Stop autonomous Downtown visits?

[yeyavailability]

Is there any way/mod to prevent sims from going Downtown when I'm not playing them? Eg. I have a custom neighborhood with a few families, and unless I specifically load into their house and tell them to go to a community lot, they wont go/appear when I'm playing another family.

Thanks for any help!

[Kneon_Knight]

Is there a specific reason you want to keep your sims at home? I always see trips downtown as a chance for my active sims to meet others from the neighborhood and get a little interaction going, which could lead to friendship, romance, etc...

In general, I view random meetings as an opportunity.

But, as far as what you are asking, i.e. if there is a way to prevent your inactive sims from showing up on community lots, I haven't seen anything like that. Then again, I haven't been looking.

Anyone else?

[yeyavailability]

Is there a specific reason you want to keep your sims at home? I always see trips downtown as a chance for my active sims to meet others from the neighborhood and get a little interaction going, which could lead to friendship, romance, etc...

In general, I view random meetings as an opportunity.

Yup, the reason is that I don't play Sims 2 to make dream families/friends, I just use it as a character simulator--eg. I make a bunch of characters from a series and I only want to see them interacting with their cast mates. They pretty much have no other contacts besides who they're living with, and I'd like to keep it that way--so random meetings would just kill the purpose of what I play this game for.

Thanks for the reply at any rate!

[cheshirekat]

I have to agree with your desire to limit who the sims meet when the game sends the sims to a lot when you are playing other sims. Too bad there isn't any in-game way to control which sims get sent to the community lot.

This was one of my peeves about playing with maxis townies. When I played other families, my sims would show up at the community lot and meet a bunch of townies I did not want them to meet. Then their relationship panel would be filled with all the "strange" new sims that they would roll wants to call, talk to, play with, be friends with, etc. Instead of having those wants for the sims I was working hard to get them to meet.

I still don't want all my sims to have their friends and acquaintances dictated by the game, but there is not a hack that provides the player more control of this, that I know of. Like why would all my upper class sims have only lower class sims as their best friends? Or falling in love and wanting to get married to a sim of the wrong class? Even with the upper class sims living in a subhood, the lower class sims show up at the community lots of the upper class sims. Or, If I wanted to have a vampire subhood - they would be loose all over the different subhoods.

Of course, with a separatist type of scenario, there would be player driven exceptions. But damn it, I want to be in control of the exceptions. So my stories don't get ruined!

Hmmm. I wonder how that works with monasteries and such. Now that I think about it, I think the prison hacks have a way of keeping all the prisoners from leaving the prison for community lot visits. Would be nice to give some of my families a "no community lot" token to keep their butts home when I am playing other families.

[Babahara]

Maybe you could use the visitor controller combined with the prisoner tag, banning specific sims from community lots:

http://www.simbology.com/smf/index.php/topic,17.0.html
http://www.drealm.info/simlogical/sl/Sims2Pages/Sims2_Prison.htm

Or the colorkeys in conjunction with the visitor controller, too:

http://www.drealm.info/simlogical/sl/Sims2Pages/Sims2_ColorKeys.htm

[Nissun]

I've always wondered about this. In one ocassion, because I wanted to make a post apocaliptic type of neighborhood, and wanted to keep some families living in bunkers from showing up in community lots. And more recently, because I wanted to create a dystopian neighborhood, with a 1984 style government, and thought it would be REALLY weird to se "The leader" bowling, blowing bubbles and drinking at bars.

I'll check those out.

[cheshirekat]

Thanks Babahara! I guess it has been a while since I checked out simlogical's options. Although, I was specifically interested in the prison system every time I visited. But I found it too overwhelming a project, although the idea of a penal system is very very intriguing. (Except the lack of reform and corporal punishment, like public flogging is disappointing.) Now I can't wait to give out those colorkeys to my different classes of sims. Now I can have some posh clubs for my upper class sims to get chummy while keeping the lower class sims out. Yeah!

Nissun, the thought of your dystopian type leader blowing bubbles was quite funny. I've been thinking the same thing about my Queen. The coronation ceremony hasn't happened yet, but every time I've seen her on the community lots, I wonder about the awkwardness of seeing one of my lower class sims hanging out in the hot tub with the Queen.

[yeyavailability]

Babahara, thank you so much for the links! The visitor controller/prison tag definitely worked. Couldn't try the colour keys without the right EP though--is there a door-locking mod with only the base game and nightlife?

[Babahara]

Babahara, thank you so much for the links! The visitor controller/prison tag definitely worked. Couldn't try the colour keys without the right EP though--is there a door-locking mod with only the base game and nightlife?
The door-locking mod can be found on the same site. But it won't work for your purposes, I suppose, because it only locks doors and won't prevent sims from appearing on community lots. These colorkeys are only useful for you because they've been incorporated in the visitor controller for doing it, unless you're looking for door-locking mods, too.

Btw I don't know if the door-locking mod on that site locks doors on community lots or only residential, just like I don't know that about color keys. They probably only works with residential lots.

Yesterday I tried to a Myne door (like in a dorm) on the community lot and my sim was able to claim and lock it. Next time she visited it was still claimed, but it wasn't locked, so imho the locked status can't be saved on community lots.

cheshirekat, I wanted to do the same, dividing my sims into classes, just poor and rich, and then vampires (to have a vampire bar). But afterwards I thought about it and decided that this way my sims would come in contact with a very limited amount of sims: there are aren't 1000 sims in my hood, after all, so they're see the very same faces. If you do it, please write what you think about it later, ok? I wonder if that's a good idea. Still it's always weird to see richly-dressed downtownies in some shoddy bar that my poor sim frequents.

[A.G.Doren]

I'm actually writing a sim story and I had this same concern. What I ended up doing for a lot of the "community lots" is making them residential and simply summoning whoever I wanted, needed or felt should be on a lot at any given time.