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onemorekayaker · 29 days ago

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I've had a few folks ask me about creating a blog series on how I made the Premade Sim and Relationship Overhaul mod, and how they can do similar projects. This is the first of four or so blogs on the subject, starting at the beginning - creating new premade sims, including occults. Please note that these are intermediate level tutorials, and assume you are familiar with the basics of XML modding, Sims 4 Studio, and the Premade Household Tool.

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Creating New Premade Sims

The biggest tool in your arsenal of creating new premades is Denton47's Premade Household Tool, available here: https://modthesims.info/d/669907/ts4-premade-household-tool.html. It is a fantastic and very straightforward tool - you create your new premade sim (or make over an existing sim) in a save file, exit out of the game, and then open the tool and load the save, extracting the household. If this is an override of an existing household, you'd want to check a few boxes, if a new household, you don't need to. There are instructions on the actual mod page that are much more thorough so I'm just glossing over that here for the sake of time.

What you need to know is that, to add new premades, you need to assign them to a specific world either as a townie or as a resident of a specific lot. Assigning townies requires overriding a region description, and these overrides conflict*, so you will need to carefully consider what region you want to use. For example, my Aliens Reloaded mod uses Sixam to add townies in order to avoid conflicts, as Sixam is the aliens world. You can safely add multiple housed sims to the same region even with different mods/files, so long as they're assigned to different lots. If different households are assigned to the same lot, then generally only one will get successfully added. Please communicate to your mod users what region or lot you're using.

[*It may be possible to add townies to the same region via script injection - I am currently investigating this and will update this blog if I find a method.]

To ensure safety if someone does not own a pack, or if they disable a pack, please make sure to edit the group number of the world description and/or world file so it matches the pack the world is from - for example, Get to Work, or EP01, has a group number that ends in "03". The latest version of Sims4Studio will allow you to select the DLC in a dropdown and will automatically set the group number for you.

If you are making a special NPC or special NPCs, then to protect them from Neighborhood Stories and MCCC make sure to also set their household status to "Hidden" in the Premade Household Tool. You can edit this in the edit tab.

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Creating Two-Form Occult Premade Sims

Occult sims are a bit more complicated to create than regular premades - especially if they have two forms, like aliens, vampires, mermaids, and werewolves. First, make sure when you save your save file they are in their human form. It is important to extract their household data using the Premade Household Tool when they are in their human form or else the extraction will grab the wrong information and they will spawn incorrectly with missing data.

Second, these sims need a few additional steps. They need premade household templates and premade sim templates to be added to them, and you also need to separately extract their human and occult form SimInfo data from your tray files using Sims4Studio or another program (just make sure to save them to your library first).

To extract using Sims4Studio, go to "Content Management" -> "My Library", right click on the household you want and export to whatever folder you're using. You will see three files exported. Human, Occult, and Sim. You only need the Human and Occult files. You can safely delete the Sim file.

These two files (Human and Occult) must be imported into a package file, preferably with your premade household and premade sim templates. Since the instance numbers of these two files are the same, please change them before importing, as importing these files without changing the instances will result in only one file actually making it into S4S.

Here is an example of the editing you should do - paste the new unique instance between the exclamation points as shown. This should be a unique hash of some kind to prevent potential clashes:

The new SimData must be referenced in their premade sim templates like so:

Once that is done, you'll need to open the household data in the Premade Household Tool, navigate to the Edit Household section, and paste in the instance number for your sim's premade household template into the household section, then go to Sim -> Gameplay Data -> Premade Sim Template to add in the instance for their premade sim template.

Please note that this process only works for creating a premade occult sim. There is, as of the moment I'm writing this blog, no way to create an occult sim with a specific look from a tunable sim template. So if you want to make a special two-form occult NPC that has a specific in-game purpose, you will need three templates - the premade household and sim templates to add your sim of choice to a new save, and a tunable template that will create a randomly generated sim with the proper traits and skills in users' existing saves (or if your premade dies or is otherwise unavailable/invalid).

Spellcasters are not two-form occults and, if you are creating a premade spellcaster, then you do not need to do the extra step with the SimData. If you are creating one from a tunable template, just make sure to add their spellcaster trait so they are recognized as a spellcaster as it isn't possible to add occult simdata to a tunable sim template.

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Occult Sim Fixups

Keeping on the subject of occults, you will likely notice that some data does not survive the process of the sim getting turned into a premade. Things like occult rank, perks, and unlocks will need to be manually set through different types of fixups. Spellcasters specifically are a bit of a pain and require a special process, as NPC spellcasters are not coded in such a way that they can actually learn spells and fixups (adding in additional data to "fix up" a sim) can only happen when they are actually added to an active household.

For Vampires/Werewolves: these fixups are best done via loots. If you are using a script file to deliver relationship loots on new save start (like my Premade Sim and Relationship Overhaul mod does), then you can have your vampires or werewolves deliver these loot from themselves to themselves and set their appropriate rank and unlocks that way (I will share more on this process later). Alternatively, you can assign them a self-deleting trait. Trait -> loot on instance -> have the loot set rank, etc -> have the loot delete the trait so it won't fire the next time the sim instances in.

For Spellcasters: spellcasters are coded differently than other occults. The most important thing to know is that only spellcasters in households that have been played at least once can do magic and everyone else is just faking it. "But why do spellcaster premades, townies, and the sages have spells when I add them to my household?" you might ask. That's because the devs gave them hidden fixup traits. You will need to do the same with your premade spellcasters. This fixup trait should have your spellcaster's rank, unlocks, and spells specified on it, and will take effect when the sim is added to an active household and is no longer considered a NPC.

For examples of how these fixup traits are supposed to look/work, please see any of the simInfoFixup_Magic_Spells traits. You can check them through tools like the XML Extractor, the TDESC Browser, or directly in Sims4Studio.

You can add extra loot to make these self-deleting, but I have not bothered as users won't generally see these traits unless they're messing around with MCCC.

Mermaids and Aliens do not require fixups, as they do not have skill trees unless you are playing with mods. If you are playing modded, generally the abilities are added through hidden traits, and you should assign these through the standard Premade Household Tool process to avoid potential errors on new save start if someone disables a pack (I will expand more on this in a later blog). The premade Aliens Reloaded aliens generally use this method.

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Milestones Fixups

Milestones fixups follow a similar logic to spellcaster fixups. Without mods, premades, townies, and NPC sims that have never been played do not have any milestones. Existing Maxis premades have fixups on their premade sim templates that add these milestones when the sim becomes played. However, this does not work quite so well for our purposes, as users without Growing Together get errors on new save start if you try to add milestone fixups via a premade sim template - even using the group ID trick. At present, only Maxis/EA premades can use this method safely.

I'd recommend instead using a self-deleting trait to assign the milestones via a loot. The procedure is trait -> loot on instance -> milestones loot -> delete trait. You can add a test to the loot on instance to make sure it only runs if the sim is in a played household.

Make sure the trait and your initial loot have the group number for Growing Together (EP13 = 00000036). If you have a milestone that belongs to another DLC (not Growing Together) it should be chained inside of the Growing Together loot, using an action to deliver a second loot with your DLC-specific milestone. The second loot should have the group number specific to that pack. Please be very careful when assigning milestones, as they are very unsafe and may cause save issues for users. Test thoroughly!

The next blog in the series, "Setting Premade Sim Relationships" tackles the topic on setting relationships between different premade sims on new save start and have more on pack safety and chaining loots. Available here.

#sims 4 mods #sims 4 modding tutorial #premade sim and relationship overhaul

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