[Testers Needed] Dina's Residential Care

Hey everyone! I’m excited to share Dina's Residential Care, a brand-new mod for The Sims 2 that expands how the game assignings NPCs to apartments.

✨ The Origin Story
It all started when I've tuned this mod for the first time:

• midgethetree_apartmentresidents – my first approach at giving apartment lots a more believable mix of residents.

I really love this mod, but at the same time, I felt it had room for expansion. Originally, Midge's mod added the possibility of having (safe) service NPCs as apartment neighbors, but the Service NPC category is broad and diverse, including many Sims implied to belong to different social classes.

💁🏼‍♀️ What this mod does
This mod does two things:

• Prevents more Social Class sims from being generated
• Expand the pool of sims that can become neighbors, allowing to be assigned as such all safe NPCs, townies, and other types of family instances generated by the game.
• The mod is fully tunable to suit YOUR needs.

I’ve created schematics showing all the default settings I have chosen for this mod:
This one shows which sims can become your neighbor when your apartment is in the main hood, downtown or shopping district.

Class	Sims
Low	Gearheads Bohemians Grocery Delivery Exterminator Gardener Handyperson Matchmaker Maid Mail Carrier Nanny Pizza Delivery Chinese Delivery Restaurant Servers Hotel Maids Burglars
Middle	Police Officer Party Bartender Firefighter Community Bartender Barista Restaurant Chef Restaurant Host DJ Reporter Masseuse Animal Control Officer Butler Obedience Trainer Stylists Bellhops Jocks Hobby Stalkers Garden Club Members
High	Landlords Big Bosses Good Witches Bad Witches Grand Vampires Headmasters Socialites Techies

If NONE of those sims are available to become your neighbor, a townie will be picked.
August 16th 2025 update: If the apartment is in the Downtown and NONE of those sims are available to become your neighbor, a downtownie will be picked instead.
If no townie (or downtownie) is available, the game will NOT generate a new sim and the apartment will remain unoccupied.

If your sim lives in university, the selection of sims is different. I see the university hood in The Sims 2 as a special place—far removed from the main hood. A sort of side-universe that main hood Sims can travel to.
University has its own set of service NPCs that appear only there, as well as its own set of townies (the dormies). All of these Sims can now become neighbors in apartments placed in university hoods. Just like with the main hood apartments, I’ve also created a schematic showing which Sims can be picked for which apartment classes in the university hoods.

Class	Sims
Low	Evil Mascot Good Mascot Streakers Tourist families 1-4
Middle	Coach Dormitory chef Cheerleader Tourist families 5-8
High	College Professors Good witches Bad witches Tourist families 9-12

If none of those sims are available, a random dormie that is not currently living in a dormitory will be assigned as neighbor. If there are no dormies available, the apartment will remain unoccupied.
If you read this far, you are probably thinking:


I have thought about this before adding those sims:

• Witches canonically have the ability to teleport and they travel freely between the main hood and magic hood. Since they can teleport everywhere, it could be plausible that a witch rents a residence in a university hood and travel to the main hood whenever they want.
• Tourists are implied to not live near the main hood. Universities, however, are generally in towns far away from where the student was born, and since tourists are a group of sims that live “far away”, I thought this applies perfectly with the Uni Hood. Also, in university cities, there are many residents that are not university students, so this adds a level of realism.

You can customize the settings as you wish, to have the lists of Sims that you wish for your neighbors in Main Hood, Downtown, Shopping District or University.

🔧 Under the Hood: BCONs & BHAVs
All non-playable characters in The Sims 2 belong to a non-playable family instance. These instances are considered when the game decides which type of Sim to use.
The mod’s package includes four BCONs that manage family instances:

• Family Tuning - 1 - Main Hood Families
• Family Tuning - 2 - University Families
• Family Tuning - 3 - Downtown Families
• Family Tuning - 4 - Shopping District Families

Each of these BCONs determines which families appear in which type of neighborhood.
When viewed in SimPE, these BCONs look like this:

The first five values (from 0x0 to 0x4) correspond to the Low-Class families in a given neighborhood.
The next five values (from 0x5 to 0x9) represent the Middle-Class families.
The final five values (from 0xA to 0xE) are for the High-Class families.

Because of the way the mod is structured, there must always be five family instances for each class.
In the example shown above, I only wanted Service NPCs, Gearheads, and Bohemians as the Low-Class families in the main hood. To fill all five slots, I repeated the Service NPC value three times.

To edit the values, simply click on the line you want to change and modify either the Hex or Decimal number on the left.
You can find all the family instance values on this MTS page. here.


Once you’ve edited your values, I strongly advise you to update the file labes so you won’t forget what you’ve changed.


For example, if you edit the Main hood Families, you should also edit the correlated TRCN file with the name of the family instance you’ve chosen, so you won’t forget in the future what you did:

Service NPCs can be tricky: although they all belong to the same family instance (0x7FFF), they are a diverse group of Sims with different roles, and not every Service NPC is suitable to appear as an apartment neighbor.

With my mod, you can choose which NPC types can be selected as apartment neighbors in each type of neighborhood. There are four BCONs for this:

• NPCs Tuning - NPCs Allowed - Main Hood Residents
• NPCs Tuning - NPCs Allowed - University Residents
• NPCs Tuning - NPCs Allowed - Downtown Residents
• NPCs Tuning - NPCs Allowed - Shopping District Residents

Each of these BCONs controls which Service NPCs will appear in that sub-hood or main hood. To edit which NPCs can appear, you can find the specific NPC values here.

NOTE: Garden club members, apartment townies, tourists, downtownies and hobby stalkers are NOT regular townies or service NPCs, and they each have a separate family instance.


In this example, we’re looking at which types of Service NPCs can appear as apartment residents in the University neighborhood. You can freely add, remove, or edit the lines as you wish, but keep in mind that line 0x0 (labeled # of University NPCs allowed) must always match the total number of Service NPC types you want to include.

For example, in this case, nine different NPC types were selected as possible apartment neighbors, so the value on line 0x0 must be set to 9.

This rule also applies to the other neighborhoods (Main Hood, Downtown, and Shopping District).



As I mentioned before, I strongly recommend updating the labels whenever you make changes. This way, everything stays organized, and you won’t run into issues later when you inevitably forget what changes you made (we’re only human—trust me, we all forget).

It’s clear that not all Service NPCs share the same social standing. A landlord or a private school headmaster, for example, would obviously earn more than a pizza delivery person. For this reason, I thought it was important to assign different social classes to different Service NPCs.

If you want to edit which NPCs appear or not, you can find the specific NPC values here:

• NPCs Tuning - NPCs Allowed - Low Class
• NPCs Tuning - NPCs Allowed - Middle Class
• NPCs Tuning - NPCs Allowed - High Class

These BCONs determine which social class each Service NPC belongs to.

In this example, you can see all the Service NPCs I assigned to the High social class. You’re free to add, remove, or edit the lines as you like, but remember that line 0x0 (labeled # of High Class NPCs allowed) must always match the total number of Service NPC types you include.

For example, in this case, seven different NPC types were selected as potential apartment neighbors, so the value on line 0x0 must be set to 7.

The same rule applies to the other social classes (Middle and Low). Keep in mind that you must list all the Service NPCs you want to assign to a social class, regardless of which NPCs you’ve already assigned to each neighborhood.

For instance, if you want a College Professor to appear as a High-Class apartment neighbor in university lots, you need to include that NPC number both in the “NPCs Tuning – NPCs in Hoods – University Residents” BCON and in the “NPCs Tuning – NPCs Allowed – High Class” BCON.

As a final piece of advice before saying goodbye, I recommend manually setting the apartment class values in your neighborhood's lots—using tools like the Lot Adjuster or SimPE—before moving families in. The way the game calculates apartment class values is rather odd, and sometimes apartments intended to be low- or middle-class end up being considered high-class lots, and vice versa.

This issue has nothing to do with my mod; it’s simply part of the game’s code.


🔮 Future Plans

This is my first attempt at BHAV modding, so I’ll likely update this mod in the future. Additionally, there are a few improvements I plan to add down the line:

• Improve the flow of the BHAVs (since it's my first attempt, it's likely to be a bit spaghetti-ish). As of the August 16th 2025 update, I'm satisfied with the BHAV code I've made
• Create a dormitory module so that Mascots and Cheerleaders can get a dormitory room.
• Allowing teenagers to be apartment neighbors
• Maybe a version of the mod where the social class townies are still generated, but only if there are no other sims available.
• Right now, the mod picks the neighbors using their ID order. I would like to randomize the picked sim so that you don't end up having three college professors as neighbors.

🏆 Appreciacion and conclusion

• First of all, Mighe the Tree for the awesome mod they've created, as it was the first push I needed to start attempting to make my own mods.
• The creators of SimPE
• ChatGPT for explaining to me stuff about BHAV and the rest of Sims 2's code that I wouldn't understand otherwise.
• My dear friend Siria for helping me edit the pictures.

Let me know how it runs in your hood—screenshots, bug reports and suggestions are always welcome. Happy Simming!

August 16th 2025 update:

• Improved the BHAV functions so they are more organized and less redundant
• Fixed some incorrect family instance values (shoutout to Bella Dovah and her youtube video that pointed out this error)
• Service NPCs should now be picked before the Apartment Townies.
• If there are no other sims available as an apartment neighbor in the downtown, downtownies will now be picked to fill the spots.