Ah, I see! Thanks a bunch for the advice Rosawyn and simmer22. I'll look into this the next time I load up my game, I wasn't aware the Batbox could do such things. It'll help a lot, I fear all of my sim's children already all look the same.

Can someone remind me what firstborn syndrome is? I can't remember and I know I have never rolled the pacifier for any of my sims as most of them are maxis at the moment. I haven't noticed cloning per say though. The first babies in Hollis were twin girls belonging to Melissa Fancey and they both look like her (they have her nose thank goodness - their father's is MASSIVE), but have different skintones and eye colours... (the same as each other though as far as I can see. It's always hard to see with wriggling toddlers.)

I'm wondering if it's something I should be concerned about as I just figured that everything was randomized...?

Never noticed the FBS in my games either, but last time I dare say it? It kinda turned into an argument, See, I MUST have it, just like anyone else has it. lol
Basically, it is clones..all the same, personalities etc.

Yes, rolling the pacifier will help with that!

The important thing to remember is that the randomizer resets with every load of the game, and genetics are determined at the moment of birth, so as long as you roll the pacifier at some point during the session that your sim is due to give birth, before she does it, you're cool. I sometimes put the batbox in the middle of the floor and save with it in the center of the screen if I quit a house expecting to play through the birth next time, so I don't forget.

Using the batbox to roll the pacifier will make the game quit to neighborhood without saving, so doing it right after you open the house and then getting in to play normally is the easiest. If you're not doing that, remember to save right before using it.

Hmm.. Interesting. I wanted to play this family with as little cheats as possible, but now that I think about it, every child has the father's same hair and eye colour, and even skintone. But I don't know if this is related to the fact they're all boys? I can't say I remember in previous games if sons would take after the father and daughters after the mother, but it looks like that's whats happening in my game. I guess I'll have to wait and see what happens with this one daughter when she grows up. The mother has the lightest skintone with blonde hair and green eyes, so it's quite a difference. I feel like it's too late for me to start changing things now though after they already have two teenage boys.

It is never too late, as each pregnancy will be different, if you roll the pacifier. The teens well..and every child already born, yes. but I am sure, you'll have way more babies to come!
The game does not, on purpose, make sons take after their father, and daughters after their mothers. It is really just random. Features from both parents can be used. I personally love it, when a child takes more after one parent than the other. It is like real life.
I look like my dad too much...my mom, not so much.
My children do not have the same father..but since they all look like me, they all look alike! lol

Believe me, once you get the births properly randomized, you'll get plenty of girls who look like Dad, boys who look like Mom, and children of both sexes who get unexpected mixes of both. Remember that though the genetic mixes and the gender are both rolled at birth, they are different rolls on different randomizers - it's impossible to connect them without completely changing the randomizers (and for all I know, related code).

Remember also that Sims2 has a good solid working genetics system, with dominant and recessive genes working in a straightforward Mendelian way. Brown and dark blue eyes are dominant, as are black and brown hair. Light blue, gray, and green eyes are recessive, as are red and blonde hair. Skintones exist on a numerical color scale, set up so that the children of parents with two different skintones may get any skintone that falls numerically between those two, including the originals, so the children of an S1-S4 match may be any of the Maxis skintones. When you download custom genetics, there should be information explaining how the new eyes or skins work within the genetic system. It's also possible to hack whether a trait is dominant or recessive. When you're making new sims, you can be making choices based on the look you want your hood to have once they've been breeding for awhile, once you understand how the genetics work.

On the topic of rolling pacifier, some people who don't see it might be rolling the pacifier without knowing it. There are more ways to do it than randomize Sims in CAS or use a mod. I don't remember any of the other ways, but I know there are other types of game mechanics that use the same randomizer that you might trigger more often depending on play style.

so is Firstborn Syndrome just a bunch of children born to a couple that all look the same? I had thought that the game considered the pacifier 'rolled' after the first child, so I just expected that I'd get younger children that would look different and so on? I'm honestly not sure. It seems like I get all kinds of different genetics in my sim babies and toddlers, but I'm wondering if I've missed something important somewhere and will end up with an army of clones?

Ugh >.<

Something important in it is that if you play straight ahead and get all children in one go there will be rolled pacifier by game mechanics.
Whenever you decide after every child save and exit a game, the pacifier will be resetted to first again and when you want get next child it will be a same.

Terula, you'd know if you had clones. The personality points are exact matches and they look exactly alike. If that's not what you're finding, don't worry about it - you're just playing in a way that fixes the randomizer problem well enough for your purposes. I played for over a year before I found out about rolling the pacifier, and only got one clone, because my playstyle seems to work the randomizer a lot. I think it may have to do with the number of community lot trips I make - if the same randomizer is choosing how many people and which ones show up on a community lot, then it's already been used a few times before I get to the birth, in most cases. I tend to roll the pacifier anyhow.

The randomizer is reset every time you load the game. Genetics and gender are set at birth. Those are the two key points to bear in mind when making decisions about when and how often to roll the pacifier and whether to try for a specific gender. These things have been said a number of times, a number of different ways, here in this thread, and we can collectively keep saying them in as many different ways as possible till everyone's got it straight in their heads. It's no trouble.

@terula8 Here is some info about the firstborn effect, with a link to the research that Mootilda did and my own experiments:
http://www.modthesims.info/showthre...122#post5095122

Remember that that the randomizers are reset each time you load the game, so if you play for several hours in a row or leave the game running then you may not see it so much. I tend to play for very short sessions, so I was always seeing it in my games.

One more thing which should maybe be said, on the topic of rolling the pacifier: If you go in every time and click the pacifier button in CAS once before starting every play session (or before a baby is due to be born) you'll still potentially end up with clones, just different clones from what you'd get if you didn't click it. Call it the second-born syndrome or whatever. The point is, you need to roll that pacifier a different number of times in different sessions to get the effect you want. Otherwise, you'll just advance the random number generator one step from where it starts out.

On the other hand, if you use the batbox, it will pick a random number of pacifier rolls for you.

I know some very compassionate straight people and some very compassionate gay people. And in both groups, some real jerks as well.

Thank you all for the information! I wandered around the forum and came across a few other explanations of it as well (for some reason, I'm daft over this issue. Still wrapping my head around it tbh, but I think I understand now.) I've never seen it in my game (at least, I don't think I have) but then again, I tend to play neighbourhoods for very short amounts of time. I'm thinking though, in my current hoods, my sims have all had their babies on multiple rotations, so clones might be very likely. I've done a few sim randomizations, but am not sure specifically when, and I use community lots a lot while playing houses. (Usually I'll force them to go out and buy food at least.) but I'll need to see if I spot any once the secondary kids grow up. Blergh. Still coming across things I really had no idea about.

I think you've caught the problem right there. MEN aren't supposed to look girly, so might hide their compassion if it's considered a feminine trait. Gay men don't have the same pressure to look 'manly' because they're already doing something unmanly by sleeping with other guys. It's stupid.

It all depends if you keep playing that lot or if you save and load it the next time you play. If you have the first baby save then next play session have a second baby the game will use what it used for the first. So genetics, personality even hobby, they will in every way be identical, although may be the opposite gender. If you keep playing and don't save and exit the lot but keep on having more babies, each one should be different. What I do is every time I load the game I go directly to CAS (helps the houses load faster as well) and roll the dice a few times before going back to the hood and picking a house. I do this even if I don't plan on having any babies because you never know, plus it also helps load clothes, change appearance faster on the lots as well.

It tends to happen when you have few babies born and/or a short play session style most typically. When I say "play session" I mean the amount of time that the game is running in one go. It doesn't matter how many times you load up particular lots. So if you have ten births per play session, you probably won't notice anything. If you tend to have one birth in a single play session, very occasionally two, and/or many play sessions without any births taking place you will find firstborn syndrome, though with spread-apart births you may not notice it. I don't know exactly what it affects, some people say personality, some people say personality and appearance (whether by appearance they mean face structure or skin, hair, eye colour, I don't know.) Also, if your couples tend to have one child, or two children in the same play session rather than several children over time, you might not notice anything.

Because as others said, the random number generator (RNG) in the game isn't truly random. It's just a list of jumbled numbers effectively. It always starts in the same place, and goes along the same sequence. This is because it's very difficult for computers to work out random numbers. Most RNGs including the one in TS2 are "pseudo-random" which means it's a list. It looks random to humans, but it's actually predictable. This one isn't coded very well, other RNGs will add an unpredictable element, such as taking the system time down to the millisecond, or getting a figure from an online server, to induce more variety, but TS2 is not an online game and for some reason they didn't include the time workaround, perhaps because it's just a game and they didn't expect anyone to notice :P

I have to say that I haven't personally noticed any clones in terms of appearance, but I've definitely had it with personality, and I wonder if this is due to how the game determines personality vs appearance. With all 5 personality bars, sims will get either dad's value, mum's value, or a random value. So this definitely calls up the RNG because initially there are more than 2 options (known as a coin flip which is handled separately, and is properly random) and because when neither mum or dad's personality level is chosen for that bar the game has to assign a random value from 0-10. But, as others mentioned, appearance (except skin tone) is determined with a mendel diagram which DOES use a coin flip. There's a coin flip for whether each parent passes on their dominant or recessive gene, and then if the child gets two equally dominant genes, there's a coin flip to see which one is expressed. Now, as others have mentioned, if you happen to have a pair where one combination will always be dominant, for example, both parents have default skin 2, one has black hair and green eyes, the other blonde hair and brown eyes and both were made in CAS with no parents, so no recessive genes, all of their children will be skin two, black haired, brown eyed. I honestly don't know how different facial features are determined to be dominant or not so I won't give an example, but if you just happen to end up with a couple who EITHER have exactly the same facial features genetically (e.g. you click unmodified face 10 for both of them) OR perfectly match so that each feature is either dominant OR recessive from each parent, then you'll get the exact same combination of facial structure each time as well, and this can create the appearance of "clones", but it's nothing to do with the firstborn syndrome, you just happened to pick genetics which have limited outcomes. Face templates only differ by sex from teen upwards, children and toddlers with the same face template will be identical to their opposite-sex siblings, aside from hairstyle.

Here's more info on sim genetics if you're interested. http://rikkulidea.livejournal.com/21779.html

Now the clones-in-appearance thing tends to run rampant in a first born-in-game generation of a hood, especially if you have hair colours roughly equally distributed. That's just because townies, NPCs and fresh CAS sims do not come with recessive genes meaning that commonly generation 2 is overrun with brown and black haired, brown and dark blue-eyed children. But! Never fear because these children will have recessive genes, so you'll find in generation 3 and further, the blonde, red, green, light blue and grey will come out. You could bear this in mind when choosing turn ons for your teens - if you feel you have too many dark-haired children, try setting more sims to have turn ons for lighter hair colours so you'll be more likely to see children expressing these recessive genes. You can also give your founders recessive genes by creating them from two "parents" and deleting the parents before saving the family.

I've got off topic again... basically, when you have a baby in a hood, the game has to create them from a combination of the parents, and part of this process uses the pseudo-random number generator, which if you haven't used it for anything else at this point, will always be at the same point. Meaning a baby born to John and Jennifer Burb will have personality X. Let's say you play for a while, get her pregnant again, but go to play the other families in your rotation, and eventually quit. The next time you load up the game, you play a few houses with no births and then it's the Burbs' turn again. Because this is the first birth this play session, their next baby will also have personality X. If it's twins, the second twin is counted as a second birth and will have personality Y. If it's a single baby, but you've first played the Picasos and they had a baby (with personality A), the Burbs will give birth to a baby with personality Y.

PS "Rolling the pacifier" means going into CAS and creating two random sims and then clicking make a baby and mashing that little button to mix their genetics a few times. You can then quit CAS without saving. The Batbox does the same thing. You don't need to do it at the start of a play session, but you do need to save before you click it, as it will kick you out to the neighbourhood. I believe that generation of townies and NPCs are also handled by the RNG and hence susceptible to firstborn syndrome too, so if you have antiredundancy or similar and only have NPCs created occasionally you might want to roll every play session.

First born syndrome makes a clone. If anything is different such as skin colour or personality points they are not a first born clone. The game makes an exact copy.

You don't need to create two "parent" sims, actually. Clicking the dice icon in the initial CAS menu serves the same purpose.


Here's a thing you can do if you're curious about the randomizer. Go into CAS right after starting up the game, and look at the personality of the first sim the game creates for you. It'll be an Aries with the default personality for that sign. Click the dice icon to get a new one, and it'll be a default Aquarius. Then a Pisces, a Virgo, a Sagittarius... If you do the same thing the next time you start up the game, you'll get the exact same sequence of signs/personalities. (Different appearances, though, because the game doesn't have parents to pull genetics from.) The randomizer always starts at the same place in the sequence. This is what you change by rolling the dice a few times.

This also applies to the game spawning townies and NPCs. If you start with an empty or cleaned template, and don't have mods to limit spawning, the game will create townies and NPCs at certain points. The first one spawned in a play session (assuming no babies have been born yet, and you haven't rolled the CAS dice) will always be an Aries popularity sim, the next one an Aquarius family sim, and so on. So if you tend to play short sessions, and want variety in what your game will spawn for you - roll the dice!