Hey everyone,

So I want to start a legacy and I want my game to be realistic where my sims can go out on the town and meet a good looking sim, not a pudding face sim that looks like everyone else. I want my population to be genetically diverse and I would love to remove the pudding faced sims completely from my neighborhood. I have Story Progression installed and I am aware that it creates sims based on the sims you have in your "sim bin". To be honest, I do not know what the "sim bin" is. Is it the premade sims that you see in CAS? Or is it the sims in your household tray? I have a bunch of unique looking sims in BOTH areas. I was hoping that they would be the genetic parents for my future population, but I am STILL getting pudding faced sims running around everywhere!

My question is: what are the best settings on the Story Progression mod by nraas to ensure a genetically diverse population? Or what are the best settings in general to have a thriving and unique neighborhood? I have read all of the nraas mod documents to help me determine the best settings for my play style, but I am still getting pudding faced sims Hopefully some people with more experience with this mod can direct me in choosing the best settings for my game.

Any help is appreciated!

ETA: see pepoluan's post below; the Bin refers to the household list in Edit Town, NOT the Sims in the Premade section.

Hey there First you'll need to create some Sims yourself and save them to the Bin; indeed, the Bin is the collection of premades. Try to make them as diverse as you can, including features, hair/eye color and age.

The settings you are looking for are in General Options -> Options: Sims -> Options: Immigration/Emigration. Clicking on each option will give you a description of what it does. The numbers next to the options below are my settings.

Chance of Bin Offspring (50) = the chance that a new Sim will be created based on a Sim from the premades in the Bin.
Chance of Random Offspring (30) = the chance that a new Sim will be created based on a Sim randomly generated by the game.
Facial Blend Mutation: Random Sim (-1:1) = keeps Sims from copying their parents' features identically.
Facial Blend Mutation: Unset Blends (-1:1) = got a Sim with a "0" value in their sliders somewhere? This will nudge that value to avoid Ultimate Pudding Replicas.
Random Sim Bust/Fitness/Muscle/Weight Range (at least half of the interval e.g. [0;1] from an interval of [-1;1]): if you get an error and the game doesn't save your settings, input decimal values instead of simple ones (e.g. "1.0" instead of just "1").
Service Immigrant Gender (Balanced) = controls which gender to populate the town with.
Skin Tone Range (0.0 : 1.0)

In Options: Sims you also have the Maximum Residents option, where you can set the maximum number of Sims and pets you want for your neighborhood. Personally, I've found that a maximum of 40 Sims is more than enough for me, though it also depends on what your computer can handle. I've heard some have as many as 200 Sims.

Other stuff: in Master Controller -> Settings -> CAS you have more options: Slider Multiple: Body (2) and Slider Multiple: Facial (3). Coupled with SP, this will give you even more diverse Sims, as you'll have a wider range to work with in the sliders. Be careful, though: setting high values for intervals in SP when you have big multipliers for the sliders can result in some pretty fucky stuff, so use with caution

I'd also recommend getting No Mutant Hair/Eye Color by KittyCarey so you avoid having green-haired Sims with blonde and black-haired parents.

OMG thank you! This helps a lot. Do you know if there is a way to get rid or delete the premade sims that I did not download/make? For example these ones right here:

Do you think that by deleting these sims from the bin would also help getting rid of the pudding faced sims?

Sorry, I haven't found a way to remove those yet Your best bet would be to create many Sims with different features so the premades don't end up crowding your town.

I forgot to mention that even if you set your Immigration Gauge to something small (say, 10) and the final pressure is bigger than that (say, 20), Sims will still not move into the town if the existing number of Sims is greater than the maximum you specified. For example, I get a pressure of 26-28 from SP every night and have the Immigration Gauge set to 20, but new Sims aren't being created because I already have 40 Sims in town (40 is the maximum I specified). So some will have to die off before new ones are brought in.

Edit: other advice not necessarily related to SP:
- create diverse Sims, move them in town. Leave them on their own or merge them with existing households.
- edit existing Sims. Edit out the ugly genes (unless that's you're thing, I ain't judging ).
- create relationships between new and existing Sims: Master Controller allows you to both set relationships and impregnate Sims. This will help in developing a more diverse population in the second generation.
- if any Sims die without creating families, resurrect them and throw them back into the world again ("no families" rule to avoid weird family trees).
- don't make only Young Adult/Adult Sims to move in. Make families. If you make only YA/A you'll end up with a town full of old, single, childless farts within a generation (and they may be hitting on your Young Adults too!). Adding kids and teens ensures continuity. Here are some family ideas:

• parent(s) + 1 teen + 1 toddler;
• parent(s) + grandparent(s) + child(ren);
• orphanage-type household: 1 elder, 1 YA/A, 6 kids (may be baby-teen);
• roommates (this is better with young adults) etc.

Important Note: I've double checked with the NRaas maintainers, and they explicitly said that the "bins" from where SP takes genetic material are the "household bins" visible in Edit Town mode. Hence, the pre-made sims in CAS won't affect SP's genetic mixer.

So, create as many households as possible, with as diverse genetics as you want. You do NOT have to place the households in homes; their mere existence in the "household bin" is enough.

SP has the option to blacklist bins; so, if your household bins contain too many pudding faces, rather than deleting them, just blacklist those households.

Finally, if you really want to significantly reduce the spawning of pudding faces, set the "Random" chance to zero; "Random" is EA's messed up sim spawning code that *will* result in pudding faces.

You just made creating sims for my game so much easier. Thanks!

*butting out now*

Ahh okay... it all makes so much more sense now! Thank you, I will try this.

Omg this is wonderful, thank you so much!

Ooh, I had no idea SP used the households instead of the premades, thanks for the clarification.
It's a shame that those take so long to load for me It's kind of redundant to have the same Sims saved in two different places (Premades and Edit Town).
Can you give more details on how blacklisting households works? I'm not familiar with this feature at all.

I think after you've created a household, you can actually delete the sim in the Sims bin (in CAS).

To blacklist households from SP's genetic mixing, use the "Disallow Bin By House" option. Up comes a list of all household bins, mark those you don't want to be included, and click the checkmark.

Okay so I followed pepoluan's advice above and set the "Random" chance to zero and the "Bin" chance to 100. I played around with the Slider settings in Master Controller and I also tweaked the Facial Blend Settings in Story Progression, but they were a little bit too extreme for me and my sims were looking way too strange. So I changed it back to 1 for the sliders and I left the Facial Blend Settings to default.... BUT I AM STILL GETTING PUDDING FACES!!! I don't understand. I have NO pudding faced sims in my household bin... only families that I made that are very genetically diverse. I noticed that some townies and immigrants did in fact look like a blend of the sims in my household bin, and they were very attractive, but I would say about 75% were flat out pudding faces.

So what am I doing wrong? Considering I set the "Random" chance to zero, there should be ZERO chance of pudding faces. I am so confused. As a last resort, I will look into using Awesomemod with the "NoVanillaPudding" option, but I would rather just use Story Progression considering I have no experience whatsoever with Awesomemod.

Any advice guys? You have all been so helpful, I really appreciate it

By "some townies", you're not referring to pre-made families, right?

Anyways, if everything fails, you might have to bite the bullet and use AwesomeMod JUST for the NoVanillaPudding option. Here's a nice tutorial: http://realsims3.weebly.com/how-to-...-different.html

(In the NRaas 'forums', there have been isolated incidents of anti-pudding measures failing; we can't seem to pinpoint the exact cause, yet.)

There were no premade families in my neighborhood, so yea they were townies or immigrants generated by StoryProgression. Anyways, I went ahead and used the NoVanillaPudding option and it definitely worked! Now I see a bunch of unique looking sims walking around. If anyone else is having the same problems as I was having, I definitely recommend following the above link and using BOTH StoryProgression and Awesomemod. It works great!

Thanks again guys for all the help

Thanks, pepoluan I don't have too many horrid premades in the Edit Town bin, but will keep it in mind.

thesimskid25: if you don't feel like tweaking them in CAS all the time, just do a Master Controller -> Advanced -> Randomize Genetics on them. A value of 70-100 on Reroll usually keeps them from looking too pudding-ish. Of course, this is on a Sim-by-Sim basis. The downside to this is that randomization will be applied to ALL sliders; I usually end up with Sims with pointy ears that I have to fix in CAS afterwards anyway