I didn't know what else to call this thread. Basically what I mean is that I really want to play with Story Progression and aging on, but I get so sad whenever I see all those townies grow up, or move out, or die even.
It's like the entire feel of the town just poofs and disappears. Don't get me wrong; the townies usually look really ugly, have bad traits and are just plain weird. But I just love having them around.

I'm wondering if anyone else feels like this. Like, I just want the game to progress, but I'm so afraid of the townies leaving and dying, being replaced by stupid, bland, randomized common rabble without a life story.
It makes me and my Sims feel very lonely in the neighborhood, and it really feels as if my Sims lose everyone.

Depressing. I know.

So does anyone else feel like this? Or is it just me?

I turn aging off and the town won't age. I age them up when I feel they need to. I never liked aging, I get to age my families up when I've acomplished everything I want to do, if I get bored with them, just age them up.

Tweak around with the age settings, for example set everything to max or just make adulthood longer, and age your own sims up with cakes when you feel the time's appropriate. The townies will age, and eventually also die, but you will have had them around for a longer time.

Since last year I've begun playing with aging off and now age them manually with MasterController whenever I feel like it. There's an option in MC to add a numerical value of days to Sims under Immediate/Age:Relative and you can specify what group of Sims should receive the chosen number of days. So, for example if I want to advance the age of only the toddlers I go MasterController/Immediate/Age:Relative then choose Sim/Age/Toddler and choose all toddlers from the list and add the days that I want all of them to become older. The way I use this in my game is that every Monday I add 7 days to the age of that age group that I want to advance in age. If one of them then hits the age transition mark I also use MasterController to trigger the age-up if it's a family I do not play.
So, by this I age up only the babies, toddlers, children and teens, while the YA, adults and elders don't age. One advantage for me for doing it this way is that I keep age differences between individual Sims for the moment when I might turn aging on again for a while.

Am I right in thinking you're just using EA default Story Progression? Because if so, I can recommend NRaas. That way all the townies have stories of their own, and you get little pop up notifications about what they've all been doing. Some people don't like it, but I really like seeing what they're all up to because it gives them lives. And there are also some really fun personalities (I don't use all of them, because they'll make your game lag, but choose a few that fit with your town) that help give all the aging townies their own story.

Yes, I agree with you - it's sad to watch sims you're interested in grow up on their own. I can't just play one household, so I have a complicated set up so I can play some households in rotation and let story progression take care of the rest - which does mean that everything takes longer, so I don't mind so much when townies die!

I don't think I'm using Nraas' Story Progression at the moment. It's a seperate module, right?

Yes, it is.

There are some elder townies (esp. in Sunset Valley) that I, literally, pray for them to die but they refuse to (lol!). I don't like elder sims in general and it's probably EA's fault. I find so ironic that little message you get with the "tips" when the game is loading saying "elder sims love to get together and talk about their grandchildren" and stuff like that! The way I "live" it in game, the only thing elders have in mind is how to hit on younger sims.

In one of my old games, Yumi Sekemoto kept trying to flirt with my YA boy everytime and everywhere she would meet him. That stupid pop-up "an invisible magnet draw us together" almost made me puke (and, EA, Yumi has a grandson, doesn't she???). It felt like watching my great-great grandmother (never met her, of cource, but that's not the point, lol!) trying to seduce a 20-year old boy, does that make sense? And I was playing vanilla back then, no mods to interfere with EA's... big partnering plans!
At another old game of mine, my sim was friends with Gage Briody and at some point I saw at her relationship panel that Gage was at first married to Ann Song and then HE divorced her (because I saw poor Ann around town crying with the broken heart and his face bubble above her head!) to marry Yumi (really EA??? If that's your idea of "story progression" I give up!).

So, I play with aging on and for young adults and adults it's on full epic lifespan (450 days), for elders and babies just 2 days and toddlers, children and teens on epic too but I age them up myself when I find that they have completed all the skills they have to learn or they have A's at school. But stupid Sunset Valley's elders refuse to die!!! Usually Bessie Clavel is the first one who... leaves us but only after 2 or 3 sim-weeks have gone by. Yumi probably does this on purpose to annoy me because she can live for sim-months after I start a game, arrggg!!! I said 2 freaking simdays EA, why is she still alive???

Anyway... Back to OP's question, for me it depends on how I feel for specific sims. If I don't like them I wait for them to die or move to another town, if I like having them in there even though they are not my active sims, I get sad too. Once I, literally, lost a save because a pop-up informed me that Marty Keaton (whom I love to hate and hate to love, lol!) was "tragically burnt to death in a fire", so I quit without save because he always makes me laugh when my sims meet him around town and I couldn't imagine to play if he was not a part of my game. When I came back, this particular save refused to load (no idea why!) so I had to delete it.
But I have to clarify that I get all that sentimental for townies only in Sunset Valley probably because I've played so much there that it feels like "home" (lol!). When I play other worlds I don't care that much for sims I don't control (the circle of life, they live, they die, OK!).

And if you're going to install NRAAS, install the Population module. It has an option to enable Advanced Genetics, which create some diversity by slightly changing facial features that are inherited and blending skin colors. You can also make it so that immigrants are created using genes from your Sim Bin, eliminating the Face Ones from making everything monotonous. Make sure to enable it for Service Sims too.

Oh yeah, definitely same here. I could care less for the Altos or Landgraabs to die. I've always liked and got along with the Sekemoto family though. But I would've never guessed Yumi was such a frisky old hag!
And yeah, elderly sims can be a bit of a pain in the butt since some of them just nag and nag and nag... I swear, sometimes it's like half the town is the descendant of Miss. Crumplebottom.

I definitely agree on the whole "home" feeling. I hate Sunset Valley. Seriously. Despise it. Just for the reason that there's so little space, and it's so incredibly neutral.
However, it feels like home. It really feels like that one town you're supposed to be in. Since the first day I've got Sims 3 I always came back to Sunset Valley after playing in another town for long periods of time. There's something about it's townies, and the whole town in general.

Most likely because the development team had years to create Sunset Valley during the base game's creation, while they only had a few months for every other town. Therefore, the characters are more thought-out, along with the town's composition. It doesn't help that they stopped creating character bios for some of the later towns.

Oh, and since everyone owns Sunset Valley, we tend to know more about its residents than those from Bridgeport, Twinbrook, or even Riverview (since not every TS3 player downloads it).

You could always use the caste system on NRaas' StoryProgression and set it so inactives don't age.

In my town, everyone is immortal. I sometimes call it the deity town

I tried that. Six families of immortal kids, now all grown up and paired off. I added the rich kids' fathers as playable ghosts / immortal elders to fill up the family tree.


...and this happened because I didn't add the rich kids' mothers to tie them down, because they weren't interesting enough characters in the TS2 version.

So I killed all of the immortals off except for the rich kids, who will die when I say it's their time.

I've got very complex settings in story progression and I've got a game in Gibsons which is like Sunset Valley except that it dosen't have the big population and I moved my own families in.I've got Eli Jankowsky with her husband Ami living there and Cody Olson moved in with her three year old girl Tad in the fall.They've been though winter and are near the end of spring.I play both families in that town.I've got two households I play in Oak Leaf and two more in Glenvale County.I play four different families in Winfield and the customized story progression settings help to keep the families from moving away and getting replaced by unwanted messes.I've got 58 Nraas Mod package files installed in my Mods folder.I found that necessary to have a playable game because EA's SP was always ruining the game and messing their lives up.

I'm trying to use SP to flood my town a bit with babies so it's filled for the next generation. I age up my own families when it's convenient for me but I try to keep them in each stage as long as possible.

i guess i'm a horrible person, but i don't really care when ugly EA townies get old and die. it feels like a realistic simulation if anything.