Alright, I’ll admit it. I’ve had an on and off again love affair with The Sims for a couple of years now. As long as I can keep this a secret from the guys back in the US, I’ll be good. I doubt the Koreans care ;D
Anyway, does anyone know if there’s an expansion or modification that will allow me to give ownership of certain furniture to specific sims? All I have right now is the basic Sims 2, but it gets really annoying having them sleep in the wrong damn rooms! Older brother sleeps in the little kid’s room, single father sleeps in the guest room, uses the wrong computer, etc. etc. etc.!
I don’t know why that drives me so nutters!
Also, is there a way to have people to start off as roommates in a single house without them being in the same family? I was trying to create our old college apartment, but I was loathe to risk my Sims start flirting with each other since… well, my buds in university didn’t really have that close of a relationship.
For that matter, is there a way to lock relationships at a certain point? I’d like to be able to lock them into platonic, friendly relationships or whatnot for example.
One thing you can do about the beds is to set the locks on the doors. The “official” ones can’t be set to allow only two people (which you’d need for a couple’s bedroom), but there may be hacks that let you do that. Door locks require one of the expansion packs, but I don’t recall which one.
As for the roommates, if you have the University pack, you could create them all as roommates in school, in which case they have their own individual last names.
Otherwise, I don’t know about starting them together with different last names, but since one of the recent expansions if they move in as roommates without getting married, I believe they keep their old last names. I have a lot of hacks and mods, so I can’t say for certain if this is an actual game feature or just something I’ve changed.
I know I’ve seen mention of ownership issues on some of the modding sites, and I’d suggest that you check out both Mod The Sims2 and More Awesome Than You for mods and discussion.
Do you have expansion packs? I can’t recall if the door-locking came in with one of those (maybe University) or was in the original game, but that’s how I control Sim behavior, also. It’s really the only way to keep your idiot neighbors from coming over and hogging your PC or dragging the baby out of its crib. I believe there is also a modified burglar alarm device on MATY that allows you to set up different controls for who is allowed where. (It’s included in JM Pescado’s Director’s Cut collection of mods at MATY.)
You could always set up your Sims’ turn-ons and turn-offs to prevent them from becoming attracted to each other, I suppose. I micromanage my Sims so closely that they never get a chance to fall for anyone I don’t approve, so I haven’t researched mods to control their relationships, but I’m sure there are mods for such things, and MTS2 and MATY would be good places to start looking for them.
I used to use a mod that let you assign beds to individual Sims.
You can’t really lock your relationships into platonic ones. Once they become good friends, you have to be careful that they don’t flirt with each other when you’re not looking. Especially the Romance Sims, the horny bastards.
That’s University. JM Pescado’s mods are awesome, though, so if the OP doesn’t want to shell out for EPs, then I suggest downloading some mods.
Supposedly, if you get your Sims into a pattern of behavior (i.e. make them sleep in a the same bed over and over), they’ll do that every time. My Sims are like that, but I tend to play singleton Sims, so there’s only one bed for them to sleep in. I also micromanage (“No! I told you to make an omelette! Why are you eating cookies?”), so they are molded to my will.
Ugh. Those Romance Sims are such pains in the butt. I have one who has a thing for people in uniform. Firefighters, maids, bartenders, DJs – every NPC ever, irregardless of gender or age. (Well, not minors, but adults and elders.) She’s also bound and determined to seduce Mortimer Goth.
I don’t know about the ownership thing; I’ve just assumed that sims are dumb and I’ll have to tell them which bed to go to for a little while until they get into the habit.
As for roommates, sims aren’t automatically related when you create them together, but they’ll have the same family name (which you can change using the boolprop cheat, IIRC). If you want to avoid this altogether, just create each sim separately and move each one after the first one in through the neighborhood screen. It works to your advantage, actually, because creating two sims separately starts you out with $40K instead of $20K.
There’s no way to lock relationships that I know of, but if it helps, sims of your own creation will not flirt with each other unless you tell them to, because they are asexual until you force a sexual preference upon them. If you create 3 dudes in one house and never make them check each other out or say anything flirtatious, they won’t develop gayness on their own. They’d have to be romantically interacted with by another sim of the same sex in order to develop that orientation, and I don’t think there are any gay townies.