"Welcome to my newest project.. a Townie Rotation. What is that, you ask? For the purposes of this exercise, Townies are the playable sims that EA populated the world with. (Townie can also refer to any non player character, like the people that wander the streets, but I'm talking about the ones who actually live in the houses of the world and/or were officially released the the gallery.) .. And a rotation means I'll be playing all of the EA characters in a round-robin style. I started one of these when Sims 4 first came out, unblogged, and made the mistake of creating my own sims to help populate a (then) small town. Then EA started adding expansions, and it quickly became clear to me that I should have just stuck with EA's sims and not added to the town. There just got to be too many sims to keep track of, and I lost my focus of learning about the EA townies and seeing what sort of lives they might lead. Hence… I'm restarting my rotation. I've also decided to blog this one, because I barely remember what happened in the last one, and I like to be able to look back and see where my little simmies have been." 

That was the premise. The problem with it? I went WAY overboard adding “official” sims from the maxis gallery to the save. I added so many that the save is basically full. I didn’t quit because the game wouldn’t run (it still runs fine).. I quit because keeping up to date with the new sim additions from new DLCS really pushed this whole thing over the edge of ridiculous. I leave this link here because … maybe I’ll go back to it? Or maybe I’ll learn from it and re-start the game with ONLY the sims that come with each world.

I don't have "Rules" per se, they're more like guidelines - Listed here - (Updated 2/16/20)

• I organised the townies into families, breaking up the roommate set-ups in favor of actual cohesive families (More on this in later posts.)
• I'll be playing the neighborhoods in order - so Willow Creek, Oasis Springs, Newcrest, Windenburg, San Myshuno, Forgotten Hollow, Brindleton Bay, etc. As for family play order, top of screen and left go towards bottom of the screen and right - so there is a method to my madness.
• Each family/household will be played for one week of in-game time, then I'll move to the next family. Switch happens at 5 AM on a Sunday in game. (This is done so I have a standardized time to switch families.)
• Game Options are going to be set to Normal lifespan, Auto Age only the Active household, and no filling empty homes.
• No aging up sims before their birthday. Ever. This is all about the sims, so I don't want to cut any of them's time short by skipping days.
• No money cheats. Ever. The only cheat I'll allow is move objects. I did fudge this a little bit to add families to homes, since the homes vary wildly in prices. So, in other words, I allowed the "free real estate" cheat, as well.
• If the family/household runs out of heirs, that family will "retire" from play rotation.
• I will only be playing EA-made sims or the townie/NPCs I marry in... with one notable exception. When I first played a neighborhood rotation, I married in a gay alien to keep Johnny Zest company, and had so much fun with the idea I made an alien for Johnny to love this time around, too.
• Before I build houses or venues, I'll be using the ones that EA built. In other words, I won't be building new houses until the existing ones are all filled up. So, it should be quite a while. I did pick out and plop down an EA-made Restaurant, Spa, Bowling Alley, and National Park. Then I took a look at the Pre-built houses in the library and decided to use those to build up Newcrest.
• I will be changing the houses as the families grow, to take into account the family's changing needs, but I will try to make an effort to have some families switch into the more expensive houses as they grow.. because, well, I haven't ever gotten to play with most of those houses! (again, I allowed free real estate to move everyone in.. and as of now, all the residential lots are full. So if they bring out more sims, they'd better give me new neighborhoods!!)
• All traits will be randomized using createarandomsim.com. Careers will be based career around their personality instead of letting the chips fall where they may. I'm hoping I'll get to play with some traits I never use.
• I don't really have a "stop point" or final goal that I'm playing towards - so it's pretty open-ended. I could get tired of it in a few months, or a few years. Who knows.
• I did add in the "official" sims from each expansion that were released to the gallery.
• I initially decided not to include Vampires, but after Mermaids came out, I decided if I was allowing Mermaids, I probably shouldn't discount the other supernaturals, either. Hence, as of 7/5/19, I'm putting the Vampires back in the game, and adding the Maxis ones.
• I have a link on this page to a tour for each neighborhood, and those will be kept up to date with currently played families as well as an index of posts for each family.

The Tour pages are mostly for reference, if you want to dive right into the action, you're looking for the Index pages. Once started, each family's post will have links to the previous and the next pages as well as back to the index for ease of navigation. I hope you have as much fun exploring the neighborhoods as I am playing them!