Sick and Tired of Blue Nurseries!! My Sims keep having boys. This morning I saved just as the mother sim started labor. I exited without saving 4 times trying for a girl, no luck!! This group of children are all boys!! I can forsee myself either making new females for them to hook up with in college, or letting them date townies/dormies. (shudder). Anyone ever had this problem. I remember discussing this problem before but I never experienced it to such a degree.
For a while I was having nothing but girls but now it's one boy after another. Must be something in the water. A pollutant flowing from Downtown maybe?
My old Legacy family did the same thing as well! 3 boys! Not one girl! 3! I saved right before she went into labor for each one, and tried again a kazillion (I've been dying to use that non-word, I dunno why) times for each kid, and still no girls! Yes, I'm sick of blue nurseries as well.
I must be having an imbalance in my neighborhood or something, but in college I have 5 boys and 2 girls, and one of my families had just had two baby girls...I probably ought to see how the boy:girl ratio is in my neighborhood... Edit: Just checked, I have 35:30 boy:girl ratio in my neighborhood...gotta love having a database...and it looks like I'll be having pink nurseries for a while... :-S
I have one family with 9 kids so far, all boy-girl-boy-girl. The parents are both NPC's turned playable via move-in. The funny thing is...all 9 kids have *exactly* the same personality point spread! At least they all get along well, which is more than I can say about my real-world crum crunchers!
I remember reading somewhere, don't remember where, that the sex of the baby is determined at conception in Sims. As I too was trying the whole save, go into labor, exit without saving, and try it again. The result was always the same. Then I found that post, I just wish I could remember where though . . .
I've done the save right before labor and then exit before when trying for a specific gender. I've managed to get a differerent gendered baby that way before. I did this with my self-sim a while back. Her and her husband had two girls, and I really wanted them to have a boy with her third/final pregnancy. Birth came and it was a girl...I exited without saving, re-entered the house, birth came again and it was a boy. So gender is not pre-determined at conception, it is random.
Okay, since I've posted this, my Sims have given birth to two girls: Bella Bonypart, daughter of Napoleon; and Arwen Grace Simpson, daughter of Tina Simpson and Elijah Warner. Now I have pink nurseries again! Yay!! (Now if I can get my Simmie-self and Simmie-Hubby to have a little Molly to go along with Edward, Thomas, and Benjamin, I'll be okay.)
It's totally random, I've found. Congratulations on your two little girls! I'm hoping that Zaire and Castor will have one next. Though all boys wouldn't be that bad. I'm going to saddle them with more than a couple kids. Ain't I a stinker?
Shana is right about the baby's gender being decided in that hiatus between "hallooo-OO-oo!" and "ooo-OO-ooh aaah-eeeeee" (trust me it was never that easy IRL ) On the other hand twins are decided at the "rock-a-bye-baby" moment cos twins would complicate a family that was already up to seven :(
This is the infamous "Firstborn" effect. The technical details, as quoted from the mythology section: MYTH: Parents frequently produce identical children. STATUS: PARTIALLY TRUE. This effect is actually a bug, the "firstborn effect", caused because the personality generation algorithm of TS2 runs on a deterministic sequence that is reset to the beginning everytime you start the game. This can be most clearly witnessed in CAS, where you will get the exact same series of sims every time you restart the game: Aries, Aquarius, Cancer, etc. The effect extends to babies of a couple, so that if you have a baby, then save, quit, come back later, and have another baby, the second baby will be exactly the same in personality as the first. To break this trend, at the start of every session, you should go to CAS and roll an arbitrary number of sims, then discard them. The number should be be different and arbitrary, or you will simply be advancing the sequence a fixed number of steps every time. The genetics of a sim is determined by various rules of inheritance and can result in similar-looking offspring if you do not understand how traits are inherited.
Well, that explains why Sybil's three daughters all look alike. I give them different hair to tell them apart. And her husband George's two sons (one by Sybil and one by Candida) look alike except for the color of their skin. And all their kids are lazy. They just want to lounge around and watch TV. But hey, so do I.
I kept on getting nothing but baby sims girls! It was very frustrating. I was trying to get a boy from the Seymour family (one dark coloured male sim and one alien female sim) when to my surprise, a alien skin toned FEMALE sim was born. Needless to say I saved after I got her I wonder if anyone has ever expierenced that before? I have a picture of the family tree but I don't know how to insert it.
Twins and the like are determined at conception, but gender is decided at birth. (That's why we can exit without saving and try the birth repeatedly until we get the gender we want.) I've found that they tend to go in patches. I had planned to have my Harmon family do the exit/try again if they got yet another girl, but durn if she didn't go into labor just as hubby is pulling out of the driveway to go shopping for baby clothes! So it saved *after* the baby (girl, *again*) was born. Sigh. So Blythe has a baby sister whose name was "Baby Girl" until she turned toddler because daddy driving to the community lot at the wrong time messed up the naming process. (She's now known as Ianthe, but it was only because of Merola's Multipainting that it got changed.) I thought that if it was a legacy family, you couldn't use cheats such as the exit/try again strategy. (I find playing without my favorite cheats to be boring, so I've never even sort of been tempted to do the Legacy Challenge.) But as they say in the new Sims advertisings (which I worked on this summer at the ad agency, if you remember me mentioning it) "How do you play?" We don't all play the same, and therein lies the beauty of the game: It has something for everyone!
Pink nurseries and Blue ones. Hmmm. I tend to have purple and green ones, depending on what colors the parents like. However, Blythe and Ianthe had pink baby furniture with purple trim on the crib. But they were following the current American Academy of Pediatrics recommendation to prevent Sudden Infant Death Syndrome. Ie, their bed was in the parent's room until they got "over a year of age." (But then, my parents are firm believers in the use of the Merola64 Multipainting use to prevent fatigue etc.)
Thanks for the info, JMP, about the "First-Born" bug. That's why little Edward and little Thomas look and have personalities exactly alike. I've been fighting off the urge to have lots and lots of sim babies because I don't want my new neighborhood to be unmanagable, so I am spacing the children out more. In doing this, I might play a family tonight, say, long enough to get Mom through the pregnancy and the baby born. Then tomorrow night, I'll play the family long enough for the baby to transition through toddler-hood and become a child. Then the night after I'll play long enough for Mom to get pregnant and have the next child. So, actually I've restarted my game twice between births. I just don't have the unlimited time to raise a whole brood of Sim children in one sitting.
I had a family in which the oldest daughter (who was NOT the oldest child) and the second oldest biological daughter looked exactly alike, which made me think that the game just wasn't very good at varying its replication. It was weird, because I never noticed it, the girls being different ages and all, until little sis joined big sis at college and they had the exact same hairstyle, and voila, twins! I had to change one of them to avoid getting confused. I just did what JMP advised against and saved, left the game and had a second kid. Because the younger one is an infant I'll have to wait to see if they have the same personalities. Never noticed that in any of my other families, though. And I wouldn't mind if they did, because big brother is the nicest sim I've ever had born in the game. I'll take nice kids any day. Oooh, Ianthe. What a great name. How classically Greek of you. My nurseries tend to be green or red, or yellow with ladybugs. Love those simsquirts downloads.
I always have either blue, pink, or yellow. Usually blue for the boys, yellow for the girls, unless I feel like I really want the pink bedding thing (don't you love how it's so cute and lacy?) at the moment. One of my more recent sims born, Alice, has 2 nice points! I was like what happened? Will she pick on the other kids when she grows up? Then again, it'd be pretty cool--it's never happened to me before. Ianthe reminds me of Xanthe, one of the main characters of Troy. Yeah, I read Troy. It's a little inappropriate, but I still loved it. I hated the movie, because Orlando Bloom, who I think is pretty cool, was cast as Paris, and I HATE Paris. He was such a snobby spoilt brat. Anyway, I'll have to add Xanthe to my mental names list. Maybe Marpessa, too, who was Xanthe's twin.
You can dodge the "first-born" bullet by using the Lot Debugger's "Randomize" function prior to a birth to stir the pot. It'll spit back a random number in a dialog, and that's your "seed number" by which it has randomly advanced the sequence. As long as you get a different number for successive cold-start births, you'll get a more different personality matrix. Genetics, of course, are not affected by this issue, and identical-looking sims are mostly caused by homogenous genetics.
