I've recently decided to get back into The Sims 3 and decided to populate my world with some of the great unique sims that I've been seeing here and there online. While I do generally understand where to install them (sims go into the SavedSims folder, packages in mods / packages, etc. ), my problem is trying to understand just how to make them all work together.

1. First problem: The overwhelming majority of sims I've seen available rely on hordes of custom content. Pretty much every one of them at least requires unique skin and / or hair. I can understand having a bunch of hair installed in the game (something that I was planning on doing anyway) but the skin? It seems like there are a thousand different skins out there. Can't the game only use one at a time? How do I get, say, 10 different sims with 10 unique skin textures to load up properly in my game at the same time?

2. If the problem is that the sims I've downloaded aren't in the form of a .Sims3Pack file (that's the file that comes WITH the necessary CC, right?) but rather a mere.sim file that doesn't include everything that's needed for them to show up properly, what do I do? For example this site has loads of great characters but the vast majority of them either (A) come with a pile of prerequisites such as skins or face masks or nose shaders and whatnot that I guess I'm supposed to package together myself or (B) apparently require other files but don't link to (or even mention) them at all. http://sims-simseverywhere.tumblr.com/tagged/Female Is this the normal procedure? Individually seeking and downloading all the individual pieces that are required to make a single unique sim and then packing it all together myself so that it won't conflict with all the individual pieces of the next unique sim?

3. A lot of the sims I've seen are described as being made with extra sliders. Do I have to download those too just to get the sims to appear correctly in my game?

3. Lastly, and I guess this is kind of the general confusion that I have: Is the process of adding new sims to the game REALLY this lengthy, time-consuming process of finding a character, following a dozen links to piece together all the various bits of CC that they require (or, if links aren't given, locating the author and browsing around his or her website to see if they mention what other files are needed), somehow packing it all together in a way that won't interfere with anything else, and THEN spending several minutes to load up the game just to see if the character shows as more than just a default-haired character with black, nonexistent skin? It reminds me of modding Skyrim, where basically every mod required three other mods which required special installs that required even MORE mods, to the extent that you've got 15 things going on that are liable to conflict with the next dozen things that are required by the NEXT thing you want to install. It got to the point that almost every piece of user-made content required this convoluted ecosystem of files to function properly which became a massive headache that made me quit playing the game. Surely there's an easier way to go about this, right? Is there not a single repository of quality characters that are simple downloads that include everything that they need, ready to drop in and play?

Sorry if I sound whiny or totally ill-informed, I'm just kind of overwhelmed by how much more complicated this process is than I was expecting. I thought a sim would just come packed in a nice neat file that you just drop into the game.

1) Custom skins can come as two types, default replacement and non default, a default replacement skin will override the default skin that comes with the game, meaning that every sim in a world is now using that custom skin. Non default skins are stand alone skins, only the sims you give it to in CaS will actually use it, this makes it possible to have a full household with non of them using the same skin.

2) This is really going to depend on the size of the file you download, up to 500Kb and it's pretty much just the sim with no content, several Mb and you have some of the CC, 20Mb and up and you pretty much have all of the CC included.

3) No idea tbh all of the custom sims I have came with all of the CC built into the .sim file, which includes the sliders.

4) TBH it's going to really depend on the person that made the character, do they have a clue wtf they are doing or not, personally I suspect most are clueless.
As I have found out having everything for a character in one file isn't a good idea, I have 30+ .sim files from the one creator, ranging from 11Mb to 100MB. Most of the clothing has broken presets and are set to random, this means NPCs can end up wearing the broken presets, so you have sims wandering around that are one color or pattern from the neck down. On top of that we have a list of bad CC that you don't want in your game, guess what I found in several of those .sim files.
It's been eight years since I last modded a game, I've had to come out of retirement and learn how to mod TS3 so I can get rid of the broken garbage and the bad CC from the .sim files.

Ahhh, so that's the difference between default and non-default skin. It makes sense now that you've told me the difference, so that's at least one mystery solved. Sims that come with ND skins, great. Sims that come with a default replacer, stay away.

Your comments do provide some helpful info so thank you for that. You're exactly correct, all 30-40 of the .sims files I've downloaded are around 500 kb or less and come installed as nice generic skinless silhouette people. Many of them had no other links or descriptions of what else is required to make them appear as actual human beings, let alone the goddesses that appear in the pictures the creator provided, so I guess the uploader just assumed that anyone downloading them would somehow know what else was needed and where to find it.

I don't suppose it's kosher to ask whether you'd be able to upload a copy of those pre-packaged sims somewhere for me, is it? Maybe through pm? Maybe I should just ask whether there's a reliable site where one can go to download only ready-made characters like those, or perhaps whether there's one major default skin replacer that everyone (such as my silhouette sim uploaders) use because it's so universally popular that EVERYONE uses it. I don't mind doing any of this work myself, I just wanted to know how everyone else does it because it seemed like the only options I've been seeing are needlessly obscure and / or complicated.

As for the sliders: If their use was sufficiently subtle, or if you are not terribly picky (ie you know that the creator's system is probably more powerful than yours, so the sim detail settings are set higher than "Low" which would make the sim look a bit different from the pictures anyway), and those sims are never going to change their appearance (By aging up, etc.), you can generally get away without having the actual sliders in your game. (Out of the 3 sims I have had which used custom sliders, one got weird when he got a job with a career uniform, and the other 2 were fine until they aged up. )

But it was recently pointed out that if the sliders were more heavily used, or if they are ones which make stronger alterations, you will need the sliders in order for the sim to look right. And you certainly will need the sliders if the sim is going to age up, become a werewolf, or possibly even change outfits.)

(And it is perfectly possible to get a few skintones you really like, then just put one of them onto a sim you download who needs a custom skintone which you don't have. Unless the sim was a strange color that you don't have, or fuzzy, or covered with tattoos or makeup that come with the skin and which you don't mind seeing a baby inheriting, most of the skintones that downloaded sims require seem to be similar to each other anyway. )

Silhouette uploaders have probably forgotten to do one thing that MTS requires: you can show pictures of what the sim looks like with the skin you want them using, but they need to be packaged wearing a skin that will actually show up if you don't have the custom skin.

That's exactly what I thought. Most of them were just small .sim files but I thought "that's okay, at the very least they'll look kind of like the pictures. They just won't have the fancy hair and tattoos and clothes". Nope. Black soulless featureless silhouette shadow sims. Can I just grab a random skin texture and find a way to repackage each of these sims with it? I know that they won't look like their pictures but I figure that maybe if they came with a skin (as opposed to none at all, which seems to be the case) some of them might look close? EDIT: Sorry, I re-read your message and it sounds like the third paragraph confirms this idea)

As for everything else, man... It really does seem like adding sims to the game is just like adding characters to Skyrim. In that game only the characters that come packed with a bunch of other visual enhancement mods look any good, and if someone decides not to pack those enhancement mods with the character it's up to you to go dig them up and install them yourself (which, as I described in that first post, usually means messing with other things that you've installed or even just the base game itself). I get that there are so many exotic sims being made that require all kinds of custom content, I guess that's why they look so good. I just don't understand why I'm seeing sooooo many of them that don't include said content and just leave it up to others to put the mess together themselves.

There are two ways to install a sim.
The first is with the sim file. Including the required Custom Content is optional.
Advantages: You have control over what is going into your game, and you know where to find it if you want it gone.
Disadvantages: You may end up having to track down a ton of missing CC.

Then there is the sims3pack method, where you get the sim and any CC that had been installed with a Sims3pack and which has a copy in DCBackup (with a name that looks like someone spilled a bowl of alphabet soup)
Advantages: You don't have to look for a ton of CC.
Disadvantages: Without using something like CUSTARD (http://www.modthesims.info/download...ghlight=CUSTARD) you have no real idea of what is going into your game. Also, if a bit of CC that came packaged with a sim ends up being problematic, you can't just remove the CC. You have to track down the sim that it came with, change the sim to something else, repackage the sim, then delete the original. And there have been some things that are real problems. (The doll that attached itself to every sims 3 pack as though it was a virus, and the boots that tended to turn babies into monsters are two that I can remember off the top of my head.)

But the sims that are packaged as sim files are often uploaded without the CC because if you already have it you don't want it twice so wasting file space (and bandwidth, for those who have that consideration) on something you don't need is silly.

Unfortunate. It sounds like both methods are pretty unreliable. Either spend loads of time on even just a single sim tracking down all the parts they need, or find a pre-packaged sim that could cause problems in the game and spend loads of time fixing THAT.

I suppose the first method may be the most sensible. I don't mind spending the time putting together characters that I can reasonably assume will work well without problems, the only issue with that is the aforementioned difficulty in figuring out what many of the characters require (broken CC links, no CC explanation at all, etc). For example there's a pack I found that offers a whopping 117 characters, which seems great. But there's absolutely no mention of any other CC, none at all that I can find anywhere. What do people like that expect downloaders to do?

I'm still trying to figure out the custom skin thing. I've downloaded one non-replacer which does cause some of the sims I downloaded to actually appear with flesh on them, but others don't (though I'll have to go back into the game and see what happens if I try to direct those sims to use a different skin in CAS). Is that how it works? I mean even if a sim comes with custom skin textures I should be able to just tell the game to make that sim use a different skin, or even just the default, right? Maybe they won't look as smooth or whatever but I would assume that their physical features would remain the same. Actually that brings up the other issue I'm having right now: A bunch of custom sims that are supposed to look unique but who all look identical - same face and hair on every one of them. I guess that must mean that I'm missing all kinds of makeup and sliders and whatnot, right?

Ugh. I don't get how you guys manage all of this, lol.

yes, you can tell the game to put any other skin (or hair, eyes, outfit, makeup, etc.) onto a downloaded sim.

The ones that have the same facial structure are probably missing sliders (or something that expands the slider effect. (Master Controller from NRAAS has that ability, along with Awesome Mod. Both of those mods also do a lot of other things, so you should check the documentation.) The same hair is probably due either to not having a custom hair or not having the expansion pack that the hair came with.

I do have Master Controller installed but I didn't know that it allowed for extra slider capability. I'll have to give that a try. It got to the point where I was downloading sims that should have at least resembled the pictures on their upload pages, if only without some of the hair and using a different skin (I couldn't care less about having a million sims with a million unique sims, I don't know how skin textures became so popular), but in CAS they just wound up looking like complete clones of one another. I'll see if the sliders were the problem.

After all of this I think that I've decided to just try to find sims that have all their content included and run it through Custard to see if there are any problems. Beyond that maybe I'll grab the occasional character that links to just 2-3 other bits of content, I suppose. I now understand that grabbing random .sim files is pretty much pointless unless there are clear links to readily available custom content along with them. Thanks for the help, and if you (or anyone else who happens to read this) has a consistently reliable place to download fully packaged sims (whether in package or sims3pack form) please let me know.

Is this world something you made in caw? If it is you have the option of populating the world with nraas porter.

Then you can make the game populate with a bunch of EA pudding faces, or have a controlled import of custom made sims.

I usually make my own sims, rather than downloading them, so you would have to ask in WCIF about where to find them. MTS does have some good low-CC or No-CC sims available, but it takes a bit of hunting through the downloads. Someone in WCIF can probably give you links.

While these are EA sims, with a decent default skin and a few tweaks here and there, they do well in order to be used for populating with NRAAS Story Progression's automatic population function. At least that's what I use. In addition to a few others that have been created over time and I kept. I don't use them for my main family but if your worry is the work tracking CC, this should help if you have the EP's/worlds installed.
https://app.box.com/s/e6igicu8ucq0rrrpboxq

I'm playing in Roaring Heights. I have kind of a hangup about creating my own sims (beyond the immediate character or family that I play as), I can't get immersed in the game if the other characters in the world were made by me. They have to be by someone else otherwise to me the game feels too artificial and overly familiar. It's alright just working with whatever the game puts in my world but once I began seeing some of the dazzling sims that other people made I decided to up my neighborhood gene pool (and get away from some of those aforementioned pudding sims). Obviously my problem was with getting most of them to look like their sample photos.



So these are EA-created characters that don't use CC? I guess that means that they won't look as glamorous as some of the user-created sims but they WILL at least look unique rather than like the clones that I keep getting due to missing content. Thanks a lot, this should prove to be a good resource to start with.

I know that nraas allows the addition of sims to the town with the immigration feature but I assumed that this just generated new randomized sims on the fly. Do you have to do something specific to get the mod to import pre-made characters that are placed in the SavedSims folder like these? Volvenom mentioned a couple of methods that are probably what I'm looking for but I can't investigate because the nraas wiki is currently down.

What I do is have a fairly large number of sims in the bin (custom made, some of the aforementioned EA ones, some born ingame that I liked the look of but didn't want to play), set NRAAS Storyprogression to immigration from bin to a high percentage and it will create sims as descendents with genetics from those in your world. For example, if I play a custom-made unpopulated world, that's how I keep the genepool interesting. I set Rapid Immigration to the number of families I want and voila, after a few lags initially, it's done.
I don't think there is a way to automatically populate from the CAS premades, i.e. the sim files in the SavedSims folder.

Thanks for that info. It looks like I'll probably just be adding some of the EA sims manually then (though telling nraas to then create new sims based from them sounds pretty cool so I'll likely be doing that too).

Three more specific questions for the moment, and I apologize for asking so much as it is. Here goes.

1. If I download a .sim file that's listed as requiring CC (say for example custom eyes), and that CC comes in the form of a package or packages, do I place the packages in the mods/packages folder and the .sim file in the SavedSims folder? I ask because - while I originally tried to avoid such goose chases - I decided to try the process of downloading a .sim and then following all the links to get her required CC. I took the time to chase the files down and install them in the game using the folders specified but she still didn't look like her pictures on the download page. What am I still doing wrong?

2. Maybe it's the lack of custom sliders, as mentioned earlier (though at least one of these failed .sim / CC hunts specified that no custom sliders were used). Since there are apparently countless custom sliders out there I did what I could and found a pack of 116 of them, which I installed. But the earlier comment mentioned that they're enabled with nraas. That site is up again so I took a look and my understanding is that I only need Master Controller (which I already had) as well as an "integration" module which I did not. Once both of these are installed will the sims that use custom sliders "sense" that custom sliders are installed and enabled or is there something else I have to do to "tell" such sims to make use of them? In other words, if I install the nraas files, a package full of various sliders and then a sim that uses custom sliders, do I need to do anything else to see the effect of custom sliders on these sims?

3. Can a .sim file be changed into a package file? I don't yet know if there would be reason to do so, I'm just getting turned back to square one in terms of understanding why even supposedly CC-free "base" sims aren't looking the same in my game as they do on their download pages. Literally the ONLY thing that has been consistently successful for me during this CC project has been finding the occasional sims3pack with all required CC already included.