Hey Folks,

Usually when I want to modify something in a game, I hunt down a method to do it. I suppose this is the likely way that most people discover superlative projects like NRaas and what it can do. Looking at all the different modules and what they can do, it's monolithic--in a good way.

I'm curious about what other people find useful, or found themselves using the most? Yes, this is intended to be a generalized question with no other purpose than to discover typical and atypical use cases.

So, if you have a minute, post a function or two you like and what you're doing with it please. Help me discover what NRaas is doing for you!

Totalitarian control of the inhabitants of the town - what else is needed for happiness? I find it difficult to say which MC options I find most useful. I mostly use it to keep track of other sims and their relationships. However, I note that I liked the opportunity to make my sims in the service industry. Also this mod gives me more options for editing characters and does not allow the game to slow down because of the large number of things in CAS. Seriously, what guided the developers when they made three (or more) versions of repaints for each outfit? It's not a non-textural TS4! And now I'm even afraid to imagine how I would have lived without Retuner. These virtual idiots do so many annoying things! Of course, they are still not as good and logical as I'd like, but everything has become much better.

Most of nraas mods are crucial to an optimal game but the most important nraas mods are ErrorTrap and Overwatch. These mods put together (they say and I believe too), help prevent save game corruption.

The ones I use the most is Master Controller. You can use it to rename Sims, adjust their age, skills, family relationships, relationships with others, family funds, add Sims in houses they couldn't afford and much, much more.

Story Progression is a great mod too, especially if you get all the modules associated with it. First and foremost, it rids the town with homeless Sims and also prevents the resident Sims from leaving the town for no good reason. Sims live for themselves and not just extra characters for your own playable Sims to interact with. Your options on this mod determine the general story of your town.

Dresser is a good mod if you want to change the hideous clothing choices of the non-playable Sims. Register is good to assign some of the non-resident Sims into some Roles (Store Clerks, Proprietors and the like) and it allows you to purge the undesirable spawns in your town (Papparazi, Strays and the like). Traffic does the latter for vehicles. Saver helps you auto-save your game every several minutes. Retuner is for the advanced Sims player who wants to tinker with various in-game functions (be careful while using this mod, though).

The first mod I started out with back in 2014 was Relativity. I dislike the way game time runs in standard ea vanilla game. I love the way this mod gives me control over time in the game. They have more time to actually enjoy life and do things other that sleep, eat, shower, work, eat, rinse and repeat. I can control the skill factor as well since I play longer lifetimes, I don't want them to learn everything the first couple weeks of a save. I have several copies of it stashed on external drives, spare computers and flash drives. I won't play the game without it!

I have many of the nraas mods now, gradually adding them over the last few years. The last was the money module and am still learning about it. I'm also playing around with the caste system finally which is part of SP. I'm using it to adjust certain behaviors of townies to prevent certain things from happening without my approval. I like total control and finally am getting a feel for what the caste system can do to enhance my town.

I couldn't do without MC being able to swoop in as the creator and fix things about the townies that I think need fixin'. I also love the changes it makes in CAS to help shorten the load time of CAS.

I'm fairly new to the Sims and I like all the mods I've installed and would have stopped playing a while ago if it were not for those main mods already mentioned.
I physically use MC Cheat and SP the most. Retuner was an amazing edition to help with the afore mentioned annoying virtual actions like sims swimming or playing in sprinklers in near freezing temps! There are a couple that I deemed necessary that are outside Nraas realm that I truly love too, like the one that stops the annoying booing every sim will do for no real reason, even to family and friends! Then there's the anatomically correct skins, the more entries mod that helps with school bottlenecking and the scolding mod which I recently acquired that I really like now too!
What kills me about all these mods, that nearly everyone who's a true fan love, is that EA did not even bother hearing fans and making those adjustments to the newer versions. IMO Sim4 has more wrong that right! I really hate the cartoony look of them in that version and getting rid of the town aspect really sucked IMO. I know there are true fans of the newer, but I am not one of them. I get that EA wouldn't have anatomically correct sims (the world is still terrified of nudity) but the rest of the things truly boggle the mind. It's like the company deliberately avoids appeasing fans out of spite. It certainly isn't due to any limitations as modders have proven over and over again.

I think Woohooer was the first NRaas mod I used. I mostly play same sex couples and used a similar mod in TS2 for same sex pregnancies. From there my NRaas mod collection ballooned. The other feature of Woohooer that I use a lot is the ability to TFB in households greater than 8. I find playing only 8 sims to be a bit boring at times and almost always end up with a more comfortable 12-16 sims in the household. Occasionally I play households of 24 sims but those tend to give me Error Code 12 on saving so now I resist the temptation to go that large.

I also find Relativity essential. Installing Relativity and setting the speed to 19 was a revelation. I found myself spending less of a sim day juggling needs and more of the day playing out wishes (the sims and my own). Lately I've been setting skills not to be relative with the mod and consequently skill gain has been slower, more in line with vanilla game speed I think. That's added a bit of a challenge to the game that I hadn't realized I'd lost.

I admit I use MasterController + Cheats to cheat quite a bit. Whether it's tweaking sims here and there in Stylist or Edit in CAS, or giving Lifetime Happiness points when wishes don't satisfy correctly or changing traits on the fly. Lately I've been using MC's Object Info command to find collectibles in town to save me and my sims from gathering all the things just to find something; no more gathering all the seeds just to find the death flower ones, for example.

My last favorite NRaas mod is Retuner. I've taken to asking myself whether I can change some aspect of a game and often Retuner allows me to customize the game in ways that bring it closer to what I'd like.

I'm playing a save with Vector installed for the first time. It's been interesting to say the least. I'm not sure I'll want diseases enabled for all my saves, but it's certainly made things different. Right now I've got simfluenza and accidentitis running in town with my main sim as patient zero (not with both at the same time). It's certainly shaken things up for me.

Other " typical and atypical use cases" which depend on the specific game I play:

1. I'll often use Traveler and Careers to send teens to university. Sometimes I just want more time playing those sims without changing the teen age span. Other times I bring along their steadies to see how well the couple might do once I age the teens to YA and move them out of the house. Other times I'm just looking to play a small household for a bit.

2. In one long running game I decided to play a sim couple and have them raise 100 babies while tackling various rabbit hole careers. However, my computer can't possibly handle running a populated town with 100 sims added to the population, and certainly not 200 if I marred the kids off before moving them out. So I ended up using Traveler's change hometown command to move the current household from Bellatrix to Strangetown to Moon Base Charlie to ... I think Rflong's new world, Elysium, will be next once I return to that game. I leave the older kids behind (the ones who have moved out) so they remain on the family tree and in my sim's relationship panel. But with 70+ kids now, family reunions are rare.

3. Speaking of Traveler, I've set up Bridgeport as a vacation world for sims in my other games to spend a week in the big city and do nothing but go out clubbing all night and sleep in all day. Occasionally I use all the clubs in that world to achieve one of the Mixology skill challenges.

4. I also regularly use Traveler's features to pause travel and to travel from one WA world to another directly to run though all the WA adventures in fewer trips. For example, I recently had a sim complete all the tomb related adventures in 2 trips and return home with a ton of loot (relics, gems, metals, 4 tiberium) and consigned it all for 1.6 million.

Okay, my turn. My favorite NRaas mods by far are SecondImage and UntranslatedKey. They sit there quietly on the site's sidebar not causing any trouble and no one ever asks questions about them. I don't think most players even know what they are for.

It's possible that my frame of reference has become a bit skewed over the years...

I really appreciate all the NRAAS mods I use. I don't like most of the supernatural beings that could be in my game, so I can control that with SP. I am not interested in the holidays, so Tempest is really helpful there, and I like the control over my inactive sims that both MC and SP give me. I don't think I would play sims if it wasn't for the NRAAS mods. I also like that with Retuner, I can stop my sims from autonomously doing annoying things like pillow fighting, etc.
I used to use the features of Traveller a lot, but find that travelling and living in the larger worlds that came with WA slow my game down too much.

I agree with JohnL83, that EA made a backward move with sims 4 when they removed the open town. Even though my sims don't get out enough, I really enjoy that they can, and that when they do, things like time and the sims still at home, go on as normal.

thanks very much all to the talented people who created these mods.

Saver.

Sure, I want to scream at it sometimes when it interferes with my game flow, but without it I never remember to save often enough.

For a while, Saver was the main thing that kept TS3 playable for me. I was having frequent crashes due to bad RAM, although it took me months to find the cause because the RAM kept testing okay in the diagnostics I ran. Anyway, when that was happening, I had Saver set to save every 7 minutes.

Without Saver, I think I would have quit playing TS3 entirely.

Wow, so many creative and useful ideas here. I hope you don't mind if I steal a few!

As for myself, so far this is what I'm using (I might as well reply to my own question):

Relativity. This was what I initially searched for that dovetailed into discovering NRaas in the first place. At the game's normal speed, Sims 3 seems to become a time management game more than anything else. Especially true if I have multiple sims in the household. They barely have time to do anything before they have to be off to the next activity. If you like time management games, I suppose this is a feature! I don't. I slow that sucker down to 5 and just speed it up as needed.

Retuner. So far I've only used it to stop sims from playing computer games. Every single person will flock to any unoccupied computer and jump on it, even if they have no traits related to it. I thought that was rather silly and annoying. If the computer wasn't so useful for the other functions, I'd not even put them in the lots. But that somehow feels wrong. Retuner fixes that efficiently.

All of the functions that allow you to immediately edit a Sim or the Lot are all incredibly userful [sic]. I use them all the time.

I might consider delving into Story Progression. But the only thing I would use it for is rapid population of a world. I'm still looking for alternative ways to do that, so I wouldn't have to enable SP. I like a slim installation. The only EP I have installed is Generations, and I keep my CC down to a bare minimum. My loading time is quite fast and I experience zero lag. I wonder if I can use NRaas SP to facilitate the immigration and then disable it after that's done. Probably a good question for a different topic.

Thanks for the ideas folks, keep them coming if you care to!