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Mad Poster
Original Poster
#1 Old 31st May 2021 at 1:52 AM
Default Household Staff
How do you handle the various employees of a large household? Do you include them in the actual playable household along with the family they're hired by? Do you run the house as a never-open home business, and hire employees and assign them tasks to work around the house, when there's huge gardens or massive kitchens to work and clean? Or if you do stick to the NPCs that can actually be hired in the game, how much of a relationship do they develop with the playable Sims in any of the homes they work in?

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#2 Old 31st May 2021 at 2:37 AM
My royal castle in my medieval hood is the best example I have of this. I moved in a goodly number of playables as different types of servants.

My 2 royal guards/knights I have on one side of the castle. They have a door to the basement, their quarters and their yard.
the wizard I have up in the tower area and he has rooms and a rooftop. None of these sims can go anywhere else so this keeps them where I want them.

I then have a nanny/governess, a cook/maid, a general upkeep man and a jester. They have rooms on the other side of the castle and can wader freely although I tend to keep them busy. Not to say I won't find them playing the organ in the chapel.
The Simlogical serving controller helps with the cook and where she serves meals.
A teleport mod helps at times too since it's a reasonably large lot and it can take all day for my upkeep man to cart water up to the wizard's tower. I use a mod that means water is required for tubs and things to work. Filling the water pitchers is a big part of his job.

I also hire a NPC maid as well since she can go into the guard section past the locked doors. No one can get into the wizard's area or leave unless I teleport them.

"I dream of a better tomorrow, where chickens can cross the road and not be questioned about their motives." - Unknown
~Call me Jo~
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#3 Old 31st May 2021 at 3:05 AM
The Vandermorgans' butler turned into a live-in because he either would not or could not leave the (very large) lot. There was an attached "guest house" that I made over into the butler's quarters, and he lives there when he's not otherwise occupied (which he usually is). I've begun to think he's an android, as he never seems to need to eat or sleep or, well, anything.

There's another butler (not even the same Sim) at Oresha-Hoh-Var (the fraternity at La Fiesta Tech), but he's usually able to leave around 8 pm and show up again next morning. Even with a bunch of rowdy frat boys, he doesn't have all that much to do.
Theorist
#4 Old 31st May 2021 at 9:58 AM
In regular neighbourhoods I only had that one time, when I gave the early generations of the Goths and the Crumplebottoms live-in nannies. They had their little servant's quarters and stuff, but the Butler still was hired as an NPC. Oh and when I made the Langraab ancestors a mafia clan they had live-in henchmen, one of them ended up marrying a daughter of the family.

In my post-apocalyptic neighbourhoods, however, the elite does have servants and guards that live in their household. They are Sims in their early adulthood who have to serve for a set amount of time and sleep in barracks on the compounds of the elite families. After their "term" is up they are allowed to leave and found their own families. As with above there's sometimes semi-forbidden romances between them and members of the elite family.

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#5 Old 31st May 2021 at 10:52 AM
When I was planning to play a medieval-ish neighbourhood, I was going to have the servants live with the household as actual members. Although, this wouldn't have been a problem for the most part, since I would've only allowed nobles to have one servant at most.

But it did come with some problems with the royal family, since they had a cook, a nanny, a gardener and a maid, and they combined with the kind and queen made six people, so there was only room for two babies, which would make it awkward if there was no boy to be the heir. Poor maid Anne would have had to be fired and sent back to the orphanage.

As for their tasks, I was just planning on using the macrotastics mod to set them to do things, or just control them instead of the king and queen since I thought they didn't really have a lot to do anyway, aside from skilling or something.
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#6 Old 31st May 2021 at 2:11 PM
Update on the Vandermorgan situation: the lot eventually hosed up because it was just too big and complicated for one butler to take care of. So I downsized to a house and lot that, though still large, won't be so time-consuming, and reset the butler to live-out work-in status.
Mad Poster
#7 Old 31st May 2021 at 7:11 PM
I might have older kids sometimes as live-in staff like parent helpers or household help and playables can work as housekeepers or nannies.It's also an ooption to hire NPC's if the family only needs that once.
Link Ninja
#9 Old 21st Oct 2021 at 3:31 PM
Quote: Originally posted by Aspersim
I've noticed that a butler also does that nanny job and in fact does literally everything, I hate the standard Gardner in the sims 2 because he/she never waters all the plants and then I end up needing sims to dispose of all the flowerbeds one by one, it's vary annoying, but I found out that that butler NPC in the sims 2. That when hired is actually better then the Gardner.

The Maids are great in the sims 2 as well, and the butler will hire additional staff I think, when needed, but the sims 2 Gardner is worthless and never does the job right.

The nanny's in the sims 2 are annoying as well they, constantly get in the households path way and, for some reason attack poke and wreck havoc on the parent sims emotional lives. Why does the nanny constantly poke the parent who in which are paying the nanny's salary and nanny's in the sims 2 are not cheap.


So, here is a case of I hit disagree and agree since we have been discussing it another thread, I'm going to explain it.

I disagreed because 1. Butler's don't 'hire' additional staff. They dismiss all the other service sims once they are hired. 2. Nannies don't go around poking parents, willy-nilly, maybe unless the sims that hired them can't pay their fees but I've never seen that personally nor heard about in the years of playing, only they steal something and say they are leaving because the parents couldn't pay. If your nannies are poking your sims, there's something else going on with their interpersonal relationships, cause that is not normal behavior. 3. The gardener comes every three days and waters as much plants as they are able to before their shift ends, if you have a large yard they might not get to it all, but saying they never water them all and are worthless isn't correct because they do if the yard is a manageable size. Keep in mind also, that fencing around a set of flowerbeds in a vanilla game could cause the gardener to complain they can't reach the plant to maintain it. There are a few mods that take care of this, but that's for another thread.

I DID agree with some of the stuff 1. nannies Are/can be annoying. 2. Maids are great.

Also, it would have been better to create a new topic about service sims or something instead of resurrecting one from May where it asks how you handle service sims of large households and then you don't really answer that and just tell us your opinions and some incorrect facts about the service sims instead. But that is just my two cents, based on being around this forum for many years.

Uh oh! My social bar is low - that's why I posted today.

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#11 Old 21st Oct 2021 at 8:11 PM
Never thought about this. Always used the in-game nanny/babysitter/butler system. Might try to do a rich family soon that's cold and distant from their kids, and hires a live-in nanny to take care of everything. That is one reason I liked TS3 butlers slightly more, the fact they reside at the employer's home. Always liked making a little butler's quarters in TS3. Sometimes I was mean and would put it in the dark creepy basement. Sometimes he'd be on the top floor with his own little balcony. Something to try in TS2 now I guess!

edit: just noticed this was an older thread that was revived by someone else, but it wasn't me !

I ramble a lot, and get confused easily, so my apologies to you in advance.
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#12 Old 21st Oct 2021 at 11:07 PM
Quote: Originally posted by Charmful
2. Nannies don't go around poking parents, willy-nilly, maybe unless the sims that hired them can't pay their fees but I've never seen that personally nor heard about in the years of playing, only they steal something and say they are leaving because the parents couldn't pay. If your nannies are poking your sims, there's something else going on with their interpersonal relationships, cause that is not normal behavior.


Nannies can poke the adults in the house the same way any sim does. So you know the annoy interaction and how mean sims like to point to the sim and flick their nose? That. But that is based on the sims personality, not any any nanny coding.
Worse at poking are landlords. They must come mean because they are constantly the most hated sims in my hoods, over various hoods.


Quote: Originally posted by Aspersim
The nannies poke parents autonomously for whatever reason in the sims 2, Not because they are not getting paid to geez this forum is rude. I never encounters so many rude people in my life, this forum takes everything people say and pick pockets every last detail just to get the point across,

I swear the butler hires additional staff when he needs helps and yes their is a choice to tell him not to and yes he does dismiss the staff, why nitpick everything newbies say? and what is wrong with bumping a thread form May when people bump threads from 4 years ago


They are not coded to poke. They can poke as any sim can poke.

Butlers fire unless you stop them.

"I dream of a better tomorrow, where chickens can cross the road and not be questioned about their motives." - Unknown
~Call me Jo~
Mad Poster
#13 Old 22nd Oct 2021 at 8:36 AM
If I played a medieval game, I might have done things differently, but since I don't:
A gardener is sometimes necessary if the garden is very big, but - yes, I have a mod So instead of having to prune hedges, they will have some fruit trees and vegetables to take care of and leaves to rake in autumn.
When it comes to cleaning, it is mostly elder sims who get to hire a maid or very rich ones who earns enough money (in my opinion). My sims do most of the work themselves, and nannies are basically the only employees because parents have to go to work. The more members of a family, the easier it is - there is almost always some-one who can cook or clean for the day or tend to the garden. Some nannies clean as well and sometimes, they make food without burning it. Children are perfectly able to help with cleaning, and teens certainly are (besides, the neat ones love to). It does not really matter how big the kitchen is: they will still only clean the counter they used to prep the food, the stove and the basin - no need to clean anything else, so more manpower is not actually necessary. Elders, who tend to wake up in middle of the night because they are well-rested due to aspiration points, clean while others are sleeping - they can go back to bed or play the piano or work out on the exercise machine or do whatever they want to do after that
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