I thought maybe this little trial of mine might help:

This morning, I counted "by hand" all my Sims from Manage Families: played and unplayed, in houses and homeless. I came up with 158.

I used the getpopulation mod to see what it said: 164.

I have had 2 in-game deaths of played Sims. I also had ageing turned on for townies for a bit, so I may have had 4 more deaths that I was unaware of. (I turned it off when I realized my town was turning into a retirement home).

I then deleted a homeless Sim from Manage Families and rechecked the population: 163.

Anyway ... I thought it was interesting. It seems like if you delete Sims from Manage Families, it does reduce the population count.

I've added the mod to keep more townies from spawning and am keeping a close eye on the population.

New patch dropping. Not sure if it will affect this mod or not. I'll be removing it for the time being (going to start a new save to play around). We ARE getting ghosts today with this patch, which may explain why dead sims remained in population for those who were looking into it.

hidden in the huge patch notes list:

Second try at correcting the disappearing sims Yet they still don't give a damn about townies being deleted, so I'm keeping the fix mod in.

Another patch?
As a player, this is pretty cool.
As a modder.. Very frustrating.

Anyone noticed any issues in their game with NoGene' since latest patch?

Really need this, thanks! But.. whats a resource.cfg?

A file in the mods folder. You will need to open the resource.cfg file with notepad or any text editor and add the "DirectoryFiles unpackedmod autoupdate" line (without quotes).

@MasterDinadan -- do you still need feedback on this? Asking because uploads are actually not supposed to stay in Feedback forever .. if it works, why not upload it?

I'd like to know as well. I'd be happy to help test, otherwise you should put it out there! :D

Can't Download it for some reason
Keep on missing cookies...

I've seen some people report both these problems. The knocking on door was a conflict with some other mod, but I cannot remember what. To get your Sim to stop composing, cancel the action and queue one or two other actions. This should stop them. You can go back to the composition later by going to your inventory and clicking on the sheet music (which disappears once the composition is complete).

I use this mod and my primary Sim is a musician. He just finished his fourth composition last night. Also, no problems knocking on doors. I don't think this mod is your culprit.

New EA patch! http://help.ea.com/en/article/the-sims-4-updates/

It looks like they've changed some things about "hidden Sims" ("Fixed a performance issue resulting in too many hidden Sims being created for "just in case" scenarios. Resulting in a large number of Sims being loaded that were not needed."). Wondering how the new code impacts this mod. I'm not updating immediately.

Is this mod still needed?

After discovering the game had deleted the newly deceased founder of my sim-family and her husband (which occurred after the 10/21 patch), I found and installed this mod. The culling left pretty much every ghost sim in my game intact except for the two that I actually cared about and wanted to keep around. It made me so mad seeing all those townie ghosts in their kids' relationship panels that I gave up on the monthlong game I'd been playing and started my me-sim's life all over again in a fresh 'hood. So yeah, I'd say the culling problem is not fixed and this mod is definitely still needed.

Mod is still needed. Has it been abandoned though? Any known issues?

Would love to know if this mod still works or not? Is it still being supported or what? Would love to see it actually published and kept updated until EA fixes these issues.

The mod still works in my game. It's definitely needed, and appreciated. Would love to see it officially uploaded.

Agreed, it is still needed and appreciated.

I finally decided out of pure boredom, and not wanting to do any real work tonight, to take a look at the genealogy pruning. It's easy enough to see what they're wanting to do, and easy enough to see why it doesn't work the way you would expect it to. Not so easy to fix, though. They are at least limiting the pruning to ghosts and dead sims that have been released to the netherworld, which is better.

Adding my two cents as well. Townies still being culled. A few of my legacy ghosts are just nameless tombstones now. EA continues to "fix" things yet not. This, or a mod like it, needs to go forward. I encourage the creator to respond or someone else take up the mantle and publish this mod!

Cheers.

From today's patch notes, it sounds like they might actually be doing that now:



http://help.ea.com/en/article/the-sims-4-updates/

Wow, should I feel bad now that I suggested they probably felt it was more trouble to fix than it was worth?

Well I haven't tested it yet .. :P

Finished checking all my mods to see if anything needed updating, which it appears is not the case thankfully, so thought I'd look at the new code. Didn't spend much time looking at it, but it looks like it does exactly what I suggested. They go through every household and build two sets, a prune_set and a safe_set, then before removing anyone they subtract the safe set from the prune set. Somebody at EA must have thought I had a good idea (or had the same idea themselves).

My impression is distinctly not that they're able to implement anything in under say three or four weeks. So I guess you simply described the reasonable way to do it, and someone over there had also thought "why not just do something reasonable once in a while?"