I have a question regarding neighborhood population--I have a legacy hood I've been playing for several years now, and so far, no known issues with population, but I've been wondering ... when will I begin to see issues with overpopulation? Or will I? I realize that the answer is a bit of fuzzy logic--starting with what the PC will handle, and involving a certain alchemy of how ep's and special subhoods. At this point, I have all EP's installed, with two universities, a downtown, a business district, and a vacation spot (or is it two? can't remember since my sims never get a vacation At any rate, I know that my playable sims are over 200 now--and I play every sim that is born in game until s/he dies of accident or natural causes, mainly old age, so they tend to have tons of memories, relationships, etc. And recently, I've been working to get townies replaced, through the use of "add neighbor to family" then letting them live out their days in relative peace and comfort in a townie old folks home. I tried killing off a few, but for some reasons, I can't seem to get sims to die--oh well. Then, I read in several places that dead sims still count toward population--so maybe that won't really help the population issue(s), but at least I'll get some different townies. I'm really tired of Tasha Go

So, I guess my question is two part: what is the upper limit on neighborhood population? And, what does everyone else do to control population?

Dead Sims do count to the total population, but the upper limit on population is something that no-one has any hard definite answers to at this time, to the best of my knowlege, though whatever it is, it seems to have gone up from expansion to expansion [ie, the more recently your latest expansion was released, the higher the total supported]. A bigger issue is data corruption, which usually nukes a neighborhood before any hard limit on population is determinable. Further, I understand that all standard-issue neighborhoods come pre-corrupted by EA, and that there is no known way of reversing corruption once it occurs. The biggest problem with large populations, as I understand it, is that the larger the population, the more places corruption can hide. Worse, deleting Sims to reduce the population totals is the surest way to increase the corruption levels. At this point, I`m not doing ANYthing to control population levels in my main `hood, but I understand that MATY has some hacks that prevent generation of new Townies and NPCs. You might want to consider checking them out.

OK, thanks--I really appreciate the insight. The legacy hood I'm playing is a custom hood that I created myself, so no Maxis pre-corruption there, thankfully. Where should I go to find out about how to prevent corruption before it happens? I regularly back up character and hood files every month or so--is that sufficient? I'd really hate to lose this hood--it's really my favorite so far.

I'm sort of half-expecting my hood to become corrupted eventually although, touch wood, it seems fine for now.

I try to wipe corrupt memories at least using the FFS Lot Debugger Batbox edition. Whenever I'm playing a family or community lot and there are lots of sims there, I make them selectable (even the townies) and wipe all their corrupt memories as well as clearing out memory "trash" at every opportunity. Nearly all of my playables (approaching 100 in total) are now corrupt-memory-free, if that makes sense. I don't know if it helps but I guess there's no harm in doing this. As I said my game is running fairly smoothly atm. Personally I've never played the Maxi's pre-made playable families, I always like to start from scratch with my own characters.

I have the "notownieregen" mod in my game (or whatever it's called) so at least I can keep a cap on respawning of unwanted Maxi's characters. When my custom sims have babies I usually unleash my hood's hitman on the townies and the tombstones end up in a cemetery specifically for dead townies. So at least those character files won't get bloated.

If I had the knowledge now about clean hood templates back when I first started, I probably would have created a completely clean hood free of any townies. I'm rather attached to my current hood though so don't really have any desire or inclination to start a new one just now, (although ideally wish I could and transfer all my playable sims to that hood).

So, just curious ... how would one know if a sim's memory was corrupt and in need of wiping?

If I want to play a legacy, I typically have one Sim out of a family marry. Though there was this one time I had second cousins marry...the game does not acknowledge anything beyond grandparent or first cousin as family (it does not acknowledge first cousin once removed).

Keeps my population down so I don't have so many families in rotation. I have absolutely nothing against big families...but when I want a legacy, I limit it.

The FFS Lot Debugger (it's basically a black box that you put on a lot) will have that appearing when you click it - it's under the "Memories" tab, and then there will be a tab saying "Wipe corrupt". If there are no corrupt memories the "Wipe corrupt" option simply won't appear.

To be honest I have no idea whether this helps prevention of a corrupt neighbourhood, but I do it anyway. For example, with my first legacy sim (who obviously has lots of memories), when I had her selected and clicked the box to wipe her corrupt memories and clear trash, it got rid of about 50 corrupt memories and 300 trash. There is also the option to clear gossip, eg boring gossip or "dead" gossip (whatever that means).

Once I'd got used to using the Lot Debugger it was very helpful in doing lots of other things to repair glitches on the lot, and you can also retrieve missing sims with it.

You can also use the batbox to wipe gossip, which is very helpful as well.

Personally if you are not experiencing any problems such as major glitches, disappearing Sims ect. I wouldn't do much to try to "fix" it. That old saying of "if it ain't broke don't fix it" exists for a reason.

You can certainly put in the notownieregen (also from MATY) if your townies are dying off and that at least will limit the number of new Sims generating.
They also have other mods that stop other re-spawning of Sims in the sub hoods as well.

Thanks everybody! I'm definitely going to look into the noregen/norespawn mods and the lot debugger. So far, everything seems to be smooth with this neighborhood--and I tend to agree Clashfan, sometimes it's better not to borrow trouble!

You`re welcome. I hope I was of some help.

I have a huge problem. I don't have any EPs or SPs and my custom hood has the dead head bug as a result of the population being too great(?). I tried looking for some MATY fixes but was unable to find any for the base game.

Edit: the notownieregen and notowniekidregen hacks for the basegame didn't seem to work as some new random townies spawned in my game.
And the deadhead fix didn't seem to work, either.

What's the "dead head bug" Kittykuba?

Also out of interest how many characters do you have in your hood?

I tallied up the whole number of character files in my hood and it came to about 1700!! Bearing in mind only 150 of those are my playable sims, then you can see why I want to kill off everyone else!

The character files aren't bloated in size though, well apart from one of my sims (which is about 12,000 kb). I wonder why that is since I don't play him more than the others

The deadhead bug is when an elder dies but the game doesn't recognize them as dead. There's no headstone and no one can move off the lot. And it messes up births; the baby just hangs on the front of the sim and is never added to family but all the buttons remain gray as if the event is still taking place. I think it also glitches lots.

I went into the Nhood file and found 388 character files. I'd say I have just under or slightly over 100 playables.

1700? Wow.

Yeah, I know it's a lot - probably due to my game corrupting some time a while back and obviously more characters were spawned in droves - I've no idea what caused it but I don't like to fix what "ain't broken" so to speak. So if and when it does eventually explode on me, I'll start again with clean template hoods.

Most of these character files are only about 12kb in size though so I'm not particularly worried about "bloating".

Still, at least my businesses get lots of customers!

Since I play with huge 'hoods, I'm really interested in this issue. I think I saw something on MATY a long time ago that suggested the upper limit was now large enough that, as long as you don't do stupid stuff, it's not an issue (i.e. upper limit is unlikely to be reached by anyone, being in the thousands.)

Updated:

Found what I was thinking of! Pescado says: "Before NL, number-of-characters was a serious problem that could be reached around 800-1000 entries. Furthermore, critical fixes which resolved the inefficiencies of the code could extend this out more. Post-NL, the iteration-max was increased to about 10x its former size, so it's reasonable to expect that iteration limits which were formerly hit at 800-1000 entries will expand by the same order of magnitude. It is unlikely that sheer "number of characters" alone will blow anything up, but it remains desirable to avoid the accumulation of cruft created by unnecessary spawning of useless characters and garbage tailings created by moving occupied lots, as these leave behind undesirable debris which can still jam your neighborhood's functioning."

I have a town with - get this - 2383 sims, fifteen pregnant, one with twins. It's called Skylife City, and they all live in apartment buildings (highrises and such) and I noticed a major lag in the game ever since I hit around 1500 sims. My computer is the latest and greatest as you can get in the Melbourne burbs, but it STILL lags and I just want to kill them all off!

The only other issue I've had is that the townies are barely existant thanks to the population - good for me, but I've only seen the paperboy and the mailman so far ever since I hit 1000 sims. Did I kill off all my townies or something? (BTW all my restaurants and stuff are owned by my sims, so no luck there).

Wow! All very informative. I've learned a lot. That deadhead bug sounds frightening--wonder what would happen if that whole family had an .... accident. Would any of them die? Or are they now immortal? Just thinking aloud here. I'm still not sure how to find how many character files I have--but I would guess somewhere near 250 playables, and probably 2-3 times that number of townies. So, after hearing Pescado's update, I'm thinking it will be a while before sheer population blows up the town. I have the townienoregen now--thanks everyone for suggesting it--what is the norespawn? what does it do differently? do I need both?

I could be wrong but I don't think there is just a "norespawn" hack. There is a "nossrepawn" which is Uni related and keeps the game from respawning secret society members if you kill or turn one playable. The other is a "nostrayrepawn" which is pet related.

I have noticed a strange thing today. I have created a new NH and built many lots there, but as for now, there is just 1 playable character there. She is in the family bin. I killed the pre-made families (I have all EPs and SPs, so there were a lot of them) and used this sim to move the graves to the community cemetary. And, when I went into the character folder, I saw that I had approximately 300 characters in my neighbourhood (which doesn't even have any subhoods).
Are all of them townies? How is it possible to have so many townies in the 'hood I've not actually played yet?

Unless you are playing with empty templates (and you are not, or you wouldn't have pre-made families to kill), you have the full allotment of townies for that neighborhood (Pleasantview's NPCs, if you created a custom hood) + pets + Apartment Life "social groups" + Freetime "iconic" hobbiests +... you get the idea. Half the EPs add NPCs automatically. Others (like Uni and BV) wait until you attach a subhood, then dump new characters in your folder.

I seem to recall the AL in particular spawned massive numbers in an unpatched game. You are fully patched?

They just disappear like in a regular death, they no longer show up on the select panel but they still appear in the neighborhood view and load family screen. They're like "half dead", they are never seen again but have no ghosts, no tombstone and mess up every thing in the house. I'm sad because it got two of my favorite legacies.

So I'd say if I killed everyone else in those families the game would still consider the lot occupied.

This is all amazing to hear considering I am currently starting a brand new neighborhood (two families, adds some variety to my playing) and if the children in those current families get married and they have their own children and so on and so forth...whew! That would be total overpopulation. And I have never heard of glitching with overpopulation. Good to know

Officially, I have to force myself to stop making all my families have 10+ children. Massive overpopulation for the basegame and it's purely my fault. Should never have generated that house full of random teens. *grumble*

Ah, too true KittyKuba I've always loved all of the children-crazy challenges, so my sims tend to procreate wildly. I am only now starting to enforce some restraint on my sim-bunnies, but it's really, really hard. I just have to keep reminding myself, do I really want to have to play these people until they finally croak, or worse, have to devise deaths for them? Some, granted, I don't mind, but I'm really a very benevolent simmer: I hate to see my sims suffer anything, so I have like 99% old age deaths in my hood. It is difficult, though, keeping those smaller families (or gasp! childless couples) fun to play.

Well, about Al townies... yes, too many of them hanging around, who on Earth needs them in such big quantities?...
As for playable population, I like to have small families (no more than 3 children), and many of my sims are actually single and have no kids. However, I like to create sims in BodyShop, and sometimes it is difficult to stop. I hope the game doesn't generate any NPCs for community lots automatically BEFORE these lots are played? I plan to make all my community lots privately owned, so that I can make the owners hire other playables from the NH as cashiers, waiters, etc, it might be interesting to see these people at work, and its good to have at least a little less townies (moreover, that I've built a lot of community lots).
As for subhoods, I even don't want to attach uni now (I find it too long and annoying to play it), as wel as Downtown and business district, but I can't resist adding vacation 'hoods, I love vacations (as far as I know, they don't spawn too many townies, or they do?)