Townies and NPCs

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Townies

There is a way to clean out the regulation Townies. You can read a very helpful walkthrough of  replacement and removal of Townies, Dormies, Downtownies, Strays etc at http://www.sunsims.com

It is better and safer but more work than deleteallcharacters.

You might also want:

Nailati's replacement CAS templates replace the default faces in CAS and BodyShop which you use in making your own Sims, and which the game uses to create new townies.

Jordi's replacement names hack no more Abhijeets, Marylenas, Goopys etc.

Other NPCs

Here is the list of NPC IDs and NPC Types from the game using SimPE. I've also included the Sim IDs for sims in the objects.package.

Thanks for this info to MATY, Mootilda, Darby, Maxon and other contributors to a thread on Mod the Sims 2

Notes

Characters you cannot interact with have 'unlinked character data', 'uneditable' character and 'default character' listings. I'd strongly recommend never using these characters or putting them into play. Also, adding some of the Universal NPCs is a GAME borker, not just the neighbourhood. With the universals, there is only one file and that is in the game files, in the files your game uses as templates. This means there is only ONE version of Grimmy, the Therapist and, yes, Mrs C for ALL your neighbourhoods. If you make changes to those files (and by playing or adding memories, experiences, etc to the sims you are making changes), you run the very real risk of making the game unplayable. That was why the Mrs C getting bitten by a vampire bug was so serious.

Yes, there's a major problem with trying to play sims who are really objects. Their character data is in the objects.package in the installation folder (Program Files). When the game tries to change their user data (which it will try to do when you make them playable), it destroys your installation files. Your only option then is to uninstall and reinstall everything. Even if you haven't played a neighborhood, the game has opened all of your neighborhoods and subhoods and re-written them. Since the game is now corrupt, you can assume that your neighborhoods are also corrupt. One way to check is to look at the last-modified date. If a file has changed since you started fooling around with unplayable characters, then the file must be assumed to be bad. Otherwise, I'd suggest that you restore from your latest backup.

Players have long used the Tombstone of Life and Death to make sims pregnant with Grim, without making him playable in doing so, and that seems to be safe. Grim's presence is required (meaning a death needs to have happened), but he doesn't have to be made playable to accomplish a pregnancy with a playable.

It may be safe to do something similar with the Ghost Captain. The key is not making him playable. That's what will bork things.

You can use the "Clear NPC state" option on Cyjon's Debugger, which is useful for playable NPCs that you've moved in. It clears their NPC flag so the game no longer views them as an NPC, which should stop them from doing their hard-coded NPC actions. It's worth trying, though I haven't tested it out myself.