strangetomato | The Great ReBuild 2010: Paring things down?

I'm struggling with this rebuild. At first I was going to package up all the sims that have been born in the those neighborhoods and share them and then do the same for my edited lots, but every time I load the game to do so, I lose steam fast. I've now settled on only packaging up characters and lots that I absolutely can't do without. So that means any story characters that have already been featured (and one that hasn't — Phi's mystery baby), and maybe some lots (the Summerdream place comes to mind), but everything else will be played through and made over again. That'll take some time, but it'll be far less tedious than piecing it together bit by bit.

I think I'm going to start by playing the fresh megahood to give myself a chance to see what I truly miss from my other game. I'm going to keep my cc (though I'm paring that down quite liberally), but I want to try to use the bare minimum of hacks and things like that. That brings me to my question of the day (and it's a classic one):

If you were going to start over with only a handful of hacks, which ones would you consider essential?

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*mandatory "almost-everything-by-Pescado-except-the-sexist-women always-take-husband's-last-name-one" comment goes here*

Other than that, a whole lot of assorted fixes by other MATY members, most notably everything by Lord Darcy (which fixes a whole bunch of objects and menu strings, adds slots, etc), Argon's face template fixes... oh, and the random beard/glasses on townies hack, because it's awesome.

ACR2. Not essential, perhaps, but fun. And the sim blender (or insim, if that's your preference) for those annoying little argh-my-character-won't-do-what-I-want moments.

Probably more. I have so many hacks it's barely the same game anymore. Vanilla game would drive me insane. :P

That's very similar to what I'm going with right now. Great minds think alike?

Do you know if the Sim Blender generally considered better/safer/more efficient than InSIM these days? A note on the InSIM download page seemed to suggest that.

I had a lot of hacks in previously, and I'm sure I'm going to want some of them back, but I'm feeling very wary of hack conflicts these days, and most creators seem to leave that info out. I'll add the ones I really miss back in, I suppose, but I'm going to try to live with less for now, just to see how it goes.

I'll be using your megahood! I finally get to test it out. ^_^ To ask a newbish question, will I need any cleaned templates to keep the townie count down or does that come with the edited hood? I'm guessing I just need the notownieregen and those sorts of hacks. Would that be correct?

I had a lot of hacks in previously, and I'm sure I'm going to want some of them back, but I'm feeling very wary of hack conflicts these days, and most creators seem to leave that info out.

Have you used the Hack Conflict Detector program? Even when I had a ton of hacks, that program kept the bugs at minimum. Nowadays, I have more issues with conflicting mislabeled default replacements than hacks thanks to it.

No, I haven't been using that. Thanks for the advice! I may have had that at some point in the past, but not since my last hard drive fail. That should be very helpful!

As I understood it, InSim is more or less unsupported now, and from experience I didn't really like it very much... one of the options made my sims get memories of meeting themselves once, and as we know, that is a VBT indeed. I like sim blender better, what it doesn't do I get from the FFS debugger or ACR.

Hee, hope you'll find it to your liking. :) You do need notownieregen/anti-redundancy (and nodormierespawn/nostrays if you want) to avoid new townies/NPCs regenerating, especially if you start making any of the existing ones playable. By default, it only comes with Pleasantview townies & NPCs, the Garden Club, and some Bluewater townies and ST townies that had existing relationships. Oh, and the strays. You'll need to add in Kendal Lawson and any other Strangetown townies yourself, if you need them.

Be careful with apartments if you do use them, even with the hacks in they'll spawn a whole lot of social group townies with stupid clothes. D:

Are all the AL social group townies included? I started a custom hood with what I thought was empty templates installed and they showed up, anyway. Is there no way to stop them? D:

They're not. :) And you don't need to worry about empty templates, because the uberhood has already been loaded in my game (to do the merging) and thus all stealth hoods have already been added, which means no sneaky social group townies. With Pescado's hacks in, at least, social group townies should ONLY spawn to live in empty apartments or as roommates.

That's awesome. Thank you for removing them! ^_^ I'm so so sick of those AL townies.

Aren't we all. :) The template I used for the stealth hood is in my list of downloads, it has the Newsons, Gavigans and Goodies, but no AL townies. Not quite "clean", though...

I'll have to review your notes again. I'm terrible for skimming. I didn't realize you'd included your templates, too.

http://meetme2theriver.livejournal.com/36433.html

It's the uberhood, as well as all of the cleaned neighbourhood, subhood and stealthhood templates. None of the templates have been loaded ingame and should work with only its associated EP installed. :)

If you're using Cyjon's Townie Apartment Residents you'll get rid of those social group townies altogether.

Wow, that's an awesome hack. Thank you!

The Great ReBuild 2010: Paring things down?

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