Hi everyone! Remember the tutorial on how to create custom service NPCs I wrote a few years ago? Where you'd let the game generate the NPCs first and use Alt Sim Surgery to modify their appearances?

Well, with April Black's recent discoveries about sims corruption, especially with respect to whether or not NPCs are safe to play as, it has been discovered that creating custom NPCs is actually way easier than we all thought!

Plus, with Chris Hatch's updated SimPE (0_77_69), NPC creation has never been easier before!
So first things first, credit goes to all these amazing people who helped within the sims community and discovered new stuff up to this day! It's crazy how new things are still being discovered well after 20 years from the release of a 2004 game!

Alright, let's get to the tutorial.
You'll need:
- SimPE (0_77_69)
- InSimenator
- FFS Debugger, aka Batbox

Step 0: Always, ALWAYYS back-up your neighborhood first before doing anything unusual or SimPE in general. Please do not skip this step! Made your back-up now? You're good? Good!

Step 1: Create your custom NPC just like a regular sim in CAS. You don't even have to worry about their NPC outfit, just create your sim as you wish to create them! You can create any NPC you like, I'm creating a Drama professor for this tutorial, as professors are the only NPCs that need a bit more special tweaking in order for them to work properly.



You can even give them a family if you want to. This is especially useful and interesting if you're creating custom neighborhoods for upload! Always wanted to create a playable sim who's the sister of an imfamous bank robber? Or a playable uni sim who has professor parents? Well, now it's your chance!



(Step 2:):
Note: This extra step is only needed if you create custom uni professor NPCs! Otherwise, skip to Step 3!

Using the batbox, give your sim a college degree in that major you wish to assign your custom professor to. You can do that by selecting "Upgrade Sim.../Pre-Uni.../[Major of your choice]".



Since I want to create a Drama professor, I'm choosing Drama. If you want to create a professor for the hidden major "Undeclared", don't give your sim a college degree. You can just skip to Step 3!



Step 3: Customize your sim as you like, you can give them even careers, skills, relationships, etc. as you like!



As you can see, for my custom Drama professor NPC, I made her 1 brother and 3 daughters, one of which is also a cheerleader NPC. You can link as many NPCs as you want (or not if you prefer for them to not have customized family trees). You can even add ancestors if you want! All up to you ^^



Step 4: Now, comes the magic, lol! Open up your neighborhood in SimPE and select your sim's SimDescription file. Under "Type" select the NPC type you wish to assign your sim to.



Step 5: A pop-up will appear then, telling you that changing a sim's NPC type won't make them into an actual NPC, but only give them the special powers associated with that NPC (i.e. giving playable sims the ability to sneak if you give them the Burglar sim type). To make them an actual NPC, hit the button "Fix Original GUID".



Oh, and don't forget to commit your changes! You can save and close SimPE afterwards.



Step 6: Load your household your newly created NPC sim is in... and tadaaa! Upon load, your NPC sim should be properly initalized now and should wear their respective NPC clothing.



Now is your last change to make any additional changes, i.e. interests, skills or relationships, etc. Once you've fully customized your NPC sim, you can continue with Step 7.

Step 7: Your sim should be ready to go now! Now, use InSimenator's FamilyTree to remove your sim as an NPC from your household.

IMPORTANT! You really need the InSimenator for this. Teleporter Shrub/Cat/SimBlender can unfortunately only remove sims as townies, not NPCs, hence not so useful in this tutorial. The only "use" it may potentially have is to clear non-residents off your lot after you added them to the NPC household using InSimenator.




But this can also be done with InSimenator's Summoner or just with a simple Force Error >> Delete. You can technically also just ask the NPC sim to leave the lot using a playable sim. You don't technically have to clear off the NPC sim from your lot at all, that's more a cosmetic thing to do, lol.





Step 8: Now, feel free to check whether your newly created NPC really works as intended. If you for instance created custom maids, they should be available for your sims to hire now or any custom burglars may come to rob your houses at night, etc. As you can see, my custom Drama professor suddenly fell in love with everyone except her family members, as she should... oh, well!



That's it! I hope you have fun creating your custom NPCs! It's quite fun and simple with the new SimPE update actually!

Loving this (re-)discovery!

Is it possible to change their NPC clothes to something custom? In step 6, can I have them plan outfit and then assign something different, like a CC outfit for a maid?

Also in step 7, I'm not sure I understand this:So, do I need InSim/Teleporter shrub/SimBlender at all, or is error + delete enough to get through to step 8/end?

@topp



Yes, but some NPC have hard-coded clothing like the diva NPC or the professors, but some NPC can have custom clothing as well. In my own test, I created a bartender who had the maid outfit and she showed up just fine!

And I think the same might be also true for maids!
Since this hasn't been done before, I'm not quite sure which NPC have hard-coded clothing, and which are free to wear whatever they want.

But you can have unusual NPCs, like a male social worker or a repo-woman, they all work just fine! Or a teenage nanny! I've also created a child paper delivery boy and he showed up just fine as well! It's just the animation of laying down the newspaper that's a bit weird, but hey, at least we can have teenage nannies and paper delivery kids like in TS3!



You will need InSimenator's FamilyTree to add your sim to the NPC household, otherwise it's just like as if you befriended a NPC and moved them in. They won't show up as service NPCs if you leave them in your playable household.

The Teleporter shrub/cat/SimBlender can unfortunately only add to the Townies household, hence not so useful in this tutorial. The only "use" it may potentially have is to clear non-residents off your lot after you added them to the NPC household using InSimenator.

But this can also be done with InSimenator's Summoner or just with a simple Force Error >> Delete. You can technically also just ask the NPC sim to leave the lot using a playable sim. You don't technically have to clear off the NPC sim from your lot at all, that's more a cosmetic thing to do, lol.

This is why I haven't listed Teleporter shrub/cat/SimBlender as a required tool for this tutorial... only InSimenator
I've edited the main post to make things more clearer. Hope this helps

Thank you!

I guess the Insim step can also then be done using SimPE? In the FAMI tab, I can just find the Rauvu household and transfer the Sim from that household to the NPC household. It can be a bit tedious to find, though, but the high instance number of the NPC household/FAMI entry easily gives itself away. I'm not sitting at my computer right now to open SimPE and get the instance number myself, but I'll update the post once I do!

EDIT: From looking at my Strangetown, I think the FAMI with the instance 0x7FFF is the NPC "household." So just transferring Sims there could work (remove them from the list of family members of the Rauvu household and add them to the 0x7FFF one). That way, Insim may not even be required at all! Not sure what would happen to the Sim once you load the lot, but I believe that a simple force error would suffice, like you said.

(Unless Insim does something extra other than switching the FAMI data when transferring Sims between households...)

@topp

Yeah, sure! You could technically do everything in SimPE!
After changing the sim type to the desired NPC, as well as fixing the original GUID. While in SimPE, you could also edit the family information file and remove that sim from the household and add to the 0x7FFF NPC household as you mentioned.

But that will require at least one NPC to be generated by the game in order for that household to exist. So yeah, you'd still need the InSimenator to remove as a NPC (hence creating the hidden NPC household) if you have no sims in your neighoborhood and want to create the NPCs completely from scratch.

And the FFS Debugger isn't actually required as well. If you want to create custom professors and assign them a major, you can do that in SimPE as well, just switch to the University tab and change the major there. But I think... professors should still have a degree. Lol!

I've listed those mods as required tools anyway, since I thought it would make things even easier! So you don't have to deal with editing FAMI files and all.

You can set custom clothes if the NPC is of the wrong age for whom the special outfit doesn't exist. For example, a young adult doesn't have most service clothes. He will try to put them on but have no change. If you want to customize clothes per lot (out of possible GUID outfits), you can use Memory Commander with the controller that will put on the clothes every time he sees the NPC.

I came up with a new idea for a feature to make custom NPCs or Playable Custom NPCS, add custom ways of walking like the rabbit or other NPCs or even the sexy, angry, sad, skip walk and so on. But unfortunately my knowledge of SimPE is practically zero and I only know how to do very basic things. I am sure that with your knowledge you could follow the instructions that @kestrellyn and @jonasn gave me and create a tutorial with images and suitable for storytellers or more casual players who lack such advanced knowledge of Simpe.

https://modthesims.info/showthread....25#startcomment

@Sokisims It's quite doable. I experimented a little and managed to make it work.^^
Have a look here.

All you need to do is extract the walk style from the social bunny NPC (or any other locomotion files for the other walk styles you wish to use) from the game files (objects.package file) and add those files into your sim's character file. Then go to Resource Tab and change the group ID of the files you've just extracted to match with the playable sim's group ID (i.e. 0xFFFFFFFF). Next, you'll just have to add an additional line in the "Function - Init" BHAV file to include the "CT - Restore Loco" BHAV file and you're good to go!

But as I said in that post, sims never use the coding from their character file but use the code in the template they were made from which is determined by their original GUID. That's why, as a final step, you'll have the change the sim's original GUID to just the sim's actual GUID and that should make the game use your sim's character file to determine its behaviour, i.e. make the sims hop like the social bunny for instance.

By the way, you can also customize the sims further by also including unique idle interactions (i.e. make a sim juggle occassionally, etc.) much like how EA implemented the unique behaviour for Mr. Big/Diva or the Grand Vampire NPCs.