Hi everyone,
In my custom neighbourhood, I’m only on my second generation of my one family (there’s only one other playable family that I’ve not used yet that I’ve moved in), but something seems wrong. Despite me installing mods that slow down population growth, I get around 20-50 new sims each time I play. I’m at around 400 sims total in this neighbourhood now, which is worrying since I’m only on my second generation and I know that the population limit is around 1,000.

Admittedly I made the mistake of adding every neighbourhood add-on except for the Bon Voyage ones, so I don’t know if this contributed to the population growth, but I was wondering if anyone had any suggestions on how to fix this? I’m using the Ultimate Collection.

System specs:
Intel Core i5 6500 3.2 GHz
Radeon Rx 480 8GB graphics card
16GB RAM

Thanks for any advice.

There is no practical population limit. Technically it tops out at 32,767, but you'll never get there. I don't think 400 sims is an unreasonable about of sims to have in the neighborhood given all the townies and social groups and NPCs and so forth that are generated. You shouldn't be getting 20-50 new sims each time you play (unless you play for very long periods of time), but if you were I'd expect a number much larger than 400.

Which mods did you install? There's a different noregen mod for each type of non-playable, including strays. If the problem is creating new sims, it's mods suppressing their generation that you need.

I'm not sure when the character limit was removed, but unless you're only playing with very early EPs you don't have to worry about numbers from a technical standpoint. There are gameplay reasons to limit population, but those are strictly voluntary.

Thank you! I was worried since I saw some people have problems at 1,000 sims despite the population limit being 32,000, but this helps ease my worries. Maybe it is that I play for long enough periods of time for that many sims to be generated. I can play for several hours at a time, but I’m not sure if that’s enough to generate that many sims. I was checking the dates that sims were created, which is how I got that number, but I’m not sure if that means anything. Thanks again for the help!

Aside from my custom content, the mods I have are:
Sim Transformer by Treeag
Select Your Cemetery by arek_91
No Stray Respawn by Pescado
No werewolf hair by Piople
No Townie Regen by Pescado
No Corrupt Death by Pescado
Anti Redundancy by Pescado
Werewolf Personality by CJ
No Secret Society Respawn by Pescado
No Unlink on Delete by Pescado
No Dormie Regen by Pescado

Thanks for your help!

The game will generate townies/downtownies/etc to replace ones that you have removed the the population by making them playable or killing them, but the case where you might legitimately see a whole lot of sims created on a single day is if you do something like add a new subhood, install a new EP, or send sims to a vacation destination for the first time, which cause the game to generate a bunch of new characters for the subhood/EP/vacation destination.

There are problems you can encounter from having large numbers of sims, basically the game has a builtin catch to prevent infinite loops which automatically terminate processes if they go on for too long, and there are a lot of things in the game that iterate over ever sim in the neighborhood. If it takes too long to do that, some things may get terminated with a "too many iterations" error. I have close to 1000 sims in my main neighborhood, though, and haven't really seen those errors. I don't know how many sims you need before that becomes a problem, I think the threshold has increased in the later expansions and it may not be much of a problem anymore.

Did you add on sub hoods like vacation, Uni, Downtown or shopping? That will add sims. Did any sims go to class or in any other way force more NPC's to be created? The game should stop and only generate new townies if you make them playable. i forget how many as I use clean and empty templates myself so don't have all of the above. So going over to empty templates is another way to avoid having many sims.

I didn’t add a vacation neighbourhood, but I added all three college subhoods, downtown, and a shopping district. In hindsight I know that was a bad idea, but it was an oversight when trying to find ways to have a neighborhood that’s not corrupted. Most of my sims go to work and sometimes have friends come home, and other sims go to class.

Now that you mention it, it seems that sims only really get added when I go to a community lot in a subhood, but I haven’t confirmed if that is true.

This is by maxon

If you don't have mods to stop NPCs and townies from generating, and don't use empty neighborhood templates, these auto-generated sims will take up at least 350-400 characters all on their own, possibly more if you add subhoods of any kind.

In a pretty much untouched Strangetown (without using templates) I have 358 characters, while a couple custom hoods I made the character count is about 400 (I have about 30-50 player-made characters in that hood). My Pleasantview (where I've been doing most of my story stuff since 2008) I have a little over 1000 characters, but a solid part of this is the 350-400 NPCs and townies. Can't say I've seen any sim-related errors in that neighborhood (I know Pleasantville is corrupted, but I haven't touched the premades), but it is rather heavy (could be the buildings).

(Which reminds me of the reason I've been looking into those empty templates...)

I installed empty subhoods & stealth hoods ; and that keeps my population under better control.
Plus I like to 'manufacture' my own townies/downtownies.
No random 'uglies' and no Scottish kilts outfits.
Also in a hood like an apocalypse or medieval all of the townies look like they 'belong'.

And I put in "localwalkby" hack so that the residents of the Fallout city don't wander into the main Strangetown hood and mix up the 'storyline'.
I LOVE the hacks and empty hoods and the people who created them !!