Creating Parents for existing Sims - How would you do it?

[jdw6]

Backstory's backstory:

 

I started with one sim (Cora), then decided that she needed a sister.  So I created a new sim (Julia), using her save as a base, made changes to height, weight, facial structure, hair, personality, etc. Saved her off and everything was great.

 

Backstory:

 

No I've got the idea to add a niece (Lena) to the household, but the only way to actually get the family tree sorted out, is to create parents for my two sisters, use NRaas MC to do an instant baby on the parents, and connect them all using NRaas MC's family interactions.  From a purely family tree perspective, that works fine.  The niece shows both of the sisters as aunts.  My original idea was that the niece was having to join the household, because her mother died in a freak accident, the "baby daddy" is nowhere to be found, and the grandparents are both dead.

 

Method used:

 

Since I didn't have any issues creating Julia from Cora (many real-months of gameplay ago), I decided that their parents should be built using the two sisters as a starting point.  So I (again) created a new sim using the save of Cora, aged her to elder, and made a few other changes (but not too many, since they were just going to "reside" at the graveyard).  This gave me the mother (Angelina) I needed for this family.  Then I created another new sim, this time using the save of Julia, aging to elder, changing gender to male, a few quick tweaks.

 

Then dropped them into a new household (using the create household tool to set the husband-wife relationship).  Went live, switched over to that household, created an instant baby between them (in menu NRaas | MC | Intermediate). Used MC | Advanced to set the new baby to be the mother of the niece. Then triggered the age transition a few times until young adult. Then switched back to my household. (Only reason for selecting their household was so that they wouldn't go running all over town.) Then force killed all 3 of them.

 

This got the job done.  For that world.

 

Issues found:

 

Today I was starting a new world, and was going through finding all CC items used by the sims in my world (so I can clear out the unused packages and fix any issues found).

 

What I discovered, is that both the grandparents/parents (Henry & Angelina) have 'Special' outfits that turn make them look identical to the young adult sims I started with.  Henry looks like Julia and Angelina looks like Cora.  The same happened with the Martial Arts outfits, but NRaas Dresser allowed removing those outfits.  I cannot find a way to delete the Special outfits (which seem to be the one they turn into after getting the university welcome kit).

 

So... 

 

How would you go about creating parents?  Would you care about whether they 'looked' like they were related, or would you just create 2 new sims and not worry about the whole familial resemblance thing?

 

And, yes, technically, Lena doesn't look anything like the rest of the family, since I grabbed her as a pre-made teen from somewhere else.  (For some reason I didn't think of that until typing this up just now).

[Moses Martin]

As long as with "saved sim" you mean the bin save you produce within CAS instead of a library copy, you should be fine, as that one will only copy appearances, not ID's.

 

I have already created parents that look like their kids by using the "Play with genetics" function of Master Controller, with the kids as "parents". It's not completely realistic, as these parents will look more closely related to each other than you may like, but with a few changes, the results are good enough. I sometimes use other townies or even dead for those mixes. "Play with genetics" saves a lot of headaches when it comes to producing relatives.

 

Canceling the "choose parents" screens in this MC function defaults to biological parents btw., which was something that took me a while to figure out. This obviously doesn't work for creating parents, but helps a lot for standard issues, like when you change the appearance of parents and want to adapt already existing children to the new look.

[jdw6]

31 minutes ago, Moses Martin said:

As long as with "saved sim" you mean the bin save you produce within CAS instead of a library copy, you should be fine.

Oof!  TBH I can't recall which was used.  Maybe I should just redo them.

 

I looked at the 'play with genetics' thing, but don't quite think I figured it out, and right now my mind is mush, so figuring it out tonight isn't realistic.   But... do you use that on an existing sim to just change that sims' genetics to match the 2 selected donors?  Or does it create a new sim from the genetics of the 2 you select?

[Moses Martin]

It works on existing sims. You could just produce a zero slider sim and then use "Play with genetics" on him and have him look like a child produced by the game, or rather, like MC's improved version of the genetics, as sometimes you will get real mixes. You can press the button as many times as you want to re-roll the mixes.

[jdw6]

A-ha! So, PwG won't work with a teen as a 'parent' due to some base EA code. (Per this discussion.)  But there's a suggestion in that thread I'm gonna try.

[Moses Martin]

Oh right, I forgot about that. I only got the idea to change the parents when their offspring had already reached  YA stage and got a makeover that made use of some other sims.

[landess]

On 3/2/2020 at 7:16 PM, Moses Martin said:

As long as with "saved sim" you mean the bin save you produce within CAS instead of a library copy, you should be fine, as that one will only copy appearances, not ID's.

Yeah, This is exactly what I mean when I refer to a sim before going 'live'.

 

On 3/2/2020 at 7:52 PM, jdw6 said:

Maybe I should just redo them.

EA is fickle, and MC is a godsend. Any major changes to a Sim should be accomplished using MC, as taking a Sim into CAS and changing things like sex, occult, age, doesn't work well.

 

"I" would make the Sim anyway one wants, and save it to the bin as above. Then create a new Sim(s), use the Bin to apply the looks/etc. then move them into the household. Now they automatically get a relationship. Open MC/Advanced/Family/Add(?) and choose 'current lot'. Choose the newly created Sims. Now you can do what ever you want. If Ghosts to live with - use the occult setting in MC. For real ghosts, you'll need to kill them, somehow, somewhere. Now you'll have gravestones. Move the gravestones to the graveyard, and you'll find them there. One should be able to use MC to change the Ghost appearance by selecting the 'death type'.

 

Now I haven't actually gone through all the steps personally, but this seems the safest way to get things working naturally. Use MC to remove any unwanted moodlets.

[Moses Martin]

Regarding CAS, make sure you wait until all mods have properly initialized. If you open CAS directly after starting the game, you'll get the EA version, not the improved MC one.

 

There are some limitations even those mods can't work around. For example, aging down adults to teen is risky, as it may corrupt the sim and lastly the game. That doesn't always happen, but it happens, and the NRaas mods cannot always prevent this.

[jdw6]

On 3/4/2020 at 8:13 AM, landess said:

If Ghosts to live with - use the occult setting in MC.

Now that is an idea I hadn't thought of.  But I'm also trying to keep the household under EA's limit, even though I used NR SP to allow > 8, I've noticed in the past some things don't seem to cooperate.  But I could then move them-there ghosts out into a new household (ala that ghost family in IP). 

 

On 3/4/2020 at 8:13 AM, landess said:

For real ghosts, you'll need to kill them, somehow, somewhere. Now you'll have gravestones. Move the gravestones to the graveyard, and you'll find them there. One should be able to use MC to change the Ghost appearance by selecting the 'death type'.

That's actually how I did it in the game I'm putting on ice (pun intended).  That allowed them to spawn back into the world every now & then, so the family could grow/maintain relationships w/ their dearly departed.

 

2 hours ago, Moses Martin said:

make sure you wait until all mods have properly initialized. If you open CAS directly after starting the game, you'll get the EA version, not the improved MC one.

Thought I had, but then again... maybe I didn't.  I'm pretty the notification that NR SP had started showed up, but I'm not so sure that I'd bet money on it.  What I do know is that after (what I expected would work) tweaking the parents (having to hit the damn pacifier far more times than I wanted to get something I liked) they didn't change in the game after accepting the chagnes. I guess I expected it to *poof* they now look like this new thing instead of that old thing. ?‍♂️  Plus side to that whole experiment is that heir "merged genetics" (as I'll call it) from the NRaas mod didn't look all that far off from how they were to start with.  So from a "familial resemblance"side of things, they're good enough.

 

2 hours ago, Moses Martin said:

There are some limitations even those mods can't work around. For example, aging down adults to teen is risky, as it may corrupt the sim and lastly the game. That doesn't always happen, but it happens, and the NRaas mods cannot always prevent this.

The aging down thing I'd not actually heard of before, and I don't think I've done it, but therein again, I'm not gonna put money on me never having done that. I do (did I delete that yet) have a backup of the game tree which will no longer load... so I fubar'd at least one game before.

[Moses Martin]

4 hours ago, jdw6 said:

What I do know is that after (what I expected would work) tweaking the parents (having to hit the damn pacifier far more times than I wanted to get something I liked) they didn't change in the game after accepting the chagnes. I guess I expected it to *poof* they now look like this new thing instead of that old thing.

The changes should actually appear immediately, or at least after a few seconds. I've also had it happen that I didn't get the changes to stick, but that was in a game that was already on the verge of collapse (in constant error 12 territory) and probably had too much other stuff going on. Like every use of CAS, every use of PwG, including every time you press that pacifier button, adds to memory usage and general game overhead. Save file cleaning is recommended sometime afterwards. If necessary, I do stuff like that in tiny worlds where I put the needed sims in just for the sake of doing this, save the results to the bin and transfer that within the main game after 3 am (or whatever your typical nightlife cut-off time is) when the town is quiet, similar to what landess was describing. Save, close the game, reload.

 

Of course, if your game is running well, you shouldn't need any of these workarounds. I usually have resmon running on a second screen to watch RAM usage and see whether I'm still in the green.

[landess]

The use of KW ensures all other mods load before it - IF - you wait till the KW woohoo locations for that world/save have completed and the game auto pauses afterwards.