Hi! I absolutely adore your Sycomore Cove lots!!! I have been searching desperately to find nice Community Lots for Sims 2 everywhere. Are you planning to upload all your lots?!?!?!

Hi there! Thank you so much for your wonderful compliment. 😀 I have a few uploaded already!

I don’t mind sharing community lots, although there are a couple I won’t share (such as the boardwalk, because beach lots are so finicky when placed into a different neighborhood). I’ve also been asked about sharing Surrey Hall, the dormitory at Windham University, but it’s absolutely massive and chock-full of CC. Maybe in the future I could uploaded a smaller/simpler version. 🙂

Other than that, I’m open to suggestions for lots to be uploaded, although I will warn that I’m very slow about actually doing it. D: Most of my community lots are very CC-heavy. I try to cull as much unnecessary content as possible while keeping the basic look of the lot intact. I also try to hunt down master meshes wherever possible (some of my earlier lots are missing the master meshes in the upload and I’d like to fix this in the future!). So for a very cluttered lot, this could take awhile. I’ve had some lovely people request Lucy’s Diner and also the Oakwood Biergarten, and I’ve yet to upload either of them. :X

TL;DR – Yes, I’m open to uploading lots, although it’s not always feasible for certain ones. Feel free to request any, although I can’t guarantee it will be uploaded in a timely manner. ^^;

What mod do you use to give your sims traits?

Hi there! I answered this right here. 🙂

Would you ever consider selling your downloads folder? I love your cc and would totes pay to have it available in my game.

Uh, whoa. People do this? D: I’m sorry, but I’ve answered in the past why I won’t share my downloads folder. I especially couldn’t ever accept money for it when all of these creations are the work of other people – I only downloaded them and unzipped them into my own game folder.

Again, I’m more than happy to answer WCIFs for anything you see in my screenshots. My resources page is a WIP but I have quite a few links in there, as well. I’m sorry I couldn’t help, anon.

How long does it take for your game to load? Love your blog!👏🏻

Thank you! 🙂 *hugs* It takes about 20 minutes to get to the main screen, and another 5-10 minutes to load CAS (where I randomize a few Sims to “roll the pacifier” before loading up a household). 🙂

I may be imagining it, but since I cleared about 1 GB of CC this week, it feels like it loads a bit faster. 😛

Do you know of a way to remove the version number that pops up in the corner of the screen? I’m tired of editing that thing out :(

Hey anon! I’m actually not sure. : I’ve noticed it occasionally happens on my screenshots, but most of the time it doesn’t? I’m not sure if there’s a setting I accidentally toggled on/off without realizing. It is annoying to keep editing out, though. 😦

Can anyone help this anon? (Gosh, I’m just useless today, aren’t I? D:)

EDIT: “The version number comes from having testing cheats enabled; turning them off and then exiting/re-entering the lot is the only way to remove it, if I’m not mistaken.” Thanks deveroux! That makes sense, since I play with testing cheats off. 🙂 Anon, give this a try!

EDIT EDIT: Confirmed by diigosims as well!

I love your pictures. I’ve lost motivation for my game, can I ask what do you do? Do you jump between families and just post whatever :)?

Hi hi! Thank you so much. 😀 I play my families in loosely-organized rotations consisting of five days (one season). It gets a little tricky with uni – I have to decide how quickly I want to play uni to have certain playables age to adulthood at certain times. Previously, I was playing one “year” as a round, but I want to close the age gap a bit so I’m going to be playing the current round for two years. I know a lot of people use the Lot Sync Timer to keep meticulous track of exactly how many days each family has been played, but I haven’t been able to get used to it. 😦 If/when Sycamore Cove gets corrupted, or I decide to start a completely new hood, I want to be a lot more thorough with record-keeping, and do more of a BaCC with actual rules to spice things up. 🙂

Sometimes I hit a bit of a lull – I try not to do too much building or decorating all at once, because that can be overwhelming and I start to feel uninspired. And vice versa – sometimes when I’ve been playing families for awhile, I’ll feel the urge to build a new lot just to have something different to do. I tend to find families a bit boring until they start having kids – mostly because I just love seeing how different genetics play out, so just about all of my Sims wind up having kids. XD Poor Chase was having a really uninteresting round, so I decided to add a bunch of other people’s sims to the neighborhood to shake things up a bit. 😉 I’m thinking of introducing ROS events at the start of the next round!

I fall into the same habits when I play, and it’s something I’ve been trying to break since I started this (not-so-) new neighborhood. For example, I have almost zero experience with Sim-owned businesses, and I’ve never really played a supernatural Sim (Sheila is a witch, but I don’t really do anything witchy with her :|). There’s still so much left to explore in TS2, even though I’ve had the game for nearly ten years!

When I’m feeling uninspired, I usually look at other people’s BaCCs/legacies. Looking at building and decorating screenshots is always nice, but to really get the urge to play, I need to look at deedee-sims, permaplat, lilithpleasant, and zebrafagsims posts (among other Simmers!). They all post regularly and you can see the progression of the challenge/storyline/etc. It’s what really motivates to get my own neighborhood going!

I hope you’re feeling a bit more inspired soon!! ❤

Can you post some pictures of the downtown area of your neighborhood? It looks lovely, but I’m having a hard time piecing it together in my head.

Hey anon! I hope this is what you mean. :3 Forgive my craptastic diagrams…

Blue lots are residential, pink lots are community. Everything else is hood deco. ❤

Duplex (current residents: Chase Thompson)
Greenwich Apartments (current residents: Sheila Dunne & Alfred Blake)
Artist’s loft (vacant)
Comic book store
Paddy Murphy’s Pub
Higher Grounds Coffee Shop
The Hive
Lucy’s Diner
Trattoria da Fiore
Sugarplum Park & Skating Rink
Bowl-o-Rama

Lot 3.5 is Nate and Tabitha’s house, which I didn’t realize was in the screenshot. :3 Annie and Jasper live “off-screen” in the more rural part of town.

More pictures to illustrate the layout:

If you want more/better pictures, feel free to send me another message! I at least hope my pitiful labeling skills help you better understand the layout of the urban part of Sycamore Cove. 🙂

Would you be willing to share Jasper and Annie? Its okay if you don’t I just love seeing them so much! <3

Sure! I was originally going to wait until the “founders” had passed away before uploading them, but considering I’ve never actually had a Sim reach elder life stage and pass away, that might never happen. 😛 There’s no reason why Annie and Jasper can’t go on to have fulfilling (or un-fulfilling? D:) lives in someone else’s game!

I’m extracting them in SimPE now, I should have them up tonight. 🙂

How do you take and edit your pictures in sims 2? I awalys try to take pictures pictures with good quality but they always come bad :(

Hi there! I use Fraps, not the in-game camera, to take nice high-quality screenshots. Before I post them, I edit them a bit in Photoshop using snapdragoned’s PSD, which I tweak a bit for each individual picture. 🙂 Hope this helps!

How do you not get overwhelmed with decorating in such detail as you do and not get burnt out (tired of the game?) i admire your talent :)

Ahahah, I do get overwhelmed sometimes! I especially have a love/hate relationship with kitchens – I always feel the need to clutter the crap out of them, but once I start and see how many shelves I still have left to clutter I’m like whyyyyyyyy did I do this. 😛 I tend to decorate in bursts, which is why it takes forever for me to finish something. If I find myself getting tired or losing momentum, I step away for awhile and do something else, like read or watch TV. I do most of my simming at night, so when I start feeling this way, it’s usually time for bed. :3 Sometimes it helps to sleep on it, and when you revisit the lot the next day you might have fresh ideas. 🙂

In general, I try not to do too much building/decorating all at once. I like to mix in a fair amount of playing so I don’t get bored or uninspired. Although, there are times where I have so many ideas (usually for community lots), and I’ll build them one right after another. (This usually happens when I’ve been out to a bar or a cafe or a park in real life – I’m constantly getting ideas for community lots when I’m out!) But residential lots are a little harder for me. Sometimes I’ll google a phrase like “rustic living room” or “colorful kitchen” and mix and match some ideas I see. Or sometimes I download a cool piece of CC and I just ~have to~ use it, so the room will fall into place around it.

There will always be periods of time where I’m busy, or uninspired, or just not feeling up to sitting at my computer, and I won’t play for awhile. But TS2 has kept me coming back for ten years now, and I know it will continue to do so in the future! 🙂