How often do you make totally new, custom 'hoods? And do you build your own lots or use packaged ones? What kinds of names do you give them, and how do you start them out?

I'm working on one I call Calopsita, which is Portuguese for cockatiel. Other subhoods I've added onto it are often given cockatoo, cockatiel or parrot names. I might start out with one young adult in college, then move him to the main 'hood.

I only have the one custom neighborhood, Drama Acres, which consists of the Crystal Springs map for the main hood, Downtown, Sim State University, and the vacation hoods. That's all I need so far, since I'm engaged with the characters and would rather play than build. The lots are a mix of packaged lots and build-to-suit, with the packaged lots tweaked to suit my playstyle better. Entry Way in Drama Acres is the commercial district, so I put in Doc Alan's, Pepe's Pets, the Rapid Racers Roller Rink, the trailer park, and a nicer set of apartments; but I also built the Convenient Stores and Seasonal Center Ice Rink down there. Custom-made Drama Acres Park and Memorial Park are custom lots halfway up the hillside, and so is packaged Pettina's Pet Retreat.

Downtown I've left all the existing businesses and residences, tweaked a few, and added packaged apartments and businesses that came when I added EPs; but I've also built some apartments, new residences, and new businesses. It's generally easier to use a packaged lot and get on with playing, but the venues I like best are the ones I build myself after learning what works and doesn't work with the packaged ones. If I ever start an owned business I'm likely to start with something from the lot bin, and build subsequent ones.

At Sim State, I've added lots of residences - more than I need; they're basically hood deco at this point - from the lot bin, to make it look more like the college neighborhoods I've known in real life; added a Campus Sports Center and a Campus Swim Center to address obvious lacks in the existing facilities; and added features to the existing venues to make them more useful. There's no point in the Quad as shipped. Add a couple of chess tables, some sunbathing towels, human statues, etc., and you've got a happening place in the afternoon. This sort of thing makes it "mine" with less trouble than creating a University from scratch.

I get ideas for new neighborhoods all the time, of course. The Alien Zoo. Island Refugia (a BACC full of sims exiled for ugliness from the oppressive eugenicist state). Dystopian Crystal Meth Springs. And so on. That's the nature of the beast. But what's the point if I don't have time to develop them to my satisfaction?

I don't often make my own custom 'hoods because they take me so long to do as I'm not an accomplished builder. This was Adamswater Ridge back in August, and while I've added a couple more residential homes (thank you Ralph for having seven children and wanting ten) and a toy store business has been set up, it is largely unchanged. I do try to build my own lots, and for residential I often follow house plans -- community lots get built up as and when they're needed, and as Adamswater Ridge is connected to the default Downtown, I haven't had the need to build up the shopping areas. Sim State is my go-to uni 'hood when I don't feel like building one, and I always put Downtown in unless I'm restricted.

For sims, I follow the prosperity challenge rules and randomly roll for families using mangaroo's randomiser. Sometimes it takes a couple of goes before I get a family I'm interested in, but to take Adamswater Ridge again as an example, I ended up with twenty sims across six families: one with two adult females and a teen male (mothers and son); one elder male and one adult female (father and daughter); one adult female and adult male (husband and wife); two adult females, one teen female, one child male, one toddler female (grandparents and grandchildren); one adult male, one adult female, one child female, two toddler males (parents, daughter, twin sons); one elder male, one teen male, one toddler female (grandfather and grandchildren). I have tinkered with the idea of allowing young adults to be included, but I'm still trying to work out the logistics.

For the names, I use a town name generator, although all my created 'hoods seem to start with either an A or a C (Adamswater Ridge, Cresdale, Albion Falls, Angelos Town). I've also got a ton of names for use for the sims themselves (taken from US census data: given names are the top 1000 since 1950, and the surnames are every single one which had 100 or more people registered with them on the 2000 census, although I only use the top 2500 because even that gives me a lot of variety).

At first, i created a a custom hood based on the pets console version, Whiskerton, however, i got stuck somewhere where im not sure of what to do, so i decided that playing another neighborhood would be better, so i started Townie Place, based on the name, Melrose Place, where townies are "mysteriously" connected together as parents, children, siblings, etc... And im having quite alot of fun with this neighborhood because it has more space and is well organized.

I always make my own for Sims 2! I've made many, and I make the downtown/ business/ uni hoods too.

I always make the lots from scratch (because that's the best bit) and I had to make one for my daughter too (although that was using one of the BV terrains, whereas I make my own SC4 terrains usually).

Here are some images- for each album look on the right side of the screen and click on the sub-albums too.

Bluehaven (Lorondel region)

Lacuna Delta

Channelwood

Oh I don't make custom neighborhoods very often. The first ones I've done were two empty flat places, and one of them was just an empty place to build homes/community lots, then move the lot into the other neighborhood.

Basically one map is just for building houses (no one living there) and the other map is for playing the families.

I have three custom neighborhoods. My first one was an island neighborhood and I used Spanish names for each subhood, like Villa Dorada. I started it out with about 15-20 college students and sent them to the Academie campus (my favorite). I also created a few families with teens and younger children for the main neighborhood. I did a mixture of building my own lots and using the pre-builts. For Downtown, I basically put 15 of my favorite community lots in the Lots bin and put them on the Bluewater Village terrain. I also used the apartment buildings from the bin. The home lots were all built by me; some are large, fancy beachhouses and others are brightly colored inland houses.

My next one is a country-glam neighborhood called Rosewood (yep, inspired by the PLL books, but some big differences here and there). For this one I created a bunch of families and I downloaded a lot of ritzy homes and small cottages from Parsimonious for them to live in. But for community lots, I basically built them all. The downtown district is less of a city and more of a busy yet cute little town. Old Hollis is a shopping district instead of a quirky college town in the books and it's filled with Sim-owned businesses. I wanted to have the 'quirky' part too so there's a few odd/old pubs and coffeehouses. I think I used the Crystal Springs terrain for Rosewood itself, which actually has a rather cool/interesting layout (It's very hilly and perfect for that bucolic touch).

I have a third neighborhood which I've been neglecting. It's a mountain-themed neighborhood with harsher weather elements and a more rustic/"roughing it" feel than Rosewood. I've just been so absorbed with the former two neighborhoods that I haven't spent much time developing this one. There's a few families in the main hood and some single households in the Downtown area but there not many Sims at all yet. It was difficult to come up with good town names that I liked. The main one's called Chester Hills and I can't remember the others at the moment ^^;. I'll probably think of some better titles and change them when I feel inspired to work on it again.

Generally when creating custom neighborhoods, I find that I'm much happier customizing my downtown and shopping districts rather than just adding Downtown and Bluewater Village. I've become pretty good at creating Community lots with a decent layout and nice appearance so I create them and add the ones I like the most to my Lots bin so I can put them in other neighborhoods too.

lI have one custom hood called 'Isla del Kashmire' I made around 2007 and three custom cities attached caled 'Memosa Bay', 'Pandora' and 'Scandalica City' All the community lots are custom made by me, as are most residential houses. However I have used quite a few of Triciamanly's housing lots because they are so well done. I just started to fill Isla Del Kashmire with Custom families, and kept adding them when I downloaded a new skin or eyes set to give the population variety. I have stopped making new ones and have let the in-game-born sims take over and it's nice. The neighborhood, 3 cities, and the three pre-made colledges now have a total of 270-ish playable sims

I only have one custom neighborhood, and I haven't been playing but that hood ever since I installed my expansions. I've put a lot of effort into building, decorating and populating it with various and vivid characters - it's sort of a pet project of mine. The main hood is linked to all sub-hoods that come with the EPs: three vacation hoods, one college, downtown, Bluewater village & so on, and most of those sub-hoods got a little makeover, to match my gameplay style.

Formally speaking, I divided my hood into several sub-quarters: the fancy part of town (mansions,villas,neat lawns etc.), the fantasy/magical part (castles & co.) , the trashed/grungy part (factories,abandoned alleys,run-down shacks), and the apartment part (ghetto n' stuff). Of course, all those parts of town shelter the appropriate kind of residents.

I named it Margitaville- it's a tribute to my very first custom hood, which bore the rather embarrassing name of Maggie town (that was back in the time when TS2 was still new and shiny and I was a silly little n00b). I even made a Sim named Margita Visconti and released her into the wild (a.k.a made her a townie), so she could take up the role of the symbolic town founder. In my mind, Margita is the daughter of Verona, who is the founder of Veronaville. I guess founding cities is a family business of theirs.

I have yet to find an SC4 terrain that bowls me over enough to actually want to create and entire neighborhood. So normally i play the premade hoods and mentally plan out the perfect neighborhood.

I am making a new hood right now:






I also built the terrain for my six year old hood, but I've learned a lot since then. For this hood I wanted a tiny tightly built layout with both an isle and a mainland on the same map, connected by a train. I wanted the mainland to have a seedy run down warehouse district area and upper crust area and lots of little parks, with the buildings close in together. Lots of apartment buildings.

The isle I wanted to have a central park around which the important "downtown" buildings are situated, such as the church, the city hall and lots of markets/stores.

I also wanted some farmland and a university area on the isle.

Fitting all this in has been a fun challenge and I looked at lots of other hoods for inspiration, such as kettlemumble: http://lagritsalammas.dreamwidth.org/7029.html and Volcanoland: http://ja-viera.livejournal.com/tag/~new%20volcanoland~ and Huld: http://www.digitalperversion.net/ga...?topic=8770.285

So I researched some tutorials here and then opened both SC4 and TS2 at the same time and would try things out in SC4 and then make a new hood in TS2 to see how it looked and just kept going back and forth. Then once I had things how I liked them in SC4, I used freetime's INVALUABLE hood terrain cheat to smooth pointy bits and lower the whole terrain to better accommodate beach lots.

I've been working on it for about two weeks and it is very satisfying to see things come together. Now, to be honest, I really dislike building so I am using a lot of downloaded lots, like plasticbox's Backdoor Lane Series, which is superb because of the selection of tiny lots available. The largest lot in this hood is 2x2 most are 1x2 and 1x1. Tiny lots are so much more playable for me, even though I have a very good desktop, I just like the look of a tiny tightly integrated hood.

The main "mistake" I used to make in making hoods was to make the roads to far apart, so that I would lose steam before being able to fill it all in with houses and deco.

Last edited by Liv Lukas : 16th Mar 2012 at 08:35 PM.

One, once. It's the only neighbourhood I have played for any length of time. And I've been playing it for a very long time. I am, though, allegedly, working on Polgannon though it's unlikely I'd actually play that myself. It's on hold though while I get over Mass Effect 3.

Edit - to say, Liv that's a really nice picture. I love messing around with the neighbourhood decor. I'm redoing Sirencester (Little Carping's DT) right now - thanks to Mootilda's terrain replacer and all that neighbourhood stuff from Criquette - my city has an airport, motorway (highway?) and bus stations all over it. I think I might be channeling SimCity.*

*Still there's news of a new SC for next year so it's all good.

Last edited by maxon : 16th Mar 2012 at 01:55 PM.

I always build custom neighbourhoods, and build everything in them. I'm rotten at building, but for whatever reason, I don't like using other people's lots. Right now my neighbourhood is called Port Manley, and I built the terrain and all the lots myself. It's actually a series of islands, each sub-hood is its own island.

Prepare for major rambling....because I used to be a custom hood ADDICT!
My very first custom 'hood was called Simmywood. I made Sims webserieses all the time, and it was where I put all the families I used for filming. There was a Simmywood sign and everything. Downtown was where I satisfied all my building whims (malls and giant bedrooms and nurseries, oh my!). It was my favorite and most-used custom 'hood.
The second one I made was called Cleveland. I'm not kidding. I was an extreme KND fan when I started sims on my computer, so of /course/ I had to make all the future families (and then only ever play with one of them) in a town of their very own.
Then there was Refugia, which was originally a town full of families on tiny lots that all congregated on a refugee shelter community lot. Then they all lived on it. Then I used it for various other refugee/dystopia purposes.
Populatia was an idea I originally came up with when I was fascinated by the concept of aliens in the game. I decided that the government would force women to take part in an expiriment that was basically breeding a town full of aliens. Then I realised this would take FOREVER and abandoned the town within a few months.
Then there was Gathering, where I made sim versions of my extended family in order for them to have family gatherings and parties for no reason.
At some point I actually had a town called Photo where I put all the families that I used solely for picture-taking when I got an idea for a new photo.
There were others, but I forget about them because they were so insignificant or fleeting.
Anyway, my only custom 'hood after The Great Reinstall is my themed tribal 'hood, which I plan to stick with and pay attention to.

Liv Lukas, this world is great !

Over the years I have created custom hoods for each of the Maxis neighborhoods (my versions of Pleasatview, Sedona/Strangetown, Veronaville, Riverblossom hills, Desiderata Valley, and Belladonna Cove) each with four sub-hoods, connected to the standard Downtown template, university, and the three vacation locals, because I had this grand idea to create my own version of these hoods because I was not very happy with the pre-made neighborhoods. I gave each hood a theme, and made rules regarding what types of supernaturals each hood would allow, and then I created several other hoods (Bridgeport, Four Corners, Sandy Point, Simville, Strangeview, Viper Canyon) each with three or four sub-hoods, and attached downtowns, universities, and vacation areas to round out my major hoods, and several minor hoods (Freehaven, Garden heights, Greenville, Lakeview, Pinewood township, Riverside, Sandview, Strangeville, Townsend, Winterville) each with three sub-hoods, downtowns, universities, and vacation destinations.

My intention was to populate each of these hoods, starting with Pleasantview with 35 families in the main hood, and 25 families per sub hood, and downtown and I'd play the hood until the first set of teens got into college, and then recreate those teens in one of the blank hoods with the idea that the teens from Pleasantview go off to college in a new area (Veronaville) and become the founders of that area, and their children go to university and become the founders of Riverblossom Hills) and so on until each new hood has it's starting population.

But do to several mistakes I made my Pleasantview had to be restarted several times, which has caused inconsistancies in my plans, and as I refuse to throw anything away, I have various incarnations of Pleasantview, and Veronaville. So currently I have my old Pleasantview neighborhood (generation three), two new Pleasantview neighborhoods( each at generation one), an expanded Maxis Pleasantview (which I'm currently playing until I get my other computers back from Canada and transfer the old hoods to my new computer), Veronaville (1st generation), Viper Canyon (first generation), Sedona/Strangetown (first generation) and Greenville (1st generation).

Each of these hoods uses copies of the maxis community lots, as well as community lots from this site that I downloaded, and has a mixture of maxis houses that I gutted and rebuilt to suit my tastes, original houses that I've built, and a ton of houses that I've downloaded from here as well.

I've promised myself after reading some of the stories and remarks from some of the others here (like Peni Griffin who I'm a big fan of) that when I get my other computers back and really start playing my own custom hoods again, that I will try my best to avoid the VBTs and try to avoid restarting the hoods, and focus on my Simmies and their stories rather than building more and more neighborhoods, families and houses and never get to play them.

I'm a Peni fan, too. So inspiring.

Here's another photo I took last night, looking from the isle to the mainland, with the docks on the left side of the bridge and the more upscale on the right. I wanted that manor to sit just a little above the rest of the town, sort've "lording" it over everyone else. :-)







Anyway, I spent last night swapping between Mootilda's Hood Replace and two copies of the same terrain trying to lower the terrain to accommodate these fantastic tiny beach lots from maty: http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/s...p?topic=10456.0

Finally got those to work, after hacking the neighborhood.ini file. Phew! Hood building is not for the cowardly or impatient! (Of which I am sometimes both.)

Afterwards, I rewarded myself with some cookies and a warm bed!

Last edited by Liv Lukas : 16th Mar 2012 at 08:28 PM.

HOW BEAUTIFUL! You did such a good job!

Wow Liv, your neighborhood looks so amazing! Wish I had used a better map on my own custom hood xD (since I'm too much of a chicken to try to hack it)

Thank you so much for the kind feedback. Here's another photo:







I'll quit spamming the thread with photos now. But I will say this: though it is a lot of work, even if you do not build your own houses, designing your hood from scratch is ABSOLUTELY worth it, to me.

Oh and question for us hood builders, besides here, has anyone found any good custom hood deco? I'm always looking for more.

I'll use an already-existing template or even build one with SimCity 4. Right now I have a custom 'hood, Sim Valley, that I'm setting up. I used the Viper Canyon template (but set it as Lush instead of Desert). I attached Bluewater Village and a downtown. In the middle of Sim Valley are tall buildings, and surrounding this is my commercial/fun zone--H&M Sim Valley, FreeTime Recreation Center, Planetary Pet Store and Planetary Pet Park among other pre-made community lots, and in one area I have City Center Lofts and Main Street (actually Valleyview) Mobile Homes. I plan on creating a custom college for it. I deleted (safely) all the townies and the playables I'm not going to use, saving the Landgraab and Jacquet families. I'm going to let the game regenerate townies, since they'll use the face templates that I installed.

I always make a custom 'hood. Mostly I play in one, but sometimes I'll make a themed 'hood or something to try out. My main 'hood is the third iteration on the same hood I created when the game first came out (iteration #2 got created when I discovered deleting Sims from the bin was bad, and #3 was created when AL's empty templates and noregenhacks were released, letting me make a townie-free 'hood.) Since original hood was Otherworld (being mostly characters from various urban fantasy), version 2.0 was New Otherworld, and this one is Ultimate Otherworld. Other 'hoods get named based on what their theme is: a medieval 'hood might be Camelot, a Regency 'hood Steventon, or a medieval fantasy hood something like Westeros or Middle-Earth (I am not the height of creativity when it comes to 'hood naming.)

Making the different versions was, at the time, frustrating, but let me change the appearance of my game: hood #1 had no CC genetics, #2 had Lyran's Maxis-Match-ish genetics with only 5 eye colors, 4 skin tones, and very EAxis-like face templates, and #3 has a lot of Pooklet genetics with 18 skintones, dozens of eye colors, and a ton of different face templates. The new versions also let me get rid of Sims who were boring the first time around, and add others I thought might be more interesting.

For the generic modern-day 'hood, I made about eight basic houses (unfurnished) and furnish them uniquely for each family. Certain families (specifically, the older, richer ones) have custom-built lots that are larger and unique. I only have a handful of downloaded lots that are for special families (my Weasleys have a Burrow lot that I downloaded and modified: the original house looked more like the movie house but wasn't very playable for a large family.) For a group of 13 families that were supposed to live in remodeled homes based off of an older home, I built what was supposed to be the older home, then remodeled and renovated based on that frame. I don't use community lots a lot, but I build them anyway.

I have to admit, I'm terrible with terrain decor, so my neighborhoods are basically a lot of buildings plonked on a terrain with no attention to how everything looks overall in terms of neighborhood decor. I am in awe of Liv Lukas's gorgeous rainbow bridge and lighthouse setup above. I'm kind of afraid that I'll make my 'hood crash if I use too much neighborhood decor anyway, given how many sims live in the various hoods - smaller terrain might've helped that issue, but I really have no desire to start over now.

It takes more work, but honestly, I can't imagine using the EAxis premade hoods. If I want a lot with an architectural feature that I can't build (and yes, there are many), I might download a lot, tear it down, and rebuild around that feature. But mostly my Sims end up living in autoroofed places that are much more playable than pretty. I admire the house designers who manage both, and while my skill at building is a lot better than it was in the days of "create rectangle, roof, repeat," I have to admit, I prefer playing to building.

I like designing stuff - in fact, I often just go overboard with everything. It's so much fun to make a unique residential or community lot, one that doesn't look like you got it from the lot bin.

Nah, you don't have to feel bad for pic-spamming. Here,I'll do it too:





This is that 'fancy' part of the hood I talked about earlier. It features neat apartment homes, posh houses, community lots, a healthy mix of concrete&greenery, and, of course, Criquette's awesome roundabout as center piece :D




And this is Margita herself, posing for the last picture before taking up her role as townie. Notice the self confident "I run this s**t" smirk on her face.

As for other hood deco sites, I use a lot of stuff from CuriousB: http://curiousb.livejournal.com/
The N99 forum too got several buildings to offer: http://n99forumpaks.jfade.com/index...ory=4&subcat=11
What I'm most thankful for is that they extracted that old NL tower building that got overwritten by a later EP. Way to correct Maxis' failed coding.
Also, check Psychosim's lj. He already posted several hood decorations here at MTS, but his lj has a lot more, if you're into a more grungy look.

Dagi, that neighborhood is so detailed!

My current 'hood is New Avondale, which is also my legacy neighborhood. Other than the SC4 terrain and one building, it's all of my own creation. The townies are all unique to my game because I went through the procedures to make an empty, clean neighborhood and spawned them randomly. It's rather small and sparse right now, but the buildings that are there are surprisingly ambitious. This is all intentional; The shining city of [Old] Avondale was bombed and burnt in a war. New Avondale started off enthusiastically, but interest and influence slowly drooped down to a depressing cessation.

But as I speak, in that very town some sort of change, some spark of life seems to be quietly bubbling up...

And...

Well, I need to play more to get past that part.