"Faelians": Multi-PT mod based on "Stolen by Fairies" with Pixie skins and geneticized galaxy eyes

"Some beings in the Otherworld are so different that we have no human name for them."

Introduction

I discovered Hat's Stolen by Fairies at an impressionable age. I'm inclined to blame it for my long-running fascination with the conceptual overlap between aliens and fae. The idea of beings so unlike humanity as to create an unbridgeable psychological difference, that take people and brings them back changed, lurks somewhere intriguingly in the collective unconsciousness. Stolen by Fairies restyles the PTs as fae and was designed for medieval games, but is brilliantly applicable in any context; the concepts shake and shift and shudder when you poke at them a moment, and man, do I like poking them.

Still, I'm picky. Coming back to serious play after a long break and needing a PT set, I didn't want the eyes anymore, and I wasn't sure about the skins, either, even though I respect the Discworld reference. Outside the context of medieval-ania, I also found myself wondering about the titles. See, Hat gave the PTs titles -- kings and queens, lords and ladies. They're not all equally-titled, either, but occupy different parts of a class structure. I wondered, stripped of the romance, what fundamentally and profoundly alien creatures would need their kings and queens for.

As I discovered Enayla's Pixie skins, a few concepts started slotting into place. Where did creatures that (no matter how human-shaped they were) are so deeply unlike humans get a caste system from? What would they distinguish themselves by?

...Did, perhaps, some have gems growing out of their skin?

Description

This is an eight-PT set that uses the Stolen by Fairies PTs as a base. The face shapes and hair colours are unchanged, and can be seen in the first image or the original Stolen by Fairies post on Dreamwidth (linked in intro). The hairstyles and clothes the PTs come with are also unchanged; the image uses default replacements, and in your family trees they'll appear in base game Maxis hairstyles (or whatever default replacements you have for them, which are probably different to mine). The unreplaced hairstyles can be seen in Hat's original screenshots.

What's changed are the skins and eyes. Skins have been replaced with various fantasy skins from Enayla's Pixie set. I pulled Auberon's and Titania's from Pixie Gems and Ainsel's and Lankin's from Pixie Demonic, as an intentional 'class' consistency; the rest come from a couple different sets. Eyes have been replaced with (a few names here...) Joku's untownification of Pooklet's/Furbyq's/Aelia's/CuriousB's/Nyren's/Lella's recolours of Mouseyblue's 'galaxy' alien eyes. These are geneticized eyes, something I haven't seen any multi-PT sets do before and which the guides I've seen on the subject claim is impossible -- it's completely possible, and they behave exactly as you'd expect them to.

The eyes are all geneticized at 1. For the five basic eye colours, they're codominant with brown and dark blue (so offspring will have a 50/50 chance of either) and dominant over light blue, green, and grey. If your game has additional eye colours to the base five, check the details of your set; some custom eyes are left ungeneticized (so are super-dominant over all geneticized eyes, these included), while others are geneticized either at the basic 1 or 2 values, or various fractions. The skins are just straight custom and are superdominant over normal geneticized skins. All skins and eyes are included (and necessary for the mod to work properly) and will show up in CAS; none are townified, so townies won't spawn with faelian features.

Details of the PTs, in the order they appear in the first pic:

















Spawn

These are good PTs. The skins are all distinguishable such that the specific faelian parent is obvious from birth (though some of the lighter shades require a bit of squinting and zooming). Their offspring are broadly "good-looking, but just weird enough" -- tendencies to long faces. Corrigan's are weirder than the rest, so people who prefer their PTs 'interesting-looking' are still served. Auberon's are the best of the bunch, IMO; Hat likes Robin's and Titania's a lot. See what you like.



A cool part of multi-PT mods is you can have multigenerational aliens. In an unmodded game, the presence of only one PT means all aliens are considered related; half-aliens can't have relationships with each other, and abductions don't result in 3/4ths or higher offspring. Because there are multiple faelians, it's possible to have faelian-spawn get taken (however you choose to interpret it) themselves and produce faelian-spawn of their own.



Finally, it's important to know how the faelian-spawn themselves reproduce with normal sims. I tested with two fathers; the original faelian-spawn reproduced with a sim with black hair, grey eyes, S1 skin, and the first face template, while her daughter reproduced with a sim with brown hair, green eyes, S3 skin, and the 27th face template. The results were promising.



Usage

Multi-PT mods are simple to use, but have a few caveats to avoid causing problems for your game.

To install the mod, simply place it in your downloads folder as you would other CC/mods. This mod includes all the genetics needed for the PTs to work -- the base sims and their CC skins and eyes. None of those three elements can be removed if there are faelian-spawn in your game, unless you plan to permanently cease playing any neighbourhoods with faelian-spawn. Removing them will break genetics, resulting in sims passing down junk genetic data that eventually causes gameplay problems.

If you want to remove the mod (to replace it with another PT set or go back to the default PT), remove the subfolder 'Mod' from the Faelians folder. You can do this repeatedly -- if you'd like to alternate between this mod and another multi-PT set, you can just repeatedly change which mod file you have in your game. (This is useful if you have radically different neighbourhoods and want this set for some but not all.) Similarly, if you want to switch to this mod from another multi-PT mod, just find the mod file of it and remove it. Some will have clearly marked mod files/folders as mine does, while others might require a bit of poking, but they'll all have a distinct mod file to handle the actual PT elements. (You'll know you have the right file if it reads 'Get Alien Dad' in SimPe.)

It's perfectly safe to switch to this mod from the original Stolen by Fairies (or vice versa). I remade the mod from scratch; the GUIDs are different, so won't cause any issues.

Notes

The mod file itself is called 'Faelians Mod v2'. There is no v1 -- my playtesting revealed my original attempt at an eight-PT mod resulted in a de facto four-PT mod (four were overridden and unable to spawn).

Not included, but suggested: Hat's original Stolen by Fairies includes an optional add-on that replaces game text referencing 'aliens' to reference 'fairies'. I've intentionally played up the ambiguity here, so if you want it to land confidently on that side rather than the other (whether because you play a period game or because you just want it to say 'fairies'), feel free to check it out. The text-changing add-on is available as a separate download, so you can pick it up from the link in the first paragraph.

Credits

Hat deserves the most credit for the original mod, the inspiration, and the obsession with the overlap it gestures at. As mentioned: Enayla, Joku, Pooklet, Furbyq, Aelia, CuriousB, Nyren, Lella, and Mouseyblue deserve credit for the skins and eyes (and Enayla another part of the mod's inspiration). Simgaroop made a helpful (if not entirely accurate regarding geneticized eyes) tutorial that I kept close while working on the mod. Quaxi made SimPe, which was of course a fundamental part of its creation. As we all do, I stand on the shoulders of giants.