Hi everyone, long time lurker and nraas mod user, first time posting here after deciding it was time to make an account.

I'm noticing that sims all over my town are partnering up (boyfriend/girlfriend), romance is thriving, and kids are being born like it's the 1950's all over again. However, no one seems to be getting engaged, married, or even move in together. Some have been dating for a very long time (50+ sim days), and I've had to force at least 3 or 4 couples to actually live together with their children. I've even disallowed them from moving out, both as a family and solo to try and keep them together. It's possible I've gone overboard with this setting and have blocked move-in progression inadvertently... I'm not ruling that out. I will have to do a thorough examination next time I play.

This has been going on for a few months but only recently started to annoy me. I micromanage the inactive families in my neighborhood a lot and tend to cycle groups of sims to either let age or not. The recent wave of teens that I let age up to YA's have started to date and in some cases have one or more children together but they don't seem to want to get engaged or move in together unless I intervene.

Admittedly, I've tweaked some of the liking gates and cooldown times, but nothing too extreme. For a few of them, I'll creep on their relationships using MC to see if they should qualify for engagement and most should, but still don't. When I first started this save, people got engaged, married, and moved in together all over town very quickly. I think at some point I tried to tone this down but may have overdone things. I even went to the future recently and noticed sims in Oasis Landing getting engaged, married, breaking up, etc. right away (all SP settings are on default there). I'm wondering if keep experimenting with these settings in my main hood, or if anyone has any tips going forward?

It seems odd that couples with kids don't seem to ever want to move in together. I'm playing in Riverblossom Hills, which seems to have a large amount of very small houses. I'm thinking this might be a factor, since a lot of the houses wouldn't accommodate families of 4+ sims. I recently added some more mid-sized homes around town, so I'm hopeful that will encourage some movement over time. As I'm typing this, I realize that I should check the finances of some of these sims, particularly the YA's to see if maybe the mid-sized homes are out of their price range.

Ultimately, it's mostly just a nuisance if I have to keep forcing sims to move in together, and I could live with it if I had to, but at the same time it'd be nice to not have a neighborhood full of incomplete families who keep having kids without becoming a genuine household

Any tips or insight is appreciated. Cheers!

Hi there. It sounds to me like SP is doing exactly what it is instructed to do, but the player (you) has over time lost track of what that might be. I mean, sims cannot move in, out, apart, or together nor get married except by player direction if SP has forbidden them to do so.

One has to have a known and stable starting point, even if we know in advance that some adjustments will be required, to use SP's more advanced interdependent options effectively. My suggestion would be to reset SP to all standard settings, get rid of any custom made castes, and begin the options adjustment processes again from there.

Thanks for the reply, igazor. Your answers in many other threads have been a valuable resource to me over my years of playing.

I think your suggestion to reset the settings and castes under a new "save as" is probably my best course at this point. In my attempts to control things a bit too much, it's definitely possible that I have blocked certain progression settings on a larger scale.

I will also experiment with "snail" speed instead of my current "slow" setting to see how that mixes with the default settings. I recall things happened a bit too quickly for my liking at first, but I never meant to disable it completely, so maybe that will help find a balance.