Hello people at NRaas!

I have been using many NRaas Mods for a long time now, and I am really enjoying the fun they add to the beloved Sims 3 game. NRaas Story Progression was the first NRaas Mod I ever installed, and I have learned to tweak it to make my games just how I want them.

However, there is one thing I have never been able to figure out, so I was hoping someone here could help me.

Ever since I started using Story Progression, the function "Neighbourhood Pet Adoption" has stopped working. Even when I turn all options for pet adoption on in the settings, I never get the pop-up that a neighbour has a pet up for adoption. And whenever I look for pets for adoption in the neighbourhood, it says that there are none. The sims in my towns do have pets, and their pets are having puppies/kittens. They just keep them all to themselves, how selfish!
Neighbourhood pet adoption definitely worked before I started using SP, and I am certain it doesn't work anymore. I have not been able to use this feature for at least 3 years, so I'm positive that I haven't just been unlucky.

My question is: is there a way to turn neighbourhood pet adoption back on? Or is it disabled on purpose with this mod?
I know that neighbourhood pet adoption was a bit strange in the vanilla game (since it generated a pet instead of using the townies' actual puppies/kittens I believe) but I have always loved it anyway.

Thanks in advance!

Do you happen to use Overwatch at all? There's a setting for the Neighbourhood Pet Adoptions in that mod.

There's two distinct issues here.

1 - The Neighborhood Pet Adoption Center scenario is where a random residential lot is given this special status and some baby animals are spawned, available for adoption by inactive and active residents. There are issues with this scenario. One is that the baby animals have no genetic connection to any other animals in the world so it is not realistic. The next is that the animals get deleted if no one adopts them, which can cause hurt feelings if a player was thinking about it at the time. And finally, the scenario often runs on residential lots not large enough or equipped to even handle pets, and/or gets stuck and breaks the game.

Overwatch has a setting to stop the Scenario from ever happening. That is all that setting in OW does even though it's not named very clearly. SP blocks the scenario from running just by virtue of being present and in control of progression. There are no options and no way to switch it back on other than not using SP for progression because it is deemed to be more broken than it is helpful.

2 - Adoption of pets generally, from friends of resident sims and the shelters (off-screen, viewable by phone or computer) is unrelated to the above. SP gates animal adoption using the same setting as adoption of human babies/children: SP > Town (Caste, Household, Sim) Options: Pregnancy: Allow Adoption > T/F. Further, if you have rigorous household inspections engaged, then the households you want to adopt must have enough pet beds for the incoming animals. That requirement can be softened again by SP option. There's also adjustable limits to the number of pets each household can have.(it's 6 by default) and the number of each species of resident pets in the world.

None of the above should be preventing the player from adding or moving pets around the resident households manually using MC's Add Sim command. But understandably many players want these things to have more of a naturally happening feel to them than to have to inject animals into the households themselves.

Thank you for the quick answer! And so elaborate as well, you are wonderful I never knew that the neighbourhood pet adoption was actually 2 different things!

If you go to the newspaper and select "check neighbourhood for pets to adopt", is that the 2nd option? Because that is what I'd like to be functional, as it doesn't work right now. (If this is actually the 1st option, then I think its fair that this is disabled by SP by default, as it sounds pretty lag-inducing.)

Adoption from the shelter has always worked perfectly, for both my active household and for NPC households. I have every "allow adoption" option set to "true" (though it doesn't seem like human babies are ever adopted but that's another question/issue entirely), and I have made it so that pet beds are not necessary for households to adopt pets. Many sims in my town have adopted cats and dogs

I have been using Master Controller to add puppies/kittens from other households to my current household, when an NPC family has puppies/kittens. And it works fine like that, I was just silently hoping that I could get the newspaper adoption to work, since that feels less like stealing someone else's pet :p

Oh, it's been a while so I'm not sure which scenario the newspaper option is supposed to call up. Perhaps a current player here can advise better?

'Check Neighborhood Pets to Adopt' does a check for the disabled scenario, 'Adopt a Pet from Shelter' is a separate option on the newspaper that can pull up the interface for a standard adoption.

I don't think there is any alternate way to do an inter-household adoption. It would be interesting if it were possible to push inactives to put their pets up for adoption in the same way the player can direct them to, which would at least put real offspring into the shelter's pool of options.
Sometimes you have to resolve yourself to pretend you aren't stealing them When I've wanted my sims to adopt babies, I check the Sims wiki for what premades are pregnant and decide if it would make sense with their backstory that I adopt that child. Then I have a baby that actually has biological parents in the world, rather than one that spawned like a Grendel egg.

You could also use Consigner and switch control to the household with the new litter in order to use 'Sell Pet', if that's a good bridge between hands on and an exchange actually taking place.

Ah thanks, then I got my full answer plus detailed explanation of what is happening behind the screens, what a treat!

I will keep stealing pets from neighbours then, while pretending that it was all a friendly exchange. Luckily The Sims is all pretend anyway
Imagine if there was a 'friendly' option to 'offer to adopt pet', that would be very cool. And also quite funny, just walking up to someone like "hey I want your dog".

Thanks again for all your help Igazor, CardinalSims and Kimlupai!

If you use the "Ask to Move In" interaction on one of the sims, and they accept, you can choose to move in a different household member than the one your sim asked. At least it works on human sims—it's the way a couple of my sims have, um, taken custody of their kids after ignoring them and their mothers as toddlers. I haven't tried it on a pet, but it should work there too. Just move pet you want your sim to adopt to the right on the move-in screen, then the original sim to the left.

Your sim and the one they're asking need to be Good Friends, or very close, and have at least the "X thinks Y is being sociable" conversation tone. If you want to pay for the pet, you could do an MC money transfer after the fact.