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Mad Poster
Original Poster
#1 Old 13th Nov 2018 at 11:55 PM
Default Cyberpunk District
OK, this whole "can't tell anyone what I'm working on because reasons" thing that I've fallen into is STUPID. Especially when I get to the point where I'm getting stuck and could probably benefit from getting some help from others!

So, one of the lots that I'm working on right now is a city block lifted from a cyberpunk-style city. I'm taking a lot of design inspiration from the stereotypes of the genre, especially with the release of the Cyberpunk 2077 trailer a while back, and as far as exterior visuals go, I'm mostly satisfied...

At this point where I'm struggling is how to do the interior public spaces. A few things, like cybercafes or street vendors, I'm satisfied with the direction they're going in, and don't foresee the need for a lot of changes there, but others, like the brothel/love hotel (the red and gray stone building in the forefront of the image) and an unlicensed medical center (for installing all those black-market cyber-prosthetics), I'm kind of stumped on. There's also gonna be more public spaces that I'm just not sure what they'll turn into yet, so any thoughts on venues that would be fitting for a cyberpunk/neo-noir city that would be doable without relying on CC would be welcome!

Thoughts?

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Lab Assistant
#2 Old 14th Nov 2018 at 10:43 AM
Both brothel and medical center would be great. I'm playing big city which surely needs such places
For other venues I suggest poker/pool club, coffee house, pawn shop and little restaurant with stage (either for music or pole dance). i know little about cyberpunk but I think these places will fit.
Mad Poster
#3 Old 14th Nov 2018 at 2:11 PM
Don't forget to include an Abandoned Warehouse.

Ugly is in the heart of the beholder.
(My simblr isSim Media Res . Widespot,Widespot RFD: The Subhood, and Land Grant University are all available here. In case you care.)
Mad Poster
Original Poster
#4 Old 14th Nov 2018 at 4:48 PM
Ooh, an illegal card game would definitely fit! The idea of backalley illegal gambling also makes me think of robot fight clubs, and a boxing ring isn't too hard to make...

And warehouses have to be big to look right, unfortunately, and I'm trying to keep this lot from growing much bigger... plus, I've already done that!

ETA: Picture of the alley that runs through the middle of the lot, to give you a look at the even seedier side of this lot...
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Field Researcher
#5 Old 16th Dec 2018 at 9:10 AM
I've heard of a guy in China who ran a small scale electronics manufacturing line above a little shop, below an apartment. That kinda fits well with the cyberpunk theme, or at least a servo chop shop would :P

WowoW it's a badly hidden owo UwU Yeet skeet Idk what I'm doing
Test Subject
#6 Old 17th Dec 2018 at 2:30 PM
Seconding a quick 'n dirty servo repair/spare parts shop; could also do some form of vehicle repair/garage; they don't generally have hovercycles in the Sims but it goes with the metal repair/grease & soot/random machine parts lying around aesthetic of an android builder
Not sure what you're doing with CC or not, but maybe a tattoo parlor--for your barcode tattoos and cyber-plugin piercings, or maybe as a front for the even-more-sketchy medical center?
A mobster's/corrupt businessman's office? Someone's gotta run this district, and it ain't gonna be someone Lawful Good
Maybe fill in some dead space with a nice trash pile or somesuch, the kind of back-corner-of-the-alley where you might dig through & find something amazing, but you probably shouldn't look too close at anything else
Not sure how you feel about supernaturals, but vampires pair well with a nice cyberpunk--a vampire club, or just a dungeon for their coffins?
Lab Assistant
#7 Old 4th Jan 2019 at 4:10 PM Last edited by Little Nemo : 4th Jan 2019 at 5:35 PM.
How about a pet shop? In Blade Runner, Animoids are synthetic recreations of extinct animals, so lets just pretend the animals in this shop are too.
A Gym, mainly consisting of dance spheres might also work, the spheres are after all relatively techno.
An Internet Cafe will probably not be used by visitors, but perhaps a secret hacker room with computers, monitors and the criminal career reward - you go into cyberspace sitting in it and get burned if you hit a fire wall - might look good.

Question - when I read the title, I first thought you'd make an entire business district, but I guess it'll be only this lot? Will it be a Community lot, residential with home business (seeing the mailbox there) or perhaps have an apartment version based on MogHughson's Apartment/Community Lot Mod? It could also be used as a hotel - I learned that hotels work almost like normal community lots, except nobody else checks in and the styling chair doesn't work.
Mad Poster
Original Poster
#8 Old 5th Jan 2019 at 12:50 AM
Yeah, it's just a single 3x5 lot, but there's enough going on here that I still think "district" is the right term... I mean, there's three additional streets inside the lot, so it's not just a single row of storefronts...

Not sure how I missed the fact that the criminal career reward is PERFECT for this...

And my goal is to emulate the feel you'd get from MogHughson's mod, without actually requiring people to have it (though it'd be easy to tweak things just a bit to take full advantage of that mod, for people who are so inclined), so I'm focusing on 'community lot' type venues that will still work on an apartment lot (i.e., "clothing stores" that have closet shelves instead of store shelves, "love hotels" that are just thematically appropriate public bedrooms, etc) Then there will also be plenty of apartments on the upper floors of a lot of buildings, like you see in lots of cities.

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Lab Assistant
#9 Old 6th Jan 2019 at 6:23 PM
Thanks for clearing that up! Another question: since you already made a cyberpunk lot, will this be connected to the other one story wise? So perhaps we'll see a few of the replicated plants the protagonist from that story made?
Mad Poster
Original Poster
#10 Old 6th Jan 2019 at 8:50 PM
Not directly... this one is maybe a bit closer to our present day? My other cyberpunk lot makes refernence to arcologies and all sorts of much more futuristic things, whereas this will be only a bit more cyberpunk than what you'd find in a tech-heavy city today. I will probably make reference to some of the same megacorporations and metanationals that I talked about for that other lot though (and that I've actually referenced for quite a few other things as well), just because I kind of have a universe faintly sketched out in my head- not enough to really be a story that'll be included in anything else, but enough to kind of guide my thinking in certain areas. So, you'll probably see Armscor and Subarashii and Consolidated existing as powerful entities here too.

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Lab Assistant
#11 Old 8th Jan 2019 at 12:17 PM Last edited by Little Nemo : 8th Jan 2019 at 1:26 PM.
While it is supposed to be cyberpunk, would some 'vintage noir' stores work too (sorry, not sure how else to describe such stores...)? I'm thinking of a tiny painters atelier with an easel despite everyone taking selfies or do photoshopping (- also, if you put a custommade painting in a lot, does that count as CC, or will the lot suffer from corruption because the painting connects to Simdata, or will the painting vanish anyway if uploaded...I'm not sure?), or a crammed antique book shop despite everyone reading stuff on the internet... these shops feel like anchronisms even in our time yet refuse to go away....
Lab Assistant
#12 Old 16th Jan 2019 at 6:12 PM
How about a night club somewhere? I think you'd expect that from a cyberpunk setting.

I think the lot looks stunning so far, it reminds me a lot of my unfinished Blade Runner lot (for some reason most of my lights won't turn on in build mode, even though I used the boolProp allObjectLightsOn true cheat)



As you can see I used mirrors on the higher building to create the illusion of a glass facade on skyscrapers.


Did I really say that?
- Well, at least yesterday is behind us now.
/Jonipoon
Mad Poster
Original Poster
#13 Old 17th Jan 2019 at 3:33 AM
@Jonipoon , I'm glad to hear you say that, since I'm definitely drawing a lot of inspiration from your finished Blade Runner lot already! It's kind of a different feel of cyberpunk than the shop I made earlier (one of those infuriating things where I've got a clear distinction in my head, but cannot for the life of me think of how to explain it in a way that would make sense to anyone else)

As to your lighting question, I use Mootilda's "Turn on / off all lights" objects, and they've always worked for me.. .might be worth a look!

Also, I LOVE the mirrors on the outside of the building! Like, to the point where I'm kind of tempted to try to redesign one of the buildings on my lot to take advantage of it... (I won't though... I'm perfectly happy to steal- er, borrow ideas from other creators, and encourage people to do the same with any ideas they like from my creations, but scooping your idea before you've had a chance to unveil it just seems like cheating!)

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Mad Poster
Original Poster
#14 Old 19th Jan 2019 at 10:08 PM
OK, @Jonipoon especially, but really anyone else too- I'm trying to start filling in the apartments on this lot, but I'm kinda struggling with finding the kind of variety of furnishings I want. With apartments, what I try to do is find a way to create a story for each space, usually by having a mental idea of who lives there, and then being able to think about how they would furnish their space. With this lot, there's about 15 apartments to furnish, and I really want the kind of crazy variety that you'd see in a cyberpunk city, but I'm stuck... I have a couple shantytown-style shacks, and a minimalist modern penthouse, but everything else, all I'm coming up with is the shut-in otaku netrunner type. While I'm ABSOLUTELY including a few apartments in this theme (it is cyberpunk, after all), I really want more than that... things like bounty hunters or drug/illegal cybernetics dealers spring to mind, but I'm not sure how to realize that in-game. Ideas?

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Needs Coffee
retired moderator
#15 Old 19th Jan 2019 at 11:02 PM
For this many apartments, I would have 4 design ideas then repeat those. Only 4 playable families can move in any way. You might want to mention the no townie neighbour mod because if all those apartments get townies in them the lag will be significant for many people. Mirrors work well on the outside of apartments, I have done that myself.

Also, I love this! Your first picture looks great and I can't wait to download and look at it. Might even be able to use it on this new machine of mine since it isn't a huge lot.

"I dream of a better tomorrow, where chickens can cross the road and not be questioned about their motives." - Unknown
~Call me Jo~
Mad Poster
Original Poster
#16 Old 19th Jan 2019 at 11:30 PM
Without going into the minutiae, this lot basically has four different apartment "buildings" of one sort or another, where the layouts are the same, and then four standalone apartments that are different in one way or another (penthouses, shanties, etc). The standalone ones all kind of gave me ideas as I was building them, so they're finished (or nearly so), but the more traditional apartments are where I'm hung up.

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Lab Assistant
#17 Old 20th Jan 2019 at 3:23 AM Last edited by Little Nemo : 20th Jan 2019 at 2:27 PM.
Wow, you sure are dedicated on giving each of your lots a story.
Okay, the few ideas I had:
Street samurai - while futuristic, Asian deco including the samurai sword wall hanging comes to mind
Musician - apartment with music career reward and music posters, indicating anti-establishment and anarchy behaviour.
DIY pharmacist - science career reward, get your drugs here.
A.I. - a Servo apartment, no bed, no cooking, only a balcony to recharge, and a robot station to repair yourself
EDIT:
Infiltrator(Spy) - a room with a Showbiz makeover station and wardrobe, also intelligence career reward - this spy even takes the risk to deform its face to blend in. Alternatively a Sim, who does this in order to get access to high society by looking pretty, so the room has posters/pictures invoking dreams of a better life.
Webcam Media - artist career reward and similar to what you did with your SBN HQ with Green Screen et al. - digging up the dirt from the big companies nobody dares to show on official media. Unlike the Otaku, for this you sometimes need to get out on the streets, armed with a camera/smartphone - so a bunch of cell phones might be lying around here in case authority smashes your last one.
Hoarder/Junker - Room full with boxes (wardrobes), computer part deco et.al. A Sim who apparently collects everything he finds, either trying to sell it online or just hoarding it, always threatened by getting crashed under collapsing junk.
Getaway driver/Nomad - not sure, if you can add a car to the district, but if, perhaps a Sim specialized in transporting people or just being constantly on the road, who just stores stuff in his/her dirty apartment like reserve wheels and electronic parts?

Hope this helps.
Needs Coffee
retired moderator
#18 Old 20th Jan 2019 at 4:05 AM
I have done apartment units in:
grey, dark blue, white with chrome and splashes of green
yellow, black, white and orange
Seaside white wood, blue wood, and regular wood with blue, white and brown stripe.
bohemian green, purple, black and blue
Retro blue, yellow and 'red' (I think it's called the Atomic set)
Turquoise, brown and pink
Red,white, black, chrome
A cheap white, blue, yellow and black
last one was for older folk in the country sets. One in each of Pink, green, wine and yellow.

"I dream of a better tomorrow, where chickens can cross the road and not be questioned about their motives." - Unknown
~Call me Jo~
Lab Assistant
#19 Old 21st Jan 2019 at 4:54 PM
When it comes to purely Maxis content, the game is unfortunately lacking the run-down, more grungy stuff that you're clearly looking for.

There are some industrial type walls that'd work for a cyberpunk setting, and I'd definitely recommend you to utilize the neon lights as much as possible for every room. Fish tanks are cool too, and disco lights (obviously).

Did I really say that?
- Well, at least yesterday is behind us now.
/Jonipoon
Field Researcher
#20 Old 12th Feb 2019 at 6:37 AM
Maybe it's not what you're looking for, but the idea of having one apartment being "old fashioned" could be interesting. It could be home to a lovely old couple who had technology get away from them and it's their farmhouse chairs are their one respite from the neon filled, technology soaked city outside the window. It could be home of someone wary of the ever increasing dependence on technology who yearns for a simpler life, yet for whatever reason can't leave the city behind at least yet. Give the apartment some futuristic fixtures that can mix with old furniture to fully complete the look. It could be played that they also dislike the large power corporations hold over the world and may be doing something to stop it, depending. The older couple might be less inclined to fight for the future, resigned to fate, or they could be showing those around them that life can be different, it doesn't have to be corporate controlled cyberpunk, but could be a cleaner, more private world with fully realized human rights. Same goes for the younger tech adverse one. There's gotta be a few people in a cyberpunk world who reject all the technology, how they do so is actually a really interesting question with lots of possibilities.

TL:DR: old fashioned lower tech simple and/or anti corporate rebellion leader apartments

So that might be how I play the lot once it's released at least :P

WowoW it's a badly hidden owo UwU Yeet skeet Idk what I'm doing
Mad Poster
Original Poster
#21 Old 26th Mar 2019 at 10:34 PM
Still working on the interiors for lots of these places... Much as I'd love to be able to make things look like the built-in furniture that lots of cyberpunk aesthetics call for, TS2 isn't really set up well to do that in most cases. Instead I've kind of decided to go for the more near-future, overcrowded, tech-heavy slum feel, at least for most of this lot. To that end, there's a few pictures of apartments and a back-alley cyber-surgeon to give a feel for things, as well as the dining area for the penthouse apartment, to contrast that. I'm trying to figure out that apartment as well, since I want it to be much more minimalist and almost sterile feeling, but still look futuristic somehow. I still welcome any thoughts or feedback here!
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Lab Assistant
#22 Old 27th Mar 2019 at 9:03 PM
Those look pretty nice, however I think you're using the neon too sparsely. That's just me though, I tend to overuse neon, hehe.

Like for instance, in both the first and second room you could add two extra neon bars on the wall behind the computer desk. Or just add a crap load of neon bars on top of each other to create a "shutter" look.

Did I really say that?
- Well, at least yesterday is behind us now.
/Jonipoon
Mad Poster
Original Poster
#23 Old 31st May 2019 at 5:18 AM
Completed and posted.

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Mad Poster
#24 Old 1st Jun 2019 at 7:58 AM
Cool looking lot! I like it! :D
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