Hello,
I have a lot of NRAAS mods except Story Progression, I don't have SP, and I also play with EA's Story Progression turned off. So completely SP-free game here.
For a while I've been noticing whenever my sims read the newspaper, the paper talks about marriages/divorces between Sims I don't recognize. I had been thinking they were made-up names until today. Today while playing Appaloosa Plains, my sim read a news story about the expensive wedding of Elsie & Forrest (sims unknown to me). I thought it was a fake story with made-up names until I invited over Elsie Harrington, homeless NPC in town (probably created by the game), and asked her if she was single, and she mentioned her husband "Forrest". I think my game is marrying and divorcing NPCs behind my back. I'm not irritated by this, on the contrary I find it adds immersion, but I'm kind of curious as to why it is happening? Has anyone experienced this before?

Edit: I went ahead and checked the households (homeless households) of some of these stray couples and saw that the game generated whole families for them, complete with cats, toddlers, children and teens. They were even properly connected to each other with family trees! I appreciate the immersion except for the fact that all these unnecessary homeless families cause extra lag in my game, so I got rid of the majority of them via MC total annihilation. Also turned off immigration!

I think some of EA's pre-mades NPCs are just destined to do these things if left to their own devices. They cannot have kids without becoming proper residents first though because the homeless virtual household is not equipped to handle babies or toddlers. Although I think we have all seen homeless NPCs in the middle of a resident household's family tree (e.g., a homeless NPC adult whose resident parent is raising their child) and we have to imagine how that came to be.

Thanks for the reply Igazor. Do you know how to make a Resident sim "homeless"? To make him stick around to tend bars, or become a colleague for my resident sims but not actually live in a real house?

I want this option so bad, especially in smaller neighborhood when I don't have enough houses (and stories...) for all the kids that grow up.

Take their home away.

Okay, I know that's not really what you meant. Homeless sims are volatile, there are never any guarantees that they will stay in the game if they are not residents with a proper household of their own. If you are using NRaas Register, then assigned Role Sims should stay put if they are homeless because they have a reason for being in town as long as their assigned role objects stay in the game -- we can see that Seasons festival booth workers for example become unassigned after a season is over but before the next festival begins and during that one sim day or so anything can happen to them because their assignments are gone.

Homeless co-workers and street performers are never stable, especially if you ever switch active households. One of my sims lost some good friends that way because I really wasn't paying attention as I should have, lots of weddings and other life-changing things happening in rapid succession, and he got all new co-workers the next time I rotated into his household to play.

NRaas StoryProgression does offer options for some higher degrees of stability, but even with that we can never be certain that homeless sims of any kind will really stick around. There may be some technical reasons you do not wish to have NRaas SP, but I'd like to point out that the mod can be used to inhibit progression just as much as it can be used to encourage it. Without the mod, there are no controls. It's the same as with Woohooer, our romance manager. Not everyone who uses the mod wants free for all romance and woohoo all over the place (some do of course), but the mod offers controls so that such activity is limited or not existent as the player may want.

But anyway, if your world is that small and limiting to your gameplay such that adding more residents in as you may wish is impossible, you may want to consider playing larger worlds (if you can) or spreading your sims out into several Traveler mod connected smaller worlds and playing those in rotations of some kind within the same ongoing game save.

So helpful as always! Thanks Igazor.

I had to download story progression. Do not be afraid to use it. That way you can control your population, decide who is with who and of course have homeless people if you choose.

Did it cause any extra lag in your name?

BTW, I finally decided to dive deep and check on all these mysterious homeless couples, and saw that my game generated 100 of them in just a couple of sim weeks! I had left NRAAS Register Immigration on to fill a few vacant positions in town, and apparently immigration went havoc and created all these stray families which my game has no use for. I play in Appaloosa plains, with just 2-3 bars, no Showtime venues, so all these homeless families (they were proper families BTW, the game generated kids for the couples as well) had no use other than fill up my game and cause lag. I finally turned off Immigration and then went and annihilated %80 of my homeless population. I hope "total annihilating" 70 NPCs doesn't harm my game in any way.

Are you sure about this Igazor? Some of the game-generated homeless households I checked yesterday via MC seemed to have toddlers in them... Are my homeless engaging in some paranormal procreation?

The purview of NRaas Register is to keep role giving objects staffed (and to an extent to control the pools for Service Sims). When a role giving object is unstaffed, Register will either try to find an unemployed resident to take it over if that option is switched on or it will spawn one new single homeless sim if its type of "immigration" is allowed. That is all, Register is not interested in family units and it will not immigrate or create new sims or families for any other purpose than to staff role objects or fill the service pools. I don't know where these homeless couples and families are coming from, but it can't be due to Register and its kind of immigration. If you have IP installed, possibly some of them might have been unneeded resort workers? Or maybe street performers if you have Showtime? Were you able to run MC Status reports on them to see if those revealed any further information? Might they possibly really be residents of a Traveler mod connected foreign world that were showing up in various MC filters, unexpectedly? Register also controls tourism, might some of these sims really have been tourist mini-sims visiting your world but really live in a different homeworld, a WA world, or Oasis Landing if you have ITF?

Babies and toddlers cannot be homeless unless we count the placeholder sims that populate the adoption rosters but those never appear in the game until they are actually adopted; of course children can be homeless as that is where newspaper deliverers come from. Further, homeless sims cannot be impregnated. A homeless sim can sire (father) a child, but the game or maybe it's NRaas SP as right now I'm not sure will move the expectant daddy into a proper resident household as soon as it can so that their genetics can be used when the baby is born.

Hmm... That is confusing indeed. They shan't be unneeded resort workers or street performers since I set all of those pool sizes to 0 with Register. I also have Tourists disabled, and haven't traveled anywhere in this Save yet, so that is another no. What I noticed was that some game-generated sims were also placed in the "Service" household when in reality all the Service positions were already full with Appaloosa Plain pre-made Service sims, so there was no need for them.

But the real mystery is why my game created so many "families". I swear I total-annihilated 3-4 toddlers. How did they come to exist?? I don't have any major mods other than basic NRAAS.

Setting the service pools to 0 does not stop the game itself from populating those pools when it thinks it needs to or when those Service Sims are required. It is not unusual for a world with let's say 80 residents to have somewhere over 100 Service Sims. These sims are really tiny bundles of data that are not cluttering up our worlds by being instantiated on screen and it's (usually) not worth it to try to reduce the numbers of them as they would never really all be called upon at once.

To get a proper reading of how many Service and how many unassigned Homeless sims a world has, on City Hall or an in-game computer NRaas > MC > Demographics > Population > "X" to dismiss the filter if this is not what you are already doing. We cannot rely on lists of sims from MC's other filters as in many cases we don't always really know the status of the sims being included that way.

Resort workers are generated by the game itself. Overwatch should clean them out periodically if they are not really needed.

The families with toddlers I have no explanation for, but again we cannot fully control what the game itself tries to do with resident immigration even when story progression is switched off within the Game Options without the StoryProgression mod as without the mod the controls are just not there.