I'm in the process of populating the Edit Town Bin with households for SP, so that new sims don't all look the same. I have a few questions:

1. How many sims are required for a reasonable degree of diversity?
2. Is it better to have a few household with many sims (up to 8) or many households each with a smaller number of sims?
3. Do sims of each age group have to be provided? Or will SP take genetics from, let's say, an elder, to generate a teen, if needed?

Thanks!

1 & 2: These are going to be a matter of personal taste. Some would say five or ten sims is plenty (doesn't sound like much diversity to me), other more like eighty. But maybe I shouldn't have responded to this one. I've tried it and let it happen by accident, but can't stand bin immigration for some reason and always set the chances of that to 0 when I remember to. I like to see new sims generated from the Options:Lots genetics settings (for Residents) and Options:Sims settings (for non-resident NPCs; SP Population module required) with a fair number of just randomly generated sims using neither.

3: As far as I know, and others can correct me if I've got this wrong, the age of the sims in the bin doesn't really matter.

Interesting. Can you elaborate more on the two options you mentioned?

Under SP, there are three sources of genetics for newly immigrating sims.

NRaas > SP > General Options > Options:Lots > Options:Immigration/Emigration > Chance of Bin Offspring
NRaas > SP > General Options > Options:Lots > Options:Immigration/Emigration > Chance of Random Offspring
(a sim is randomly generated to be the genetic parent)

The third source kicks in if the first two do not (as when the chances do not add up to 100), that would be using a random sim already in town to be the genetic parent.

Once two parents are chosen, no matter how they are chosen, a new sim is created from their genetics and the originals are discarded so these sims aren't really the "parents" of the resulting ones but more like genetic donors.

So in my game, I have the Bin option set to 0 and the Random option set to something like 70. The remaining 30% of the time, a sim already in the world is chosen.

A similar but independent set of options is to be found on General Options > Options:Sims > Options:Immigration/Emigration, unlocked by Replace Service Sims With Immigrants = True (and/or Replace NPC Roommates With Immigrants = True). This is where the SP Population add-on module is required.

And some day I'll have to properly document the steps I took to repopulate Uni World using Rapid and ended up with an incoming freshman class of all vamipres, werewolves, and vampire-werewolf hybrids, all of them having the same first and last name. That was totally by accident though, my own clumsiness, and I dumped that session so I could start over properly but I did hesitate for a few minutes thinking that just might be interesting enough to try playing through.

"Hi, I'm Darryl and I am a vampire-werewolf.
"This is my brother Darryl, he is a vampire-werewolf.
"And these are our roommates Darryl, they are vampire-werewolves.
And this is our professor Darryl, he is a..."

Well, you get the idea.

Thanks for sharing your setting igazor. I have always been wondering how to get rid of those pudding faces. I might need to try your numbers for random offspring and bin off spring.

Also, i have read sotry progression interaction page but am still bit confused. Whats the difference between facial blend mutation: random sims and facial blemd mutation: unset blends.

Lastly, one blogger said that to remove puddig faces completely, I have to use awesome mod and nraas story progression together and using nraas setting is not enough. Do you also use aweome mod igazor?? What do you think of that?

@kkaizer - From that same Interactions page.
Facial Blend Mutation: Random Sims
Specifies the minimum and maximum range the mod is allowed to alter each facial blend for randomly generated genetic parents (aka Pudding Faces)

Facial Blend Mutation:Unset Blends
This is useful for assigning values to custom sliders which did not exist when the genetic parents were originally saved.

I would suggest leaving the two values at their defaults if, given the description of where these sims' genetics are coming from above on this thread, it's still not clear to the player what they are doing.

The SP documentation is silent as to whether it is supposed to work on certain kinds of non-resident NPCs. For example, homeless Role Sims generated by Register's "immigration" and adoptees. But my Role Sims are most certainly very diverse. And I've just seen two inactive sims adopt. Not only are the adopted kids not zero slider, but they are occults and one is a hybrid (much to my surprise). There will still be some zero-slider sims in my town somewhere, I am sure. I have seen it on homeless co-workers, for example, but I can tolerate a finite amount of those. You know, some people are just "plain" looking in real life. There is no reason to get all upset and carried away about a "pudding" face here and there like some players tend to do.

Awesome uses different methods to approach the pudding issue and is not customizable like SP is. That's fine for people who prefer it, but the statement that SP alone (with SP Population and some understanding of what it's doing) is not enough is, if not entirely incorrect, still a bit heavy-handed. I used to use Awesome together with NRaas mods many years ago, have not done so since then.

Thank you for your answer igazor!!

@igazor

Thanks for the detailed explanation! I think I'll set SP to draw from the bin and the town, and never generate a random parent.

If you don't mind, could you explain why you eschew bin immigration? Is it because the game does a poor job of actually mixing the genetics, leading to new sims to be too similar to the gene donors?

@banque11 - Oh no, it's just a matter of personal preference. I tend to use my bin for storage, not to be a source of intended automatic generation of sims or genetics. It's kind of unsettling to see new sims arriving or spawning in town who look just like or share the surname or attributes of my binned versions of my own self-sim or those of my otherwise beloved colleagues here at NRaas, for example. Or any other household I like to keep there who already exists in some other of my connected worlds or in my testing labs. Of course SP allows us to exempt those households from usage within each world's settings, but for me it's far too easy to forget to set those exemptions whenever I add new sims/households to the bin for other reasons.