I didn't want to disrupt the Stupid Questions thread plus when I put this here for someone to find it under a simple google search

all I found was this thread on this matter so far
https://modthesims.info/t/434639

Do Random Sims Move into random houses in the town by themselves if you are starting the game "in an empty town" with the default story progression turned on, when the town was originally empty and no prior sims lived in the town besides the sims you put into the town yourself?

Sorry if this was asked before but when I searched this question in this thread and forum it came up empty

I really really need to know if the game auto populates empty towns once I start playing live mode. right now I am in the building process of a saved game file, and if anyone could also tell me how many sims and other sim families can I expect to see move in besides my own created sims. I started this town when it had no lots or sims in it at all. and I'm curious to know if I will have to manually populate the town first or will the game do most of that work for me?

I did see this answer but I'm a newbie to this game so I am still unsure



If not I'll just need to create the families manually I guess. I don't want to go through the hassle of downloading sims from another persons game of downloading another mod. I did erase my original post in the stupid questions thread I hope nobody minds me creating a separate thread. but all in all from my experience all created thread titles show up in google searches when someone else is looking for a direct answer to a question they have. 98% of the results I get when I ask a question on google comes from an online forum, I don't know about you though

Yes, but it happens very slowly in my experience. I think I read somewhere (Quite a long time ago, so take it with a grain of salt, I could be wrong here), that one of the things that can trigger it is need based.
For example, you send you child to school, there are no other households with children, the game may move in a family with children from the bin so your child can use all the features of the school.

The quote you specified is true too. It's like villagers in minecraft, there are certain requirements to get the game to see that as a living space and let them move in. There needs to be a bed and a fridge. If you want to block sims from moving in, make shell houses with nothing on the inside, that way you can still get the neighborhood vibe without those pesky neighbors.

I'm not sure about the EA story progression, but with nraas story progression (which is generally recommended over the EA as it's more robust and has loads of options for editing how it should work) Sims won't move in to homes unless immigration is enabled. As someone mentioned in that thread, there is also a rapid immigration which is great for quickly populating the town.
Again there are loads of options for which Sims should be immigrated as well as where their genetics should come from.

Without immigration enabled, homeless Sims will be generated to fill needs like missing coworkers.
But that's all with the nraas version, I'm afraid I don't know much about how the EA one works

Yes, with Story Progression on, random sims definitely move into empty houses. What triggers it is what @LemonyLin said. When you give your starting household jobs and it has kids, the game will generate additional households to give them coworkers and classmates. I have not found the process slow as others have said, but maybe it's because I always have a large number of households in my library ready to move in. If I throw in three or four households at the start of the game and assign jobs, the world will start generating 2-3 households overnight and an additional household or two by the end of the sim week.

I also tend to play large households. So, imagine you have three households with 5-8 roommates each and give each household member jobs, this will cause a town to grow fairly quickly in about a sim week.

Lastly, I think Showtime makes the difference. If you have ST venues, SP will force the creation of households for Sim Fests.

Just be careful with all this, though, because I found this very strange situation when it comes to kids. Sometimes, SP will generate "orphans."

Of course it does. It can take a few days. And if you have played a bit you will see that it does.

I found this quote on a different thread related to this one vary helpfull, to enable random NPC's to occupy neighboring apartments in the sims 3 Late Night Expansion, however if have University from what I was told and you don't want dormie's in your sims houses and apartments crashing your refrigerator your first need to select a sim with a house "not an apartment" then smart phone, real estate, roommates, disable roommates option to make sure you don't have a bunch of sims crashing all your families apartments and houses in town.

I can't access the disable roommate option with an apartment only a sim in a house can disable dormie for the neighborhood as far as I know.

I found out that apartment complexes in the sims 3 when done correctly with "testingcheatsEnabled true" and "buydebug on" cheats activated in order to get the public and hidden marker as well as the apartment mailboxes is the best way to populate your town, but I am still running tests though, so your going to have to be patient with me @daisylee because I'm just a newbie, but I am not a newbie to the sims series just a newbie to actually playing the sims 3.

if anyone is wondering I do have overwatch and error trapper but not the Custom mod story progression mod

My familiy has had the sims 3 since 2009 but I just started playing it again recently

You do not need to have a single apartment lot in a town. The game will add Sims to the town. It is not necessary to have them. At all. Worlds built before apartments were in the game filled. And worlds built since they were introduced without them work/fill perfectly well without them.

I have about 6 worlds in progress in CAW now and have not put a single apartment lot in any of them.

There would not be thousands, whatever the number is, of worlds put on the exchange before there were apartments if players had to populate them manually. The game does that automatically.