I'm new at TS3 and trying to create a community of my own sims like I did in TS2...but! If I play one household the other household ALWAYS started having pets and gave birth to kitties and puppies ALWAYS. So if I come back later to play the other household I'll have to call the pet adoption agency multiple times,and the other household I was just playing minutes ago will do the same thing!This game is not quite as smooth as I expected from playing TS2,and I don't think I can start the game with an empty neighborhood like I did TS2,and I've also learned if I send a sim to college I can't switch households anymore...anyway,this problem is the biggest headache for me so far,is there a way to stop the other households from having pets? Thanks for your time.

You could achieve this with NRaas Story Progression: http://nraas.wikispaces.com/StoryProgression.

If you go to the list of interactions: http://nraas.wikispaces.com/StoryPr...on+Interactions and search for the word 'pet', there's a setting for this and you can set pets to 0 or however many you want the game to allow in inactive households.

In game, it looks like it would be Lot Options > Maximum Size: Pet

Thanks for replying but,I read through the description and installed the mod and turned it to 0...the other household still adopted a pet...I don't understand. And another problem has occurred as well,the party guest stuck in the household and while my sim is trying to ask her to leave,he stuck as well...sigh, I don't know,wonder other players has had these many problems at their start.

In theory that should've done it. However it's possible that another setting somewhere needs to be adjusted, or is it possible an adoption was already in progress when you updated the setting? I'm just throwing out a few guesses, I'm not an expert, lol.
I just looked on the interactions page, and there's some other settings about whether to allow further adoption under: General Options > Options: Pregnancy > Options: Adoption
It's possible that these need to be adjusted also.

About the other issue you're having, the game is inherently very buggy. A lot of us wouldn't bother playing without some of the other NRaas mods with functionalities to help cleanup the game. A few I couldn't play without are ErrorTrap and Overwatch

On the Maximum Pet Size options in SP, not sure but I think 0 means there is no limit. Try 1. Or even -1. This is how it works with the total town population caps by species anyway, which would also be worth taking a look at, where again 0 means no cap.

On City Hall or an in-game computer,
NRaas > SP > General Options > Options:Sim > Maximum Residents > (by species)

Thank you both,I'll try both.And thanks for mentioning the bug fix mods,I sure hope they work their magic and help this game run smoother.

any other way? not the story progression?

Other than turning off all pets, I don't think so. Setting adoptions to false with Story Progression is probably going to be the easiest way.

I think what you are looking for is NRass Overwatch if you don't already have it. But according to the mod's notes, the 'Stop Pet Adoption' feature is by default already off.
https://www.nraas.net/Overwatch

City Hall/Computer/Active Sim > NRass > Overwatch >Settings > Stop Pet Adoption: False

No, that's not exactly what the NRaas Overwatch setting does. It's admittedly not named very well.

Some genius at EA decided, when Pets was released, that a great way to get more resident animals into players' worlds was to periodically designate a random not being actively controlled household as a Neighborhood Pet Adoption Center. While this scenario is running, the residential lot so designated gets a special map tag and has some baby animals inserted into it that both our actively played sims and other inactives may stop by and adopt. These baby animals have no genetic connections to any other animals in the world and will disappear (or at least they should) if they haven't been adopted by the end of the scenario.

What happens as a result is that the scenario often gets stuck running forever, the baby animals that should get culled out of it do not, and it's also often the case that the designated household is not really set up to handle pets or quite as many of them as are inserted into it temporarily or otherwise. Between that and the scenario not being realistic in the first place, Overwatch offers the default option to just shut it down before it even begins. That is what and is all the setting does. It does not stop inactive resident sims from finding and adopting pets from other sources or from breeding activities as those would be functions of story progression, no matter whose or which version of story progression is running. If no story progression is running at all, then I believe these things just happen randomly and there's no real controls on them.

Reply option 1: STOP RIGHT THERE! We have our answer!!! The rest is just Christmas lights on a dead tree stump.

Reply option 2: And what? You guys at Nraas didn't fix it for EA??? SHEESH!

One time I misclicked in Overwatch and turned the pet adoption scenario back on. One started while my sim was in University. Like seriously, EA? The students can't even take care of themselves no less a puppy.

(Usually I turn off pet adoptions with Story Progression, the pet adoption scenario in Overwatch, and have Register turn off the strays/wild horses in both University and Bridgeport. The first has no way for me to swap to the family and have them buy pet care items and the last second is a nightmare since kittens and puppies can't use elevators.)

Actually, I don't mind strays in Uni World and they do seem to have an affinity for old sofas that might be sitting on the lawns of the frat/sorority houses. But maybe that's just me.

The way to care for kittens and puppies in LN Apartments is to arrange accommodations for them in a publicly accessed area on the ground floor, should the building actually have one or have room for one. When they age up to adult cats and dogs, then they get to use the elevators even on their own some magical way. But that can be awfully awkward to set up for households we have no interest in controlling ourselves. Baby horses might prove to be a bit more challenging to work through.

One thing I neglected to point out is that if NRaas StoryProgression is running and in control, then it doesn't matter what its options are nor what the Overwatch setting is. The Neighborhood Pet Adoption Center scenario will not run (or at least it shouldn't) with no questions being asked and no way to switch it back on. Our founder, Twallan, apparently lost patience with this poorly conceived concept early on and today, years later, we still agree with his conclusion that it breaks games more than it is helpful or cute. It's just that the Overwatch setting, for when it's actually relevant, needs a better name.

But sims adopting from the off-screen shelters and friends in town who have "real" born in the game pets to give away are still options for inactives unless some form of story progression disallows them from doing so.

I don't play with any kind of story progression in my main The Sims 3 folder and besides, the 'Stop Pet Adoption' feature I left off since there's no smart A.I. to either pick a household that makes sense and/or at least add the necessary pet essentials. I personally have never encountered an inactive Sim who adopted a pet, obviously because there is no option to. Whether that's only in accordance along with no story progression and/or other settings, I don't know. In my options under 'Advanced Demographics Options' and under 'Population Control Settings' everything is unchecked.

And no this isn't a suggestion for those who want to disable inactive neighborhood pet adoptions, it's an explanation of my playstyle and perhaps why my inactive Sims do not adopt pets because that feature is disabled using that NRass Overwatch setting. However, I'm not that knowledgeable about story progression...so yeah.

This is why you have no inactive resident pet adoptions. Unchecking those boxes means you are telling the game that you do not wish to have pets in town other than those you place yourself, and do not want pets created in any automated way, so the portion of the world simulator (game engine) that automatically creates and places them through adoption or breeding gets switched off.

And that's totally fine, but I think many players do want some inactive households to acquire a small and reasonable number of pets over time on their own and maybe have them mate and give birth to litters on occasion. But, rightfully so, they do not trust the built in systems to recognize what "small and reasonable" even mean.

The scenario that Overwatch controls is a weird and special case of the above, not related to what might be regarded as the more natural flow of animal populations through households with pets immigrating in, other forms of adoption, and animal births.