I’m not sure what happened, but somewhere along the past 8 months story progression seems to have been disabled for the other residents in town that you’re not actively playing. I would like to see a proper story progression mechanic to be returned to the game. Here’s my idea on how it should be managed:
Autonomous relationships, marriage, children for non-actives:
These are the most important elements that should be managed by story progression, because they keep the town alive, make sure the residents provide us with new generations for our own children to form relationships with and it creates multi-generational family trees which makes playing in a town for longer than 1 generation more fun. We should be able to use the city management menu to determine the speed at which inactive Zois are pushed to form relationships, get married and have children. This setting is already there, but currently doesn’t seem to do anything.
Moving in and out:
At the moment, inactive Zois stay within the household they are born in for their entire lives unless you the player moves them out. It’d be nice if Zois, once grown up, would autonomously move into their own house, preferably with their romantic partner. Especially when Canvas town will be released and we’ll have a lot more space for residential homes, this would be easier since there’ll be plenty of empty homes for Zois to move into.
Story progression for idle families with aging on:
We can enable aging for families that don’t live in the city, but other than that it makes them age up, not much seems to happen to them. It’d be nice if these idle families would progress ‘off-screen’ as well, since they do appear in the city as NPCs. It’d be nice if they could form relationships, get married and have children when their aging is turned on, so that your pool of idle families evolves with the town instead of them just dying out and then getting replaced by new idle families.
Toggle Story progression on/off:
Some players like to play rotationally. Which means they don’t want inactive families to progress while they aren’t playing them. Therefore there should be an option to toggle story progression on or off, just like we can now toggle aging for non-active families.
Toggle migration on/off:
I’ve noticed that at the moment, once a house becomes empty because everyone in the household has died, the game moves in a random singular Zoi automatically. For the sake of rotational play and giving other Zois the opportunity to move out of their parental home, please give us a toggle to turn automatic immigration of Zois on or off. When it’s turned on, I’d also prefer it if the game would pick a family from the idle families list to move in instead of these solo Zois.