Decided I was tired of having a male maid in my game, and gender-swapped "him" to female (complete deep job). However, I didn't trust the game to do a complete switchover, and created a new appearance for her in Bodyshop. But...the Maid outfit was not available, neither clothing nor hair, and I wound up giving her custom skintone and hair as well as an ordinary Everyday outfit.

This did not work out too well, because the Maid outfit pulls from the generic hair and skin files. So after quite a bit of fuss and bother, I switched her back to Maxis skintone and a near-matching hair.

Probably the game would have completed the gender switch without my interfering - so if this situation comes up again, I just won't bother.

Take note of this, people, and don't waste your time customizing Service NPCs - they won't be customized when they go to work.

There's three maids available in each hood, two female and one male. If you just want a generic female maid, you could make the male maid into a townie (or kill them off, or get rid of them in any other way), and the game should generate a new maid (or likely use one of the other ones, if you have the mod that stops unnecessary NPCs from spawning).

I don't think the maid outfit pulls from the skin files in any other way than other maxis clothes do - could be something iffy with the other clothes, maybe (especially if they were TS3/4 conversions or similar - then it would depend how you tried to add them). It's possible to extract the maid clothes, those work as regular clothes if extracted. Same with the maid hair. Not sure if I've seen it extracted anywhere, but I think it's just based on one of the regular hairstyles with a maid tiara added.

If you want the actual maid outfit available in Bodyshop, you can make an unlocker/unhider file - pretty much the opposite of a hider file (same method, but reverse engineer the numbers - I think you can find tutorials for both things. Don't do it by recoloring, it won't work for this purpose). Once you've figured out that, there are fully working defaults you could use instead of the original maid outfit.

You can make NPCs. If you don't want them to switch outfit to service, and you don't have a mod that unlocks work clothes for students, you can create a Young Adult. She will not be able to switch into a maid's clothes.

If he work outfit doesn't include hair, you can customize that.

With Memory Commander you can switch an NPC to a different set of work clothes. But the window of time when this can be done invisibly is narrow, and it doesn't loop too often to avoid causing CPU load.

All I know is, I used a custom (very dark) skin and it did NOT show up on the Maid when she came to work - she showed up in Maxis skin 4. Likewise her hair (a Pooklet dark brown) became Maxis brown and considerably lighter. So since she HAD to be Maxis-match, I redid her as Maxis-match.

The Maids don't have to be 2 female/1 male, there's a mod that ensures they will all be female. But apparently they do have to be Maxis-match.

Can you take the maid and dress her into Casual wear to restore her hair? I don't think it should get erased, anymore than on other people. Work clothes are applied temporarily. If you can, then you can use some method to prevent her from switching.

I don't have any experience with added skins. All I know is the standard overlays that stay put forever.

There's two sets of genetics for skin, eyes and hair (recessive and dominant gene), did you change both? If you only changed the recessive (the one that doesn't show on the sim but can be transferred to kids), you'd be stuck with a sim that doesn't show the proper skin.

Forgot to say the 2 female/1 male thing is a preset for (most of) the original neighborhoods, so if you're playing a custom hood it's possible you'll get different maids.

Does the maid have a split character file?

jonasn: she probably did/does have Everyday settings, but the work outfit overrode everything (except facial features, those were the only exceptions).

simmer22: All genetics were correctly changed, automatically via Alt Sim Surgery (and I did double-check).

simsample: No, I don't have the split character file problem any more - that was quite a while ago.

So the bottom line seems to be that you can modify a Service NPC's facial features, but don't bother using custom skin tones or hair styles. They will just be overwritten as long as the Service NPC is doing its Service thing.

The Clean Installer likely won't be helpful here, and the red items aren't necessary harmful items (nor does this program show all mods/items that can be problematic). Just today I had it show a plain flower pot in red, but it didn't pick up on various other modded objects I know can cause trouble). I've rarely if ever had it show any CAS items in red.

The CI is helpful for installing CC, and for locating items, and alongside other programs for finding problem content or for finding something in a build if you don't want to install the whole thing (I tend to prefer a nix of CI and SimPE - weeding out the files I know what are with CI, then using SimPE to figure out the rest).



Do you know which work outfit? Does this outfit work fine for other non-NPC sims? Does the hair work fine for non-NPCs?

There has been some outfits that can cause crashes when sims try to apply for jobs (or do other job-related tasks) while wearing them, but it doesn't sound like the same issue. Some clothing/appearance mods can temporarily change the looks of the sim in the preview.

Custom skins aren't that different from the base skins - they work mostly similar (some differences for genetics), but shouldn't affect clothes any different.

And you know this how?

And why does it matter now?

She's only been dead for 10 years.

Let the dead lie in peace.

The issue is probably the Maxis game Maid Hair specifically - in other words this is something that the base game does and you just have to work with it. That means you get the four Maxis base skin tones, the four Maxis hair tones in the specifically Maid-with-tiara style, and unless you do some heavy-duty modding, that's all you get. (And Maids really aren't worth going to all that trouble for, as all they are supposed to do is come and clean house.)

I don't think she was bullied, but she did work for Microsoft. Not sure what bullying would have to do with microsoft!
She was a very kind person and well loved here.
https://modthesims.info/showthread....523#post4511523

I can't see anything weird going on in the clothes or hair files. The issues with the hair could come from it only being set as everyday (I think it's supposed to auto-select the hair without the maid tiara for the other categories).

If you want to check out whether the maid hair/clothes work for other skins and such for NPCs, you can test out the unhider I posted below - only thing I've changed is the "flags". Not 100% sure if the hair connects back to the other one for the other categories, but should do so in theory (my game is a slow loader at the moment, not sure I'll get ingame today). Don't use together with default replacements.

What the everloving fudge are you on about?

"Service NPCs and Custom Skin/Hair Don't Mix" ?

I've never attempted a complicated sex-change makeover of an NPC like Sims2Maven's but quite a lot of NPCs have generated in my game with custom hair. For example Tyler Kim, the eponymous NPC host of Tyler's Diner in New Desconia, has custom hair, and so do his two waiters and his chef. Similarly the three teenage boys who generated as cashiers in my Strangetown, all have custom hair, and are, as a result, rather good looking! I don't have much use for custom skins, except for a default replacement skin that gives all my female Sims (teen and older) rudimentary nipples (because frankly women with out nipples just look weird!). But, since I don't recall any of my female NPCs ever going topless, I'm not certain that these are working for NPCs. I might just test it and see.

I found a simple dodge to give the two waiters at Tyler's Diner custom uniforms. I gave them both variants of KnightSkyKyte's "Pretty Boy" outfits as their formal wear. So, when I'm playing the Diner, I simply ask them to change into their formal clothes.

Default skins work for NPCs (they work for all sims).
I've seen NPCs with custom hairs too, so they shouldn't be an issue.

If you edit a PropertySet resource the wrong way by inputting the wrong information in where it's not supposed to be, you can get issues with the skintone (usually hair or clothing texture "defaulting" itself onto the space it's trying to overlay, so ou can get black scalps for all . That's all I can think of.

They aren't - IF the particular NPC class does not have an assigned hat/hairstyle. The (Female) Maid does. (There are default replacements to get around this, including one that allows random hairstyles. But with rando hairstyles you don't get the signature "Maid" tiara. Tradeoffs, tradeoffs.)

I'd think the maid hat and outfit works like any of the other work outfits and hat-hairs for NPCs. Looking at the files of the maid hair, there doesn't seem to be anything that causes issues with skins. Same with the maid dress. If they're behaving fine in Bodyshop with the unhider, then it's likely something else was going on.

There's definitely a maid in my neighborhood who generated with a custom geneticized skintone, and she's had no issues displaying that skintone while wearing the regular maid outfit.