Great! Going to reinstall it again... After wasting so much time trying to redo sunset valley 2 to fit everything... can't believe I missed the fact that LA has everything I was trying to make from the get go.

I found a nice world, Saaquartoq by Nilxis, it's here:
http://nilxissims.blogspot.com/2011...-e-iglesia.html

It's made like a little town in Greenland, and the author managed to recreate the feel and atmosphere of this place. It's a small town, cute and fun to play. I think, even not very powerful computers can handle it well.
The world comes in twon versions - populated and unpopulated. I downloaded the populated one, it has a base camp and a hotel, so it makes a nice vacation destination (actually, this is what I downloaded it for).

Edit: it does have some flaws: lack of single young sims, quite a lot of elder sims, and half of the names are unpronouncable, LOL (I mean, Inuit names).

There's a new world out from Awesims, called St. Claire. It uses all the community lots through SHT. I just started looking at it, and I think it's pretty well made, although as it just came out I haven't spent much time with it, so I don't know if there is any buggy behavior yet.

http://awesims.sixty-ten.net/2012/0...for-the-sims-3/

I've been using Setra for a while now, and it's fantastic. Admittedly, I haven't tried very many other worlds (I tried Jericho, and while it was good, it just wasn't my cup of tea), so I'll have to try out more at some point.

Thanks for that link eskie! From the screenshots, St. Claire looks like just the kind of world I was searching for.

Coconut Island final version will be released in 2 weeks tops

Dammit, I really wish my game worked right now

I was just heading ingame to try out St. Claire for the first time. I've been waiting for a (YES! POPULATED!) neighborhood that's up to date with Showtime.

I downloaded St. Clair by Awesims, and it's really quite lovely and not huge. Plus the apartments and houses all look fabulous. She made some custom venues for showtime too. I really like it alot.

Johnnywr (who made Great Bear) has another nice world: Matkooskee.

It has For example this nice little cabin in this forest bit and the atmosphere is very much like Great Bear, just island type.
I'm really looking forward to see what he makes in the future.

Would that Awesims world work without downloading the cornices? I had them on my last install for another Awesims world, and I didn't care for them. If I don't have them when I try to install the world, will they just not show up in the world, or will the thing not even install?

It will install, but the buildings won't look the same. If you install them for this world, you're not obligated to use them in any of your own building, so you might want to consider just adding them to maintain the "look and feel" of the town.

I have noted a few pros and cons.

Pro. There are lots of good sized empty lots, most in standard sizes, for adding your own houses and community lots. I have found that with most custom worlds, I've been hard pressed to create additional lots to add my own content.

Con. A significant number (quite a few, but certainly not the majority) of the homes are unfurnished. If you enjoy furnishing and decorating, this isn't a problem, but if you just want to populate the world yourself, you'll have to handle the furnishing yourself. Of course, you don't HAVE to, but, if you like heavily populated town, you won't be able to expand your population to the size you might like until you furnish some more homes.

Possible issue. The big venue is created in a park. I'm not sure how that will work (not dark enough) for the big, fake crowd you usually have in the big venues. I haven't tried using it with a high enough level performer to find out if it works out correctly. If it does, great. If not, there are, as I mentioned above, multiple empty lots, a few large 64X64, that can allow placement of an EA pre-made big venue. The architecture won't match, but it's nice to know you have options if the park as big venue doesn't work out.

I have all expansions and the required mod items and I still got a "missing items" warning. But I don't see anything blatantly missing (like the bridge), so....whatever.

I generally do not play gamer made games anymore. Most of them are unpopulated, which makes them about as much fun as watching paint dry. A big part of the Sims games is the social interraction, and most player worlds lack this. It's really not the creators' fault; EA has made it difficult, but not impossible, to populate worlds. (In terms of families, I generally just relocate some of the families I have played in past worlds to my new world.)

Yes, there are ways to populate a city fast using Awesome Mod or Twallan's mods. Or you can move a bunch of families into a world. Been there, done that.

But when I use a player made world, I really want to have the feeling of a finished project rather than a work in progress.

Since self-population is so easy with Twallan mod, I don't think pre-population is a must-have feature.

Which is quite true. However I do understand wanting to open a new world that has it's own population, each person having their own backstory that interweaves with the 'plot' of the town. That's the sign of a world with depth.

I love me a good story, but I'd still pass on a world with a great story if the world itself is painted badly, or any number of other technical things.

Votenga's Avalon is very very nice indeed. Look on the official forums.

Yeah, but those sims will be a completely randomly generated mismatch drafted by the game... which means pitch-black skin combined with bright orange hair, bright blue eyes, sandals with socks and shorts combined with a tophat, not to mention the awful puddingy facial features. Sure it's fine if you don't mind the random EA sims, but some of us dislike them deeply. Which is why I'm pre-populating my own custom world with custom made sims all from the mailman to maids, bartenders and playable sims.

Generated pudding can easily be fixed with Twallan's Stylist option, though. I actually prefer unpopulated worlds, because I like fixing the 'immigrants' as they come in.

I've been playing version after version of the medieval world called Misty Valley. It's a blank canvas, and while the seam between world and unroutable land could be better, I like the road layout and how rustic the whole place is.

Twallan's method of population, with the right set up, uses the sims in your bin to breed from, so I've never experienced the pitch black blondes. I do have to remember to set the generated names to random or, I think, it defaults to last names formatted as mother-father. Rather confusing as I don't want the newly spawned sims related to my actively played sims.

Edit: I just checked, it uses sims from your library, not the bin.

Oh wow, that sounds quite promising! I always thought that the mod would just draft random sims in the EA manner, so thus never used the mod. But if it has that detailed settings, it means that there is a way out of EA pudding! Awesomesauce!

You can also tell it to ask you what to name them, so you can avoid utterly ridiculous names.

And of course you can determine how many of them will be vampires, celebrities, etc.

Jericho is a beautiful world, I like it very much. But I just downloaded St. Clair by Awesims.. OMIGOD this world is fantastic, you have to download it and check it out for yourself, I can't describe it, except to say it's really very realistic. I've fallen in love with it, and now I'm hooked. Try it out!!

I think St Clair looks gorgeous too, but as I far as I know, it won't even install unless one is patched to 1.33. Which is the patch I intend on forgoing as look as humanely possible ;-) Sad though, I'd really love to try that world! Pictures are just amazing.

I've got patch 1.31 and could install St Claire without any problem. What's more, I don't have SHT and could still play the world so I'd recommend trying it on your own.