I just recently bought all the sims 3 expansions and have a question.

I downloaded a custom world from the exchange that is completely empty except for the roads and such. But my question is after I finish putting houses and community buildings into lots and go to create my sim will the world just fill with random sims that will live in the houses or will I have to make them myself?

You will have to fill the population yourself, it wont be too difficult if you just place people into houses and have story progression on, as many things will happen on their own while you are still playing with your current sims.

Okay. So i have a lot of work to do. Also, what does story progression really do? I've had it on until recently and I haven't noticed a difference.

the sims in your neighborhood will carry out their own autonomy (daily tasks) but they also will progress with relationships and family matters, even some will have children. Their progression will depend on their relationships and their traits so a family oriented sim that is married or in a relationship with another sim will more likely have children. If you want to increase your overall sim population with minimal amounts of work you can make a few "couples" families and let those progressions do most of the work.

On another note, you can download some completed families off of this community here and on the sims exchange to give you a jump start.

You don't actually have to do anything... sims WILL move in on their own (if story progression is on). It just won't happen instantly. You can read the newspaper to find out about story progression related events (sims moving in, out, being born, dying etc).

BTW, since you are new, it might be helpful to know that you are much more likely to get good answers to questions here (or pretty much anywhere on the Internet) if you use an informative subject line for your post That way, people who know the answer to your question are much more likely ot read it. Something like "How do I populate a town?"



That's not true, unless you are using a story progression mod (like Awesomemod or Twallan's Story Progression). AFAIK default EA Story Progression pays no attention to traits, skills, careers, LTWs or anything else... it is pretty much completely random. Which is exactly why it was one of the first things to be modded It will also give you some pretty strange scenarios in terms of the makeup of the "families" it produces.

While it's true the overall process doesn't happen instantly, some sims will be created almost instantly in a world with zero population aside from just the active household.

Such sims that are created almost instantly, if they don't already exist, include:
- Service Sims (Mailman, Repairman, etc.)
- Role Sims (clerk/WA register objects, tattoo artist/tattoo chair, pianist/piano, etc.)
- One sim for every rabbit hole.

Then the town starts to fill up a bit more over time.


This is what I have observed when I've play tested my world in progress.

thanks for clearing that up... I could have sworn that my sims were having babies on their own when I first played Sims 3 before I installed any mods at all... My memory isn't the best though so I could have been thinking of something else.

One of the reasons I got AwesomeMod, then IndieStone, then back to AwesomeMod, then Twallan's Story Progression is the weird way EA's sp handled the town. First babies were just popping up in single sim's households, some families had most of their babies die before they can grow up, odd how my CAS sims were the first to die in the town, and everyone moving away.

I would be lost playing Sims 3 without Twallan's story progression.

Sorry to rez this thread...I actually forgot about this. So if I just start putting community buildings I can go a head and just make all the sims I want so that they can live in the houses I build?

The world I want to populate is this one: http://www.thesims3.com/assetDetail...assetId=1732646

I just want to fully know what I'm getting into when I build in that world.

Also, how do you use awesome mod? I have it in my packages folder, but I haven't seen any changes.

Also worth noting is that without AwesomeMod, your entire world will be populated by Vanilla Pudding, meaning every single sim in the neighborhood is face 1. This, incidentally, is why sim-spawn tend to all look the same after a few generations: In a few generations, the only thing left in the neighborhood will be Vanilla Puddings, and so every time you breed with a Vanilla Pudding, about half of any unique genetic information is replaced by Vanilla Pudding. The "random mutation chance" will also gradually result in the loss of all player-introduced eye color genetics in about 20 generations even in the absence of any EAxian genetics, and much faster if there are. Hair color will be affected similarly, but sims don't actually have hair genetics as any player-applied changes become genetic, so this isn't important.

That's true. With Awesomemod, I actually see some pretty Sims that were generated for jobs and such. ♥

Is it AM or just EA that also gives you copies of sims from the sim bin? (I find the risk of having my family's long-lost identical twins showing up to be worth the result of having sims in the neighborhood that I like watching. And with 50 sims and families in there, the odds of getting yours shrink a bit.)

Either way, I do like what AM did for my towns.

Neither. Dopplegangers like that are the result of an error in the EA Library Import system.

A copy of the imported family is left in your homeless population, which is *supposed* to be removed. Unfortunately that does not always happen.

Mind you, Awesome may contain a fix for that issue, I do not know off-hand.

When I see a doppelganger of one of my sims around town, I always remember of How I Met Your Mother. hahahaha

How do I know that AM is working?

You can get Awesomemod support at the forum where you got it

Okay. Thank you all for the information.

One of the weaknesses of most player created worlds is they come unpopulated. It's not universal, and there are a FEW populated player created worlds. But those are the exceptions rather than the rule.

The various story progressions will eventually fill up your worlds. But your young adult sims may very well be elders by the time their are suitable spouses for them. Waiting for the story progression to fill up your world does not work if you want to play a social game.

This means, you usually need to kickstart the process. Plan on adding between 30 and 100 sims to your world. The more, the better.

Personally, I really don't want to be bothered making 100 or more sims, so I filch other sims. You can find sims here, on the exchange, at TSR or through other sites like the My Sims 3 blog. I am assuming people are uploading their sims because they want them to be used. In any case there are thousands and thousands of premade sims ready to be downloaded and installed.

Then you can move them into the homes in your neighborhood. By the way, last time I looked, there were over 300,000 homes available for download at various sites. You really only need 50 to 60 for a well populated world. I sort of assume that the typical house will house 3 sims on the average. So 50 houses supports a population of 150 sims.

You can count on spending several hours doing this, but it is well worth the effort.

Depends on the progression system :

Normally I simply set the "Rapid Immigration" to "20" in StoryProgression mod when I want to immigrate an entire population in the shortest possible time.

Takes a couple of sim-hours, and after that : Instant neighbors.

Unsure if Awesome has any equivalent functionality, but I know that EA does not.

Awesomod have a handy code for that: "spawnmoreoverlords". Type that without the quotes and 30 to 60 sims will be created, depending of the population you already have. It created 54 sims in an empty world IIRC. I'm not sure but apparently they were all YA, which means new active genes for the hood.
As Pescado explained with AM installed, the generated sims will have different faces - I saw some beautiful random sims (!) and just having sims without the potato head is, well, awesome. The code works even if you don't have the awesome story mod activated and use Twallan's!

I don't have AM installed, but I do use Twallan's StoryProgression and MasterController. StoryProgression works for me because it uses the sims in my sim bin as source material for creating immigrant sims. So I don't get pudding, but I do get sims who are blended from the sims I already use, so they look as though they are naturally part of the same community.

I should add that I frequently grab those sims into CAS and save them to my sim bin, so they also become part of the available gene pool, whether or not they breed in-game.

I might try Twallan's Story Progression. I haven't really noticed any changes besides non pudding sims showing up in town. Other than that I don't see any changes.

You won't be sorry using Twallan's Story Progression. Better than Awesome (in my opinion).

More story-driven than Awesome at any rate. Although the pop-up messages acting as a gossip rag so I always know who's doing what with which sim gets on my nerves after a while.

You can turn the pop ups off, or tune them so you only get ones related to your Sims friends and/or relatives. Under all the Options tabs there are options for Stories, so if you don't want to hear about how anyone is getting on their careers, you can go to Options>Careers>Stories and turn them off, or set them to only get pop ups about you friends, or relatives.
Same with every other option, for relationships, etc.

I personally love getting those messages. I don't want to play every Sim in town, but I do want to know what they are up to. So when my Sim's kid meets a kid at school, I already know their history, what their parents do, what kind of relationship they have. And it works into my story about my kid's relationship with this kid.