build week #1: moving mountains

First, welcome to build week! Or weeks, I guess, since it ends up taking about a month, lol!

You can expect fluffy building posts, some storytelling discussion, and lots of picspam! If you're not interested in the building and remodeling stuff, and would like to skip ahead to the start of the next story season, go here: winter 2083/84: still hear you.

I have a list of the projects I intend to work on in the "coming soon..." box, though I don't expect I'll have enough time to finish all of them. I hope to at least make some progress on each of them. And I'll share pics as I go along.

My first project was learning to use the neighborhood terrain editing cheat. It's kind of an essential cheat to laying down rail track, so I dug into it. And I practiced by moving a mountain, lol!

Before...

And after! :)

Okay, so this is totally not a tutorial. To write a tutorial, you kind of have to know a lot about something. And I know next to nothing about this, since it's the first time I tried it. But I did learn a few tricks I could share. If you're interested in trying it out, here are the cheats:

(You need the Freetime EP)
modifyNeighborhoodTerrain [on/off]

To raise: [
To lower: ]
To level: \
To smooth: p

Of course, back up your neighborhood first! Especially since any changes made from the neighborhood screen are instant and you can't "go back." I'd also recommend exiting out and saving once every hour or so, depending on how much you're doing. Again, because the changes are instant and you can't go back, so you can't "exit without saving" if you mess something up.

I was scared to try out this cheat, for fear of borking my neighborhood terrain in an irreparable way, but once I got into it, I actually found it quite easy. There really isn't much you can break, since if you raise something too high, you can just lower it again - and vice versa. In fact, I've found that in the past, I've been much more likely to deform my neighborhood terrain by moving around oddly shaped lots than I have using this tool. And this tool can also fix those odd deformities caused by moving lots.

First, you NEED to know (because it apparently wasn't that obvious to me, lol!) that you can select large areas of terrain by dragging. It took me a good freaking hour to figure this little gem out, lol! Seriously, you can see the pock-marks I was making at this mountain just trying to lower it point by point. Hell no!

So go ahead and take a big chunk of that bad boy and knock it down!

Also, my favorite part of these cheats was the P key, which smooths the terrain. Use it after you've got things to just about the right level, and it will lower out your high points, and raise up your low points, and give you some soft rolling hills instead of jagged edges.

As demonstrated...

Before...

And after.

I never tried the \ key, but as it says, it probably flattens out the selected terrain. Most of these tools seem to work just as the terrain tools work inside the lot.

So this is what I ended up with in the end. I stopped because I got tired last night, and had intended to lower those hills a bit more. But now, I think I kind of like them. Maybe? So maybe they'll stay.

Please don't pay attention to my misaligned tracks, because that's a work in progress. But you can kind of see how I intend it to wrap around the hill, and back across the river. I'll add in a highway overpass back there too. And that's the way to Lake City, by the way ;)

But unfortunately, I'm finding that the scale for these pieces might be much too large for my neighborhood layout.

Also don't mind that blued-out community lot in the back there. I changed the lot size, and it's owned, and I haven't been bothered yet to load up the owner, who lives in Lake City, just so I can actually take him there, so he can edit it... blah! That's one part of OFB that's a nuisance, that you have to actually have the owner there to make changes. It'd be nice if there was a way to edit from neighborhood screen still.

But anyway, as you can see here, to have the track running to the place where I'd envisioned it, I would need a much sharper and steeper turn that this downslope will allow. (You say, "WTF, Laura, this is a train not a roller coaster!") But the set only comes with one kind of turning downslope. Maybe I'll fake it by covering it up with rocks and trees, and we'll use our imaginations? lol!

But even the train stop itself is HUGE! And stretches well beyond the length of the entire Lakeside Heights town center, lol! I think I'll probably just use the track and trains, and maybe build my own platform around it. The nice thing about these pieces is that they do lay through lots, so I could build my own smaller platform around it - and bonus, then my Sims could actually stand on it as a story set! :)

So that's that then. Moved a whole mountain! And now I'm trying to make these enormous track pieces work with my very tightly fitted neighborhood.

***

Part 2, this is the little family house that you're voting on for the download. I figure it's not really fair to have you voting on something you've never seen, lol!

Layout - 2x2 lot. Two bedrooms, one bathroom with utility space (aka, where you put your hack objects, lol!), one closet that could be another bathroom if you wanted. Not much of a yard, but a small patio, and you could easily use the lot adjuster to pop that back yard back a little. This is very minimally decorated, at the moment. Just enough to give you an idea of where the furniture could go. But whatever lot actually wins the poll, I'll probably go through again and give it a little more attention.

I actually first built this as a model of the RL-condo I live in, with the layout, walls and floors. I know bright walls aren't everybody's thing, but I love them ;)

Kitchen. Obviously ;)

I don't have a family living in this one at the moment, but it's in my Hazel Park neighborhood of Lakeside Heights. Maybe Chandler and Jane might be ready to move out of their little box-condo and into an actual house soon ;)