Hello everyone!
Lately I've been doing community lots wedding parties with THIS mod.
The problem is that guests leave very quickly (almost as soon as they arrive at the church) and that's a bit sad. It makes all my efforts pointless.
Is it a compatibility issue? Is there a way to fix it? Maybe I should use a better mod (if there is one?)
Thank you in advance!

The mod that I have, that encourages Sims to stay longer in church, is BoilingOil's Need Freak available at LeeFish. It can take a bit of adjusting to get it right, and I probably should relax the settings at St Simeon's Parish Church for regular Sunday services. But I now rarely have Sims leaving immediately. There have been occasions when the Rev. Elspeth Anderson has preached for over three hours on a Sunday, and in those circumstances, she really shouldn't be surprised if some of the congregation decide to go home! She knows to keep the sermon short at weddings though. Don't get rid of the Community Lot Parties mod though -- Need Freak serves a completely different purpose.

Actually when my Sims have church weddings, they tend to have the reception and wedding breakfast at home after the church service. (When I think about it, Club Venezia on the other side of Veronaville would be a good place for wedding receptions. It has a large restaurant, a large dance floor, and a bar. Don't look for Club Venezia or St Simeon's Church n your Veronaville; they're both lots that I added!)

Thank you! I don't know this mod, can you tell me if it's incompatible with other mods? And how does it work in my case? I'm looking at the mod and it's made to control motives, right?

It's a very configurable mod, which can make it complicated, but it's also an object mod, which can only affect the lot that it's placed on. In my case I only have it installed on one lot -- St Simeon's Parish Church in Veronaville. I set it up in November 2020 for a big double church wedding (Andrew & Julian, and Gloria & Garry) and I've never changed it since. I think though it's probably time that I looked at the settings again. I set the minimums for Hunger, Energy etc. quite high as I didn't want anyone starving or passing out during the wedding. Some of my Sims are regular churchgoers, and everything has worked ever since. The only problem is that my Sims can't go for a restaurant meal after church because the Need Freak makes them never hungry. (I can easily get round that problem by using the Sim Manipulator to set their Hunger level to 50%.) I'm not aware of it clashing with any other mods, and I play a fairly heavily modded game. Because it is very flexible and configurable it takes a bit of understanding to set it up, but I've found that, once you've set it up, you can pretty well ignore it.

You can download it on Leefish here.

Ok, so, what I'm understading is that my sims leave the party because the motives get too low. But with this mod the motives get "paused".
So once you leave the lot the motives start decaying again on their own or do you need to "unpause" them?

Looking over the mod description, it should only affect the current lot, so no, you shouldn't need to unpause them.

Sims do periodically leave the community lot though (and new sims show up in their place), so another thing to try is to create a group and make your comm party a Just for Fun Outing. That way, if motives are good, all the sims you invite should stay until you end the outing.

Nopke has a bigger group mod here, if you need.

Another thing to try is Inge's Meeting Controller on Simlogical here. The downside with that one is that you'll have to set up the tokens for every single sim you want to invite and they'll be selectable, but the upside is that they will definitely stay until you End the Meeting.

So a few options here--I think starting with making sure motives are high is a good place to start. If you want sims to eat and dance and do wedding reception-type things, then I would just use Need Freak to make sure their motives don't get too low, making sure energy, hygenie, and hunger don't get into the red. Maybe comfort as well. I might max hygenie, but otherwise raise the other motives to about half only, so that they will want to eat and do something fun, etc. IIRC, if sims' motives drop but they can handle it on the lot, they will generally do so. It's when motives fall into that critical level, or it they can't take care of motives on the lot that they leave.

If you are finding that your sims' motives are fine and they are still leaving, it could be just that there are too many sims on the lot and the game is trying to manage lot population. Oh, another thing to try is putting this cheat in your userstartup:
intProp maxNumOfVisitingSims XX

Replace XX with the number you want; I usually do 30. This number is the number of visitors allowed on community lots (including the secret society lot!) and includes any npcs on the lot--servers, cooks, the host, baristas, djs, etc. So if you have a lot of NPCs on the lot, you may need to adjust this up.

@TRamp94 : Sorry about being so slow in replying. Real Life health issues have been taking up a lot of my time lately. I always use groups when sending Sims to church, even for ordinary services.

The only Need Freak in my game is in St Simeon's Parish Church in Veronaville, near the market. While it is possible to edit the BCONs in SimPE (which would affect all Need Freaks in my game, if I had more than one), the main way to adjust, or even check, the Needs Freak setting, is to send a Sim to the lot and use the menu. Now I installed that Needs Freak there over five years ago for that big double wedding. I used its setup menu then, and, until yesterday I'd never even looked at it since. My Sims do regularly use the church, but I'd just left the Needs Freak settings as they were set up for that for that event. Your posts made me think it was probably time for me to look at those settings, and see if I should change them. But that would require maybe an hour's concentration on my part, and Real Life pressures were restricting my time. I'd also of course like to fit a visit to the church into my regular play, rather than sending a Sim there specially,just to adjust the Needs Freak menu. Well, yesterday gave me such an opportunity. . .

Yesterday (2nd February) was the Feast of the Presentation of Jesus in the Temple (also known as Candlemas) as described in the Bible in Luke 2:22–40. This describes how an old man called Simeon recognised the significance of the infant Jesus. Now St Simeon's Church (although it's also obviously also a wordplay on "Sim" and "Simeon") is dedicated to this Simeon, so 2nd February is their Patronal Festival. So it made perfect sense for the Rector (and parish priest) the Rev. Elspeth Anderson to hold a special weekday service to celebrate this event. And that of course gave me the opportunity to check the Needs Freak settings there, and possibly change them . . .

So here is the Rev. Elspeth Anderson with her Needs Freak and its settings. (Visitors to the church may wonder why there's a pink Flamingo in the corner of the North Transept!)

It probably makes sense to open BoilingOil's description to understand this post. Those settings certainly kept everybody content during that wedding, but they really are very restrictive. By setting the maximums and minimums to the same level I have effectively made my Sims' levels static for as long as they are on the lot. These were Elspeth's levels when I took that picture:

(You may spot that her Social level is slightly higher than it should be. That is because she has just been talking to another Sim, and the Needs Freak only adjusts Sims' motives every 20 Sim minutes. When it next checks, it will lower her Social level back to 75.) Now the Needs Freak only controls Sims' levels while they are on the lot, but they leave the lot with these very high levels, so it takes a while for them to return to more normal levels. This interfered with a previously established custom of some of my Sims (including Rev. Elspeth) of going for a meal out after church on a Sunday. So yesterday I took the opportunity to try modify these settings. Before the start of yesterday's "candlemas" service I changed them to these:

They went on and I played the rest of the Candlemas service, including a very long sermon, on these settings without my difficulties. I think I could lower the minimum levels further to 25 or even zero (Remember zero is the midpoint of this range, not the bottom), and there really is no need for me to restrict the maximum levels at all, so I have now set them all to 100. I think the next time I visit the church with my Sims, I'll switch the Needs Freak from Flamingo to Defender mode, which (if I understand the instructions properly) will allow motives to rise and fall normally, but never drop significantly below the minimum levels I've set.

So thanks, TRamp94 for starting this thread. Otherwise I might never have got round to modifying these settings. Needs Freak is a powerful and useful mod, but it really pays to take the time to read its description, to understand it and know how to configure to achieve what you want.

Thanks too @Phantomknight for that link to Nopke's bigger groups mod. When playing on my old Packard Bell netbook, I tried to be careful not t overload it, but I'm sure the Dell gaming laptop I use now will cope with bigger groups.

I'll have a look at using intProp maxNumOfVisitingSims too. With that in my UserStartup.cheat file, Rev. Elspeth might start getting slightly larger congregations at St. Simeon's. It tends to be "two or three are gathered together" at present.