Hello you lovely people I have a bunch of questions which I couldn't solve by my own research on here or the rest of the internet.

I'm setting up a savegame for a very particular world. Nothing new here. But I do have some troubles with the NPCs/role sims/all those sims the game is supposed to spawn as required. Nothing new here either I'm afraid...

What I want to achieve is to have some dedicated sims for certain positions (i.e. registers, newspaper delivery, handyman, paparazzi, unicorn, mixologists, baristas, bouncers, stylist, tattooist, proprietors and preferedly also the babysitters) and let the game spawn sims/use homeless sims for any remaining empty positions.

See below for the list of NRAAS mods I use. Allow immigration is set to true. Allow assignment of residents is set to false. Story Progression is deactivated.

Issue 1: I read in several places that in order to provide some non-EA homeless sim you'd have to move in a household and evict it again. They would be added to the homeless pool instead of being actually deleted. But this does seem to work only randomly? Some of them show up, others don't. Is there a specific way to do it? It didn't seem to matter if I did it via Edit town or via MC evict. Or does it?

Issue 1a: Maybe related to this (or not), some even were removed from the world. So I placed e.g. Household no. 2 with 8 sims. All of them were assigned a role: bouncer, stylist, barista, paparazzi, mixologist, tattooist, food register. But only 4 of them still show up as I set them up. The stylist and food register clerk seem to have vanished from the world. The other two can be found but have different positions or none. The game clock only ran for 37 sim minutes so far, the game has been reloaded after quitting to desktop.

Issue 2: While it's easy to assign sims as bouncers, baristas and all the others that have a role object, I can't find a way to e.g. assign the paper kids or babysitters. Those jobs from the service pool are not offered when I click on the sim and I neither can find an option in Register. So how can I assign those service positions? Is it even possible?

Issue 3: I find sims assigned to jobs/role objects but it only says "Food register" (or something alike, my game is localized so I'm not sure about the correct English term, sorry), but it doesn't say which food register. Is there a way to find out more? Like, show the work place or name the lot they are working on or similar?

Issue 4: Some of the role sims are happy about their cashier jobs, but secretly the game assigned them to a rabbit hole career. So they head off to the RH instead of attending role object. Grrr... Is there a way to prevent that? I tried to assign the homemaker careers to them as this one at least doesn't have working hours, but that didn't seem to help much.

Issue 5: Even when somewhat done with the settings, I play a few sim days, and find that the game has shuffled around job and role assignments... Can this be prevented without using SP?

Issue 6: I want to have only one Paparazzi. Which doesn't work, it's either none or 3. I read somewhere on here a confirmation that this is indeed a bug in register - did I dream that? Or is it possible to have 1 or 2 paparazzi only?

These are the NRAAS mods I have installed:
Careers (with Academics, Homemaker, PartTime, School, SelfEmployed,Tones)
Decensor
Debug Enabler
Error Trap
Go Here
Master Controller (with Cheats)
Overwatch
Register
Retuner
Tagger
Tempest
Traffic
Traveler

No Story Progression for several reasons: For this particular save I don't want much story progression, I want the households to mostly stay as they are and only progress them through player interaction. I did try SP but ... it broke my one brain cell with its many options. After some weeks of trying to tame it while it "messed up" my town I gave up. If possible I would prefer to not have it in game (also for performance reasons, that town is already quite heavy).

This is a lot, I apologize for that. But I still hope to find some answers, so thank you very much for even reading this

For issues 1 and 2, we could hack at the problem a bit, but there's a simpler workaround. Save the sims you want to use as templates in CAS, and let the game choose whoever it wants for all these service and role assignments. Take the corresponding sims into CAS and impose your saved CAS template sims on them, and you'll have your custom-made sims. You can assign skill points or relationships with MasterController if you want.

If the game replaces a service or role sim, just repeat the process.

For issue 3, I believe this is the WA food register.

For issue 4, try the Retired career. You can also manually assign coworkers to your active sims so the game doesn't try to choose its own.

For issue 5, the answer is no, without SP, you can't really prevent the game from messing around with the careers of inactive sims, residents or otherwise.

For issue 6, I'm not completely sure, so someone else can answer.

I would suggest taking another look at NRaas SP, perhaps simply copying igazor's rotational caste settings to prevent inactive sims from any kind of progression without your intervention:

Story-Progression-Rotational-Caste-Settings

You don't really need to learn about SP to use these at first, and you can tweak the settings to your liking as you go along. Allowing all stories (true by default) will show you if something is happening you don't like, and you can adjust from there.

Another bonus of SP is you can set Manage the Homeless to False, which makes homeless sims somewhat more stable. It's never going to be perfect, but this setting plus disabling aging for homeless sims makes their replacement somewhat less frequent.

Thanks for your reply, puzzleaddict! Will try the retired career for (4). Or maybe the Unemployed career as I can't seem to find the retired career. Which module contains it?

And thanks for that link to igazor's SP settings, I will definitely have a look at it. Though even while reading through those very concise instructions more than one question mark popped up...

As for saving all NPCs to bin, we are talking about 68 (or more) sims here. That's why I thought that adding them to the homeless pool by evicting them would be rather convenient. For most I don't care which one is assigned (e.g. co-workers), so taking them all into CAS individually seems not that simple to me, at least not with this amount of sims. Also the problem of finding them first remains. Some only appear at special occasions or at certain hours.

re: Issue 3: Ah, that might be possible. That's one of the role objects where my assigned sim was removed from the world and replaced by someone else.

68 npc Service/role Sims?
That are quite many
What kind of town is this going to be?

No, no, not 68 sims for Service/Roles alone. For all of those and the homeless pool, co-workers etc. When I checked there were about 80 NPC sims in town. That's why I would prefer to add those to the homeless pool. By evicting them. And then just assign those that are particular made over to fill a specific role.

Role sims (by that I mean register clerks, mixologists, bouncer, baristas, proprietors, stylist and tattoo guy) are about 20 sims. For those I could actually use the "take into CAS and replace" option puzzleaddict suggested. But it still doesn't solve the problem of the bigger group of the service pool/co-workers etc. As I said, everyone says just to evict households, but maybe I'm missing something in the process.

Instead of evicting them, you can create an active homeless household using the "makesim" cheat code, then add your premade sims to it by clicking on the randomly generated sim and selecting: MasterController > Household > Add Sim > (select up to 7 sims). The first sim can be TA'ed so that another can be added in their place. Once the household reaches the maximum number of sims, create another one using the same cheat code and repeat the process.

I don't remember using the Retired "career" before I installed SP, but you access it with an MC command:

NRaas > MC > (Sim) > Intermediate > Career > Retire

For issue 6,

Do you have the most recent version of Register?
Proper paparazzi culling is mentioned in the release notes. Setting the paparazzi pool to 1 worked as intended while I was testing some Register stuff for another thread. If an additional two were already assigned before you changed it, it's possible the game may need to reload to cull them- or you can remove the role yourself with Register.

phantom99 post_id=100508 time=1711315801 user_id=23867 wrote: Instead of evicting them, you can create an active homeless household using the "makesim" cheat code, then add your premade sims to it by clicking on the randomly generated sim and selecting: MasterController > Household > Add Sim > (select up to 7 sims). The first sim can be TA'ed so that another can be added in their place. Once the household reaches the maximum number of sims, create another one using the same cheat code and repeat the process.

I'm not sure I understand what you mean. So, in game I use the makesim cheat? But isn't that sim (and any I would add manually) added to a residential lot, so not homeless? So the step of evictim them would still be required?
I tried that command in EIG in the CAW-Tool, that sim was definitely added to an existing residential lot, also the ones I added. They were regular residentials. Evicting them in EIG didn't add them to the homeless pool either. I never tried in game, will definitely experiment with that.

puzzlezaddict post_id=100514 time=1711335088 user_id=17934 wrote: I don't remember using the Retired "career" before I installed SP, but you access it with an MC command:
NRaas > MC > (Sim) > Intermediate > Career > Retire

Ah, ok, I was looking for an "active" career. Thanks, I will try that! The EA retirement definitely doesn't protect from being shoved to some open position.

CardinalSims post_id=100517 time=1711340941 user_id=22933 wrote: For issue 6,
Do you have the most recent version of Register?

Hm, I use V81, I thought that was the most recent one? So far it didn't work when I TA'd any surplus paparazzi, new ones were spawned immediately again up to 3. I did not try the register method to remove them, will try that too, thanks!

I may have misremembered the Retired career part, as it's been a while. Now that I think about it (and I haven't opened my game in a couple weeks), I belive I used ... Career > Choose Job > Retired. But it's easy enough to figure out in-game.