build week #3.5: what not to do with the lot adjuster

Experiments and failures on placing lots "off-grid"

So I had this grand idea that I'd take some houses, and place them along a fake street, to use up some of that pesky middle space in one of my city blocks. So that street in the middle of the picture is completely decorative, and the homes there are placed "off-grid", meaning they're not attached to any actual road.

These houses I used are by Maisie by the way.

And for the most part, it worked. But I did run into a few deal-breaking (in my book, anyway) problems.

But first I'll go over how I did it, in case anyone else is stubborn enough to need to figure this out, lol! Maybe you can help me solve some of these problems.

First, I placed them along the real road, facing the direction I want them to face when they're finished. Then I made a note of where I wanted them to end up, 4 units back, and 3 units left.

I did these three at a time, but if I ever felt inclined to do this again, I'd do all 6 at once, because it's a hassle to have to exit out of the game to use the Lot Adjuster, and then load everything up again. It's less of a hassle to have to move your existing lots somewhere else until you're done.

You'll be working under the advanced options this time - three left, and four back.

And hey, look, that "regenerate roads" box was what I actually needed to get the road tiles to show up on the parking lot one. Good to note for later.

So they're perfectly playable as they are. And they actually even retained the road in front of the house. But the deco road is far too bothersome to play so close up, as it actually sits up off the ground by quite a bit. (Why, oh why, did they have to be made to sit SO far up off the ground???)

Which seems simple, just delete the deco road, right?...

But if you remove the deco road, there won't be one showing in neighborhood view. And from inside the lot, the only road that will show is the lot you're actually on. So you won't see any of the fake road for the other houses on the street either.

I did even try re-tiling over the road space with road tiles, but that wouldn't show up in neighborhood view, or outside the lot view, either.

So I ran out of ideas then for creating a fake street with real houses on it, and considered that one a fail for now.

***

And I did this instead: I filled my empty space with a faux rental village, which is really not news or anything. People build these things all the time. Doesn't make them any less cool though ;)

Note: overlapping lots again! I'm totally addicted! I can't stop myself!!! lol!

View of my fake street from inside the lot. They're all basically identical.

I know there's a trick to getting these houses to function as apartments, up on a foundation, but with the back yard still usable. But I forget what it is. Simple way is to just not include a back door until after they move in - but I know there's another trick too. Does anyone remember what that was?

Of course, there had to be a parking lot ;)

I left a couple spaces empty to be usable for whoever moves in here. And I hope someone does, because I love them for being so little and simple! They're two bedrooms, 1.5 bathrooms, and they have a decent-sized yard too.

And for all the detail I put into arranging those dumpsters and garbage deco, I can't believe I didn't take a better picture of them! Well, they look very trashy, lol!

And here's the current view of Lake City's Old West End. The fake street doesn't look so great from neighborhood view as the deco one did, but I'd rather have it look better from lot view. So I'll take this :)

***

Next thing not to do with the lot adjuster... bork Bella's house, lol! The poor girl is just not having a good time right now - besides being on bedrest for the final five months of her pregnancy (I sped up her pregnancy too fast, and now she's paused "in labor" lol!), I also went and ruined her house! I built the row she lives in a long time ago, with an old version of the lot adjuster which would allow for shrinking straight to the very edge of the lot. So her house, on a 1x2 lot, is actually the full 10 tiles across.

I also built her house before there were ceilings in game, so I thought I'd enlarge it, fix the ceilings, and then shrink it again.

But no, can't do that. Or at least, I can't shrink it the way I could back in the previous version. I didn't know that they'd enforced the 1-tile-edge rule right into the program, or I would have left it as it was. (I never really had the crashing problem everyone else was having with the edge-to-edge rowhouses.) So now, I can either rework the layout, shaving 1 full tile off both sides of the house, or scrap it. Honestly, I'm kind of leaning towards scrapping it. The main reason I like those houses is because they're so spacious inside, being 10 tiles across. So having to shave off that much space would really be a very tight squeeze.

What I can do though is replace it with a binned version, and redecorate the whole thing... but that doesn't sound like a lot of fun either. So first the poor girl got knocked up, then lost her job over it, then she got put on bedrest, and now her house has "a termite problem" lol!

At least I know not to touch my other edge-to-edge rowhouses!

***

And to quickly revisit what we were talking about in the last one, the decorative cars mod in community lots - this is what always happens to me:


When I try to fill so many spaces, I always get like fifteen white Smoogos, lol! And always the yellow sports car, and the dark blue van. Even if it didn't want to use any of my custom cars, it would at least look better if it would use some alternating colors of the base Nightlife cars.

So blah - it's usually fine for filling smaller lots, with only a few spaces in it. But large lots look silly with so many similar cars. I'm still working on the perfect solution to the whole community zoned parking lot thing... and so far, it's looking like the perfect solution might be just leaving it a residential lot?