Don't place any community lots but one all-in-one downtown so your simmies have somewhere to go if they have a buddy fond of inviting them downtown all the time. Then either build or download community lots that have what you find yourself wanting. I like having at least one:
-restaurant
-community garden
-clothier
-public graveyard
-playground
-public pool
-convenience store
-park w/fishing pond
-bowling alley
-arcade

I'm building one community lot & one residential lot each generation of my current Alphabet Legacy, and it's really working well to make the neighborhood seem like it's growing naturally...and I've a custom terrain I made with loads of plot space. Uni is the same, but I'm building one lot every generation that actually attends, which is about half, and works since it is a significantly smaller terrain.

You also can play with the Visitor Controller. I haven't yet, but it's something I'm planning on doing. Then you can make community lots and specify that they only have teens visiting, or only singles, or only sims of X persuasion, etc.

Eh, not truly. As Alexx said (and I'm removing the repeated bad advice), you can copy the .sc4 terrains from My Documents/Electronic Arts/The Simstm Life Stories/SC4Terrains. Paste these into My Documents/EA Games/The Sims 2/SC4Terrains. Now you can use these terrains to create new neighborhoods.

If you give half a crap about the character in the game (eh) then you can use SimPE to clone them and then go into CAS and make sims using the saved files. I've never done that myself, but there is a thread around here that goes into it. Make sure to use the latest version of SimPE as that's the one that recognizes Life Stories.

If you don't want ye ole Maxis crap townies, use SaraMK's clean templates.

I really wish Maxis would dump the stuff packs and make something like Life Stories for the "normal" game.
No, please do come back for help, I need a good laugh.

It would be awfully cool looking if you could somehow get that perpetually-bubbling cleaning bug or the perpetually swimming pool bug going.

No, they'll be thinking of the plates 'o' sandwiches. Gah, it makes perfect sense for the image of the brain to reside in the objects package, but I'll be boiled if I can find it. Too many images! I looked through objects.package first (the Seasons one, since that should have all the shinies in it) and then through every dratted package file in the /Res folder. No dice.

Took a break to actually play, now I'll go back into just the lighter Uni objects.package to see if I can't miss it there. I've fed all my playables (only thirteen) but one to the cow plant, took some photos of neighborhood ka-blooey in SC4, and have 27 zombies to make. May dice-roll to see if some will get the chance to change their errant ways, though. That's an awful lot of undead.

I quit using the stupid things, since I always play with walls down and they stick out like a sore thumb. For a greenhouse look, I just wall it in and put Windkeeper's Helios window on every segment.

SimPE. It's under one of the tabs for the sim information. You have to change the coding, so it would be best to look at another sim for the replacement reference, then copy and paste to your Servo.

Thanks, kids. I know how to do it, I just don't, and was poking fun at myself.

Ok, I've had it with my Grilled Cheese zombies temporarily stepping out of character and thinking about brains, and as I'm doing a ...ahem..."cleansing" at the moment, I'm seeing this more and more often Brains aren't a significant source of calcium. I'm 90% certain that I could just located the stupid image file for brains and replace it with one of yummy cheesy goodness, however I've no idea where to look for said file. Does anyone know where the buggers are?

I have some stuff from sims2sisters that I've recategorized as outerwear. The butts have joined the TSR brigade, but you can get their stuff in the booty. tsr/sims2sisters/clothing. It's pretty quality stuff overall, except that they of course feel the need to do 20 recolors of the same mesh.

Sometimes the forum default titles are extremely accurate.

What's a backup? *prefers to live dangerously...stupidly...but dangerously* I backup my custom content periodically, but not my 'hoods.

Until someone fixes it...or Maxis fixes it (unlikely)...you'll have to remove all Japanese Maples and recolors of the tree from all your lots. Stinks, as those are my favorites next to that hulking cyprus.

How? I'm seriously  ;Dtelling you that I couldn't get a sim there w/out owning a business/working on campus. Pre law or gamer career objects, anyways.

I've talked about it, so it may be me you were recalling. I just use boolProp to "set to birthday" when they show 8 days to go...or thereabouts.

Captiousness? No, I wasn't trying to find faults, I just was listing some other behaviors you've posted as suggestions before which are well-known game-killers. This makes me trust your stating that your hack isn't potentially problematic unlikely as compared to the posts of others.

The fight-loving comment was based off of a couple posts you made before about sims of yours who have had 450+ and 100+ fights. That's a heck of a lot of sim-on-sim action, and was noted as an observation as to why having a fight mod was so important to you, and also a minor dig at JM's vindictive nature in regards to his sims. Not that I can't be accused of the same...I'm in the midst of a mass-murdering, zombifying, neighborhood-flattening spree. Plus, a recently deceased dog in my neighborhood (Bert) was in approximately 15 brawls as apparently he was the neighborhood's bitch.

You also promote using deleteallcharacters and trashing sims with wants & fears from the bin. Both of which, when done regularly, cause ye ole ball of fire.  So, yeah....perhaps it would be a good idea to recognize that the top hack/modders here may know better.

You've got a very big obsession with fights, too. I think even Pescado would be alarmed.

It's not, that why I said "I suspect" instead of being more sure about it. It would make sense that the more expensive one would break down less, and that happened the one time I actually paid attention, but one comparitive sample does not make proof. If I cared more about crop-growing, I'd really test it, but, alas, I don't. I will be doing some in my Alpha/Apoc hybrid soon, but no sprinklers as I'm categorizing that as Medical (running water).

My sim kids haven't wanted the lemonade stand since Seasons, which is fine. They usually end up smashed by a nasty townie or chewn to bits by a dog, anyways. Now, I do have one sim whose want slots are filled with "make zombie of Sim X", but then I'm in the middle of setting up a second try at the Apocalypse Challenge and doing some cleaning. The Oversoul is about to get very angry. Also, Charisma is a murderous freak.

Were the homes that were on the last day of the first season new/newly moved into? My game always sets new homes to that day.

...and if you have poor personality qualities, specifically being mean or lazy.

If you sell it back, you can't buy the cooked items...unless BusinessRunsYou changes that. OFB and I aren't friends, as my simmies live long enough without wasting non-time on community lots.

I wasn't implying that. I just wondered if you had looked at JM's since it is similar, and you might get a bigger response promoting it on a site not of JM's, since a lot of us have his version. A lot of hackers/modders come out with similar work and that doesn't mean they've stolen from each other...just that the annoyance the mod is addressing is bad enough that more than one person cares to fix it.

I'm not downloading your particular hack, but that's just because I already have JM's, and his does what I want. Yours does some things I don't want (personal taste). Specifically "No more senseless fights or fights for fun only!" Fights should always be senseless. 

Not sure about the Clean Installer catching dupe lots (I didn't use the program until just a few months ago and I haven't downloaded a lot since...well...I can't remember...Uni?) but if you download & install the same lot twice, you will get the same lot twice in your catalog. Same as if you package your own lot to the bin twice.

Have you ever had to lift a pan full of eight stuffed lobsters? Those suckers are heavy.

But seriously, my non-body-point-needing sims only get enough to make them fit, if they desire fitness or someone who is attracted to fitness. Any past that are purely accidental from the dance sphere or the pool.

Alexx, have you seen JM's "wants & fears sanity"? It's a similar concept.