I use the gallery when placing new houses just to make it a faster process. I just Ctrl C copy the lot name, paste it in the gallery search and select a house (usually most popular) from the first few rows.
I quickly glance through the house to make sure all the doors are there. You wouldn't believe how many of the most popular homes are missing bathroom doors, etc., or maybe you would idk.
It would be great if we could download and place entire worlds from the gallery.
I wondered if others did that also, I bought the new Island expansion and have been spending all playtime evicting the sims and moving my families to the island. This time I moved the families in first then rebuilt the home to fit the family. This world is so small it has been hard to accomplish. I still left some in the city.
I was disappointed that it is not more like island paradise from TS3, loved the underwater stuff and exploring the islands.
The two things I hate about the sims are that the game is not started with a world big enough to expand as expansion packs come out instead of having to pick where you want your sims to live and playing that neighborhood; and the fact that we could not bring our favorite sims along for the journey to the new Sim games.
I've repopulated a whole Save with my own houses and families (after 4 years or building etc.) The problem now I find is that whenever I go to another family in this Save they are grown up, elderly or dead! Next one I will turn aging off so that I can control who grows up or dies.
Currently I am complaining on another thread that I can't find an urn for one of them! I need a cemetary or urn locator.
try looking in their inventory in build mode, that is where I found some
Here is the way I set up a "living", i.e. a world that uses MCC world progression. The first time you do this, it's a lot of work that requires 4-6 hours at least. It could be made so much easier by the devs if club management was easier and sims could be reskilled in CAS and if the unmodded game itself actually featured story progression.
Replace the community lot builds with whatever you like. The gallery offers plenty nice builds.
Download/have an interesting choice of sims in your library. Unfortunately, there is no way to (re)skill them quickly and easily in CAS or to assign job-preferences to them. Also, it would be usefull to have a folder-structure to manage your stored sims more easily (I guess you could invent some form of personal #-system for this).
Combine these sims into families of 6-7 sims (no more, else they won't be able to have children) according to some characteristic. For example, I have households for "mid aged singles", "mid aged families", "students", "elderlies", etc. At least in terms of looks, I like to have a nice variety of interesting characters (in terms of gameplay, sims have no characters anyway...). I do this grouping (rather than moving in single sim households) in order not to lose track of what I'm doing.
Place all those families in the world (the younger and single people usually go to the city, families and elderlies to the suburbs and countryside). I suppose that sims who are in the same world do show up more often than sims who are not in the same world? Note that I do not care at all about the appartment/house they go to - sometimes it's just an empty parcel of land. I just want to have them in my world and see them on community lots. You will need to use the "freerealestate" cheat to place your families.
Set up clubs, if you like (this is extremely tedious as you first need to delete the preset ones by playing each individual club-leader! And afaik you can't search sims in your world by their name. Also, many sims downloaded from the library come unskilled, which means you should not set skill entry barriers for your clubs)
Adjust all your marriage and pregnancy progression related settings in MCC. I usually also turn on all notifications so that I see if progression works and if my settings are okay (not too extreme). Setting the right balance is important (how often per week to run the tests needs to be calibrated with marriage/pregnancy chances and the aging setting of your game).
Use ww cheats to adjust global gender preferences. These will also be used by the MCC progression. I really like this as you can't see other sims' gender preference. It adds some hidden info/surprise element.
Adjust game difficulty in MCC - usually, I want to turn up the time it takes to increase skills (find a setting that balances well with your aging speed) and increase the cost of living (bills). I don't like it how you can "earn" money when you have a job at level 1! Job level 1 should barely keep you alive in the smallest ugliest appartment! Also, I like maxed out skills to be rare and hard to achieve (you'd need to neglect other aspects in life!).
Mark all your added households as "your households", unplayed. This is done to prevent sim-culling. (The game produces townies on its own; once the total number of your and the automatically created sims reaches 800, the game starts to delete sims; sims in "my households" are protected from deletion)
Wow. I just do changes as I go with my saved games. I have tried to remodel a world BEFORE starting to play but I just can't do it. I don't have the attention span or the willpower. I tried to rewamp Willow Creek once in a fairytail area, with only hobbit like houses and tree houses and I gave up. I just did the changes as I went along and added what was needed each time; community lots, residentials, Sims and Simfamilies, etc.
And in my main saved game I just add and remove community lots and housings as I go and do renovations as needed. I even once did a change to the Newcrest swimming pool's outside area while I had a Sim visiting there because it was raining and it had electronics. I had to add an open cover for the bar area. But at least my Sim got his experience increase in handiness fixing the broken electronics.
I am really impressed and a bit envious with you guys being able to create the world before starting to play.
Comments
I quickly glance through the house to make sure all the doors are there. You wouldn't believe how many of the most popular homes are missing bathroom doors, etc., or maybe you would idk.
It would be great if we could download and place entire worlds from the gallery.
I was disappointed that it is not more like island paradise from TS3, loved the underwater stuff and exploring the islands.
The two things I hate about the sims are that the game is not started with a world big enough to expand as expansion packs come out instead of having to pick where you want your sims to live and playing that neighborhood; and the fact that we could not bring our favorite sims along for the journey to the new Sim games.
try looking in their inventory in build mode, that is where I found some
You're ready to go!
And in my main saved game I just add and remove community lots and housings as I go and do renovations as needed. I even once did a change to the Newcrest swimming pool's outside area while I had a Sim visiting there because it was raining and it had electronics. I had to add an open cover for the bar area. But at least my Sim got his experience increase in handiness fixing the broken electronics.
I am really impressed and a bit envious with you guys being able to create the world before starting to play.