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

UPLOAD - Amphithéâtre Apartments

Two months ago I uploaded my first apartments building to MTS.
And just today my second one got posted!

It's a very different kind of building, both practically and aesthetically.
I built it thinking about the general structure of a modern amphitheatre, which was obviously modified to suit an apartment building.
 I also wanted a kinda exotic look which would stand out in my neighbourhoods but would not look too weird in a modern world. So. Here it is.

UPLOAD - Cheapdale Place

My very first upload to MTS!
I'm so happy one of my submissions made it... and that it also got picked by the MTS2 staff  ^o^
I really did not expect that!

I submit a first version two weeks ago, but it did not have enough quality and did not do it.
The nice mod comments were very encouraging, and the star score system allowed me to figure out what needed to be improved for this new version.
I asked for help in the MTS forums because my roofs still looked poorly, and after some interesting suggestions of fellow members this is what turned out!

Clean premade neighbourhood templates

I must admit I had no idea that my game could be corrupted.
I guess I never played it long enough to let corruption spread enough to be noticeable, because I tend to get bored of a neighbourhood fairly fast and move on to a new one or restart a default one.
But since I learned it was possible, I'm trying to be as careful as I can.

Hacks and mods I love

So this is a very personal section, because the packages listed here are not required for a safe or enhanced game, but really improve my personal gameplay and I don't think playing TS2 without them would be the same!
So I'll keep the list here, in case I ever lose them and want to find them again ^-^

Safe gameplay

After years of playing TS2 the way EA intended it to be played, I've recently learned that there are several issues which may lead to neighbourhoood and game corruption even if you don't mess around.
So...
This is a list of things you may screw up without really noticing you're doing something wrong.