Hi there everybody. I've been playing The Sims since the original game all those year ago. I got every expansion pack over time as they were released and played them all without end. I haven't played them seriously in a few years and tried to get into The Sims 2 back when the deluxe edition was out bundled with I think Nightlife. I found it too "new" and gave up on it without trying it much further than that. Then last year I came across a topic on the internet about The Sims Ultimate Collection and downloaded it later that day. I haven't really tried to play it much until a few weeks ago. This will probably sound really silly (I know it does to me anyway) but I feel kind of intimidated by the whole thing in a way. It would have been one thing if I just started off with The Sims 2 base game but to have the whole series in one package right up front just seems like a bit much. I am certainly not complaining! I did the math over the years as to how expensive the whole series would be if I bought each expansion and stuff pack piece by piece and needless to say, this Ultimate Collection was definitely the best thing that could have happened to someone like me. Still though, it just seems like a whole lot of new stuff to jump into. The Sims 2 was definitely a big change from The Sims 1 and I just feel sort of lost as to where to start.

I guess it would be easier if I said what's giving me the most trouble. I suppose to start, I didn't get anything like a manual with the game. I know of course what the object of The Sims is but I missed the big manual I got with the original Sims game. It broke down a lot of the simple and complex things and gave a lot of interesting tidbits. I was considering buying the guides for the Sims 2 series but strategy guides in this day and age seem to be so outdated, plus a lot of the information can be found online and most online guides are more accurate and up to date than the paid ones! I want to experience just about everything this game has to offer but I have no idea where to start, so I figured one big guide or a few smaller ones for each expansion pack would help break things down a little better than simply diving in and hoping to make sense of everything.

Now for a few specific things that have me a little confused. The neighborhoods are definitely different from the original game. Are there any differences to the neighborhoods aside from who lives in them? What is it about associating vacation spots/universities/shopping centers/etc., with neighborhoods? Can you not have more than one vacation spot (or university/etc.) per town? What about the seasons, do they just flow naturally with time or do you have to select a season to play with?

Now, considering this is a site about mods I've got a few questions about that too. One of my biggest turn offs with this game from the very beginning when it first came out was aging. Now, I like the concept of children turning to teens and teens to young adults but I'm not crazy about adults turning to elders and definitely not crazy about elders dying. I get the concept behind it, for the realism and all that, but I don't like to prospect of putting hours and hours into a sim just for them to eventually die of old age. It doesn't look there's any way in-game to prevent this (short of never saving so time doesn't pass which is obviously not too appealing) so was there ever a mod for this? How exactly do you install mods/downloads? Is it anything like The Sims 1? If I remember correctly all you had to do was put things in the right folders, where as other things actually needed to be "installed". Is there anyway to check things out with a download before putting it in the game/after it is in the game and has caused problems? I remember The Sims File Cop from the official Maxis site, that helped me a lot back in the day when I would have things get corrupted. Does something exist like that for The Sims 2?

I'm leaving out a lot of information but for a fast way to sum everything up: I'm totally lost and confused! I definitely think the game is more than worthwhile but I'm so confused as to where I should start that I just don't know where to begin! Any help at all would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks so much!

First of all, welcome.

Second of all, go to the top of your screen, to the Help Menu. This will bring up a series of drop-down menus. Over to your left you will find the choice: Gameplay Guides. Click that, and many of your questions will be answered.

Personally I bought individual EPs cheap online and installed one game at a time, playing a series of experimental games with sims that didn't matter (though I was astonished at how quickly they started to matter, and had to make a rule that the moment I started caring I needed to drop a family and go somewhere else). You don't have that option with the UC, alas, but I do recommend that you start off with games that you have firmly decided will be experimental. Open neighborhoods and go exploring. Pick a household and start playing. Decide: Today I will explore gardening, or pets, or University and just noodle around with those things. Try everything. When things go wrong, either quit without saving or tell yourself: "Well, it was a throwaway game anyway; I'll reset the neighborhood and come back to do it right when I know what I'm doing." You can reset all the premade neighborhoods without downloading a thing or reinstalling; and there's ways to recreate sims you've made in CAS, about which you will learn in due time.

Start slow. Breathe. The pause button is your friend. There are ways to do almost anything you want in this game, and you are in the right place to learn them.

And there are, in fact, in-game ways to keep sims alive forever, should you decide that's what you want to do. So don't you fret about that.

Pleasantview, Strangetown, and Veronaville, and to a lesser extent Belladonna Cove and Riverblossom Hills, start you in media res of some ongoing storylines. Desiderata Valley and Bluewater Village subhood, and to some extent Belladonna Cove and Riverblossom, are organized around the themes of the EPs which introduced them. If you feel you need a direction to go, then, start with Pleasantview (soap opera), Strangetown (science fiction soap opera), or Veronaville (mayhem in the Shakespearean streets!). These three neighborhoods have scripted events in many households, and if you follow the suggestions made in the pop-up when you open the households in these neighborhoods, you'll start scenarios illustrating new features of the game.

If you just want to wander around and Experience stuff, choose the hood with the theme that interests you the most. Belladonna Cove is an urban environment with apartment dwellers and a range of rich, middle class, and poor families; also witches. Riverblossom Hills is a rural community where you can explore fishing, gardening, and plantpeople. Bluewater Village is all about the character-owned businesses. Desiderata Valley is hobby-themed (and is also the armpit of nowhere, without real storylines) with amazingly bad architecture.

If you want to experiment with making sims, or building, just start. Make a new neighborhood; or plop your creations down in the middle of an existing one and ignore the premades till they thrust themselves upon your notice.

You can attach as many Universities and business districts as you like, but if you add more than one downtown, the second one will be empty. Vacation neighborhoods come in three varieties only. Don't add anything till you're ready to play with them. There's a mod to suppress the annoying pop-up suggesting that you add All the Things.

Pick a place to start, and just play.

Also explore around this site and read some of the longer threads, like What's Happening in Your Game Right Now? You'll find it gives you wonderful ideas and opens your mind to the possibilities of this game, which are practically limitless. I treat it as a storytelling medium myself. Other people just love to build all the time, or take out their frustrations on helpless pixels, or create utopia, or turn it into a whole new game with their playstyle.

No one has to be pleased with how you play your game but you. So have fun!

You can stop aging with the 'aging off' cheat. Then just force age up anyone you want to go to the next age bracket.

Does the UC not come with a pdf manual? I suppose you could always use the wiki. http://sims.wikia.com/wiki/The_Sims_2

EDIT: Predictably, sniped by other faster users while I was typing all this out!

I don't know whether any new neighborhoods came with UC that weren't included in the normal games (though I doubt it), but Pleasantview, Strangetown, and Veronaville were the basegame (BG) neighborhoods, so they're probably the best places to start, since they'll have less other new content than the neighborhoods that came with later expansion packs (EPs). Each of those neighborhoods is essentially the "core" of its own universe (there's no crossover between the main neighborhoods, so Sims from Pleasantview can't visit Sims from Veronaville, etc), and then you can add many different universities, downtowns, shopping districts, and vacation destinations to each neighborhood for Sims from it to visit, all using the tabs up at the top of the screen when you're looking at the neighborhood. You can also use those tabs to change the sequence of seasons to whatever flow you want, everything between all summers and all frigid winters being available..
Aging you can turn off just by pulling up the cheat menu (CTRL+SHIFT+C) and typing in "aging off" , so you don't need any mods to change that (though there are mods to slow down the aging process so you have more time with your Sims before they finally kick the bucket.

You're probably right that you'll probably have better luck with looking for advice online than in a print guide at this point, and the MTS community is quite happy to answer questions like that- there's lots of different forums and threads for different questions you have! It's a fun game, we all love it, and we want you to have fun with it too! Happy Simming!

First thing is Sims 2 is much easier than Sims 1, a piece of cake. So keep that in mind.

I never had a manual, not for one or two.
Many of us here have been playing for ten years and still have yet to experience everything, I wouldn't worry about it.

So you have your main hood, either a pre-made one or a custom one. To that you can attach sub hoods or you can attach none. One of the best things about the sims 2 is it's very much a sandbox for you to do whatever you want, it's also very modable and after ten years there is a ton of mods and custom content. So attach them or not is up to you. Make your own custom one or not, attach none, one or many.

You set up the seasons how you want them to go. Want a hood to be all summers? Do it, want perpetual winter, do that.

Aging, there are heaps of ways to handle this aspect.
You can use aging off which is a cheat-bit messy. I think they might need to be applied every time you load up, I don't use it. (could be wrong on having to reapply it)
You can strive to gain lots of aspiration points, use it to by the elixcer of life, have your sim drink a glass to gain back 3 days. I did that for many years.
You can gain a cow plant (Either by stealing one from a Uni secret society, to getting the ecological career and getting it that way, to growing one (cc) to using a cheat to get one from your sims career panel. With that you can have a sim who kills other sims and drinks them-5 days extra for each glass.
You can use a mod that lets you turn aging on and off at your whim on every sim. Aging on-aging off.
You can use an age duration mod. I use a double lifespan mod. There are longer ones around.
You can use a mod like simblender which has option to age up, age down or add 3 more days to the current life stage.

Now since you are on the UC some things are different. Since I have all disks I simply make a Download folder inside my Documents>EA Games>Sims 2 folder. Could be a different place for you. You can and should also make sub folders. Don't toss a heap of things into Downloads. If you download just a few mods make yourself a folder inside the Download folder and call it 'Mods, and place them in there. You like hair, make a folder called 'Hair'. There is so much content out there you need to start out being organized unless you keep your content to something under 20 files.

before doing anything you need to know about hood and game corruption: http://simswiki.info/wiki.php?title...Hood_Corruption
main thing is DO NOT use the ingame function of deleting sims from the bin, moving them between hoods, installing houses with sims or deleting graves. Doing those things guarantees your hood a quick trip to oblivion. Do not turn on testing cheats and add any old sims to your household, only regular sims. So if your sim receives a visit from the therapist, the social bunny or other special sim leave them alone. Also don't shift click the mail box and make them know everybody.

And make sure you have in place the essential mods:http://modthesims.info/t/532696
These two will help keep your game running. The UC comes patched so you won't need to worry about that. A bit later you will want to download Hood Checker which can check your hood and fix issues.

You will want to get Clean Installer if you plan on downloading lots or sims. Most files are inside of Rar's, you will need a program to unzip those like WinRar.

I hope that gives you a start, it's a huge topic.

edit: Shows how long that took as there were no replies here when I started this post.

I remember disliking the idea of my sims growing older and dying when Sims 2 came out. But when I started playing them as generations, it started to feel natural.

The three basegame neighborhoods all include small tutorials in each house that introduce some of the game features. You'll get a popup when you first load the game that says stuff like "Don Lothario's house is really dirty! grab the phone and hire a maid!". I found that very helpful.


edit: Regarding the aging thing, I just remembered i saw this mod a while ago: http://modthesims.info/download.php?t=558407
It doesn't turn off aging completely, but it makes the ages last really long, which might help you get used to it.

Aging off is a very easy cheat and once it is on, it will be on until you turn it off - you need to turn it on on every lot, though, where you want it off.

Do not be intimidated by all the info - just get the most essential mods before you worry about anything else - and, then, just play. You can turn on game tips in the UC too - in fact, it should be on until you turn them off. You don't even have to play any of the populated hoods, you can start with a custom one, make a single Sim or family and just play with him/her/ them for a while too.

If you are going to experiment, it is easy to generate a new game with UC, - you will never need to uninstall and reinstall except if you buy another computer, there are other options (repair game in Origin/ delete the Sims 2 UC folder (ask if you are not sure which one) and Origin will generate a new one for you when you restart your game).

UC works almost exactly the same in most ways and there is a FAQ pinned to the top of these discussion page. (The Clean Installer has been updated, if you download the latest one, it will work perfectly with UC).


So go and play and, especially, enjoy! And, if you run into a problem, ask

I'd second all of the above - if you're not sure about what you want to do I'd start with an experimental hood to begin with, or one of the premades. Don't worry about getting too attached to sims or 'spoiling' the premade neighbourhoods to begin with - there are ways of copying sims and resetting neighbourhoods to out-of-the-box pristine states. Though ask (or find out) first before you start copying sims about the safe ways to do it (the in-game ways are NOT safe). Just this really:



I think it's three universities max.

Nope. I attached a custom university to my GS Uberhood, which already had all three Universities.

Granted, I haven't used it for anything, having gotten sidetracked from what I'd been going to do almost at once. So there might be difficulties about playing it that I have not encountered, akin to the empty second downtown. But the game gave me no hassle about adding it.

Which brings up an important bit of advice no one's given the OP yet - once you stop experimenting and start playing "for reals," you'll need to back up your game periodically. At a minimum you should back up before making any major change, such as adding or deleting a subhood or complicated mod; before using a utility (such as Hoodchecker) to do maintenance on a hood; and before troubleshooting a problem. This is done simply by making a copy of the relevant folder(s). Thus, if you change your mind or something goes wrong, you'll be able to restore your backups and proceed. Add your game data files to your regularly scheduled data backups for that computer. (If you aren't doing regularly scheduled data backups, start. Today! All hard drives die eventually, and no man knows the hour of their passing.)

Once you start adding custom content, you'll need to pay attention to what, exactly, they add to your game. Certain items, especially animated objects and multi-pollination-technician mods, add NPCs to all hoods, and removing that custom content from your Downloads folder - or your neighborhoods from contact with that downloads folder! - is the same as deleting a sim from those neighborhoods, which is the worst thing you can do to your neighborhood. The late great Mootilda, who knew more about this game than the developers did, recommended adding NPC-bearing CC to the character folders of each hood, or simply backing up the Sims2 folder as a unit every time instead of backing up individual folders.

At times, you'll feel crushed and overwhelmed by the sheer number of things that can go wrong. This is one of the world's greatest games, but it is also one of the most complex, and it was created by teams of variously talented people under corporate conditions. A lot of things can go wrong, and certain known issues were never patched because the corporation was rushing on to the Next Thing and didn't feel it was cost effective to go back and fix things. (Corporations are universally idiots at this level of judgement.) The modding community has developed a number of tools and procedures for prolonging neighborhood shelf-life, preventing problems, and fixing problems that arise, but in any program as complicated at this one, chaos theory is in operation, and we don't have the source code so the modding community is limited in the places it can go to fix things, or even to test whether certain things that look problematic are in fact problems.

It's easy to get hung up on doing everything just right in order to prevent corruption of the code, and still wind up with a corrupt neighborhood. So practice good game hygiene, don't do any of the Very Bad Things in the thread Jo linked you to, and relax. You can't play soccer with a clean ball, and you can't use a program without glitches arising. But you can have fun, and that's what you're here for.

Everyone else has given really good advice, so I'll just say... Enjoy this time! Even if it feels overwhelming now. Sooner or later you'll have the game mechanics down pat and will be playing in the style that suits you best. Some of the weirdest and funniest things can happen when you don't know what you're doing and you might miss all the chaos a little once it's gone.

Oh maybe it was three Downtowns then? I thought not but there was something early on about limited numbers of additions because one of the selling points of OFB's business districts was that you could have as many as you like.

Wow! Thanks so much everyone for all of your replies, I never expected to get such a big response. I was thinking one or two at the most would help but I'm really impressed and touched at the huge response on trying to help me. Just wanted to start off by saying thanks to everyone!

Peni: Thanks so much for all of your in depth advice! I'm new to the site so I wasn't even aware the site had game guides on here. Thanks for pointing that out to me. This is definitely along the lines of what I wanted to look through. I really like your idea of devoting each play session to a single topic, that seems like it will be the easiest route to learn things. A big thank you for explaining all the neighborhoods too, I wasn't aware that each one had a sort of "theme" to it. I knew that each had a semi-story but didn't realize that it went further than that. I'll definitely look around the forum for things to do and experiment with. Also, thanks for making the suggestion about backing up files. I usually back up my hard drive no less than once a month, on average how much is considered "Safe" for The Sims? Is it very easy to "ruin"/corrupt the game with simple downloads/mods? For now, I'm not sure I'm going to get too far involved in mods and the like, nothing too in depth. I'm interested in custom content for sure (clothing, furniture, physical objects) but I've never been too involved with game altering mods. That of course may change (and probably will) but can things really get out of whack with just skins/objects? Just curious here. And I suppose a follow up question would be: how "easy" is it to get things back to normal when things go wrong? I remember with The Sims 1 if I downloaded something that just didn't work right with my game, deleting it would 99% of the time take care of things with no after effects. Is The Sims 2 more of the same idea or does it go deeper than that?

Charity: Thanks for the aging cheat, I actually didn't know that existed, I wasn't even thinking about cheats actually which is odd considering how often I used them in the original game. Also thanks for the link!

Zarathustra: Thanks for the suggestions on which neighborhoods to start with and also the explanations on the seasons. And thank you for the suggestion on searching the forum for suggestions and help with other topics.

Joansarah: Adorable avatar by the way! Hehe. What are the subhoods? Are those the downtown/university/etc. districts? Thanks for the tip about the seasons too. Thanks for breaking down all the various ways to tackle the aging, some of them are definitely along the lines of what I'm looking for. Thanks for the suggestion about organizing the Downloads folder. Does it not matter how many subfolders I create, as long as they are in the Downloads section they should all work correctly? Thank you for the links on corruption, clean installer, and essential mods, they were definitely helpful!

Ovenhole: Thanks for the information about how the premade homes offer mini tutorials. I'll definitely give that a whirl a few times as I get used to things. Thanks also for the links to the mod too.

Justpetro: Thanks for the information about the aging issue and I like the idea of using a family to experiment with. Thanks for the explanation about to "reset" things in the game too. I appreciate the information about the FAQs and I appreciate your encouragement about asking for help. Silly as it sounds I need to be told that from time to time, I'm always reluctant to ask for help...surprised myself by making this topic!

Maxon: Thanks for the tip about experimenting and for the information about resetting neighborhoods!

Platinumplumbbob: Thanks for the alternate approach about what's been suggested so far. I think I'll try a little of both, taking things one at a time and other times simply just going in and seeing how different things interact with each other. Thanks for the tops on the in-game encyclopedia and tutorials too.

Vladora: Thanks for your post, it definitely reminded me of The Sims 1. After awhile I would experience most of the things an expansion pack would have to offer, and I would get a little sad realizing there wasn't going to be anything "big" to experience until another expansion pack. With this game it's like one giant expansion pack so there's a lot to explore!

Whew, I think that's everyone. Again, thanks a million everyone for such a big response, I wasn't expecting it in the least. As somewhat of an aside I must say I'm really impressed with this community. I've been a member of dozens of forums and online communities before and I hardly see communities really reach out to newbies like this. I definitely feel more than welcomed here and think I'll try and make myself at home!

Hooray guys! We're apparently actually nice people! Who'd have guessed? In all seriousness though, @Wire, this is a pretty great community- we all like the game, and we like helping other people to like it too!

@Wire The Sims 2 community in general is pretty nice- if I do say so myself. A lot but not all of us are older players but I think also because we are a lot smaller with players who are quite devoted to this particular sims game. A lot of us have been here or playing since sims 1 days but have either not moved to the newer versions of the game or moved past and came back. We love new blood! people! The more people we have here the more we discover, the more we have to chat about and the more content we feel like making.

I don't really have any advice to give other than: try not to read up too much online. A big part of the experience is getting surprised in-game!

I haven't played Pleasantview in some time, but if and when I attempt it again, I will grab Don instead and make him clean up the mess. He could probably use the skill gain anyway.

There are already great suggestions and help so i'll just say, have fun and enjoy! There are really nice people here willing to help should you run into an issue

Thanks everybody for the follow up replies! I'm going to try playing around with the game a little tomorrow night. I suppose I have a few more questions (the answers for which will probably vary from person to person). See, I want to create at least two totally separate neighborhoods. One for downloads and the like (downloaded characters) and the other for people who I know in real life (myself, family, etc.) How easy/hard is it create neighborhoods from scratch? I'm sort of bad with creativity sometimes and end up making really straight forward things that don't have much imagination so I'm wondering if I would be better off just using predone neighborhoods and dropping people in there as I see fit. I also want to try and make in game versions of houses I've been to in real life (such as my house, my parents house, etc.) how easy/hard would you say it is to do something like that? I remember trying this years and years ago in The Sims 1 and what I ended up with was some god awful monstrosity that looked more like an empty museum than a house. On a semi-related note how much effort would it take to re-create people? Again, I'm sort of a bad artist/designer so I was a little intimidated seeing all the customization options for faces in the build-a-sim mode. I want to try and come close to how people look but it doesn't have to be perfect. I guess really my huge question is: is all of this going to be pretty time-consuming/difficult to do?

I had a lot more to post but I'm sort of worn out with writing, I just got done doing a lot of that so when I came here I sort of cheated and just summed up fast what I wanted to say. I do appreciate everyone's posts though! It means a lot to me! Oh, and also to follow up to you what Carooh said, I decided I won't read up on too too much as I thought about it and yes, I do want to be surprised by the game for sure! I'll just read enough to get a good foundation of what to expect/what to do and let experiences lead me to build from there.

One way you can keep your sims young without mods is accumulating a lot of aspiration points (or just cheating and typing in aspirationPoints 40000) and getting the elixir of life. Don't try using this unless your sim's aspiration level is gold or platinum, or you may actually age more. An even more fun way is to use the cheat unlockcareerrewards (or be a smartass and go to college and then achieve a high level in the biology career) and get the cowplant. You must sacrifice the ugliest, most useless townie in order to satisfy the cow plant's palate. She will then produce a milk of the townie's essence, which will enhance your lifespan. Though if you want your sim to live for generations, you had better have a lot of meat around (don't worry, you will).

edit: whoops I didn't see someone else already mentioned this

Creating a neighborhood is not difficult at all. Creating a perfect neighborhood is impossible, so don't worry about that. Everyone builds ugly buildings to start with. If you feel that you need a neighborhood full of beautiful buildings, but want them to have no sims but the ones you create, you can download one of the uninhabited but fully-built neighborhoods ready for download here, or at other sites. If you want a prebuilt neighborhood with a few sims, to which you add your own as you see fit, you can use any of the premade ones, or, if none of them is quite what you want, there's a number of inhabited neighborhoods available for download here, too; from tiny ones like Widespot (five families, three community lots, no empty buildings) to huge ones like Meadow Creek or Riverside (I can't count that high).

Honestly, you can do whatever you want! Absolutely anything! If the game doesn't seem set up for it - someone's built or modded or done something that will let you do it, you just have to find it. And if you don't know what you want - pick something that looks attractive and start. If you get bored and decide you want to do something else, you can. No one will judge you harshly. It's no one's business what you do.

Play around and find what makes you happy.

That depends on your expectations for your hood. If what you want are just a few basic houses you could start off with a blank hood and either use bin houses, build or download houses.



That is certainly an option, I did this myself with my new hood. I used Elsewhere by Plasticbox. Might not suit a new player as it has a lot of very tiny houses. There are other unoccupied hoods up for download here. That could be a nice easy way to get straight to playing.



That depends on the house. Houses range in difficulty from basic to something requiring advanced building skills. You may also need cc. Rule of thumb is on a house plan, a bath tub takes up 2 game tiles while a narrow-regular window, door or stove uses 1.




Not something I can help with as I only ever tweak face templates (you can get a range of face templates to add to those already there) I made my simself a couple of times, she has a badly made forehead and her eyes are too widely spaced. She makes okay looking kids with my husbands simself so I guess that is something.

Thanks again for all the input guys (and girls!). I'm going to have a look around the downloads section and probably try a premade neighborhood but I'll experiment with doing my own too. I'm also going to just try and recreate some people/places from my own life and see how it turns out. If it's a disaster, at least it'll be my own homemade disaster! I'll own that disaster and be proud of it.

Trying to recreate real people and real houses is the way that I learned how to use the basic tools A tip for creating sims is that it's much easier to do so in Body Shop which is an external application which comes with the game (you'll find it under Start/Programs/EA Games/The Sims 2 Apartment Life/Body Shop, or at least that's where it is for me, unsure if UC is different!) - it's got more controls,

You will sometimes find that there are elements of real life houses which are difficult/impossible to crate in the sims. That's okay too - learning the limitations of the program is also useful!

I also really like MikeInside's building tutorials, if they are still up.

http://modthesims.info/showthread.p...626#post4749626

This post by esmeiolanthe links to a bunch of building tutorials. The second link contains links to Mike Inside's tutorials, but I prefer the "clockwatching.net" ones for learning to make simple, but cute, starter homes.

(Because the OP wasn't overwhelmed enough... Sorry!)