Dusty footprints? :O *goes to look*

Zarathustra, the side of the road pavement is towards the end of the "poured" (or is it concrete?) floors catalogue, only the colour seems different. It's the one that comes with a paw marks version, they're next to each other so easy to spot.

The construction floor exists as CC, I don't remember where from (4ESF 8DeadlySims on the booty?).
Edit: yup, "8DeadlySimsFloor01" for me but I'm likely to have renamed it.

If I put a second apartment door (ie, the one with the floor mat that seperates the apartments), will it function as a proper back door or will it screw up something in the apartment? I want my sims to be able to have useable fire escapes, but I don't want to have any old sim be able to just waltz in off the street any time they want (like would happen if I just used a normal door).

Do you have to have the Reagents in your inventory before the make spell will show up? I'm using the buyable Reagents but the make spells doesn't show up on the cauldron.

Have you reached the skill level needed for the spells you are trying to do? You have to have a certain skill level before you can cast certain spells.

I maxed out their magic skill using the book of talent.

Anothereyjana, you will screw up the entire apartment if you have more than one entrance. Apartments are extremely fussy about what they do and do not allow. Even giving them a second entrance to a yard will screw it up if the yard has a gate, or the house is on a foundation. Exterior private spaces must be on the same level as the entrance door.

You can mimic a fire escape by running stairs past their windows. Place fire hazards well away from the entrance and they'll be all right. Since each apartment is an individual sublot, fire will never spread to an apartment from another unit or the common area, and they cannot be trapped from below or by a fire in the hallway, which are the contingencies fire escapes are built to cover.

Thanks Peni. I wasn't really worried about fires (hadn't actually even thought of what you mentioned. Whoops.), I just wanted them to have a pseudo-balcony, which seems to be what a lot of people use them for IRL. I guess I can just delete or block the stairs and put a regular door in so that I won't find random sims popping in and out of apartments. Especially townies and those creepy stalkery hobby people. Thank god for the mods that stop them from visiting you, the phone calls are already bad enough!

You can also put a functional fire escape PROVIDED THAT it's only accessible from the public areas of an apartment.

My turn now- what happened to the basegame feature that added work clothes to a Sims' standard available wardrobe? I remember being able to dress a Sim in an astronaut suit or a general's uniform if they or anyone in the household had held that position at some point... yet at some point that ability disappeared, and I want it back!

I've had some success with my apartments having second entrances but I used the tutorial which is around here somewhere about the invisible fence surrounding the raised foundation and then putting the stairs. Although there was fencing surrounding the area the stairs led to so it would be impossible for anyone else to access it.

The notion that apartments can only have the one entrance is a myth.

You can have an unlimited number of entrances/exits to an apartment, provided you seal off the additional entrances/exits using one of the Great Divide fences in the Fence build bin. The reason Maxis made those fences as visually unobtrusive as possible is precisely to allow them to be used in this manner, in my opinion.
I wrote a simple pictorial on this last October, here.
There is no need to use additional apartment doors (Unique Separator), since regular doors can just be locked in the normal manner to keep unwanted Sims out. The Unique Separator apartment doors basically just act as an initial focal point where Sims purchase the apartment. After that, they act just like any other door. There is no need to use more than one Unique Separator per apartment and I actually don't know whether using more than one would even work.

You have 1 Unique Separator per apartment, along with any number of additional doors desired, as longs as those additional doors are sealed off using the Great Divide fences, as shown in my pictorial. There is nothing complicated about this, look at the pictorial.

I think the reason this myth persists is mostly because a number of players use the Great Divide fences in ways which in my opinion they were not intended to be used, namely, as room dividers to isolate Sims from one another, when desired. For example, to isolate baby cribs and prevent crying babies from disturbing other Sims in the room and a number of similar uses. In reality, using the Great Divide fences for things like this is really nothing more than a form of cheating. Nothing wrong with it, if that's the way a player wants to play, as there are countless other cheats used in the game, but I think it's important to remember to call it what it is.

To be clear, by Entrance I meant the Unique Separator door. The space enclosed by the apartment boundaries beyond that is all perceived by the inhabitants as "inside" the apartment - so if you have a trailer with a fenced yard for the dog, the housetrained dog will go into the common area to do his business. Which no doubt makes the neighbors very happy.

Wow, I wasn't expecting this many replies, thanks everyone. I'll probably go back and try the room dividers you mentioned (right now there's just deco and some OMSPs blocking it ). My main thing was keeping them off the fire escape and out of the apartments. I'm re-doing a pre-built, and the faux fire escape goes right up to the roof, which I also wanted to keep random passer-by from accessing, if I could.

The public areas of an apartment LOT. I tend to call each individual sublot a "unit" and the building as a whole an "apartment."

I am so frustrated. When I install the Sims 2 Clean pack installer, what location do I use? I install it in the downloads folder of my game or should I put it on my desktop? It is been awhile since I have played (I sold my games, then recently started playing again) and I cannot remember where to place it. The only objects that will not install in the game our houses. I am ready to throw in the towel...help!

No it goes on your desktop, it's a program not a piece of cc. After downloading a lot it probably looks like a rar file, unzip it. Then click on the sims 2 pack that it extracted and Clean Installer will open it. If this is a cc free lot only the lot file will show and you click install. It will show the path it's going to as the teleport folder which is where lots go to. So click install and when you run the game, the game will move the file and you should find the lot ready to place in your hood in the house bin.

Desktop. It's a utility, not a download. You'll need to change the default installer for Sims2Packs from the one that came with the game to CleanInstaller.

You might want to go back to the downloads thread and refresh your memory of how it works, too, so you don't leave out any steps or confuse it with another utility. Which is the sort of thing I would do under the circumstances.

It doesn't go into any game folders. Put it anywhere else on your computer you desire.

So, for instance, when I download a house in .zip form, do I extract to the Clean Installer first or do I extract it to the downloads folder in my sims game, which doesn't work.

You unzip the rar or zip first on your desktop. Inside is the sim2pack, you click on that and Clean Installer opens it.

What Jo said.
With Lots, it doesn't matter where you put the Sims2Pack files. All you have to do is click on them and Clean Installer will automatically start and then you just follow the prompts to install the Lot. Lots are not the same as CC and they don't go into the game's downloads folder.

I don't even unzip my Sims2.pack files. I double click the file within my WinRAR program and Clean Installer takes it from there. If your lots have CC in them, then the CC will go into your downloads. folder.

If the lot has cc you should make a separate folder called the name of the lot and place the cc inside of that, not directly into your Download folder. Then if there are no issues with the cc (I picked up a kitchen counter that crashed my game from a lot) You may want to then move the cc into other folders.

It's not for every type of building (it's very grungy) but there's a deco object fire escape here .

I am disagreeing with your post, because the Great Divide fences came with the Pets expansion pack. They won't be found in Maxis pre-made apartment lots, because they weren't carried forward from Pets to AL. And simmers should be careful using them on apartment lots, because if used inside an apartment, whatever they seal off will be treated as common space.

So, they were originally designed to divide living spaces. Simmers have implemented that in a number of creative ways.