UPLOAD - Brisa (a beach style house... in a normal lot)

There was an announcement at MTS regarding a little challenge - monthly themes!
The theme for this month is "a day at the beach" so I decided to build something on purpose. Which is rather unusual for me.
Also the very first time sharing something I built with UC - so unluckily it requires all the expansions. But as usual no custom content was included.
To be honest I'm quite happy of the outcome :)

What will you find?
It is a two bedroom beach house. But it's not placed on a beach lot so it can be used in any other kind of neighborhoods as well.

Outside it looks like a quite classical wooden house but the inside is decorated in a modern style.

Would you like to see more pics?
Do you want to download it?
You will find all the information and images at MTS.

TUTORIAL - How to change the language of UC

When I downloaded The Sims 2 Ultimate Collection from Origin it automatically installed in my language.
But for some reasons I wanted to temporary change it to English.

It is slightly different from other versions so I'm writing it down so I don't have to figure it out again next time.

1. Open the register editor. The easiest way is typing regedit into your Windows search bar.
2. There are a lot of subfolders there; don't freak out.
   You need to expand  HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE, then SOFTWARE, if you are on 64 bits also Wow6432Node, then EA Games, then The Sims 2 Fun with Pets Collections.
   Too hard to find? Don't despair and use the search function instead: search for Fun with Pets and most likely the editor will find the right path - just look at the status bar to make sure you got there.
3. There should be a subfolder named 1.0 which you must select.
4. Double click on Language and edit your code with the one of the language you want to use (see below). Make sure to enter it as a decimal value instead of a hexadecimal one.
   
   

   CODE	Language
   1	U.S. English
   2	French
   3	German
   4	Italian
   5	Spanish
   6	Swedish
   7	Finnish
   8	Dutch
   9	Danish
   10	Brazilian Portuguese
   11	Czech
   12	Hebrew
   13	Greek
   14	Japanese
   15	Korean
   16	Russian
   17	Simplified Chinese
   18	Traditional Chinese
   19	UK English
   20	Polish
   21	Thai
   22	Portuguese
   23	Hungarian

5. You may also click on LanguageName with the name of the language you want to use, but it's not mandatory.

And that's it, you are done. Go enjoy the game in whatever language you have chosen!

UPLOAD - 101 Road to Nowhere B

It has been a while since I uploaded anything at all!
I have a few lots I could share but I never got to take pictures and actually upload them... until now.

This is a version of 101 Road to Nowhere (Smith family home) which I built from scratch.
I specially wanted to change the upper bedrooms structure and improve the landscaping, and here you have the result:

Do you want to see more pics and download the lot?

UPLOAD - Custom bills (for houses & apartments)

I finally decided to make some changes to this blog.

Blogging about my stories is quite fun but also very time consuming - and I doubt anyone else wants to hear about them anyway xD
So I think I should be spending more time playing and less time writing about it. In face I've even hidden all the previous entries about my games - so hopefully the blog will look much less cluttered now.

While doing so I realized there are two uploads which I had not blogged about.
And it's funny because my custom bill mods is my most popular upload at MTS so far :D

As the name says it's just an override for the default bills so you may get more expensive ones if you wish so.
They come in many different flavours and you may choose different ones for your houses and apartments.
This will allow you to customize your hood economy very easily!!

UPLOAD - Flowery Fields

My last upload to MTS was actually something very simple:
A flat cemetery full of bushes and flowers, so your dead ones may rest in peace. Nothing fancy here, just a useful layout for all the graves.

These pictures belong to the large version, but there is also an smallish one which I use when families want to own a private cemetery of their own.

More pictures and file to download are located at MTS.

UPLOAD - Heritage Manor

I was talking about this new building of mine a few entries ago.
I did not expect to upload it so soon, but I was engaged in a discussion about how to create an elder care home for retired Sims and I thought some people could find this building of mine interesting.

It is a rather big building, with plenty of different sections which are sure to provide plenty of entertainment for my pixels even if they are left alone on their own.

More information, pictures and downloadable files at ModTheSims.

UPLOAD - Curiosity Dorm

Yay! Another lot of mine got accepted at MTS.

In this case it's a college dorm inspired by the Curious house.
That's why I called it Curiosity Dorm. Original, huh? xD

It's a 4 bedrooms dorm with all my Strangetown sims want... including of course a telescope.
Bedrooms were kept simple, but the building is fully furnished an ready to play.

If you want to see more pics or download it, please check it at MTS.

Tutorial - Basic troubleshooting

I recently experienced some weird behaviour in my game. A little nuisance: water puddles would not go away.
But it might have been the symptom of a serious issue, so after asking for advice at MTS I decided to dedicate some time to troubleshoot my game.

I was given a link to a very complete and detailed guide (which you can find here) but I figure that it's a good idea to keep a short summary which helps me to get an idea of the right steps to follow next time I have a similar issue -and what worked for me in the past.

Strangetown [32] Take my skin off!!

I am not a CC-holic.
I usually don't bother to download something unless I absolutely fall in love with it. You know, the kind of things you think will really boost your gaming experience, not just the cute ones.

But I've been reading a lot about geneticized skins lately, and the idea of having more diversity was really really tempting.
I only had to choose which ones I wanted. But that was much harder than it seemed.

Because I made my mind that I could have a really dark skin now as default (at least to me, the Maxis dark skin seems rather light) and several in-between skin colors between the light and the dark one.
Nothing worked for me, because all the CC skins defaults just added the darker shades as "darker than the darkest default" and for my sturborn obssesive mind it should no be like that.

So.
I got this beautiful skintone set by PeachT, created my defaults, geneticized them and made them townie-friendly as well.
It took me a while because it was my first time doing all those things, but I must admit that the result is beautiful -and what's even better, now I have 7 different skin colores which are actually arranged the way I want them!

Now my NPCs looks like this:

I have tons of pictures of this last round in Strangetown. Seriously, tons. Of all them, even if nothing of interest happened in their house.
I also saved the loading screen pictures when I finished, so I could see all the members of the household together (to notice the subtle diferent shades in skin colors).

So this is a warning: the rest of this post is image heavy!
(To balance it, I'm gonna try to keep the text short.)

TUTORIAL - How to send a townie to university

Emma wanted to go to college. And she also wanted her high school boyfriend to go with her (which makes sense, wouldn't it be sad if she were a young adult while he stays as a teenager forever?).
But he was a townie.
And I don't want townies to become playables at that stage :(

I must admit I love Free Time's feature which allows the player to choose which NPCs will age up with your playables, so best friends and lovers can grow together.
But it does not work for young adults. Pity.

For the sake of sending this guy to university, I learned something new: Townifying my Sims!
And since it's likely I will soon forget about it, I'm writing this short tutorial :D