Empty Neighborhoods + Custom Service NPCs | The Sims 4
Ever wanted to make a ghost town.. feel like an actual ghost town? Or how about having your playable family match with the rest of your world? Well, that’s not actually possible.. not without mods.. but don’t worry, you only need two and they are base game compatible!
I’ve personally tested these mods myself and the results are incredible. Here’s my custom Sim delivering the mail via the role I assigned.. and yet here he is once more socializing with my sim and another custom NPC. Based on my observations, you can socialize and form relationships but they’ll lose their NPC role as soon as you add them to your household. I haven’t tested story progression by MCCC because I don’t use it.

You will need the assign NPC roles mod and Zer0’s private filters. (Assign NPC Jobs Private Filters) Keep in mind, these filters will not allow the game to generate an NPC not even if there are no Sims available to fulfill the role.. which personally.. I love. Zer0’s tweaks and especially their private filters have made me fall in love with the game all over again.
Once you have these two mods installed, we need to go in game.
For this process to work, you need to do a few things. First, you will need to empty out the world you want to play in or download an empty world. That means all households should be evicted and all other households should be deleted. There should be zero homeless Sims before creating your own.
I personally started with a brand new world.
Next, create the Sims you intend to use as an NPC or download from the gallery. Move them to any empty lot. Assign any careers or traits needed. Save and evict them.
Make sure that your evicted Sim household doesn’t have a heart. They should be in Other Households. I accidentally had mine hearted and despite many days passing, the mail wasn’t getting delivered. As soon as I put them in Other Household, my bill got delivered right away.
Enter your playable family and click on the mailbox > Assign NPC role

If any skills are needed, you will get a notification. I suggest following the linked guide in this post to see what trait or career each NPC needs.
For my first test, I only made one custom Sim to fulfill a single role which was to be the mail carrier. I found that the easiest way was to assign these via cheats: traits.equip_trait trait_isMailman and careers.add_career career_Adult_NPC_Mailman
For my second test, I was able to easily create a maid NPC. You can see her going about her duties while still showing up in the world as a pretty townie. I tried to make a Grim Reaper but I’m unsure how to get it to work and frankly, I don’t care since they are masked anyway.

For the maid, I used traits.equip_trait trait_isMaid and careers.add_career career_Adult_NPC_Maid. The maid can’t have the trait slob.
I mainly care about the NPCs I’m going to see every day (mailman, maid, pizza delivery, etc.) and the rest, I just let the game assign them. I’ve been following this helpful guide which has all the details on NPC templates and how the game determines each role.
As a bonus, if you go into game settings, you can see Sim Count is 1/80 despite having 2 custom NPCs as shown in the Service NPCs popup.

I found the Service NPCs very easy to manage but I had trouble getting the community roles to work. This is something that Zer0 mentioned in their post. If you use their filters, some roles just might not work and this is something I’m willing to compromise on. I created a community lot designated as a library and even though the librarian role didn’t work, it was refreshing to see familiar faces browsing the shelves versus the generated Maxis townies and their aesthetic which clashes with my Sims.
I tested this world through many Sim days and not once did an ugly townie generated so it definitely works as intended!
The game runs exceedingly smooth and it makes the world so much more immersive. Picture a ghost town.. or a zombie apocalypse or even a storyline that follows a very specific theme. Personally, there are NPCs generated in my game that bloat it unnecessarily. I barely visit venues or festivals as it is. This way I can just generate the NPCs that I need when I need them. I highly …highly recommend going this route if you like to control every aspect of your game, especially for storytelling. Even though I don’t do much storytelling anymore, I’m still someone that enjoys pretty visuals.
I’ll probably revisit this guide as I experiment more and more with the filter and NPC roles.
Update: I’ve been testing the community NPC jobs some more. It seems that Sims lose their role upon saving and reloading or by being edited by MCCC. I did try to edit some of Zero’s tuning files to test different things and soon my game was full of undesirables. I much prefer the filter even if I have to reassign roles any time I visit a venue. Service roles are not affected by saving (maid, mailman, etc.)