The Great ReBuild 2010: Paring things down?

[strangetomato]

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?

Comments

[simgarooop.livejournal.com]

As someone who is also trying to keep the amount of hacks at minimum with her new hood, let me suggest you one that is in my opinion essential when playing apartments: No talk through stuffed animals autonomously.

I was pissed when I began to play an apartment at Pleobit Island and my Isaiah Gavigan went to the Monty-Capp apartment, took their daughter's teddy bear and went back outside to play with his wife and later dropped it on the ground. Of course, Buy Mode did not allow me to pick it back up to return it to the Monty apartment and when I tried to ask Isaiah to pick it up, it was not possible because it was an object from outside the apartment. When I loaded the Montys, the bear was in the girl's room so I deleted it, but it showed up when I loaded the Gavigans and, well, I hope I did not screw up the lot. GRRRR!

That and the Uni student's walk fix :)

[strange-tomato.livejournal.com]

I'm not really that into apartments these days. They're just so buggy, they drive me crazy.

I'll keep an eye out for that one, though. That's a Simbology hack, right? I'm trying to be very careful of having conflicting hacks this time around, so I'm going to try to keep non-MATY hacks to a bare minimum.

Do you use InSIM these days? I went back to see if there was any newer info on it, and the post was recommending using the Sim Blender instead.

[simgarooop.livejournal.com]

Goodness, I hope the apartment system is not as buggy as I fear, because I've just finished decorating the first seven apartments of my new hood :P (I am using apartments to promote interaction between my families)

I use the object version of INSIM because for some reason (before I deleted my massive DOwnloads folder), the SIM version was not working anymore. I don't know if it was M&G or a hack what was making it conflict.

I think I will try it out again before I begin playing with Pleobit Island because the select and teleport options were very useful when I had to take pics in Community Lots.

[strange-tomato.livejournal.com]

They do seem like a good way to have interactions between different families. I hope you don't face anything too buggy. I've always just found them a little irritating that way.

The selector and teleporter options were very useful. I don't know if the Sim Blender provides anything like that. I should look into it.

[skellington7d.livejournal.com]

I tried to switch to Sim Blender because of that but I must had something that conflicted with it because my game crashed and I had various other little issues. So I went back to Insim because I've never had any issues with it, even though it's unsupported. I did like some of the options better than Insim, though.

[meetme2theriver.livejournal.com]

Oh yeah, various "don't do that!" hacks from Simbology are very useful. 'Talk through bear' drove me insane long before I had any apartments (and apartments do kind of suck in general, really).

Some of them prevent more than what they advertise, though. No autonmous jump on bed made the 'jump on bed' interaction not work at all, and the one that's supposed to prevent excessive amounts of pet wants killed ALL the pets wants. No one ever wanted a kitten anymore. And that's sad. :(

[strange-tomato.livejournal.com]

I knew about the pet wants hack, but not the jump on bed one. That's good to know.

No pets wants is very sad. :(

[sim-insanity.livejournal.com]

What is this student walk fix and how do I get my grubby little paws on it?

[simgarooop.livejournal.com]

http://www.simbology.com/smf/index.php?topic=13.0

Scroll down to the bottom of the post and you'll find it. No more stick up their butt walking for your Uni Students :P.

[sim-insanity.livejournal.com]

Thank you!