I searched for this, but I'm not even entirely sure what keywords to search for, so if this question has already been answered I appologize.

I'm trying my hand at neighborhood building via SC4 for the first time. And while the controls there are quite good and all, they're just a little too ... big ... for my purposes. So I went into the neighborhood terrian in TS2, created a new neighborhood with that terrain, used the modifyNeighborhoodTerrain cheat, and put the finishing touches on it.

So here's my question: is there any way to save the modified neighborhood terrian as the template, so that if I was to create another neighborhood using the same terrain, or upload it onto the Internet, it would be the moddified terrain and not the original SC4-only one?

I dont believe its possible. It is hardcoded into the neighborhood files.

Basically, you can only use the .sc4 files and those dont keep the information from which you changed the terrain with the sims cheat code.

You could clone the neighborhood's terrain using Neighborhood Terrain Surgery technique. I believe someone (Mootilda?) has a tool for this, or you can follow this old tutorial to extract the necessary files manually, if the terrain surgery tool doesn't permit you to save the data in an intermediate export format.

Thanks! But would I be able to save the edited terrain as an SC4 file for future use, or would I have to go in and edit it the hard way any time that I wanted to use that terrain? It seems to me like that would only allow me to clone a neighborhood terrain from one neighborhood to another, not to extract the edited terrain.

Exporting a neighbourhood terrain to .sc4 is currently not possible, no. But making the basic terrain in SC4, and the finishing touches in TS2, and then copying it with HoodReplace seems like a good strategy to me -- that way you can also copy the neighbourhood decoration, which you couldn't do with an sc4 file.

HoodReplace is by Mootilda, yes. It's very easy to use. http://www.modthesims2.com/showthread.php?t=279992

Alright, I think I found out what I needed to know. Thanks, guys!