I'm sure this is a total noob question but i'm new to The Sims 3. I'm currently running a second generation family and only recently started to pay attention to what was happening outside my household. My initial Sim married Holly Alto and joined their household early on in the game so I had a lot of money and space to play with right off the bat. Apparently social climbing is genetic because their son married born in game daughter of Malcolm Landgraab and Bebe Hart. This lead my to believe that most Sims born during gameplay were the result of random pairings happening off screen. Since my Sims seem to be drawn to wealthy families I decided to see what was happening with the Goths. I found out the Mortimer Goth had two daughters, both of whose family trees show only Mortimer as a parent. I skimmed around my neighborhood and it looks like most of the sims born since i started playing have only one parent. Are they all adopted? Is this typical? I was planning to marry my third generation sim to a Goth and see what results i'd get by combining the genetics of the big three wealthy families but if Mortimer's daughter's don't share his genetics I may go another way. So are they adopted or is this like in Sims 2 when you could make a sim pregnant with themselves and produce a gender swapped clone?

Have you patched to the most recent version of the game yet? Early on, "births" involving only one parent and no apparent pregnancy were a common Story Progression glitch- if you haven't patched yet, it may well be that. Took a few patches for it to be dealt with. As for children who do have both parents yet have neither of their hair colours, that may be due to a random chance of genetic mutation that's in the game. There's a mod to fix the latter, though.

meh .. if you're playing in *Sunset Valley I suspect that any child born to a townie there is too ashamed to admit who their mother is!

On a more serious note, I suspect as Mr Smith said you may need to patch up to date. Also if you have certain mods installed I am fairly sure you can 'add a parent' so your motherless sims can chose their mum retrospectively.

*disclaimer - I play SV a lot and know of what I speak

Ming... is a guy?

I read that as Minge instead of Ming. I should probably cut out the all nighters.

Holy crap....I genuinely laughed out loud.

I'm slightly surprised that anyone thought I was female, I thought I'd referred to myself as male on here before.

...Then again, I've got confused about the genders of a few other posters on here before myself, so I guess it happens. :P

My apologies, good sir!

Oh, no, don't worry, it's not a problem. I just didn't realise people didn't know, that's all.

As for the questionable genetics of Sunset Valley, I always saw that town's population as a very mixed bag. On the one hand, I actually like the designs of some of the characters in it- Nick and Vita Alto have tons of personality, and Mortimer Goth, his father and his aunt all have decent genetics for early TS3 premades. On the other hand, though, you've got monstrosities like the Bunch family and adult Malcolm Landgraab, who quite frankly looks more like a stereotypical Reddit poster than a rich man's son. I know he starts out as an overweight nerdy kid, but jesus christ.

Thanks for the help. Most likely you're correct and I just need to patch. Sorry about that, I am VERY new.

It's no problem. You wouldn't think Story Progression would be that silly if you hadn't played the game before, but when the game was first released, it was.

The most recent patch should definitely take care of that, though. It'll also add a bunch of new stuff to do- sometimes, things related to new expansions come in the patches they release before them rather than the expansion itself. Some of the more notable examples being toddler/child interactions and diving boards.

I dunno, one of the things I really enjoyed was my sim sticking Malcolm's fat ass on a treadmill and training him until he dropped. Didn't do anything for that unfortunate nose ,tho.