I'm wondering what to do about dormies that don't pan out attractive enough (to me) to turn into townies. I'd rather not feed them to the Cowplant or kill them off through other means, so what's the best way to recycle them so they will continue to be available (but will be different people) for the next batch of playables to come through University?

I know how to change their appearance and names using SimPE and other mods, but what's the best way to clean out their memories so they don't have inappropriate relationships with Sims they shouldn't have been able to meet?

You can delete memories with I think pretty much any memory management hack, but that won't affect their relationships at all. If you want those gone too, you'll have to remove them with SimPE. Also, dormies are already townies, so I'm not sure I understand the first part of your post.

I get the impression that Sims2Maven ages up the dormies to 'regular' townies alongside the playables, and lets the game re-generate new ones.

I understand Sims2Maven has a Mac, so can't use SimPE. I'm pretty sure the Sim Manipulator can delete relationships. It certainly has an option Family Relations / Set no Relation. (I use it a lot when creating teen and child townies.) I think you can drag relationship scores down just by enabling testing cheats. The Sim manipulator will do this too. If you find them unattractive, you can always give them a makeover.

What I would like to do with dormies is randomise what semester they're in. If you go to university in real life you will find lots of students you don't know. But they won't all be in their first semester. And any that are in their first semester will continue to move on in much the same way as you do! So, when you're in your third semester, they'll probably be in theirs too.

You understand incorrectly and must be thinking of someone else - I have a standard PC running Windows 8.1 (yeah yeah I know, lagging edge and I ought to upgrade blah blah blah). So of course I can use SimPE! (and I know just enough about how to use it to be really dangerous!)

As for what I'm doing with the dormies, I generally select a few to add to the Townie/Downtownie pool as adults but would like to restart the others as "new" dormies (different faces and names, all new memories, etc.). I'm currently on a lag between the last batch of playables to go through uni and the next batch to start coming through, so having the same old bunch still hanging around just doesn't feel right. (And I don't want to overload the game with Townies.)

The "Playables" in the Greek houses can be randomized (Greek residents are by definition Playable), but the others are resistant to manipulation and tend to reset every time you re-enter the lot.

I age all NPC's up after a while if they don't marry in. So the teen paper girl/boy I send to uni, dormies I age to adults, adults I age to elders and elders I grab as they pass by my retirement home and they live there until Grim picks them up.

I don't care if they are ugly unless they are really bad in which case I use Gussy up on them and tweak their face a bit.
I don't bother with memories either, but if I were to tweak it I would use the Memory manipulator in game. Same person who made Sim Manipulator. The bat Box can also remove 'trash memories'

Did find out that Memory Commander has a "Full CAS Reset" option, which is pretty much what I was looking for. In the case of dormies it zaps their memories back to the very beginning of their college careers, as if they were just made in Create-A-Student and on the first day of their college careers. (Inappropriate relationships still have to be removed with SimPE, though, and this should probably be done before the memory zap.)

The Greeks require a bit more finesse, as they are actually Playables (whether or not they are actually played with).

Download Simlogical's prison hacks and use them to populate your prison.

Already did that to Loki and Circe Beaker. And it doesn't solve the "population problem".

I don't understand the question - if you just leave dormies alone, they stay in the uni hood for any number of generations. It doesn't matter about relationships they have formed because if I'm not aging them up, then they probably haven't formed any so they will just fade back to 0/0 when my playables don't return their calls.

If I have moved them in with someone but don't want to graduate them to a normal townie, I just use the teleporter to make them into a townie. If they are townie + YA then the game considers them a dormie and they go back to the dormie pool.

But, I guess I don't really understand your criteria for upgrading them to a normal townie. I do it based on relationship - if they have been friends with or romantically involved with a playable, then they get graduated and turned into an adult townie so that they can exist as a background character and continue to age as that friend, ex-friend, boyfriend, ex-girlfriend, etc. Everyone else stays in the college hood as a kind of "extra" and I don't worry about who they have literally been involved with or met.

If you only turn them into townies based on attractiveness, surely they will be stuck there forever, in which case, why bother with them at all? Why not just create attractive dormies to begin with?

I didn't see you mention a population problem before. Once a sim is alive they are a part of the population permanently, either alive or dead. You can kill them and have them be ghosts for a cemetery, have them be some form of townie, imprison them, ban them or play them. Doesn't change the population numbers.

if attractiveness is the main issue just plastic surgery their face.

What I mean by a "population problem" is that I don't want to overload the neighborhood(s) with Sims. (I have enough trouble keeping track of the Playables - I think I already have too many Playables.) So whenever possible I would like to just recycle the existing ones. (I think the game already does this with the Uni Professors - more than once I have seen a Professor who was an Elder last time around listed this time as Adult.)

As for "criteria", it's partly looks, partly relationships, and partly "this one's got a good story arc going for him/her". ("Attractiveness" = "what attracts me to this particular Sim?")

If you don't create more sims, there won't be a population problem. The game occasionally creates more, but if you're moving townies in with your playables at a normal rate, this will happen pretty rarely. The game does not "recycle" or change the age of professors, no.

Except that aging up dormies to townies would result in the game generating more dormies (barring anti-generation hacks). Now I'm very confused.

Yes, it would.

In case it helps, here is my headcanon for townies, dormies, NPCs etc that I do not age (this time) since I also dislike having too many sims to keep track of, even though I play large hoods with a lot of playables.

They are not that person. Sienna Acock (I'm sorry but this mailperson name is hilarious, especially since she spawned in a hood that is rampant with ACR) is not actually Sienna Acock, Immortal Post Lady - she is "generic mail carrier" (who happens to have a funny/memorable name). She can be a generic mail carrier for generation 1 and then when generation 4 comes around she is another generic post lady. She might even be the theoretical great-great-granddaughter of the original post lady. It doesn't matter. She is an extra. She might even have a brief fling with someone, become an ex, etc. Until she develops sufficient relationship with a playable, interesting storyline, fathers a child (for males), anything that I want to explore, she will not age, not because she is immortal but because she does not exist as a character, she exists as a placeholder "mailperson".

The townie goth teen, likewise, is not literally "David Boone", immortal goth teenager. He is simply a generic classmate who dresses goth-like. There will be a goth classmate in every school year, and he fills that role.

The middle aged male neighbour that dresses smartly is not literally "Fergus Crouch". He is just a generic, smartly-dressed neighbour.

These people can exist in the background and my sims can have fond memories of "my super-hot but crazy college girlfriend" or "the weird loner girl at school" without me ever needing to turn them into somebody else, or age them up, kill them off, squeeze them into a prison etc.

When they are ready, they will come to the front and become playable and until then they can exist happily in the background as an extra for as long as I need them to be there.

I am kinda the same. Unless one of my sims becomes really fond of an NPC and they are worth marrying/moving in it doesn't bother me if they age or not. The town filler is just that, town filler. I don't actually talk to the paper boy/girl anyway and there will be a ton of people passing through the dorms that are NPC filler. Like you said, they are not immortal they are a different boy/girl who just may look a lot like Grandma's old playmate. If a significant relationship doesn't develop, doesn't bother me. By that point, my Sim has moved on and lived life and relationship decay will take care of the rest.

Meanwhile, this happened in my last hood. I love ACR sometimes.

Lol, there's a reason I don't have ACR installed, lol. But if it was really a big deal, any teen can become playable through college. Still not a big deal.

They only mention population numbers later, first post asked what to do with them.

To stop them spawning the uni template can be removed and or No Dormie regen used. http://www.mediafire.com/file/ymca1...en.package/file


I know thats what you meant, but those dormies are already in your hood and you asked what to do with them. They are there alive or dead.
What you are after is a way to stop them spawning, link above ^

Actually no, I'm working on how to reuse the ones that already exist (I have the nodormieregen mod) that I decide not to graduate and add to the Townie/Downtownie pool. Specifically, there must always be at least one resident in each Greek house, and I like to keep three - but they can't have the same names or appearances as the last batch (and usually not the same memories either).

The "roaming dormies", since they are usually generic placeholders (unless I get one I really like), can get the "full reset" treatment and probably will in future.

Taking up simsfreq's comment that the generic NPCs are "placeholders", I did a little fiddling with some names. The Newsies are now Annie Boddy, Sim Boddy and Noah Boddy (Sim got switched FTM, a SimPE deep job). I also decided to give the four don't-mess-with-them drivers automotive-related names as a reminder of their game function, so the three carpool drivers are Nikki Ford, Bob Bentley, and Mercedes Benz, while the schoolbus driver is Ginnie Mack.