[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 is available to become your neighbor, a townie will be picked.
If no townie 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
To make the system modular and tunable, I introduced a few new BCON tuning instances:

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

The first five values in those BCONs are assigned to the low class families; the next 5 to the middle class families and the last 5 are the high class families. You can edit the values to add/remove/change which family instances are chosen for your hoods! If you want to know what the family instance values are, you can check them here.

The next BCONs list which service NPCs can be picked for each specific apartment class. All the NPCs you want to appear in an apartment must be present in at least one of those BCONs. If you want to edit them, the Service NPCs values can be found here.

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

The last group of BCONs refers to the hoods in which the service NPCs can be picked as neighbors:

• 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

The NPCs you want to be chosen as neighbors, must be specified both in their class and hood lists.

🔮 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).
• 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.

🏆 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!