I've seen some people make mention of using lots for schools or daycare. It really interested me and I'd like to give it a shot, so I was just trying to nail down some of the specifics.

For those of you that use a school, do you use a residential or community lot, and if the children are just visiting, how do you keep them from leaving? And if they're visiting, aren't some of the object interactions not available (like napping or showering)? What's the best way to keep motives up (namely, energy and hygiene) if these interactions aren't available?

And on that note, what other sort of "specialty" lots do you use? I've never considered using a lot for a home/school sort of environment until just recently after reading this thread, and now I'm really interested!

I've done a daycare as a kids get-together, but not something I do regularly.

I think residential lot is more convenient. What I have is someone who owns the house, like the daycare lady, and I teleport kids with simwardrobe's teleporter. I use boolprop to control them all; I don't actually tell them what to do, but I like to do that to keep track of them. And I guess that prevents them from leaving the lot since they're temporarily in the household. When they're done for the day, I de-control them all, before letting them go. This would let them shower/nap, as if they were part of the family.

Theres a hack/sign so that the school bus doesn't come to pick them up here: http://www.drealm.info/simlogical/s...itutionSign.htm
Theres a bunch of other school hacks at the same site.

I built one a while back and shared pictures and a download of it here:
http://katween.livejournal.com/12363.html
The download includes CC, so if you don't want it, hopefully it gives you ideas :D. Mine doesn't include showers, beds, etc since they only went for one day (9am-3pm ish). And I use the buffet table to feed them.

I'm not sure how to go about live-in daycares, but I recall another thread talking about that a month or two ago.

--
For other speciality lots.. I made like a large room, kinda like high school's gym, that was used for teenager's prom or a large town parties.
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v...20-05-49-69.png

I also made a evacuation camp group. I made a scenario where the town was infested with locust, and everyone had to stay at the camp for a few days with limited food. I thought it would be fun and challenging, but it was actually boring for me D: haha.
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v...20-45-12-90.png

And I have a museum of my town's history. Its mainly pictures of the mayors (painted by a town's artist), and stuff like: the first made servo, the first generation, artwork from sims, etc.
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v...02-05-49-63.png

Yeah.. I love doing these kinda stuff haha! My livejournal has more pictures of these if you're interested.

Wow I'm so tempted to download that lol! I would love to have just one day where all the children in town could meet, play and interact with each other.

So lazzybum that daycare is a residential lot right? and the only person who lives there is just for the daycare?

Yep, residential lot. Even the highschool party/gym is residential, and I used the same lady for both haha. It's just someone to own the lot really. For daycare, I actually locked her outside, and her paint the whole time lol.

Thanks so much for the ideas! I completely forgot about the buffet table, I was thinking I would have a sim cook for all of them! I think the buffet would be much easier to manage.

I LOVE that lot, it's so colorful! And I will be stalking your LJ. ;3 Also, great idea about having a town museum! That is fantastic!

I use the simlogical school mods on a residential lot simply because I figured I would have more control. You can use it on a community lot too, but never having tried that I don't know how it plays out. I do know on the residential lot all kids automatically become playable as soon as school starts and non selectable when school ends which I like. So during school time I have full control over them. I set it so they go to their classroom to do their work book first up and in the afternoon I send them off skilling to the school pool, gym, etc. Or I can just let them play. I have a sick room where I can send one to nap and showers if someone stinks.
You need to have the institution sign which stops the school bus from coming, basically it tricks the game into thinking the kids are at school-which they are. ^_^ Without that sign, the bus will come and if the kids don't get on it the game will drop their grades for being truant. There are different set ups you can try such as prep school or flexi school. With prep school the kids must do their work, but with Flexi school you can home school or even do no school. Those kids doing no workbooks will simply stay at a C grade.
With prep school, when you are on the child’s home lot, the bus picks them up at 8am and drops them home at 5pm. It's a long day, but they get no homework so they are free to do what they like.

I've thought about making a day care and a summer camp but haven't tried yet. I have a summer school holiday mod because so even my public school kids could go. I have seen someone on the LJ BACC community post about running a day care. I think each family pays a fee and she summons the toddlers keeping them there with the meeting controller.

Just adding: I use the hacked shiny time cook top which sporns a cafeteria worker. So they serve up the same foods to the kids as they do at uni.
And the link to my LJ on my trial using simselves as school victims. http://joandsarah.livejournal.com/tag/prep%20school I carried on with the prep school experiment after finishing a toddler mania challenge with the kids.

Community - owned
Lock the door
I use the school hack. What that does is temporarily add the children sims to your family when you start the school (ring the school bell). So you are controlling them and they can't leave under their own steam. I lock the door to keep the passersby out.


same as above
I like to play the hard way so I make them take care of themselves. I don't bother with hygiene and feed them at midday. They go home about 4 o'clock. My primary school currently has about 24 school age sims, the senior school about 15.


Prison, hospital, churches - the prison and hospital are mods. The prison is an owned residential lot, the hospital a unowned community lot (that's the way the mods work). The churches are owned community lots and I do this quite a lot. I have owned: cemetery, fire station, police station, town hall, sports centre and spa, library, banks (with some mods) and lots of shops, clubs, restaurants and pubs of course. I have a petrol station and railway stations, market too but they're just regular community lots. That's all I can think of for now. I am particularly pleased with my railway station lot for Carping Magna. Dunno why really but I enjoyed building it. It has a cafe in the waiting room so there is something for the sims to do if they visit. I make use of a lot of things that make the community lots more realistic like the traffic hydrant and parking slots which get used and you can park in and so on. Edit: I forgot my beach lot. Little Carping has a beach lot. I know that we all have those if we have BV but the one I made for LC is based on the English seaside and has wooden huts and a pier. I enjoyed building that one too. I built it when Hastings pier burned down a while back - a sort of tribute. Do you get seaside leisure piers in the States? I guess you do.

Like your daycare centre Lazzy.

Thanks for your day care centre and all the pics Lazzy.

Maxon, can you share more about the traffic hydrant? I vaguely remember something like that, perhaps from pc sims, years and years ago...

My schools are also Simlogical schools, and I've built them both on com lots and res lots. If the teacher's family (lot owner's) has school aged children, there will be a problem if the school is on res lot - school bus will come and take the hosehold kids (and the kids spawned with Inge's hack) away. That's why you need to have Inge's Institutional Sign that will stop the bus.

Kindergarten or daycare is another story. I needed it to circumvent the Nanny functionality - my hoods are self-sustained and I avoid any NPCs or townies or such - I play only with playable Sims (empty templates). So I needed a place where to put all those kids that need Nanny (babies and tots) so that the parents can go to work. Which means that I had to come up with a way to send the kids ("drop them off") to the kindergarten lot from inside their parents' house. I use Christianlov's teleport mirror for this, since it allows me to both send and return the kids at the appropriate times. That mirror will remove the kids from the current household and make them members of the kindergarten household. Whn the parents get home, or when the working hours in the kindergarten are over, I summon the kid/s back home with the mirror, whoch again makes them members of their parents household.
When I play the kindergarten lot, which I do when their turn in rotation comes, I summon the kids in the morning and send them home in the afternoon. I'm anal with time management in my games, and a saner person should not worry themselves with the temporal particulars of this case like I ordinarily do. You could create a kindergarten lot as an empty lot, place any Sim there to act as a dummy, and drop the kids there whenever you want.

I've tried other options for kindergarten gameplay, but this is by far the easiest way to do it, in my experience.

I once made a family that had a "daycare" but it did nothing for when the kids were at the other houses. Basically when the family's kids went to school, I summoned all the neighborhood kids with a teleporter and stuck them up on the third floor with a ton of toys. Then I brought them downstairs so they would leave once the family's kids got home.

lazzybum, before I download your daycare, I was wondering, did you use Clean Installer before uploading it or should we use it before installing it?

Simsica that mirror sounds like a great idea for a working day care. I take it you have never had any glitches or parents not wanting to leave or the SW turn up?

No, I've had no problems. Parents do come relatively often, but it's easy to ban them from lot using Visitor Controller. SW will only take children if they aren't properly cared for.

i have a daycare center that's mostly like everyone else's. The kids are teleported into a residential lot and the teachers/owners care for them. I move the toddlers in so that the teachers can work on potty training with them. There's a room with toys, then another one with modded blankets for the toddlers to nap on.

The center for the kids is full of skilling objects inside and there's a playground outside. Again, they're teleported in and made selectable, but they're not moved in. I make them unselectable around 8 pm and their parents come and take them home.

I also have a prison and a vocational center. The vocational center is a home business that's always closed (there's a reason for this). It contains the OFB manufacturing stations for Sims to practice on before going into business. I move the sims in with the teleporter mod. The reason it's a closed business is that those are the conditions needed to make the cash register trainer work.

This was such a good idea! I just built my own school for my sims today I decided I'll get all the kids together at the end of each rotation so they can get to know each other if they haven't met yet.

Though the teleporter doesn't let me teleport toddlers any idea why??

Which teleporter are you using?

Simwardrobe

@Liv - sorry, I'll post a reply later today. Bit busy, just at the mo.

No problem, Maxon, whenever you can. I've tried to find the traffic cone at Sims2Graveyard, but no luck. At least I think not, maybe it is in the police station set...

I LOVE your site!! Thanks!

Hi Liv - it's called the Shaklin_Somian_CarSpawningHydrant - if you can't find it at the graveyard (It's a very old file BTW - Shaklin left the sims community several years ago), I obviously have it and can send it on if you PM me with your email address. It's a bit crude in the sense that it calls up cars to run along the roads every so often but it's the same on all lots. It was meant to be a replacement for the TS1 traffic which disappeared in TS2 - much to the detriment of community lot atmosphere, I always felt. The traffic's a bit much on residential lots on quiet roads. Also, it will spawn extra drivers in your characters folder. I think Little Carping now has 5. It shouldn't get too out of hand, the extra drivers, but it's something to be wary of. It will probably help if you have notownieregen.

I have been thinking about trying to mod it further. I was thinking that I could maybe offer options for quiet roads, moderate roads and busy roads and maybe also try to vary traffic intensity by time of day (being quiet at night). Another thing I thought might be fun would be to use the set up Moghughson used with the parking lots where you could alter your custom cars so they would get used too. Anyway, a project for the future. At the mo, I'm trying to finish a career for this month's theme.

Maxon, I would love to try this mod. I can PM you, but so others can share it, would you be willing to upload it in this thread? Just slap it in a zip and attach it. Otherwise, I can get it by email and attach it here for all to share.

I did work my google-fu on this file but came up with zip, except you talking about it in another forum! :-) I can also submit it to the graveyard so everyone can find it there, too.

Oh do submit to the graveyard. I noticed it wasn't there. If the mods are ok with it, here's the file. Please feel free to remove it if it is not welcome.

Last edited by maxon : 27th Apr 2012 at 04:05 PM. Reason: Cannot spell apparently

Thank you, Maxon. Submitted to the graveyard.