I commend you on your superior quoting abilities.

For the LTW on age transitioning...are you referring to the child-to-teen transition? I never get a LTW directly upon transition, not since Uni first came out. It will pop up in a few sim hours. If I'm impatient, I'll exit and reenter the lot and the LTW will be set. Definitely EA borkedness. I don't kill kittens or puppies. I prefer to use the age sim cheat to age up, stud farm, then age down my one teen father, and wouldn't even have done that if I hadn't found out that my only mate choice for my C generation was marked for grilled cheese zombification.

Yes, you need to do both portions. Renaming and replacing N001 prevents the game from creating those same ol' Pleasantview townies into your new custom neighborhood. Renaming and replacing G001 doesn't prevent any specific townies, but it prevents these sim-bin families (one of which has majorly borked genetics) from being dumped on you.

Basically, if you have any of the files you are told to replace, do it.

I used to wing it, but found I'd fall into a bit of a rut that way. I love house building, though, and hate rebuilding or remodeling, so it's new homes all the way, all the time. I started using Architectural House Plans, recommended in an earlier thread as a good place for ideas. My current home I'm playing (pre yardwork and furnishing) is this:

Unfortunately I don't have any aerial views, but it basically has a huge master suite on the right, two smaller bedrooms on the far left with a shared bathroom. The kitchen is that small jutted-out portion with the two central windows, and the dining/living room is behind it.

Basically, just look at as many player-created houses out there as you can. Not the Maxis ones, they are inefficient ugly crap. Download your favorites and play them a bit. Then try building a few. By seeing the possibilities, you can start to find what you like.

I haven't had one taken...haven't had a social worker take a kid for a good long time, and that was because of a nanny not showing. The warning is just annoying, and pisses me off. I'm not neglecting the kid, it's just a brat.

Why do they change any names? That has to be the most idiot thing Maxis ever did, especially since it opens the door to all those issues people have installing SPs that change the names of their existing sims. Leave names alone! Vincent and Riley aren't extremely common names here, either. Used...sure...but not even as much as Michelle.

Bit elementary, but this can be very hard to spot...are you using sprinklers? Check them. They can break rather frequently but aren't terribly noticeable. Enviro score plummets. Since your Test family had a good enviro score at first and then it went bad, that's what I suspect.

*Quit making me miss the Tests, people, or I'll have to resurrect my laptop and clone the suckers into my current neighborhood. I miss Chuck & Saish v2.

That's something I keep meaning to set up: a petting zoo. Overall, home businesses are incredibly cash cows. Just put a poker table or even just a chess set out on the front lawn at low levels with a ticket taker on Cheap. Lock the doors of the house to "household only". Leave it be. You don't have to interact with the customers at all, and just readjust the ticket cost to the new Cheap every business level. Add another game and give the place walls and a public toilet around level 3. With the ticket moneys and the monetary level rewards, sims are swimming in it quickly.

When I first got OFB, I took the entire downstairs of a home and converted it into three rotating businesses. One was a mirror shop, the other a robotics/electronics store, the other was an arcade with ticket machine. At all times when the two shops weren't open, the arcade was going. $$$

I had a telescope go to ashes because of a lightning strike, but that's all. Overall, in my game, lightning prefers trees and swingsets. I've not had a gravestone go up in flames, but then I rarely play with gravestones on my lots since my family moves every generation.

Em, this keeps bugging me. Overall, this hack is working as advertised, etc. However, it would be lovely if something was added to severely reduce or eliminate the internal heat caused by jumping on the bed. I find it ridiculous that a kid can still be taken from home by the social worker just because they were hopping around a bit.

I know Pes doesn't much care for the offspring, so it may just be a pipe dream.

No, definitely not. My first simsicle didn't decrease terribly quickly. The second was extremely quick. I actually had to intervene and move him into the livingroom so he didn't croak. Perhaps the outside temp was lower the second time; I didn't have the lot debugger back then. As for the hairdryer...maybe I didn't wait long enough. I'll test it again sometime soonish, but for now my sims have been pretty good and no one is marked for death by the Oversoul. My current procreator can't break the kid number rule as he's a guy and his mate has recently undergone grilled cheese zombification.

If a tombstone is hit by lightning, the ghost will come out for a bit and then return to its "home". That's new with Seasons, of course.

This is most of what the Oversoul (alter-ego) does in my game, other than Grilled Cheese Zombification as needed. I use ACR now. I "roll" for maximum number of kids, and they aren't to go over it, excepting to fulfill LTWs. After that maximum number of kids is met, for every extra baby they spawn, someone must die. My one exception was in the B generation of my Alphabet family, which got five kids (three pregnancies) only because all but the nasty little one were ugly and I was trying for a visually appealing heir. I settled for silly-looking. My neighborhood is very small, but I don't like a huge sim population since I play one family exclusively.
I move mine every generation. That way I can build houses, which I love. I give them pocket money equal to the depriciated value of the old home and their in-hand money right before moving (often I don't move the whole family, hence the need for calculation). All that money, within a thousand simoleans, must be spent on the new home. If for some reason the home I'm building just won't cost that much furnished, I send them on a clothes shopping spree. Theoretically that makes it harder for the next generation, since the more expensive home means higher bills and they are starting out with little pocket money and the same low-level jobs.

This definitely sounds like some nasty malware. Try going to http://www.pandasoftware.com/products/activescan.htm and click on the big blue button that says "Scan your PC now". It will take a good long time to do, but that bugger catches almost everything...including some malware I had right after getting my current comp a couple years ago (which nothing else would diagnose). You can either pay to buy the program (worth it, IMO) or do a quick search on http://www.geekstogo.com/ and stumble through fixing it. The geeks helped me with my Vundo problem, for which I'm eternally grateful.

Your last resort solution is always to reformat your harddrive, but you will lose absolutely everything. People suck.

I'm obsessed in the reverse. I can't play more than one family at a time. I tried the prosperity model and didn't get past generation one. I play one family (now moving lots every generation since I'm trying to fill the empty space in my "urban" neighborhood) until I'm so thoroughly bored with them and craving CAS so much I just have to make a new sim. Then I completely forget about the first family.  I absolutely would hate it if time was longer or sims took longer to grow up. I always grow toddlers, children, and adults up at the first opportunity. I usually cut teen-hood and elderhood down by half.

I can't wait to see how those genes will splice...My current family is an Alphabet challenge. A's were cute, B's and C's were mostly ugly, and the D child is extremely handsome.

I was referring to clothing submissions in general.

Apparently I have no taste, because I liked most of the stuff Frivolous posted (sans the chimney-inspired fountain...WTF?) and that set. None would be staples, but I'd use them. As for items going through walls, that does definitely annoy me.

If it were, say, knee-length with just that much of a sheer band and actually had defined hems instead of looking painted on, it would be quite nice.

Seriously, people, if the clothing doesn't look like it's actually separate from the sim's body, keep it to yourself. It looks like crap.

They pull it out of their nether regions, like the fishing pole. Scary.

Never had the "warm up" option come up, and I've had spouses and children that I've had click on them (both freezings were with the dad of the house, one intentional, and one because the stupid sim decided to take a dip and then build a snowman in his swimtrunks). One child autonomously did it, though.

Hi. The FAQ here actually contains some useful information instead of the usual commonsense crap.

Oh good lord. Apparently one of the templates looked a whole lot like one of linuslover's. He let me know that people were saying I stole his sim....which I didn't. I told him I hadn't but I'd be happy to change it if he thought it looked too similar. He said not to, he just wanted to let me know in case I had any angry PMs. Well, now it's been removed by HystericalParoxysm with no advance warning and a clear message not to PM them back.

Whatever. I just thought I'd share them since I'd taken so much time making them for myself. If they want to jump to conclusions and assume that because one has a slight resemblance to one of 20,000 (number pulled out of my nether regions) of uploaded sims that it's stolen, their loss. That's just a lovely way to treat a new contributor. I'll be sure to keep my lots and such to myself from now on, since I won't deal with TSR anymore.

Hey, some of us just like tiny terrains. I see no point in having huge downtowns (where I come from "community" lots are right across the street, thank you) or universities. You just need a downtown with one or two lots for when you're invited on an outing, and a uni big enough for a couple dorms, three or four greek houses, and a quad.

Actually, I really think there must be wrong with her....color blindness, or residual effect of too many LSD trips. There is no way a normal person could spend as much time as needed to create that crap looking at that crap and stay sane.

It could be that it's too new. Pet beds are usually ignored in my apartment until they've sat around for a few days. I've taken to putting a sock and a catnip rattle toy inside them and that seems to solve the issue. My kitties love sleeping on my clothes. With Soren, it's just because he's a total momma's boy, with Mikko I suspect it's that I purposely used to lay clothing over any surface I thought he'd be remotely interested in sleeping in when he was little (the theory being that he would get used to my scent and therefore de-feralize faster).

Honestly, learn to play with the Maxis families for a bit, but then trash the neighborhoods and create your own custom ones. Make sure to use SaraMK's clean templates. There's a decent recent thread here with someone who was looking to create a custom hood and wanted advice.

In my opinion, having your own unique hood and playing it from the dark ages is a million times better than some icky crowded Maxis hood. Shameless plug here: see the linky in my signature? Check it out, as well as the links to other custom face templates listed there. Some of the Maxis defaults are really scary.

With SimPE, it's a great tool, but keep to just messing with aspiration, skill level, and personality point changes for a long time, and read up before attempting anything else. Always attempt new things with that program on a dedicated testing neighborhood, that way you don't accidentally bomb the main one you play.

Mikko's favorite was similar to this cat pyramid, though it was more of a vinyl material. It had a pom-pom attached at the top that he liked to play with, and was very fun to roll off the couch, apparently. Soren used a carpet teepee as scratching post, toy, and bed when he was little...but he quickly got too huge. He prefers to sleep on my lap anyways.

Anyways, if some of us didn't learn how to sleep through yowling and whirring in the night, we'd never get any sleep.