Another noobish question...

Is there any way to separate lots in the lot bin? Maybe by putting them into collections or by rearranging them so that all of one sort is together, all of another is together, etc?

Because between the maxis lots, the downloaded lots, the empty 1x1 and 1x2 and so on lots, my custom residential lots, my custom community lots, my custom businesses... it's really getting rediculous. And I still have ALL the custom comm lots and the businesses to make for my new neighborhood. And they're all jumbled together with no rhyme or reason whatsoever.

Didn't mean to hold out on you! 

The terrain needs some icons... give me a couple of minutes to throw them together so it's not ugly in the chooser menu and I'll upload it.

It's completely naked and completely flat, which makes it look rather ugly imo... BUT when you use the concrete ground cover, huge skyrise buildings you can toss in from the neighborhood decorations and maybe stick a little grass in outlying areas... it looks pretty good! You can at least really get an idea what it'll look like when filled wall-to-wall with lots.

Edit: Added the terrain and its icons to this post as a .rar file. The 1x1 and such, like someone said above, were done by marylou - you can find it on MTS2. The awesome, awesome urban-themed stuff is the "Backdoor Lane" set by plasticbox on MTS2, which for your convenience is here: http://www.modthesims2.com/download.php?f=143&u=178282

I have one plant sim I'm playing with right now who's a fortune sim and has the LTW to own 5 top-level businesses. Naturally, this requires lots of money. I started her as a normal sim, and as she went through college I had her tend the dorm's plants, since I'd just gotten seasons and wanted to play with the gardening.

After a while of trying to play her normally, I wondered how well a "hippie" fortune sim would fare. When she got out of college, I moved her into a lot that I made into a small farm with a lake. She fished for her meals, and grew veggies and fruit to sell. Then she turned into a plantsim, and she was just so easy to play (especially since she was out in the garden all day, getting sunlight, love from the plants when she talked to them, and water from her nearby wishing well) that I decided to see just how much money she could generate.

She developed an obsession with selling masterpeices, so I'd paint one and leave it on the easel until her asp bar got to be low green, then sell it. If there isn't a painting up, her spare time is spent painting one. Rediculously easy asp points that also got her toward her money goal.

All the fruit, vegetables, and fish she generates goes to her home business, since she doesn't need to eat anymore. She sells them out of bins on her front porch, which amuses me greatly since it fits with my little hippie idea.

She got a want to buy a craft bench, so I had her eventually get a gold flower arrangement badge which got me snapdragon bouquets. One of those next to the cash register, one by the easel, and one by the computer... add a handful of sunlamps... and she pretty much never needed to stop for anything. Gardening, fishing, painting, and whenever she didn't have something else to do, she's writing novels.

She's bought two businesses now, is about to buy a third, and both of the daughters she's had so far have been sent to college with $25k in items in their inventory as a college fund. (I play with the no-$20k-handout hack in because... well, I can't say it was too easy and now it's not... but it goes a long way to make it more interesting.)

Well I think you could clean it all up in SimPE, but there's no point if you can just prevent the mess from being created in the first place. Other than that, yes.

Oh bleh. No more Marsha Broenig! No more Goopy! No matter what it takes! 

So just to be sure, even tho it seems kinda obvious... (I've been wrong before!  ) I want the stuff and instructions under EMPTY TEMPLATES, plus the stuff immediately above it under Seasons Update, right?


Judging from what I've read, if you use DAC, they're all created and then deleted - but the deletion is messy, leaves bits of info all over the place, and those bits could (and will, according to most people) eventually mess everything up. If you clean out the template they're never created in the first place.

The longer you play a neighborhood the more likely it's going to eventually explode into bizarre behavior. But the more careful you are to eliminate these "rogue information" pieces, the longer your neighborhood will be safe.

...But then again I'm a noob so someone can feel free to correct me. 

So if I want to create my own custom neighborhood, not use the maxis premade anything, I still need the empty templates if I don't want to have any maxis townies?

I think I'm confused now.

I have a greenhouse on one of my lots and I've never once had bugs inside it, and I don't have any hacks related to the Seasons gardening that I know of.

On the same lot, I have six fruit trees outside the greenhouse (can you even put them in there? hmm... never tried it) in two rows of three. I have two ladybug houses, one in the middle of the first four trees and one in the middle of the second four. They work excellently and I only wind up spraying once or twice a "year."

I'm not sure if they prevent bugs from appearing, or if they automatically remove bugs on a regular basis... if it's the latter, you might be spraying a lot 'cause you're micromanaging a bit too much. I've taken to ignoring my fruit trees mostly, and using macrotastics to Garden whenever I see it come up as available and/or when the plants in the greenhouse or trees need tending. When I started taking that hands-off approach I found I noticed FAR less bugs, so I'm inclined to think the ladybug houses remove bugs after they spawn.

But then again, I'd just adjusted the ladybug houses' positions under the trees so it might've been a radius issue.

Either way, hope that helps a bit.


I've heard that's an outdated hack doing that. Before I found this forum I waded through the forums over at Gamefaqs, here: http://boards.gamefaqs.com/gfaqs/gentopic.php?board=914811 There is a lot of stupidity over there, but if you can stand to wade through it, the sparkling food gets mentioned every couple of days and someone always mentions it's a conflict with an outdated version of a known hack. I just can't remember which one.

Thanks again for all the info here!!

I've been reading tutorial threads and playing with all sorts of stuff. But even after reading the thread about the blank templates, I have one major question about them:

What ARE they? From reading I think they're blank templates of the existing neighborhoods - Pleasantview, Strangetown, and Veronaville, plus the pre-built sub-neighborhoods, so you can play the maxis-created stuff without having any premade townies or families. Is that right?

In that case, I think I'd rather have my own neighborhood anyway.


I have a set of lots I got from MTS2, which combines two things I adore - very small lots and an urban city theme. I even aquired a copy of SimCity 4 (arr!) so I could make my own map with the streets very close together, to reflect the small size of my new lots. (The widest point between streets is 4 squares... so it could take one 4x4 lot which would take up the whole space, or a 1x1 and a 3x1.) Soon I'll make a similar map for my own Downtown. I decided my shopping district would be more suburban, just in case I felt like playing a lot with a big backyard now and then.

I'm getting SimPE installed right now, so I can use the binning tool to make some of my custom hair not custom anymore so the hair color can be passed down genetically.

After that, I've got notownierespawn, nodormierespawn, nossrespawn, and noredundancy installed. I'll install nostrayrespawn after I let it spawn all the strays at creation. (Speaking of which... the only way to add to the stray pool is to have a pet on a playable lot and abuse them so they run away... is that correct?  )

Once I've created my neighborhood, I use CAS to make a bunch of townies, move them into a lot, and use the teleporter shrub to make them all into townies and downtownies. Then I go to the university, do some create-a-student there, and when I make them "townies" they'll become dormies 'cause they're YA, right?

Once I've done that, then I think I'm finished, and I can start building lots and families and etc and play!

Did I miss anything? 

For what the info may or may not be worth...

I have ALL the EPs and Stuff packs, and I've never patched a thing except what might have come on a previous EP or Stuff pack, though I'm pretty darn sure one has never come with a patch before.

I installed Celebration Stuff. It did the usual "We will now check to make sure your Sims installation is up to date." And then it returned up-to-date. THEN it demanded that I patch Pets, which I let it do...

After all that, it demanded I use the Seasons disk to run.

Wow, Assmitten, that little tour was exremely helpful! It's still a little wierd and confusing but hopefully I've got it now. (Also, my inner 12 year old won't stop giggling because I typed "Assmitten" and I'm not being rude. Assmitten! ...I'm done now.)

Okay!

So, after poking around the site, I've decided what I really want to do is start a brand-new neighborhood completely from the bottom up! (Gee, I'm not ambitious or anything for a noob, oh no... )

So... what are these empty templates? And where would I get one?

Barring those, what I think I need to do isi nstall hacks like no townie regen, no pet regen, etc etc etc. so that none of the generated townies/strays will come back, and I can put in my own using the instructions that are... uh, well I can't find it anymore but I'll find it, there's some thread around here that tells how to make your pre-created sims into townies.

1. Do I do this for NPCs like the maid or the Diva or the mailman, too? I don't recall that part in the thread, maybe I missed it.

2. How about strays? I think they're auto-generated the first time I enter the neighborhood, are they removed by deleteallsims too, and replaceable somehow? I don't see the benefit to making my own pets as much, except maybe to have a few custom breeds in the pool of strays... oh, and maybe not having 3 dogs named Noodle...

3. I'm going to need new community lots too. I've made a few of my own, but I've always used the default shopping district and downtown with my empty main neighborhood, so I'm going to need a lot of new, interesting, fun lots. There are some from the defaults I'm very fond of... would it hurt anything to put them into the lot bin and put them in the new neighborhood? Actually, what I like to do is move them somewhere, put a smaller empty lot next to it, and go back and forth between the two, copying the parts of the basic lot I like and cutting out all the wasted space, rebuilding it to be smaller, load faster, etc. Would it be bad to do this in my main neighborhood? I could have a seperate neighborhood for testing stuff and rebuilding lots like that, unless I'll do more damage moving around unoccupied lots *between* neighborhoods than I will adding-deleting-moving lots within the *same* neighborhood...

Thank you for the link to the faq!

I'm ashamed how retarded I sound when I say this but it's the honest truth, I find BBS systems with this many nested forms very hard to navigate, and I haven't been able to find these threads on my own.

Could someone link me to the forum where these awesome faq threads are held? (I'm checking out the links section in the faq you already linked, thank you again for that! but I don't want to miss any so pretty please link me!  )

I promise not to ask any more questions that have been covered in a faq!


Oh, and thanks very much for the welcome... but I've been lurking here long enough to know not to believe for a minute that you guys don't bite. Good thing I don't mind!

Having read the brilliance of many posts around here over the past couple of days, I have come to realize that I know next to nothing about the sims.  So I have a handful of questions that hopefully you good people will answer.

1. I'm just starting to play with the idea of creating my own custom neighborhood instead of trying to butcher Pleasantview into being what I want it to be. I read a topic which detailed deleting all the sims in a neighborhood and creating your own. Is there a reason you would want to do this, other than not having the same hideous townies all the time? Like for example, leaving the maxis-made ones in will cause some kind of Doom and FUBAR the whole neighborhood.

2. Speaking of FUBAR... I've seen an acronym around here referring to fiery balls of doom and such. What does this actually mean, referring to the game? If you get over 500 sims (or whatever) is there a literal rain of fire? Does it just stop loading one day? Does it get too glitchy to play?

3. Is it bad to make a new sim in CAS with custom hair? Is it better to create them with a basic black/brown/red/blonde hair color that can be passed down through genetics, then use the mirror to give them new hair once they're in play?

4. I would really like to have my own custom townies, now that I know such a thing is possible. Would it be better to get rid of my beginning of a neighborhood and start fresh so I can use the directions outlined in the thread I mentioned?

4a. Would doing something like the above be the only way to introduce custom skin tones and eye colors into the townie pool?

5. I really enjoy servos, especially to use them as managers for businesses my sims own. But I hate their mechanical look. Ever since I found it I've used the technique in this tutorial here (http://thesims2.ea.com/exchange/story_detail.php?asset_id=113665) to make Servos into androids. I make my template sim, move them into a lot, use them for Sim Surgery via SimPE, then move them out and delete them from the sim bin. They never talk to anyone. Is this stupid? Am I somehow inviting Doom by doing this? Is there some other, non-stupid way of getting servos to look human?


Thank you all for your help.

I got this particular clock from a site on geocities or something, the name of which escapes me... but judging from the quality of the few other items I got from there, their illogial behavior doesn't surprise me in the least.   

That'll teach me to download things from strange places.

I had another CC clock that was a recolor of the CyberChonometer clock... I never used it anyway, so I deleted it and reloaded and poof, there it was.

How weird.

At any rate, problem fixed, and thank you for your help!

I'm alt-tabbed from something I ought to be doing so I can't start up Sims to check, but I've re-downloaded the hack a couple of times now, most recently today.

I'll check for it in an hour or two. I don't know whether to hope it's that easy to fix, or hope that it isn't because then I'm not *completely* stupid. 

More or less as the subject states, I am having a major dysfunction and cannot figure out how to get sleepclock to work. 

I've checked every clock I have, maxis and custom ones, and none of them have any options other than the usual. (Set For Work.) I've checked every folder I can think of to check to see if there's a custom clock that has all these settings, and I cannot find one. I've checked my sim's pie menu both when a clock is on the lot and when there isn't (just in case!). I've checked the bed's pie menu. I've installed Bathroom Uses You, even though I didn't particularly care to use it, because an offhanded comment four pages deep in some thread or other suggested that it was required.

Why am I defective? 

Could someone point me to where I can find the pie menu options? And/or list what other mods are required to make it run? Thank you in advance - I've been wanting to use this hack ever since I saw it.