Hey everyone, I'm feeling pretty stumped so maybe someone here has an idea of how this happened.

I'm working on creating a custom hood and have all of the "typical" mods to prevent townies from spawning (notownieregen, nostrayrespawn, nodormieregen, antiredundancy, etc.), but haven't really thought too much about it since I've been exclusively building and have yet to create a Sim or even enter Live mode to do any play testing.

Yesterday when using LotAdjuster, I went to backup my neighborhood and saw that I had character files created! I opened SimPE and sure enough I had one of each of the AL Social Group townies and a bunch of stray cats and dogs 🤨

What I'm not understanding is how these character files were even created if I've never entered Live mode! I don't have any lot set as an apartment lot currently, only Residential and Community Lots (I do have some apartment doors placed for future apartment lots, that's true) and I have the "nostrayrespawn" mod as well.

For additional context, I have all of the stealth/blank hoods setup properly and I'm playing on The Sims 2 Legacy Collection on Steam.

I tried to recreate the issue by creating a new blank hood, placing apartment doors on residential and community lots, etc., to see if I could get the game to do it again, but nothing.

I guess my main question is: in what circumstances does the game generate character files outside of Live mode?

Thanks in advance!

You are probably missing something that creates Apartment Life socialites - example mod here [but there are others, it depends on what you want exactly] https://modthesims.info/d/683106/no...r-spawning.html
Perhaps you also skipped the process with pets hidden hood, magic hood etc. There is a whole process you need to go through in program files to have a truly empty hood.
Stealth hoods here https://modthesims.info/d/520751
Read more here https://modthesims.info/t/655536
Also, some items generate sims, I believe bars on community lots for example. There should be a recent mod that prevents that. https://modthesims.info/d/690901/anti-npc-mod.html

Good call outs - I double checked and I've properly removed all of the hidden hoods that came with Pets, Seasons, Freetime, etc. So everything should be good there.

Items generating Sims feels like it makes the most sense. I think on one of my community lots I placed a dog-collar stand (you know the item you can use to purchase pet collars). Maybe that's what generated the strays? Although, I tried to reproduce that issue in a different hood and wasn't able to, so 🤷‍♂️

There is an addon that has no pet on it, here: https://episims.tumblr.com/post/721...display-add-ons