How do you populate a dorm with custom sims? Does it have to be a custom neighborhood, or could I do it in one of the base game ones if I wanted to?

Hi there! To make my custom dorm (and my custom hood in general), firstly, I used empty templates. I did this so the game wouldn’t spawn EAxis townies and NPCs. (This tutorial spells out the process of installing empty neighborhood templates better than I ever could! I follow it every time I do a reinstall.) As for creating the actual townies, there are a couple of ways you can do this – you can choose to batch create townies (the game will randomly generate townies for you), or you can create completely custom townies to your own liking in bodyshop, and then townify them. I went into more detail about creating custom townies in my post HERE. 🙂 

I’m not sure if you mean populating a Maxis dorm as in the lot itself, or populating a premade Uni subhood (such as Sim State University) with custom dormies. If you want to use a premade Maxis dorm building and plop it into your own university subhood, as long as you followed the instructions to install empty neighborhood templates and placed the necessary antiredundancy/notownieregen/nodormieregen mods in your Downloads folder, you will be able to spawn or create your own dormies and they will move into the building. I’m fairly certain the same thing would work if you wanted to add an entire Maxis uni subhood as long as you had empty templates installed. (Someone correct me if I’m wrong??? I either use completely Maxis neighborhoods with townies and all, or completely empty ones. I’ve not tried the middle-of-the-road attempt. D:)

I feel like I’m babbling now and I’m not sure if I’m making any sense. XD SO UM here’s another link for you that might break it down a little more. I think some of the links at the end of the page are dead, but you can follow the instructions to determine what you’re looking for (empty vs. clean templates, etc.). The GoS tutorial has a link to download empty templates if you need them. 🙂 

Please let me know if you need further clarification on anything! I’m a bit sleep-deprived and thought this would be a good time to answer messages so I’m sorry if I’m completely unhelpful. D: