With work coming in the future that will supposedly allow us to save family, and looking at how abysmal and useless the “Style” preset is, here’s my own point of view on what is needed to properly save/export a family.
Being able to manually edit each member of the family.
This means getting a family tree screen, and being able to click each zoi in the family and edit these values:
- First name/last name
- Age (With a number and not just a stage, including stages not currently in CAZ like Newborn, Toddler or Adolescent). This allows to generate a family like the “Collins” of Bliss Bay, which have triplet girls ! (which is impossible without cheating and extremely time consuming to do the way things are now). It also allows to set the family just how you want it without messing with 15 different saves and wasting hundred of hours.
- Assign two wardrobes to each zoi, that being child wardrobe and adult wardrobe. A wardrobe includes every clothing categories with accessories (Glasses, hair pieces, hats, etc). This would be perfect as if we have a child zoi, when they grow up they will have their pre-made adult clothes.
- Obviously, each zoi needs to have their Traits, Preferences, Characteristics, Desired Life, etc. saved as well. It’s already like that now when saving a zoi, so this should be a no-brainer.
- ( Opt-in ) Being able to edit/set a relationships between members and save it. I would not use this personally, but I’ve seen a lot of players that want it. It would be useful for husband/wife though at least.
- ( Opt-in ) Being able to set a preferred career. Like for the cadet son you pick “Nautilus” (from Bliss Bay). If you are in Bliss Bay he would auto-apply for that job. If the zoi is a teen or younger he will apply on it when he comes of age. If you use this family in Cahaya or Dowon and the job does not exist, then he would pick randomly. Leaving this field empty would mean that zoi would not manually apply for any jobs (good for stay-at-home wives/hubbies and for players that want to keep other families from applying to jobs without their input).
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Allowing for extra Zois for future family expansion.
”So what is this?” you say… We need to be able to save “extra” unused zois to the family which work like all of the above (looks, wardrobes, etc). I would say allow for up to a total of 14 zois (Current family size + extras. So a family of a hubby and wife, you could have 12 extras). Basically this allows you to save an incomplete family which can expand thru future births, and instead of generating new name and custom genetics looks each time, it will pick from the extras. Say you have the hubby and wife only, they have a girl as their firstborn. The game looks thru your extras, and randomly picks a girl. If it’s a boy? the game picks a boy from your extras. See where I am going with the 12 extras? If you have 6 boys - it’s all premades you made for your family. Same for the 6 girls if you manage to have only girls. I’d even go so far as to allow priority number on each extras, that way you could label girls 1 thru 6 and same for boys, and the game would assign presets that way. First girl will always be “Sakura” and first boy will always be “Akira”. The 3rd girl will always be “Iroha” and third boy always be “Bunzō”. And so on until each boys/girls reach number 6. Having no priority label means it’s totally random on gender (regardless of identity, which is a different issue which should be saved at character creation/editing). This is perfect for starting a family with only the wife and husband while letting the random decide where the family goes, or partial (not full) families while still having creative control of future children.
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Adding a family icon, name and description.
We really need an easy frozen in time moment to place our Zois with them picking up Newborns/toddlers (or letting them be on the floor in front of the family) without everyone trying to move away and keep messing your shot and wasting your time.
Name is easy… Maybe allow enough characters for a creative name. Like : “The Japanese Mikomi family” or something like that.
Description should be lengthy enough to write a small story but not a novel (heh).
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For now this is all I can think of.
Will edit and add more later if I have more to add.
