I'm using empty templates and mods to suppress townies/dormies/etc from spawning, and I wanted to create some custom tourists, so I made two interesting characters and tried to turn them into tourists with Inge's teleporter cat before reading online that it apparently doesn't work and we're supposed to use the NPC maker instead. So I got Cyjon's fix for that, summoned my two sims to a lot, and tried to turn them into proper tourists with the NPC maker...the little popup messages said they were "added to family," and I made them unselectable and cleared them off. But now I can't find them on the summon menu at all. Is that normal? It's kind of freaking me out.

Before I used the NPC maker on them, they were both under "Greene" in the teleporter menu. "Greene" is the last name of the one I created first and it didn't make a whole lot of sense to me for them to be grouped together, because they were created in CAS separately and I used the teleporter cat on them separately. But now, as I said, I can't find them at all. Why were they in the same "family" before I used the NPC maker and why are they apparently entirely inaccessible now?

Townies are always in the same family and named after the first one you made (unless it's an EAxis name - but it's still always the same). They usually get grouped into families depending on their function - so you get NPCs grouped into one family, strays grouped into one family, downtownies ... etc. etc.

Why you can't find them on the cat, I'm not sure. They should be there I think - under their family name.

Obviously I looked for them! I looked through every family name thinking maybe they'd somehow got stuck in with some other family group, but either I somehow managed to miss them or they just weren't showing up. When I couldn't find them (I checked in Sim Blender's summon menu as well), I eventually gave up and exited the lot without saving.

Oh - try it on another lot? I think you might have an issue if you try it from the same lot you created them from (if that makes sense). It's odd otherwise though - can you still see them in SimPE?

To check on a different lot I'd need to actually save on the first lot. And to answer your second question, I'd have to figure out how to view sims in SimPE... (Obviously I'll have to get back to you.)

Edited to add:

This was exactly the issue! I summoned them again and used the NPC maker on them again, and this time saved and exited the lot then went into another lot, and there they are in the summon menu, perfectly summonable! They're also now showing up as two separate families rather than as the same one, because I put one in "Tourist 1" and the other in "Tourist 2." I'll have to send a sim on vacation to see them in action, but for now it looks like everything's exactly the way it should be! Thanks so much for your help!

Oh good.

As I've now seen both in action in game, checking into a BV hotel and basically behaving exactly as tourists should, I've marked this thread as solved. Thanks again for your help, maxon!

Hmm, I made two tourists some time ago with the NPC/Townie Maker (and they’re grouped as a single family under the surname of the first created one), but they didn’t check in a hotel when I went on a holiday with my sims. I have seen them on regular community lots (well I’m sure about one of them, the first one, I don’t remember if I’ve seen the other one too).

Voeille, do you have other tourists? If the game has a large pool to choose from, maybe it's just picking the other ones all the time so these ones don't get a chance.

They’re the only tourists I have (however my teens brought home other teens that had tourist clothes, and those teens were generated for some reason as I don’t have the template, unless they are somewhere in the templates for the three vacation destinations as I did want to have those with EA sims), and in that hotel no-one checked in except my sims. Recently I disabled antiredundancy because I want my game to have a few more restaurant NPC, maybe I should load that hotel and then the game will generate some tourists? It’s a bit boring to play there without any other sims.

Hmm, I know tourists can take quite a while to show up and check in, but if you played through a whole vacation, I would imagine your tourists should have checked in at some point.

Oh wait, do you have Cyjon's "fewer tourists" mod? Because if you don't, that could be the problem.

I do have that mod, should I get rid of it? And I didn’t play through the whole vacation, just a day and a bit.

No, I have that mod and it's supposed to allow there to be less than about a billion tourists in the tourist pool and still have them functional. In my game, with currently exactly two tourists (2 families of one tourist each), everything is working fine. I wonder if you possibly have a mod conflict?

It's also maybe possible that you didn't play long enough for your tourists to show up? The tourists can only check in if you're there on the lot to see them do it (which is stupid, but it's also how maids clean rooms for whatever illogical reason), so if you had your sims go off lot for most of the time you played the vacation, that could also be what's causing your tourists to get lost.

I was off lot for quite a long time, so maybe that’s the problem, I’ll try to play for a day on the hotel lot and see if those two tourists I generated will check in.

Voeille, if they show up on your regular community lots, in the main neighbourhood, then they don't work properly and you can never meet them in vacation subhoods, I had the same issue when I first tried to create custom vacation destinations. It's not a matter of how long you stay at the hotel, except of course if you immediately went to visit community lots and spent you entire vacation on them.

However they're not lost, you just need to turn them into tourists again with the right mods, I could fix mine and now they're real tourists. You need both Cyjon's mods, Fewer Tourists and the NPC maker fix.
More details here, but it's really simple with the right mods: summon your broken tourists, spawn the gun, make the tourists selectable and "touristify" them again. Make unselectable and clear off the lot.

I didn’t know about that fix, thanks