Placing Households in homes on residential lots?

[PolarBair]

Uhm, Anybody have an idea how to place households in the homes on the residential lots? The households tab of the library is grayed out when I edit in game.

[DeLouche]

If you want to populate the world, you'll need to use a mod - Twallan's Porter mod, to be precise... there's information on the mods board, and here's the link: http://nraas.wikispaces.com/Porter

To clarify, there is no other way of placing households in CAW... Plus, Porter ensures that relationships, etc are preserved.

[Chuckles_82]

I've done a little bit of research into this aswell - since I plan on populating my current project. Don't do it right until the world is ready to export. Also, some things don't export properly. Horses in households were causing issues last I checked. Ghosts and Vampires don't export properly either, so I've read. If you want to include any of those kinds of things, you may need to upload a save file which you have played to get the town set up.

[PolarBair]

Thank you both. Sounds like good advice. I'll wait.

[PolarBair]

hmmm, well I never used any mods before so apparently I must be doing something wrong. I followed the instructions on this page http://nraas.wikispaces.com/How+to+Install

and that didn't work. The game launched okay but there was no pop up saying I had a mod installed and none of the new options the mod is supposed to provide.

Then quit the game and deleted all the files and folders that were involved in that installation and started again this time I followed the instructions on this page...
http://simswiki.info/wiki.php?title=Game_Help:Installing_Sims_3_Package_Files/Setup_and_Files

and got the same result. No joy.

I'm running Windows Vista home premium 64 bit and I always patch when ever there's a patch available.


Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks.

P.S.

I've done a little bit of research into this aswell - since I plan on populating my current project. Don't do it right until the world is ready to export. Also, some things don't export properly. Horses in households were causing issues last I checked. Ghosts and Vampires don't export properly either, so I've read. If you want to include any of those kinds of things, you may need to upload a save file which you have played to get the town set up.

I used to keep a save file with all the bars required for Late Night  and all the community lots for Ambitions but it was always only a matter of time before I would accidentally save over it ruining it as a starting point for new games which is why I'm going through all of this effort. If It can't be included in the world package than it won't be included. There will be no save file.

Anyway, I don't have the Pets EP,  just Late Night Ambitions and World Explorer so far so I'm planning on using Sunset Valley's default starting population so I think the only thing I might have a problem with is a vampire or two.

P.P.S.  Okay, I got the mod installed correctly. Now how to use it. The Households tab is still grayed out when in Edit in Game mode.


P.P.P.S. Okay, Now I get it. With the town loaded in "Edit in Game" mode you have to open the cheat console with Control-Shift-C and enter "makesim" which generates a random homeless sim standing on the street which becomes your active household.

You have to have one active sim in town to get access to the porter stuff.

From there you can just go into map view (not edit town) in click on vacant lots to get to the porters unpack command which is what you use to add households from the library.

I'm a little surprised at how difficult it was to dig this information up. I found lots of sites with info on what porter does but almost none that explained how. So I hope this info will be helpful to other CAWers in this community.

By the way, being a first timer I'm not sure how crucial this is but it would seem prudent to keep the game paused while inserting all your house holds.

My intention is to have the default households from Sunset valley in my revised Sunset Valley so I want new games started in my new town to be populated with sims that haven't experienced any passage of time yet plus I would expect that exporting sims that were engaged in some action at the time of saving in "Edit in Game" mode might cause some problems.

To any one looking to populate a world in CAW I highly recommend giving this page a read (http://modthesims.info/wiki.php?title=Tutorials:Populating_CAW_Worlds)

Lots of good tips and caveats there. They do mention the issue with horses, ghosts and mummies but they do say vampires are safe.

[Anushka]

Actually, on download page of UC, Carl provided a link to Sim Wiki with detailed tutorial on how to populate world in CAW. Link to that page is here.

You can unpack households even if you don't zoom out, and they don't have to be Porter households, they will unpack anyway. Keep the game paused, and if you unpause it, make shore no Sim dies while in CAW. And if you let the game unpaused, before saving do the Reset All Objects in Mastercontrol mod option, on City Hall.

It is most recomendable not to edit your game after placing Sims, specially not lots. And if you want to load the EiG with sims in the world, you can go straight to edit town and change active household, to avoid creating random townies every time.

If I remember more I'll share here with you all. Good luck with finishing your worlds