I've had it happen a couple of time, especially with ACR - every time I throw a wedding party, I keep a close eye on the bride and groom, as all it takes is for an ill-timed flirt or hug with a third party, and the daggers start flying. One time the groom rejected the bride - he'd witnessed her flirting with her ex boyfriend, and their relationship score took a hit. I clicked on the wedding arch anyway, they both stood under the arch, and the groom was, like "Nup. Not doing it." The bride started crying and the assembled guests just stood around looking awkward. The groom spent the rest of the evening in the hot tub with his ex-former-father-in-law, and the bride decided to vigorously Smustle the night away.

Well..you invited her ex boyfriend to the wedding, having ACR in your game..what were you expecting? lol

Yup, that's what you get... In real life, it's the same thing: NEVER invite exes to your wedding! Regardless of circumstances, DON'T DO IT!

Well, lesson learned, I presume

Oh, with ACR, it's more like never invite anyone with two or more bolts to anything! Especially if you also invited their spouse.

More entertaining violated than followed, though. Plus if the prospective spouse is that into someone else, better off not committing just yet, in my opinion.

Had a spectacular case of Cassie leaving Don not quite at the altar once: He accepted an ACR flirt from Nina, or it might of been a vanilla flirt, no telling, right on arrival for the wedding party, Cassie was all "I'm breaking up with him, forget the wedding, and I'm not fearing it, either!" Unfortunately, it was an awful wedding party. You'd think there'd be some difference between "I got abandoned" and "I caught that cheating skunk just in time"!

Do sims ever age up into custom clothes? I don't think I've ever seen it happen.

I've never seen it either, except of course in the case of default replacements. (Yet another reason I love default replacements to pieces.) I've always wondered, though, whether townifying certain custom clothing would also make it age-up eligible.

In order for Sims to age up into custom clothes (or be born with/created with custom eyes/brows/facial hair/accessories), you must townify them first. You can do this in batches with the Wardrobe Wrangler. (So yes, @natboopsie. If you townify the clothing, Sims will age into them. No guarantee that they'll age into anything that looks good together, of course, if they "choose" separates. )

My really stupid very n00b question: Birthday parties. They kind of fail unless a birthday happens during them. My question is, does this "birthday" have to involve a birthday cake, or will the requirement be fulfilled if the birthday boy/girl simply ages naturally during the party at 6PM, as they will do without a cake? (You can tell I, like, never do birthday parties, right? But one of my Sims has a want for one, and I kinda want to do it.)

@iCad:

For all that I know of it, a birthday party need to have a birthday at least. Also, it needs to be a *party*, so non-household members must be called and invited.

However, for babies, toddlers and children, it may be enough if there is a birthday cake and you let them blow out the candle on it. Any family members present will cheer for them, bring out horns and rattlers, make a lot of noise.

As you may have gathered from the uncertainty in this post, I'm not much of a party animal myself

The following requirements, and only these three, must be filled:

- A Sim has to have set up a birthday party on the phone. It is only an option if there's at least one Sim with 1 day to go before aging up naturally (and if it's not the middle of the night ). No other type of party will do; it has to be Birthday Party to count.

- The timer for the party has to have started, and not yet hit zero (or ended prematurely for any reason)

- The Sim with the want must age up.

Cake is strictly optional. If you like, you can age the child up with cake, and it's recommended if a baby is among those who will age up. You can also time the party so it happens on 6 PM (try to start the party after 3 PM, as parties where the birthday hasn't happened before the 2-hours-to-go point is reached get low ratings) or you can age them up by clicking on the Sim and selecting "Grow Up". All of these methods are perfectly acceptable as far as the want is concerned.

It is not necessary for the Sim to be in any particular aspiration to make it work, though if aspiration is Red, the penalty for this will more than cancel out the bonus for having the party. If you've two Sims in line for a birthday, and wanting a birthday party, simply ensure both age up during the party; then both will get their want fulfilled.

Birthday parties can be a lot of fun (Though I say that, and rarely have them. But when I do, they're an occasion).

Also, don't invite people you are currently dating to your marriage to someone else - especially if both of them are also dating other members of the household without your knowledge.

Unless your like seeing gigantic all-out brawls on your front lawn. My thought when that first happened to me with the Logorints was, "Um... ...oops... ...should I get the other Sims armour? Because this looks like a war..."

a question re-phrased::
how likely would it be for an on-duty NPC to die from a base-game death? without cheats/hacks/mods and with very little player involvement. just wondering.
flies I think might be most likely for all NPCs; though the player may need to move a number of plates/bowls to set this up.
drowning maybe second; yet player may need to move/remove any ladders from pool.
fire maybe third; though some NPCs I take to be good cooks and firefighters seem to fight them well.
electrocution also third; though some NPCs I take to be good repairers.

Advice, please? With the birth of the next generation in my hood, the boys really, really outnumber the girls. (22 to 4 or perhaps it is 5, since another set of twins was born). So - what do I do now? There are only 6 townies, and no other families. I really need a plan here or everyone will be related to everyone else!

Lots of same-sex relationships.
New townies.
Seed the adoption pool with girls and fill some have-baby wants with adoptions.
New CAS "family" of female roommates, no two related to the others, when the boys reach breeding age.

Thank you, @iCad. That's good to know. And there's always the humor potential, indeed.



I think you already know, but just to say so, the want for the birthday party itself is fulfilled when they call to do the invites, just like a want for any other party. As to the success of the party...



[ETA: Cake is *not* optional at all, either, it turns out. See my addition to the end of the post.]

And cake is interesting, because if you do use it, it appears that at least someone has to grab a piece. I had a birthday party where the cake was used to age up, and before anyone could grab a piece, the child brother of the new teen cleaned up the cake. The score immediately tanked. (It was an unusual situation: I had woken up the very tired younger brother for the cake part, not realizing that he had already missed the game's call to watch the candle blowing-out bit. Because he thus wasn't required to stand still for that, he immediately headed toward the cake and so got to be the first to do something with it [throw it out], preventing everyone else from grabbing a slice.)

I think I quit without saving, once I realized that there was no way the party could be saved---despite the fact that the birthday kid had already aged up. Cleaning up that cake without anyone having any absolutely ruined the party score.

Because I always like to have a cake, since then, I make sure everyone in the house who is at least child aged is awake by the time the guests start arriving, even if it means a child spends most of the party drinking hot chocolate. (I start birthday parties in the early afternoon, only even waiting until 2:30 if the person aging up is a child who won't be back from school until 3.) But hey, hot chocolate is fun, right?

One other note about birthday parties: as I learned from throwing one on a weekday morning (an unemployed single parent was throwing it for their toddler), aging a toddler up to child before 2pm will cause them to lose a grade for "missing school" that day. Oops.

[ETA: Using a birthday cake is definitely not optional in the first place, at least for running a birthday party that the game considers a good one. I posted extensive test results that led me to that conclusion later in this same thread. Also, during those same tests, I found that if I canceled all controlled sims' auto-queued commands to Grab a Slice of the cake, the party score was not affected. It may only be that the cake needs to stay available for the duration (and not thrown out), but perhaps it's not necessary that everyone needs to have a piece. If you go and look at my later post to which I just linked, you'll probably see why I wasn't, at that point, motivated to check on how necessary it was to actually eat any cake. ]

Peni Griffin already offered all the solutions that I've thought of...

I've had birthday parties tank because I've used "grow up" instead of cake. Like, the kind of score dropping that happens if no one has a birthday during the party. I didn't take notes, though, so I'm not 100% sure of any other circumstances (but there wasn't anything obvious like some fisticuffs breaking out!)

See now I simply don't allow that. Because I love to see how sim genetics mix I tend to give most families at least one boy and one girl so I can see how each gender from these two sims will look, otherwise how will I see what that nose or chin looks like on both? Now and then I will allow a family to have two girls or two boys but then I will mostly give them another child. I simply save before the birth and exit without saving until I get the right gender. A small in-balance is fine but with that many, I would be making some female dormies and townies.

You can I believe change the gender in simpe? Don't quote me on that though, it might go terribly wrong.

I think I have too, Dagwon---I've now got it on my list to test soon as well, because it's interesting that ieta_cassiopeia has had such a different experience.

ETA: @Dagwon is correct. So I wrote up a rather large post about the whole birthdaying thing, based on my extensive test results, later in this thread, here .

about gender changing; it can be done in SimPE. through the sim's Sim Description.
also with various hacks; insimenator, Sim Blender, Sim Manipulator. maybe also the testingcheatsenabled cheat; likely a Spawn object if so.
if you want to change the body also, SimPE's Sim Surgery may be needed. the other methods I take do not have such an option.

edit::
other options:
-edit family trees; same hacks/program
-resurrect and/or kill until the genders are equal
-download and install households
-use the Tombstone of L & D (Spawn object) to generate at least some of the characters you need; the "New [age] [gender]" interactions.

I have the same problem with my megahood, only that I don't allow for any non-maxismade sims. As male sims can literally breed at any age (within reason, of course) so I'm just letting the next generation have as many females as possible, such as if twin boys are born I quit without saving, and if a family has more than 2 boys I quit without saving until they have a girl, and then a lot of male sims won't be having children until their mid-adulthood when the next generation has grown up a bit, Also of course there are the townies, But as I said, I limit to the ones that are created by Maxis e.g Tosha To, Crystal Vu etc. Another suggestion is plantsims/aliens if you allow that in your game, as well of of course same sex relationships.

The worst family I had made me exit and load 8 times to get a boy. I was like seriously game, pink again? Then the child ended up being a clone! I don't mind too much when they are different genders as other things are easy to tweak.

Has anyone ever attempted using SimPE to change an infant sim's gender? I recall successfully doing it to pets, and since infant sims are more objects than actual Sims, I'd be curious to see the results.

My question: Anyone have a quick link to the 4GB patch? I lost the link and I can't find the right combination of words to bring it up again in Google. Thanks in advance.

EDIT: Never mind, found it.

Embarrassing noob question - I just downloaded a new/clean hood, and it has no Townies. After puzzling over this for longer than I'd like to admit, I had a giant facepalm moment when I realise, well duh, I have notownieregen in, of course there's no effing Townies. I'm an idiot.

So my question is, if I remove that mod temporarily, will my game generate a bunch of Townies straight away? Or does that part only happen when the hood is loaded the first time, or what?

Yes, the game will generate Townies straight away if you remove it.

I've downloaded several clean neighborhoods and what I always do in that situation is to leave notownieregen in and use the testing cheats to spawn the Townie/NPC Maker (Townie Gun) instead. I use that to batch create dormies/townies/downtownies, etc. Other people create their own townies, etc. in CAS and use Inge's teleporter cat to turn them into townies.

Either method will allow you to keep notownieregen in your game. That way you only get the townies YOU want in your game.