn't mess with the sims in Uni and ITF worlds. I'm no programmer or IT Specialist, but those worlds are set up differently. If you are going to try it, I would suggest you attempt it on a world that you're not very invested in just to see what happens.

Do you like to build or place your own houses or are you looking for something that is already built up? Also, I don't know what EPs you have but this world is similar to Sunset Valley but is unpopulated, base game compatible, and only has one house placed. It does have spawners but only the base game ones. I think it's a large world but as long as you don't add too many lots it shouldn't make a difference. http://www.thesims3.com/assetDetail...assetId=5940639

There is another version called Glenvale City that is more built up - don't think that one is populated, either. I've played both of these and lots of Rflong7/Rflong13's worlds and they all run very well. She might have some other small worlds you might be interested in, you can look in her Studio on the EA Forum but some are on mediafire - more info here: http://forum.thesims3.com/jforum/posts/list/374366.page

If you have a lot of sims in your bin, you can set NRASS SP to make new sims with their genetics. Mixologists and other service pool auto-generated sims will still be puddings, though.

I don't know if you'd be interested in using it, but if your sims have a high enough social networking skill from their smartphone (level 4 according to Carl's Guide) you can use a sim finder app. You pick three of the traits you want the sim to have and the game creates the sim and sends them to the lot you are at where you can make friends with them or whatever. At least when I tried it, the sim was not previously a part of the world. I only used it twice in one game not long ago, but later these sims didn't run off to get jobs right away so they were frequently showing up at venues where my sim was. That may not be standard behavior, I don't know - haven't used it enough to know. But I thought it was pretty cool, and might be another way to get sims to show up on lots. There are other methods using NRASS mods - I'll see if I can find the steps for the one I am thinking of.

I'm not sure you'll be able to create a pool of homeless townies that will stay homeless townies in TS3; let us know if you are successful with that.

Thank you for your custom worlds suggestions. Just so you know, my setup (when I get around to installing it all and properly patching it) will be all EPs+SPs, and most of the store's content later. At first I'll just play with the EPs and SPs plus the essential mods, to save myself on loading times. I prefer worlds that are already built, but I have preference for ones with the IP dive lots. I'll add the spawners myself using a mod here, so I'll only need about four of them. Populated, maybe, I'll see how the game behaves after I nuke it's population with awesomemod. If it all works well, no reason to not have pre-populated worlds.

From what I've gathered around the net, it seems mixologists, bouncers, etc, are sims that the game draws from the homeless townie pool, so at least those sims should remain homeless. IDK if it'll allow me to have a high homeless population though, but it's a matter of testing and seeing what happens. I'll also want to test if it'll mean my sims won't have coworkers if I don't assign the townies a job before I make them homeless. We'll see. I won't seriously start to play the game until I've worked out how this whole thing will work, including the University and ITF worlds (and maybe the WA worlds too). So it's gonna take a while to even test the rotation part, since I wanna get the townie part taken care of first.

It's actually Register that has the Animal Control and not Master Controller. I don't remember being able to summon sims to a community lot with MC. You can use it to find a specific sim anywhere in the town, but I don't recall a summon option. You'll probably have to use the other mod that was mentioned. I'm not sure if it's due to one of the Nraas mods or Awesomemod, but I always seem to have other sims show up to any lots my active sim is at. I can go to any lot and a bunch of other sims start showing up. If it's not Awesomemod doing it, I'd guess it's Nraas StoryProgression.



That's correct, mixologists, bouncers, and any role sims do draw from the homeless pool. If there aren't enough homeless, the game will spawn a computer-generated sim to fill the role. With Nraas Register, you can manually assign those roles to residents, however. You can also configure the game to allow automatic assignment of unemployed residents. The drawback to that, is if you ever wanted to play a household with any sims assigned to a role, switching to their household using Awesomemod's CTRL-click will cause any sims with a role in that household to drop their roles, although switching to them using Master Controller works and they can keep their role.

Nraas StoryProgression and also Awesomemod (at least in the past), likes to mess around with the homeless sometimes. I've had homeless without roles get mysteriously deleted. There are a lot of settings that can be tweaked that might stop this behavior, but I think I've tweaked some before and still would mysteriously lose homeless sims. I usually keep them safe by moving all the homeless to an empty lot, which prevents any mods from deleting them, and I have Register set to allow resident assignment. Since they're usually unemployed, Register is able to draw from the same pool of sims even though they're not officially homeless.

Another thing to consider - some of the role sims will go to a late night apartment building and "live" there. They become the apartment NPCs. I've seen as many as 18 sims use a single apartment as a home (although sometimes they just disappear when they reach the building rather than to actually enter it). If there are no apartments, they will just go to an empty lot and disappear.

Before you add your playable families you could add a sim, place them on an empty lot, and register them as unemployed. You might need the career mod for that, I'm not sure. But this will keep them unemployed although they will attempt to move into a house if it's available. Unless you are able to make them homeless after you mark them as unemployed? I'll have to try that and see if it works. But make sure that none of them have career-related lifetime goals if you ever decide to use Twallan's SP; I know for regular sims, the mod will put them in that career unless you turn that off in SP.

Edit: just to clarify, I'm talking about the non-role sims that you want to stay unemployed so they are more likely to be available to join your sims on community lots. But FYI, the game also sometimes puts sims in "low detail mode" so they aren't substantiating and using up processing power. So while some of the lack of sims on venues problem is due to game design, which is what we are trying to get around with these suggestions, some of it is due to the ability of your PCs processor to render many sims at the same time. I also don't have any problem getting sims to show up unless I send my sims somewhere at an odd time when most of the town will be working or something, which is a game design issue. Or unless the horses or pets are lagging my game, lol. But I have a desktop i7 2660k processor and even tho it's a few years old now it still runs the game pretty well.

I'm pretty sure that either Pescado or Twallan said that your sims will generate co-workers (or for kids, other students in school) and it's not related to SP. The only way to stop that might be to set a low population limit in SP? Oh wait, you said you weren't planning to use the NRASS SP. Sorry, just got confused there for a moment. Ha ha!

Obviously keeping your population down will help the world run better, especially since a lot of the time the problem is routing errors. But you would have that problem even if you made a pool of homeless sims. So putting a late night style apartment in the world and a couple of extra houses for your non-playables might be all you need. I think if you try to make them all homeless, the game will start deleting the extras. You could go to the NRASS site or Maty and do some research or someone may be able to tell you how the game and the mod manages the homeless population.

I don't know of any medium worlds that have dive lots offhand. You might check that other thread about good custom worlds if you haven't already done that.

Awesomemod also has a population limit setting, but I haven't messed with that for now. I'll trust it to create needed sims that I forget about and then use MC to un-puddingfy them. I just have a huge problem with unwanted fodder sims occupying houses. I might do the apartment thing as a last resort, but I will still give my other ideas a try, if just to figure out the game's inner mechanics a little more. I have almost everything set up now, save for the store content, so I'll do some quick tests later tonight. Heh, worst comes to worst, I'll just use awesomemod's no house limit setting to put all the townies in one empty lot far away from the other houses and leave it at that. Playing rotationally is what's important after all.

I have found a couple of good medium worlds with dive lots, so I should be set for a while, thanks.

Sorry for the double post, but I need to post my results. Okay, so here's what I got from a day of testing, played two 1 week rounds for 2 families.:
Good things:
-Homeless sims stay homeless, and with SP off, any other sims the game adds are also homeless. I'll have to set a population limit to awesome, so I can limit the number of townies the game keeps adding though. Some of them have become my co-workers, others became paparazzi and such.
-Register has kept the stray population under control. No annoying wildlife so far.
-Shimrod's mod works really well. No matter what time my sim goes out, they'll see sims visit the same lot or at least walk by it. I've finally had festivals that weren't deserted, I've even seen some strays at the beach sometimes. Some sims that joined the showtime careers even go to the park to perform sometimes, even if my Sim is not there.
-Aspiration points, career/skill progress and even pregnancy remains static.
-As far as I can tell, there's no penalty for using MC to un-puddingfy sims from University.

Bad thigns:
-Even with the sacred setting and TS2 style ageing set in awesomemood, everyone in the world ages. Even the sims in my sacred house. Which is weird, since pregnancy does remain static.
-Like someone else mentioned before, money doesn't stay static.

So, as far as I can see, all I need to do is take care of the ageing thing and I can play rotationally pretty well. There's some minor things, like the weather being global and not house based, so you may leave one family in winter and come back and it's spring, but it's something I can deal with.

Thanks for posting your findings. That's good to know that the homeless stay homeless. And I think using MC to fix up Uni sims should be fine; I was worried you were just going to delete them all and that might not have worked out very well considering how those 'hoods are programmed. Do you have the aging setting off in the game options? If so, does your active household age or just the ones not being played?

I'd also be interested in knowing what worlds you found if you don't mind sharing.

One thing you could try with the weather is set the seasons longer. Like if you have 6 households you play and you play each one for a sim week, set each season to last 42 weeks.

Okay, so I finally figured the ageing thing out. Turns out awesomemod conflicts with Overwatch in that aspect, so I took out overwatch and settle for doing a resetworld at the end of every session. So only my active household ages, my sacred sims and my townies remain static. It's working well so far, so now I can finally set up store content, get CC and plan out the sims I want to play.

Also, I cannot sing Shimrod's mod enough praises. Even with just 15 townies it's great. With a fully populated world like Oasis Landing, it's fantastic. No matter where you go, even if it's a shop, at least 5-6 sims are there. With parks and hotspots, 10-15 sims. I've even seen families take their toddlers with them to picnics and stores, so cute. No strays found so far though....

So yeah, other than having to keep some notes on how much money each family has, everything works perfectly with homeless sims, and the worlds still fell alive. As for the weather, I think I will live with it and just try Tangie's suggestion, to make seasons last as long as my rotation days x number of households I have.

So to make things short:
-Use awesomemod to set chosen houses sacred, have TS2 style ageing and to resetworld;
-Use Master Controller to evict sims to make them homeless and to un-puddingfy sims in other worlds;
-Use Register to control the pet/wildlife population;
-Use Shimrod's townie's out on the town mod to actually see Sims hanging around in your world;
-Set story progression to off;
And volia, rotation style play with townies almost a la TS2.


I mostly use this site, which has great search parameters, but if you want specific examples, I've been enjoying Palm Shadows by Cink Sims and Lillesund by Galadrielhs. Both IP enabled. But there's plently of good worlds in that site that aren't island themed, even small ones.

I made my mod of randomness to handle the TS2 style aging conflict with overwatch.
It also has integrated in it an option to disable sims who are not active, from getting paid. This keeps their funds to around what it is.
There are many other options in this mod but the instructions are included.

I love playing the whole hood in rotation. Every household in the town is played/will be played. Even the homeless I have in my hood will eventually be playable. The homeless in my hood are the sims from the other worlds. I wanted to do a type of überhood.

I play the game pretty much with the same settings except
- I don't use sacred in awesome. With SP off the game doesn't do much to these sims except will sometime give them jobs but you can prevent this by giving them jobs yourself or the unemployed job by twallan.
- I use Overwatch because it keeps the hood clean. It also does stuff like recover missing sims, and find them toddlers that sims have lost :D
With overwatch you need to turn the "delete homeless" setting off, or it will purge them every night when it runs.
- I use my own mod for aging. Because I also use my apartment mod and don't want sims in the other apartments to age + the whole overwatch/awesome conflict.

About the homeless
I like the homeless. I have had too many births and too little deaths in my hood so sometimes to keep the game running better I'll take some families I have not had the chance to play and will not play for some time and turn them to homeless. Also if I have sim kids I don't want to play, after they grow up I turn them to homeless. this keeps them save for later use, I can move them to the town if I want but I still can call them and invite them over if I want. Turning sims into homeless saves resources and makes the town run better because these people need minimal processing powers. They are just plain data, with no physical form until the game needs them and they are summoned to the town for example if you call your homeless kid over for dinner.

My only issue with the homeless is that you don't see them around in town. I don't use shimrod's townies out on town mod because the townies do fill my hood very well. I'm never alone on lots. But I'd like the homeless to show up once in a while. Does shimrod's mod effect this?

Does that mean if I have your mod, I can have Awesome, Overwatch and TS2 ageing at the same time? That'd be amazing.

But answering your homeless question, all of them worked perfectly fine going to my community lots. They still respected their job hours of course, but they were out on the town nonetheless. I even saw some sims with the ambitions and showtime professions walking around and practising their careers. Now I've only messed around with homeless with one world that had nothing but homeless, so I don't know if your normal sims would take precedence over them and make them not appear as much. I'm guessing it will still depend on their job schedule though, so making your homeless unemployed is a good idea if you want to see them often. I'd get shimrod's mod even if you already have a good number of visitors, mostly because it just removes a lot of stupid restrictions EA put on townies. Now you can even see families walk around with their toddler, and yes, they do function correctly and take their toddler with them when the leave, and some other minor stuff like allowing stray pets in beaches and such.

Yes you can.
If you decide to use it please read the instructions that come with it and note you need this item (a decorative tree in a pot) to be in your hood. Just put it somewhere on a community lot. I have it in the garden of city hall.

I'll try Shimrod's mod, because I really want to see the homeless also around town.