Messing Around with Create A World

It was inevitable that sooner or later just "playing" sims 3 wouldn't be enough. I had already purchased all of the EP's and Store content that I was interested in. I played around with Mods and Life Spans until the game play was exactly right for me. 

The only frustration I still had was the limitations of Edit Town. I couldn't always place lots where I wanted. I couldn't smooth or alter terrain outside of lots. I couldn't move or change roads and sidewalks. And despite Monte Vista being my favorite world, the wasted space was irritating. I mean seriously, what's with Mucho Espresso Cafe? It's on a huge 40 x 64 lot as is Doctor Simano's Sanatorium. One is a rabbit-hole and the other never has any NPC's showing up. With each EP added, more community venues get dropped into residential lots and next thing you know you're out of space.

I tried deleting the lots and replacing them with smaller lots and other community venues in Edit Town, but that left gaps and unsightly terrain painting with no way to fix it. I could add a few more small residential lots but there were so many places perfect for a lot that the game would not let me use. So as soon as I started to play around with Create A World the thing I most wanted to do was use it to edit Monte Vista and didn't that just turn out to be about the hardest damn thing I've ever tried to do. 

EA handles the files for worlds purchased through the store (like Monte Vista) completely different from the files that come with EP's purchased through Origin. And with Sims 3 being an old game, I was searching dead forum threads from nearly 10 years ago to figure things out. The problem is, a lot of those threads would point to other threads with a link to pages that didn't exist anymore. I spent a lot of time searching through Sims 3 forums to find answers as each new problem came up, with the biggest problem being "How do I get those damn bridges and city wall to show up?" I never even noticed the lighthouse was missing until just before I found the answers to most of my questions. Anytime I thought I would finally get somewhere it was just another dead end.

Until now I had never tried to create any custom content for any Sims game. I'm not even that into playing games on the computer, Sims 2 and Sims 3 are the only ones I've spent much time with. But a lot of the people who posted on those threads had been creating custom content and editing worlds for a long time and they already knew a lot so didn't explain any of the simpler steps. Not only did I not know the answers to my questions, sometimes I didn't even know the question to ask. Everything was trial and error and most of it failed. Sometimes I thought I finally had those effing bridges working and then after the next save - poof - they were gone.

Meanwhile I've got random files all over the place and I've had to reload my game from the(thank god I made a backup!) backup files at least a half a dozen times. But, I have a new laptop arriving in just a few days. Since that gives me the opportunity for a clean Sims 3 install, it's the perfect time to create a complete step-by-step tutorial on editing store worlds in Create A World so the next newbie to come along might have an easier time of things. 

A Note About Giving Credit where Credit is Due

It's been a long time since I considered myself a regular blogger, but in those days I was never comfortable with repeating or replicating someone else's work, it felt like stealing to me. Instead I would talk about their work while linking to it. 

However... with all of the wasted time I put into just chasing down dead links and that some original tutorials don't account for changes made as new EP's and patches happened, just providing you with links to tutorials isn't going to be as helpful to you as it could be. So instead I will write my own tutorials using my own images to share what I have learned from them. This lets me include any modifications I needed to make to account for changes made by EP's, patches, and newer operating systems. I will also reference their user names and link to the original tutorials and forum posts that I have used to figure things out. I certainly wouldn't have been able to get anywhere without their work to guide me.