Using Expanded Active Households/Home mod by Savanita! 🏠
A new guide for Savanita's mod!
Download Expanded Active Household/Homes mod here! ◀
New updates: March 2026
New features including:
* Visits and Stayovers
* Active/Inactive Daycare
* Ask any Sim to babysit!
* Sim Needs>Handle Motives
* A Daycare Marker (yellow rubberducky!)
* Seperate bills!
This mod requires Lazy Duchess’ MonoPatcher!
🏠
Click on the contents for the full, updated guide and more gameplay ideas!
I'd like to hear your soap box about romantic standards! I use ACR at the moment but reading that "unpopular opinions" post got me curious about other options 👀
Hiya! Thanks for asking. I absolutely love Romantic Standards, I could NOT play without it these days. I used to use ACR in the past though, so I tried to make a balanced list of the pros and cons for me. But then it got REALLY LOOOONG because I'm a wordy person sorry, so it's under a cut.
The quick TLDR of it is - I feel like ACR creates romantic chaos that's often unpleasant/nonsensical to me, while I feel like RS creates romantic drama that makes sense and also allows for a lot of variety in how different sims will feel about their relationships.
By the way, I use Midgethetree's edited version of RS because it's modular (you can pick which parts you want) and the documentation is way easier to understand lol. If you have any trouble with mod conflicts or with getting RS set up the way you like, feel free to ask me about it and I can help you out with what exact files you need.
The full soapbox under the cut!!
One thing I want to say is I think a lot of people have been playing with ACR for so long that they don't know what their game will be like without it? And they underestimate how much autonomous romantic interaction will still happen between sims. A key here is that sims can't autonomously interact romantically unless they have compatible gender preferences, and townies or CAS sims always start with 0 preference, so a vanilla hood without ACR will feel low on the random flirtations unless you use something like the Sim Blender (or similar) to randomize everyone's gender preferences! (And ACR gives out random gender preferences automatically, so you might install ACR, see a lot of people interacting romantically for the first time, and assume you can't get that without ACR when all you needed was the gender preference setting, yknow?) But I can assure you that with ACR removed, my sims are definitely still getting into plenty of unexpected romantic entanglements and exciting drama.
To my mind, these are the biggest features of Romantic Standards that I just can't get with ACR:
Random chance of crush/love status: I could never play without this now. As you probably already know, normally two sims automatically get a crush or love when they interact romantically with 70+ shortterm or longterm relationship respectively. It's kinda predictable and boring to me.
RS, specifically the "slower feelings" file, makes it so that crush/love flags are added randomly with the chance being based on the sims' chemistry with each other. This also allows for some amazing Drama Potential where you could have 2 sims interacting and one is completely in love with the other but the other has no feelings for them at all! It's otherwise impossible to do that. This makes crush/love flags actually feel meaningful to me, like they represent real human feelings, instead of just being able to know that if I decide one day to smooch my best friend they're guaranteed to fall in love with me.
Simple jealousy system that makes sense: I could never get my head around ACR's jealousy system to make it work the way I wanted. I felt like sims would have their token values changed even when I set them to be static, and stuff like that, and it just was so complicated to figure out what values I wanted...
OTOH, this is how jealousy works in Romantic Standards: If a sim is in love or in a committed relationship (steady/engaged/married), and they see their love/partner interact with someone else romantically, they get mad about it! Unless you put a "no jealousy" trait in their inventory (then they won't get jealous over anyone) OR if they also have crush/love flags for that 3rd sim (this, allows for you to have polyamorous relationships).
I find that easy to understand and to work well for a majority of situations. There's also an option where they won't get jealous over love, only committed relationships -- but I prefer the also-in-love version because it combines really well with the previous point about crush/love being randomized! You can frequently get situations where A is in love with B but B only has a crush, so B will be willingly flirting with other people and A might get their heart broken over it because they thought this was serious... It really generates a lot of interesting storylines.
Sims don't cheat on their partners if I don't want them to: I know ACR is supposed to have settings that will make sims stay faithful, but I was unable to get it to work consistently, and I feel like I've often heard other people say things too like "I didn't want this sim to cheat but 🤷 ACR just did that". With RS, if a sim is in a committed relationship they can never do autonomous romantic interactions with someone else unless 1) they're Romance aspiration or 2) they already have crush/love for that other sim.
You can of course still direct sims to cheat if you think it makes sense, but I don't have to worry about anyone's marriage falling apart if I want them to stay together. (Also, you can override this for specific sims by giving romance sims a "hopeless romantic" trait, or non-romance sims a "commitment issues" trait.)
Midge's version of RS is modular so almost all of the stuff I listed above is separate if you only want part of it.
On the other hand! Here are the things that ACR does that I've missed or that you might miss:
Autonomous woohoo and try for baby: Your sims won't woohoo on their own anymore. I found that I didn't really mind this? The woohoo timer in ACR feels kind of mechanical to me, and a lot of times they'd be starting to do it in situations that were really inappropriate (like other people are in the room and they're stripping naked on the sofa at 9am). And I don't mind the lack of try for baby either because I prefer to decide when my sims have a baby based on if they roll a want for it, or if it just happens from risky woohoo.
I've noticed that simler90's original version of RS has an optional plugin that allows for autonomous woohoo but I don't know if it works with Midge's edited RS. I haven't tried it yet bc I don't mind not having auto woohoo. If anyone has, let me know.
Can't woohoo on the sofa and can't woohoo in one menu-click: My god it's so much easier to be able to click "casual...woohoo" than relax on bed, ask other sim to join, wait for them to get there, cuddle, then woohoo.
Something to note is that there is a "stripped down" version of ACR which only retains the Casual Woohoo interactions and was made to be compatible with Romantic Standards. However in my experience (and that of a few other people I've talked to) the jealousy aspect of this so-called compatibility... still doesn't quite work correctly? So the "casual woohoo" option, if you have stripped-ACR, I think it will still go off of ACR-jealousy (which is impossible for me to understand lol), instead of RS-jealousy like everything else in the game? It can definitely cause situations with jealousy reactions that aren't working how they're supposed to.
So um... the crazy thing that I do, personally, is keep that stripped down ACR in my game but with all the autonomy completely disabled in global overrides, at which point it is doing literally nothing other than letting me tell them to casual woohoo if I want them to woohoo on the sofa. And I just make sure to never use that option in a situation where jealousy is a possible concern, in order to avoid the issue where it doesn't work correctly. It's kind of overly complicated a thing to do just to get sofa woohoo but I'm just saying it's an option 😂
No autonomous First Kiss: This is it! The one thing I truly do miss from ACR and would really love if someone made a mod for it one day! I love when my sims do stuff autonomously and surprise me. But First Kiss is a non-autonomous action, and what's more, sims can't roll the want to "Kiss so-and-so" if they haven't already had a first kiss, so I find it kind of hard to decide when my sims will have their first kiss. I'm always like, why can't you do it for me!
The other major difference is that the "Casual" romantic interactions from ACR have lower thresholds for acceptance than the default Maxis interactions. I personally don't see this as a positive because... well... I've been playing this game for so long, I kind of know how to get sims together at this point, I really don't need to make it even easier 😅 I'd rather have RS making it a little harder for sims to fall in love. I use a lot of other mods for other aspects of the game that make it harder overall because it's more fun for me.
Also! So, I was going to give you a list of other romance-related mods that I use in my game along with RS, but then I realized I could be lazy and just give you a link to my friend @alice-in-strangetown's mods list, because she & I have pretty similar taste in how we like romance to work in this game and I use basically all the same romance mods as her :P because I started using RS after finding out about it from watching her TS2 livestreams.
If you want to try RS on a neighborhood that has ACR but you're not sure if you'd like the playstyle, I recommend temporarily replacing it with the "stripped down" ACR version (and disabling autonomy), because that way your sims will keep their ACR tokens if you decide you don't like RS and want to switch back to using ACR. Of course, it's technically possible to have both of them at the same time, but the key thing about ACR is that all of the "Casual" interactions in it are completely separate from the vanilla maxis interactions so mods that affect default maxis interactions or maxis jealousy (like RS does) won't interface with ACR interactions and vice versa.
I hope all of this was helpful, and that maybe it convinced you to give Romantic Standards a try! Like I said, if you need any help getting it set up I can give you advice or a more detailed guide on how to install it (I think the documentation's pretty straightforward tho).
hi, thank you for your work in trying to help keep gay awakening updated! Question: is there any way for someone to individually remove specific support options from the mod? I’d like to use it but would very particularly like to remove the chrom/Frederick option for my own playthroughs because Frederick is canonically stated to have helped raise chrom and lissa according to the drama cd so it makes me uncomfortable :’) if it’s not something that can be done I understand, but if it is id very much love to know how to do that!
Hey there, sorry to hear that Chrom/Frederick makes you uncomfortable! This is the first time I'm hearing about this part of the drama CD-I should really listen to/read that one of these days.
It's actually really easy to add/remove support options nowadays, you just need a program called Paragon and a full dump of the vanilla game's romfs (what the folder containing all of the game's files is called). I'll include instructions here below the readme. If you get stuck or can't get things working, feel free to join the discord and we'll be able to help you more directly!
Step 1 - Get a clean dump of your game's romfs.
Citra users: Right click on your game and select 'Dump RomFs'
Luma users: Launch your 3ds while holding Start to run GodMode9. (note: this guide was written for version v2.1.0 of GodMode9 and any older or newer releases may have different wording)
- Physical: Select 'GAMECART'
- Digital: Select 'SYSNAND SD' and go into 'title' folder.
Open the '00040000' folder to find your games and select FEA's title ID.
NA: 000A0500
EU: 0009F100
- Open 'NCSD image options…' and select 'Mount image to drive' then press A. Open 'content0.game' and press R+A while hovering over the romfs folder. Copy to 0:/gm9/out. This is the filepath you'll use to find it when you move to your computer.
Step 2 - Now that you have your romfs dump, you're going to download Paragon and start a new project. The project name can be whatever you want it to be, but make sure you select the right language and game. Your Extracted RomFS Directory is the vanilla romfs dump that you just grabbed, and the Output Directory is going to be UGA's romfs folder. The filepaths will be different when using Luma or if you move anything around for ease of access, but it should look something like this when you're done:
Step 3 - To remove the support options itself, you're going to open the Characters module in the section labeled "Core Data". From there, go to Chrom's name and switch to his Supports tab. Scroll down until you see Frederick's name, and change the Support Type from Fast to Non-romantic. Do the same thing for Frederick- select him and look for Chrom in his support tab to change the Support Type from Fast to Non-romantic. If the support type doesn't match for both characters, they won't be able to gain any support ranks at all, so make sure you change both of them!
Step 4 - The previous step removed the ability for them to support, but you probably want to remove the S support from the support log as well. In the main Paragon menu, you're going to look at the left side where it says "Nodes" and look for the option called "Support / Reliance List". From there, go to both characters and delete their last support (the one that says Support Level 4, with 0 as the Support Number). Make sure to select the correct Delete button as shown in this image:
For Frederick, you're also going to want to delete his PC supports with Lucina, so scroll down and delete all three of the Fredrick x Lucina posts that have the Support Type set to Parent/Child. Now, make sure you also go to select the first support in these lists (the first support with male robin) and select the Regenerate IDs option furthest to the right (not the one on top!). The automatic 0 it gives you is fine, this step is to ensure the game reads the edited support log correctly- failing to regenerate IDs may cause issues. Now that that's been done you're finished in Paragon, so you can go to File > Save to save those changes!
Step 5 - The last thing you can do (if you so desire) is delete the actual supports themselves. You can find the support files in romfs/m/E, where you'll see a ton of files named with Japanese characters. Chrom and Frederick's modded supports are named "クロム_フレデリク.bin.lz" while Lucina and Frederick's PC support is named "マルス_フレデリク_親子.bin.lz"
Step 6 - After that, just make sure your romfs folder is where your mods go and you should be set! You should be able to see the changes both in-game and in the support log now.
Lastly, here are a few things you should know when it comes to updates:
The two files you've edited are the static.bin.lz (this controls many things in the game, including support options) and the RelianceList.bin.lz (the support log)
Unless the support options in the latest update change, or there's a bugfix regarding support gain, you will not need to replace your static.bin.lz! Just keep the one you edited when you update, everything will work perfectly fine. I don't expect the static.bin.lz to be updated frequently, but I will be tweaking support options for the Spotpass characters later down the line so you will have to redo Step 3 when that happens.
The support log for UGA has not been finished yet, so the RelianceList.bin.lz WILL get updated in the next major release, so you will have to replace your own edited one. When that happens, you'll have to repeat Step 4 again, but that doesn't take too long so hopefully that's not an issue! When I finish the support log, you won't have to do this ever again.
And that should be everything! I hope it wasn't too confusing- after you set up Paragon for the first time it's honestly really easy to make changes to the game. It's a super friendly program, and you can do all sorts of silly things with it. Like I said though, you're welcome to join the discord for more direct help from us! We're friendly, I promise :P
