#algary mcc

[glowyjellyfish]

I just want to share a little something I’ve been working on.

A nice castle for an MCC! It’s not finished; the interior is still vast and unfurnished, but I’m really pleased with how the overall shape turned out. Sometimes when I try to build a castle in Sims 2 it’s a big boring square, but look up a few real castle floor plans and boom--interesting layout!

Here’s a different angle (and as someone inexperienced in sharing sims 2 pictures I obviously need to up the resolution on these suckers). There’s a guardhouse at the front gates, with a little (fake) drawbridge over the moat, complete with fence gate to keep riffraff out. That fat tower in the back is linked only by a bridge on the second floor, and is ideal for a court wizard, some sort of wicked in-laws’ suite, or... anyone else who would enjoy their space and a mysterious tower all to themselves, really. There’s also a full basement, which I will probably install servant’s quarters and maybe a dungeon in, and a chapel (where the stained-glass windows are) and throne room, both of which have balconies on the second floor. I’m not totally sure I like the roof on top of the throne room (first picture back left--it’s the standard peak roof, and I’m waffling about it), but overall it’s a really good start.

oh, and here’s the Royal Steward, Felix Canmore.

He looks like a pleasant, hard-working man, but he rolled Romance so we’ll see. Not that he gets to experience life until a royal family moves in, but you never know what other local Romance sims will demand.

[glowyjellyfish]

Gather round, children, for the legend of Grimwood Abbey

(that’s the tiny pre-MCC I mentioned the other day. I only came up with this concept, oh, over a year ago. Dropped it to play a nice easy modern Megahood. I don’t have much wherewithal.)

...so I have spent two days on the weekend so far just working on getting my CC sorted out so I can consider starting this. Yesterday the big issues were a. realizing it was super inefficient to delete stuff in-game one by one even though it’s nice to be able to see it, and becoming paralyzed with indecision about whether to take the time to hunt down unidentified files by hand, or continue spending time deleting dozens and dozens of recoiled by hand… eventually I did a little of both, but boy I gotta use some kind of tooltip renamed now huh… b. I am not good at Delphy’s Download Organizer. I don’t understand it. Why is there no “how to use” documentation. So then I set it to scan for orphans or duplicates, stare hopelessly at the results unable to figure out what is the best course of action, and then quietly quit it to yet again… move files around manually. Don’t get me wrong, I was able to use it to shove several file types into correct folders, but my real issue would be so easily solved if there was a thoroughly explained duplicate scanner that I was able to trust. Ugh, I probably should have started by moving all the files to one big folder and sorting them from there but WHATEVER.

Because, you see, like many simmers, I have been collecting my cc since roughly 2004. I legit cannot remember if I have lost the whole thing and had to start over, but this collection can certainly be traced back to my first laptop that could run the Sims 2. For the longest time, I merely collected a big pile of everything shiny and cool that caught my eye, resulting in a big mixed-up mess combining modern and medieval fantasy and sci-fi and random fandoms and steampunk and everything I ever enjoyed. That… was not sustainable. I tried keeping individual folders within Downloads for specific genres, with the idea that I could swap them in and out for different hoods. Alas, that was too time-consuming for my taste, and I ended up with the same basic downloads folder but very lightly sort of organized but not really.

Sometime within the last ten years, I started trying to cultivate different downloads folders of broad genre categories, all neatly saved on a big flash drive. That’s all well and good, but copying and backing up that shit took away precious hours I could be using to play. Not only that, but it was very rough trying to separate my downloads folder properly—some stuff worked well for multiple genres! So I ended up making copies of the whole downloads folder to build these alternates, which I could then whittle down to only the stuff I actually wanted in there. This medieval alternate downloads folder therefore also contained the folder I’d labeled Medieval CC in my last attempt at organizing, and just to be sure I copied everything over and back repeatedly. And you know how it goes—every time I got excited about the idea of an MCC, I had to go out and download anything new or shiny. And oh yeah, had to stock up on defaults because now I could be using a solely medieval downloads folder! And this new CC would get plonked right into the DL folder, nary a care for organization because I needed to play before I lost interest!

So I had at least two, possibly three copies of all the same content in a collection of medieval CC that’s been building for, let’s call it 15 years more or less. I can’t trust the download organizer—like sir are you showing me all of them? do I throw all these out or leave one behind?—and doing it by hand is extremely tedious, carefully removing all txt and preview files to improve my load time. And actually playing a year-old story concept is delayed yet again.

I’ve got a Megahood set up that I can start converting to medieval whenever I get my act together, and I still that that sounds like fun but also waaaay too big a project for me (latest issue: wait if the capulets and montagues are traditionally alike in dignity is it wrong to make the Capps gentry and the montys merchants? But if I make them both gentry it’ll be an entire damn subhood of nothing but gentry!). I also have the same old MCC hood I started building a year ago, restarting after years of having the concept ready (this one is Algary and it is the one i was building a castle for; it has a few interesting rolled families to start with such as the gentry family having no sim older than teen and me choosing to set that up as the direct heir and some cousins, and a peasant family that involved two elderly ladies who were in love and joined households after their obligatory husbands died, pooling resources to care for their families, but one of them was gonna feel obliged to head off to the church and repent while the other cared for the kids and became a midwife). And then there’s the new guy, Grimwood Abbey, whose concept is only a year old but I sure hope I can follow through on it because it is quite small. Even then I can’t decide yet whether to start with one household (everybody living together for protection!), two households (the church vs the knights), or several households (each knight beginning in their own household with their squire). The latter would make it easier for each knight to earn their own money and compete to purchase gentry approval from the church… but idk.

Anyway. After all that I am really hoping I am about ready to actually play a bit. Even just making some sims and buildings. Today I need to progress further in weeding out CC, try to find a way I can do that more efficiently, maybe find some nice standardized set of makeup and default eyes and skin to use rather than the haphazard collections I barely touch (I prefer to lean toward maxis match over Shiny Realistic skins where everyone has auto makeup, but I’m sure there is something nice out there that suits my needs), and I unfortunately saw some nice medieval clothes I don’t have while downloading a whole fresh set of Sun&Moon Star Factory stuffs (which, I had multiple copies of! Didn’t know what was updated and what was outdated or what! So I threw out everything I had and re-downloaded the entire collection, which may have been a bit drastic but it definitely worked. Also, why is there no complete user guide for this. A “how to get started” or something. Whatever.), so I also gotta download that. Then maybe I can make a test sim to make sure defaults and stuff work okay, and then maybe download some medieval lots to speed up the building process? And then I can play one of my various hood concepts finally actually? Maybe?

TLDR: I am getting frustrated because I have so many downloads, many of them duplicates within folder within the main folder, that it’s taking me all weekend just to straighten them out (and even then I might not be able to finish, despite it being a 3 day weekend where I live). I swear, it would be faster just to throw it all away and start over, except I can’t do that because I am clearly a CC hoarder and I might need a piece of CC that can no longer be downloaded.

...thus goes the preliminary legend of Grimwood Abbey and the horror story of Getting It Set Up. Someday, someday...

[glowyjellyfish]

So, I’ve been having a Problem of continually switching to new Sims 2 games. Which is fine, except I keep failing to come back to the ones I’ve already started. Part of it is frustration over certain CC collections causing constant crashes, part of it is limited time causing me to lose momentum on what I was thinking about at work, part of it is probably just ADHD.

So what I’m gonna do right now is list all the games/hoods I have started and feel are in progress (as opposed to ones I am never going back to), plus ones I am planning. This is mainly for sorting out my thoughts and focus, but it’s fine if anybody else wants to look or ask me questions.

Modern Downloads Folder

1. Megahood Classic. This is an Ubermegahood I started around 2020, called a Megahood out of habit. For a while this folder had an older set of mods, not including things like traits and supernatural lifestates, but currently the only thing that distinguishes it is a lack of Proportionate Aging. It’s… slightly far along, for a megahood—most of the premade elders are dead and most of the premade teens are graduating college. It slowed down a bit because I had the aging mod installed for a while before deciding to remove it. And I had no plans to use new supernatural lifestates or traits in this megahood.

2. The Orphanarium. This is multiple instances of the Orphan Challenge played in the same hood, using deaged versions of characters from many of my favorite media, such as FF7 and Stargate. This is a type of hood I have played many times over the years, but this particular version I was just starting to set up.

Disney Downloads Folder

1. Lake Buena Vista, the Disney-themed BaCC featuring social class rules, guilds, and True Love. This is the project I made the downloads folder for, hence the name. Currently, the collection of downloads is virtually identical to the Modern collection, except this one uses Proportionate Aging.

2. Modern Ubermegahood. A freshly started Ubermegahood, featuring traits, proportionate aging with a calendar system, new LTWs, and hereditary supernaturalism. I’ve made a few posts about this; rest assured I got far enough ahead that it feels awkward to go back and make more. Plus I started forgetting to screenshot and write notes.

Medieval Downloads Folder

1. The Megakingdom of Simland. Exactly as it sounds, it’s an Ubermegahood rethemed to be medieval, played as a mega-Medieval Charter Challenge. I talk about it all the time. It’s been stalled for over a year, I think, because I installed CC incautiously and cannot pinpoint the problem CC to save my life. (Or, more accurately, I find a problem CC, remove it, and then the game crashes again and points to another one down the list. In theory the DDO, Clean Installer, and SimPE should help, but there’s always another bad CC file forcing me to 50/50. I have about 2500 files left to check and I hate how long it takes).

2. If the CC is ever resolved, I may make Grimwood Abbey, a sort of small/compressed start to an MCC forcing the sims to earn their social classes.

3. Algary, a standard MCC I started setting up long before all this was a problem. Of note is that the Squire family rolled all teens and children, no adults, and one peasant family includes elder lesbians.

Decades Downloads Folder

1. Arcadia, the hood I set up the folder for. It’s a rather ambitious plan for some sort of through-time BaCC starting in the 18th century, featuring a native population and manual religions. With Proportionate Aging, the idea is to advance a year for each aging year (4 days), or five years for each seasonal year, and progress through different eras at the correct time. There are five couples, the Shepherds, the Partidges, the Farmers, the Coles, and the Threepwoods.

2. Tortuga, the Pirate Shipwreck BaCC I posted about a couple months ago. I may need to duplicate the downloads folder and make a dedicated 18th/Pirate folder.

3. Port Royale, a Colonial BaCC I set up when I first got the downloads collection up. No plan, just four rolled families. Governor Thomas Marlowe is about all I can remember, with his elderly mother and two teen daughters. I think I have a family named Cunningham, and I might have a Cole family or… maybe an Underhill family. I’ll have to check again. I am thinking about renaming the hood to be less piratey, and using it as a simple BaCC through time starting in the 18th century, but without the complexities of manual religion or an entire native community.

4. Silver Hollow, a hood I started tonight because I wanted to start an 18th century BaCC and instead I just made one guy and started a colonial Legacy challenge, only for the game to severely hang up the first time he returned from a community lot. I did manage to make a great Woods community lot that I am packaging for my own use in any hood using the full Sun&Moon collection.

5. …and I also wanted to start a new Colonial BaCC featuring a slightly goofy Jebediah Springfield-like Founder, named Pendergast, and four families named Archer, Gardner, Parrish, and Thompson. Really, I should just merge this concept with the other one I started a while back.

Ancient Downloads Folder

1. Living History, a modified Test of Time Challenge to appeal to my history major/anthropology minor ways. The Neanderthal era is getting fully revamped to three stages of hunter/gatherer, tribal, and chiefdom; sims gain social status based on popularity and influence, not money, at least to start; and eras change based on achieving certain goals, not generations (at least not JUST generations; I’m trying to make it work with Proportionate Aging here)

Really, it’s not a ridiculous number of hoods here, it just frustrates me that aside from Ubermegahoods I struggle to get them off the ground and constantly start new ones instead of getting invested in the ones I already have. Honestly, it’s probably building everything from scratch that throws me and slows me down, which would be why I tend to prefer the premade hoods. I’d just download starter lots if I wasn’t always going for very specific themes, and also if installing downloaded lots wasn’t what broke my Megakingdom.

I wish I had more time.