My Rotational Gameplay Settings (and Mods)
I put together a guide on how I setup my game to rotate between a few main families. I hope this helps other folks, and please share any ideas you have as well!
be forewarned, it's LONG!
First off, let me explain how I use a few terms. I divide my households into certain categories: - my main families (that I play when I rotate) - NPCs (think nonplayer sims that I made for a specific role - Townies (think sims that the game auto-populates to fill a role) - and other families (families that I don't actively play with)
Story Progression vs. MCCC I prefer Story Progression over MCCC. It's simple and meets my needs. I have story Progression turned off for my main families, though. And if you want to use Story Progression exclusively, make sure to have the override in MCCC disabled, and set all the marriage settings to 0. You can do a combination of Story Progression and MCCC marriage, but I don't. I prefer to manually, match up sims every so often and I have a calendar event to remind me to do this. You could let MCCC or Story Progression handle this, but I like to decide how this will happen. Especially since I use Home Regions, I want to keep my sims entanglements local, unless I think an "international" romance or move is in the cards for them.
Game Option Settings
Neighborhood Stories: Enabled Auto Age (Played Households): Yes Auto Age (Unplayed Households): Yes Sim Lifespan: Normal (I used to play on long but now I use these MCCC aging settings ever since EA did us dirty with that CAS aging bug. It ruined all of my saves and backups!!) Season Length: See Sim Lifespan
Settings for "Townies" Households: You can learn more about how I control which sims my game imports here and here. In my gallery these, these households are all saved under "Townies" so I can sort by that term using Tmexi's Searchable Household Management mod. IMPORTANT! The MASTER configuration for Neighborhood Stories affects ALL sims in "Other Households" and for all of my townie households this is what I have (see pic below). I don't really want their households to grow or expand, I think of them as service sims and background characters. They can come and go so to speak.
Settings for "NPC" Households: Next, in my gallery these, these households are all saved under "NPC: [insert something here]" (i.e NPC: Landlord) so I can sort by them also using Twistedmexi's Searchable Household Management mod. Since the MASTER configuration for Neighborhood Stories affects ALL sims in "Other Households", these sims' settings have to be set manually one-by-one if you want them to differ from the other settings, for example I usually don't want these folks to "die in accidents" so I turn that off.
Settings for "Family" Households: In my gallery these, households are all saved under "[Insert surname here] Family" (i.e. Freedmans Family) so I can sort by them also using Twistedmexi's Searchable Household Management mod. Since the MASTER configuration for Neighborhood Stories affects ALL sims in "Other Households", these sims' settings have to be set one-by-one as well if you also want them to differ from the other settings. For example, I usually don't want these folks to "die in accidents" so I turn that off (like above). And sometimes I change the settings for them to be able to adopt children and pets too. Depends on the family and what I envision for them.
Recommend Mods:
kuttoe's Home Regions (keeps sims in their local regions/worlds)
twistedmexi's Searchable Mods + Neighborhood Stories Viewer
littlemssam's Let Friends Age Up (this mod allows you to control when all sims age up.)
Lot 51's Slower Stories
MissyHissy's Gossip about Neighborhood Stories
flauschtrud's Neighborhood Stories: Marriage+Suggestions - adds Get Married option to neighborhood stories. (cf waring)
Related Mod(s) that I haven't used:
Bienchen Story Progression Tuning here (cf waring)
KaylaDot's Neighborhood Stories Expanded here (cf waring)
Adeepindigo's Background Stories
KaylaDot's Show Full Name in Neighborhood Stories (cf waring)
Carl's Download Carl's Gender Preferences Randomizer Tool
How I Deal with the Game Importing Townies:
importing and dressing them using mccc here and here
aging settings here
Tips & Other considerations:
Consider adding an extra rotation if you want to play with random households for a bit and take a break from your mains. Sometimes it's just nice to just explore other NPC households more in-depth. I did that with the Staleys (see random gameplay tags) and other families in my forever savefile.
I'll updated this as I think of things that I missed. Have questions? Let me know.
