So... yeah. I made a nice neighborhood (well, was in the process of it) and I let my cousin play around with the game while I went somewhere. When he left and I logged back onto TS2, my 'hood was gone. I was really angry.

So! I really want to make a nice 'hood with some... interesting Simmies and their families. I have about 2 dozen premade Sims, around, I don't know, 10 houses and 50+ clothing and hair. I have enough content to work with (well, for a few fams) but I want a nice 'hood.

So, yeah. Do you have any family ideas, any neighborhood maps, anything? I want a 'hood I can play for generations. Thank you much if you help! :D

I have more ideas than I can ever possibly use. What I don't have is any knowledge about what you're like - your playstyle, personal taste, anything. So I could share my concepts for new neighborhoods all day and not hit anywhere near something you'd like. search on here for old threads concerning themed neighborhoods, what people have done with their games, challenges, etc. Look particularly in the Popular Threads. Think about the things you enjoy doing. You won't have a problem.

Oh, and look in your recycle bin for your hood, speak sternly to your cousin (I presume he's younger? You can put the fear of God into him, I'm sure), and never let him use your machine again without making backups to safeguard against his vandalism.

Some good starter points are the family structures you see in your life. Not everyone has a perfect marriage and 2.4 children. Also, play some families and use a simple cheat like aging sims to make families you can't create in CAS. My favorite source is Wikipedia's list of situation comedies. There are many household and family situations in many new and old shows. Two male sims who live together but can't get along - you just created the Odd Couple.

@Peni

Oh, I'm pretty flexible with these ideas, any idea (realistically, not like 100 alien babies) is good. And, he's a year younger than I. xD Hopefully, though!

@TortureTheNannies

Family structures /I/ see often? Er, my whole 'hood will be divorced, sadly. But I do like the 'Odd Couple' thingie.

Make your hometown? and put your friends, and extended family, and some other families, like annoying neighbors or something in it, there's endless possibilities!

Start a long challenge and let the nieghborhood build around it?

My nth generation legacy has over 30 houses of unrelated and related family surrounding it.

I-came-to-win , instant big household is like this : my friends moved in together. her with three kids, him with two kids. now the househould is two adults and five children. I see single female with child very often, and sometimes single male with child. Like Raver says , make your home town, or make the families you know personally. I add this now: make families or households you hear about in society. Some amount of young adults now choose to live as single person in small house. It's tough on a sim, but real people are doing this. Big Bang theory has four men in an apartment (maybe correction, it used to be that way in previous seasons?) And finally, I often create an artists colony. They don't need to be ancient Greek virgins like my current household, but it's a nice change of pace from having married couples in every household.

A few ideas I have tried and liked.....
-Make a couple with a few children, then make them furious at eachother with boolprop
-Build a Victorian mansion and make an ultra-victorian family live in it.
-Start a sims series!
-Make a royal-type family
-Have your single sim steal the spouse of a maxis-family sim. (preferably Daniel or Mary-Sue Pleasant, since their relationship is falling apart anyway)
-Adopt Every Person Your Sims Bring Home!
-Make a zoo (if you have pets) and make pets that look like zoo animals (wolf, fox, rabbit, bear) If you have OFB you can have a home business with it!
-Have a family with a single parent and a few kids, start them out with little money and just enough furniture to survive, then have them build their house up from the ground!
-Do a challenge!
-Make a family based off of a book, movie, or TV show and see where they end up!
-Peanut butter and jelly toilet paper hat face!

Ok, that last one was from a video I like. Got a little carried away. Anyway, I probably have more ideas at the back of my brain somewhere. Let me get my shovel....

Themed hoods are a pretty popular game style among many simmers, and you probably wouldn't make a mistake if you tried one yourself. Medieval, renaissance, fantasy, steampunk, ancient chinese, sci-fi, urban, apocalyptic are just some of many themes to choose among. You can also seek inspiration in movies and literature, and re-create a certain family or character from your favorite novel or film. Or, like TortureTheNannies said, from a situational comedie. Or a classical tragedy, if you're more into drama.

Also, I found a book / computer game that provides an achieveable challenge. It's called "I have no mouth, and I Must Scream". On the face of it, this is only five sims and their individual quirks. Can you create five phobias to match with five sims? I think locked yellow doors is a place to start. Also, this story include one character who always dresses like a gorilla.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Have...28video_game%29

I've talked about this somewhere before, but a neighborhood based on the concept of the book "Bumped" would be interesting. Basically in the somewhat-near future, a virus afflicts the world and all adults become infertile, so they pay teenagers with similar genetics to have babies that they then adopt.
BTW, I love the name "TortureTheNannies"

Thank you. The name goes back to the release of the University expansion pack, when people were complaining that nannies abandoned the children, peed on floors, and burned houses. I have a writing hobbie, and learned to "torture the characters" in making a good story. Your idea of the book "Bumped" is intriguing and presents a disturbing story line. I wouldn't use a hack for this, but I rely on the age sims cheat. That can be an idea for a family structure too. Two adults or maybe a different number, add a female teen, and age her back and forth to procreate. It's like pushing to the limits that old book by Nabakov.

Well, if you're really as open as all that, I'll push my favorite idea-I'll-never-live-long-enough-to-do: the Alien Zoo.

Aliens have been kidnapping people from many different times and places and transferring them, house and all, to an island zoo where they can be observed in their natural habitats. Realizing vaguely that sims are social and technological animals, and need to be embedded in a culture, they used sim genetic material to make townies and dormies, who closely mimic real sims and can, if they interact intensely enough, become like them - this explains why townies start to age and lose a bunch of memories when moved in, at which point special biological programs are activated rendering them "real." The townies and dormies are cogs in the artificial culture that supplies jobs to the zoo residents.

The playables will be a hodgepodge of people, culture, and architecture, drawn from where ever you darn please. Laverne and Shirley live downstairs from Holmes and Watson. Fagin, the Artful Dodger, Oliver Twist, Nancy, and Sikes live in a tenement with a view of burned-out Tara, where Scarlett, Melanie, and Mammy are trying to rebuild their lives, and the Bennett girls are competing with them for Ashley and Rhett. Arthur, Guenevere, Lancelot, Morgan le Fay, and Mordred are all stuck together in a castle without a tax base. Horatio Hornblower just wishes he could find an ocean. Chingachgook had to give up hunting and is now carpooling from his longhouse to his job as spy, and Don Quixote is trying to become Captain Hero while Sancho stays home, cooks, and tries to make time with Sacajawea. Or any other hodgepodge of characters from any source you like, tossed in willy-nilly as you get inspired.

The amount of CC this would require to do properly is enough all by itself to convince me I'll never do it. But don't you think somebody should, some time?

BUMPED! That was actually interesting read... hmmm.

-Have a totally "off the grid" household. No phones, no TV, no lights and no jobs.
-Start a household with one adult and 7 kids -- that you can't control the kids til they hit teen. (or Young Adult/Adult)
-Install ARC. Randomize everyone. Let the chaos begin!
-Work with a occult sim (vampire, werewolf, witch, plantsim, etc.) and have all of the descendants be that chosen life state. Incorporate some rebellion against the "system".
-Start a home business and make a empire (i.e. control all of the businesses in a town)
-Two men living together get impregnated by aliens.
-Have a elder couple adopt a baby. Can they raise it before time is up?

Truly, the options are endless... Sorry about your 'hood. *hands you a soft drink of choice * Had my Pleasantview self-destruct once, and man was I mad! I had everyone in the 6th generation, it was a HUGE 'hood. Everyone went to college, so you have me smushing all that generation's children into two or three households and maddeningly trying to get everyone to graduate! Those were the days... when everything was vanilla... children ran free without fear...

I love making themed neighborhoods (before I reset my game I had an old Victorian themed neighborhood and it had all these rules and cheats and I loved it :c), and lots of times I make families with either a jackass dad that hates his kids/runs out/cheats, or a teen that gets pregnant and has to stay home and take care of her kid and her siblings while her parents work to support the new baby. I like a more ~dramatic game so I don't know if you'd do any of the last things, but usually when I make a new family something like that happens. I rarely ever have nice, perfect families :s

Just thought of this while falling asleep last night. A BACC or Prosperity challenge using - the Peanuts characters, grown up!

Picture it - Charlie Brown (Popularity and in constant aspiration failure) with his little sister Sally (Family) and his dog Snoopy. Lucy (Popularity, no nice points), Linus (Knowledge), and Rerun Van Pelt across the street. Peppermint Patty and Marcie - sisters, or a lesbian couple? You decide! Frieda and her boneless cat. Schroeder and his piano. The Little Redheaded Girl is a townie. If you want more you can fill out with minor characters like Franklin, Pigpen, and Violet; or you can bring people in from other comic strips.

Yeah, I've been reading the latest collection...and I'm still a little sleep-deprived.

A while back I added a bunch of Peanuts characters to Desiderata Valley. They started out as kids, so I invented parents for them. Marcie and Charlie Brown dated in high school, but when they all moved to college, Peppermint Patty kept throwing herself at him and they ended up in love. They had three bolts, but honestly I've pretty much always liked the thought of Charlie Brown and Marcie together... I planned on getting them back together eventually. I lost interest in the hood during their college years and I imagine all my backups are gone. Oh well.

Schroeder was a very emo teen, by the way. And Linus turned out looking too rugged when he grew up. It just didn't fit him!

This is a great idea and quite humorously thought provoking although I've always felt really sorry for Charlie Brown. I wouldn't be able to let him be in aspiration failure very much. Lucy on the other hand could have a satellite hit her while watching clouds and I would totally laugh. Would never fit in with my current hood but food for thought for something in the future.

I think Lucy would have maybe one or two nice points, so at least she'd want to give hugs and flirt. But boy would she have a rough time as an adult - you'd have to watch her constantly to make sure she doesn't give any bad impressions to townies and get a penalty network.

Please tell me you gave Charlie Brown's father a barbershop! As for emo Schroeder:

Ms. daCapo, I think if you prevent Lucy from annoying townies, you violate her character. Although perhaps you're right about the hugs and flirting; perhaps she should be Romance instead of Popularity. I find the idea mildly terrifying, but that's all to the good, really.

Maybe Romance/family or Family/romance, because remember how Lucy was always talking about how she was going to marry Schroeder? I think Schroeder would be rather similar to Pascal Curious - extremely serious and neat, and possibly somewhere on the nice side.

I used to like the Jem cartoon when I was a teenager (waaayyy back in the 80s). Nowadays I create Sims that resemble the characters and alter the stories a bit.

If anyone remembers the show, here's the Benton family--Emmet, Jacqui, Jerrica, and Kimber:





And Jerrica's first kiss with Rory Llewellyn (known as Stingers frontman Riot--and no, Rio's not in the picture. LOL)

I often name mine after Star Trek or Babylon 5 characters, and of course the aliens often get alien names, though lately I have been giving them some normal ones as well. And I might make some sims with Harry Potter inspired names, because that series is awesome!