I just downloaded Blue Haven, and since it's an empty neighborhood, I want some sims to populate it. I already created some, but there needs to be some more families. I'm fairly short on teens and children, and need them for my main family's children to have friends with.

So what ideas have you got?

A lot depends on how you like to do things. The obvious thing to do is to make two or three families, each with one teen and one child, making sure that both genders are covered about evenly, but that's setting yourself up to be bored.

Another possibility would be to generate random numbers (got any polyhedral dice?), determining how many families, how many teens each has, how many children, for that matter how many toddlers, which ones are which gender and so on. Roll also for family make up. Perhaps one family has a single parent and each child is only half-sibling to the others, one family has an aunt, uncle, or grandparent living with them, in one family parents abandon the children or die and grandparents or other relatives get custody. You could have a family split by divorce with each parent getting custody of some of the children, you could have a blended family with a mix of step and biological siblings, you could have a home for endangered teens, a family of mixed humans and alien - there's no end to it. Make sure you get all skintones, eye colors, and hair colors represented!

Or you could recreate some of your favorite fictional families and send your existing to sims to school with the March girls, the Bobbsey Twins, the Hardy Boys, the Boxcar Children, the Weaselys, the Babysitters Club, the Peanuts gang, the students of Charles Xavier's school for Gifted Youngsters, or anyone else you like.

One thing I like to do is start punning and see how many names I can get with one surname. But not everybody wants a family of Red, Livva Ann, Sage Ann, Pearl, and Vidalia Onions.

Or you can make the premades as teens and children. What was Mortimer Goth like as a child?

Even if you don't, you can probably find virtual dice online for any number of sides you need.


This! But also...you could use your favourite fictional families as templates and change the names. This way, you don't have to stress over them looking anything at all like the "real" characters. I usually pick names with similar origins but one letter further in the alphabet. So Kara and Alexandra Danvers could become Leyla and Berenice Eaton, just as an example.

I'm a huge fan of complex family trees, so any way you can get more of that into the starting families is probably a good idea imo.


This is actually a bit of a peeve of mine in the combined Four Corners/Bitville I'm currently playing: there is exactly one sim in the entirety of both hoods with red hair, and there also seems to be a disproportionately small number of sims with the darkest skintone. And it gets annoying when trying to set up turn ons/offs, because a sim being turned on by "brown hair" effectively means "I'm just basically attracted to everybody."

This is brilliant for quickly coming up with groups of sims: The sim randomizer
You can randomise anything from appearance to aspiration to age, gender preference, life state, etc. Combine this data with any of the methods that help you come up with a unique looking sim in CAS, and you'll have unique families in no time.

This random generator made for the Prosperity Challenge can also be useful, as it generates families with random characteristics and number of members.