It doesn't go in your download files, I have it in a folder on my desktop. You just click the exe to run and show it which hood you want it to check.

The newspaper girl is just a regular NPC, you can make her selectable, send her to uni, or marry her in. One of the tests, although not full proof is if the NPC doesn't have the full range of options when clicked on even after a lot of interaction and does not have a proper name they are risky to mess with. The universal characters like crumplebutt are actually objects in your object folder in your installation files. There is one for the entire game and if you mess them up you mess up your installation not just your hood.

You don't have to have No Sim Loaded, it's just a good mod to have. It just keeps the game tidy and prevents the Super Duper Hug from ever appearing. But you only ever risk that if you download lots or use and remove a badly made social hack. It's not game breaking just a pesky Maxis code used by modders that you shouldn't see.

Oof, scary. I usually don't mess with those just to be safe, good thing!

Ok, I put it on my desktop and ran it but it won't check the hood I wanted it to check (my TOT hood). Also won't let me check my other main hood, every time I click it, it checks the neighborhood above it instead. Removed a lot of invalid stuff from my pre-made hoods though. Now I have to go make sure they work, lol

But it deleted my sims and houses in those neighborhoods, lol, so maybe that's a good thing!

Question: is it safe to remove downloaded mods? I don't see how it would really change anything...but I wasn't sure. I feel like more has gone wrong in game since I downloaded the last mod I downloaded so I was thinking about removing it, but don't want to mess things up.

I've decided to start another site for my tot challenge . http://justanothertestoftime.wordpress.com/

Edit: I need an opinion on who should be heir to a patrician family. What happened was the heir of one family was married and had a baby boy. When I was playing another lot the heir was murdered. Not wanting to have an extra household I moved in the heir's younger brother and wife. They also had a boy. Since by default the heir's younger brother is the titleholder in the roman age would his son inherit the title due to blood or would the nephew inherit it? Or should I have them fight to the death?

I personally would give it to the younger brother. Makes the most sense.

I'd say the younger brother's son. If you want a story, there could be a rivalry between the two, though. :D

Did you make a backup first? I've never had Hood Checker delete sims or houses and that's very strange with it not checking the hood you want. There is a Hood Check user thread where Mootilda will answer questions with it.
Don't remove any mods that make NPC's, custom foods, custom careers or majors if sims are in them.

This challenge is so epic, I must do it! Now to get some caveman clothes...gotta look the part and all.

Well, I managed the last rotation easily enough. But all the organization needed to get the hood ready for the Roman Era took a bit longer. However, now I have things sorted and ready to play. The rest of the post is just a summary of how things played out and what changes I'm incorporating, so don't feel like you have to read it if you aren't interested.

The Gaho's won the race for Emperor, and Gonu took the throne, promptly changing his last name to Gallus. Of course, the rest of the founders followed suit. Since I didn't choose to use skin tone to choose the emperor, only money, I divided the classes up by a percentage of the population. The Galluses quickly filled up the top two tiers. Ip Ij, who changed his last name to Iunius, filled up the plebeians with all but one of his children. The youngest, I fear, fell into slavery. The Eefus, Cuds, and Abs (now Egnatius, Cato, and Avitus) were all relegated to slaves. All my teen/adults were married except for 6 who were related to each other too closely for the game. I made 6 CAS sims for them, and then stuck them with their future spouses in six of my Emperor/Patrician households. I've changed everyone's names, clothing, and put them in their new houses.

I've made a couple of changes for my own enjoyment. First, if a slave or a plebeian attacks a patrician (or higher), then win or lose they're killed for committing treason (they attacked the Emperor's family or a member of the Senate). Second, I'm not going to kill a slave just because his master sees him in a romantic interaction, only if it's with a patrician or higher. Third, a lot of my sims, including the slaves and plebeians have a lot of money, so I'm going to be using some of that for things like bribes, taxes, higher education, dowries, and so on. Some of these options might alter the rules slightly (like if a rich slave gets chosen for death at the Colosseum, he might bribe the officials to choose someone else), but I don't think enough to drastically alter the balance of the challenge.

Well, long story short, I've got things set up and ready to play.

Your setup seems interesting

Since I organized my ranks by who could marry (so the emperor could marry at least one patrician family etc) my ranks are kinda messed up when I think about it. For example I sent three of the neatest, activest slave children into working for patrician/the emperor's homes. That was when I realized that two of the children (who were actually part of quads) were actually working as slaves for their grandparents. (The eldest son moved out and married the eldest daughter of the other family and then they were really poor). If my slave population wasn't so low I'd start a list everytime a slave breaks a ruld ie attacks a sim, steals a newspaper, or kicks a garbage can (thanks to realistic sickness this is pretty much attempted murder) and have those ones fight it out in the Colosseum. However I don't have enough slave sims for that so I'm letting them be for now. With the wealth I let the patricians and emperor keep all their money. Took all but 3000 from the plebians and all but 100 from the slaves after the garden was planted and sent it to the emperor.

I'm sure your slave population will increase very soon. :D

@lbsgirl24 It's nice to see you started another try to document your challenge and I hope you have the time to keep going this time. ^_^ I've been reading through what you've posted so far and I really like it, but there aren't any photos showing up for me in your latest post? o.ô

I've been eagerly looking for roman CC the last week or so and I think I have most of what I need together. Furniture, walls and floors are rather easy to find, but nice and accurate roman clothing is sadly pretty rare. =/

And as my gen 3 sims start turning into teens, I've set up a list with their names and, as someone else suggested here, the initials of their grandparents to see who I can match up with whom and... it looks pretty bad. XD Nearly everyone is related to everyone. Buuut I have a really nice gender ratio. =D 8 boys and 8 girls up to now. Well, I will see what I do once I've finished playing the (nearly) two remaining neanderthal rounds. I don't think I'll get around introducing some fresh blood in my hood. :p

It is indeed pretty rare. And since slaves aren't supposed to have togas, it makes it more challenging. I also had to end up going into SimPE and adding several categories to what I did find so I could use it when I needed/wanted to. One thing I did was use some of my medieval outfits with tunics and roman sandals. It's not perfect but it did at least give me some more options for my slaves, and male teens.

@ TheFlyingRacoon adding images is kinda stuffing up atm so ill have to try and reupload them when i have time.

It is hard to find accurate clothes so im just sticking with anything vaguely appropriate.

Alright. I just wanted to make sure it's actually your post not having any photos and not my computer doing funky things. =P

So I started using the ROS. I rolled my first two and kinda debated leaving it for a generation or two, but then I decided keeping the population down was a good thing, knowing my attention span
Water: Moshe (third eldest, male) is killed by a satellite.
Wood: Willow (Mother) picks a fight with the sim she has the lowest LT relationship with: Malachite Crystal; won.
Crystal: Career roll; Cannot complete. Amethyst (eldest daughter) won against the grim reaper for Malachite's life. I consider that as her binding his wounds. (I know, I know, cheating... but I've never tried to save someone from the grim reaper before and I was curious.)
Rock: (Mother) has Date Nights; Three dates with highest LT relationship
Fauna: Roach infestation! 5 Roaches placed on the lot (I thought this was going to be scarier than it was. Leo (father) and Falcon (second eldest son) both got sick. No one died. It was kinda chaotic without their help around the house until they were better, though.)

How are you guys figuring out matches? This is the first time I've played without just going to a community lot, scoping, taking home someone with 2+ bolts. This generation I've forced matches (to get a nice mix between the families), but I was thinking for my next generation something different. Will matching up eligible people based on signs work? Aspirations? Pay attention to who they roll wants about in childhood?

I found matches for the second gen by running a series of challenges and awarding sims points and marrying off couples with the most points. For tge third gen im working out all the marriages myself otherwise my sims would have to marry cas sims and im trying to keep population low. Third gen is trickier to find spouses in so you'll have to be mindful of not marrying all the potential spouses of one family off to different families.

For the second gens it was pretty much who was available when they became teens. My gender ratios were fairly lopsided at times, so at least 4 girls ended up marrying my founders after their first wives died. For the third generation, one or two got to choose their spouse (I used bolts), but the ones that weren't married by the time I made the switch to the Roman era were done a bit differently. Once I figured out who would be in which class, I went to the highest rank single male, and he chose a female he had high chemistry with. Then I preceded down the list by rank. Anyone that didn't get matched (too closely related) got a CAS sim. I think my Roman matches will favor those that want to move up the class system, if all the prerequisites are fulfilled.

Is anyone running out of places to build houses? I'm worried I'm going to run out of room.

You can always add a business district for more housing if you need it

I haven't yet, but I have wondered if my hood will run out of room before the Dark Ages. As lbsgirl said, you could add a subhood. I've also thought about cloning my sims and rebuilding my hood. Another option might be to move two small families of the same class in together. Reuse houses as much as possible. I know that I left/moved as many of my slave families as I could (11) in the Neanderthal houses. If you're still in Neanderthal stage though, you have to think of how what you do affects the Emperor selection at the end. Anyway, I wish you the best in finding a solution.

I'm in the Roman age. I guess I will just keep playing and see what happens.

Probably the best thing to do. I'll let you know if I have to take any drastic measures.

Well, the job I have has been eating into my play time. Not to mention a few other hoods that have wanted some attention. But I have made it more than half way through my first rotation in Roman times. So progress!

My previous game died. So I just started a new one. I'm on the second round of the Neanderthal Era on the new one.



Oh! Can I know what sort of challenges? This sounds interesting.

Since I stole her idea, I'll answer.

As to how I'm handling things, I set up a spreadsheet ( I swear I use them for tracking everything in this challenge) with two pages. The first is the teens on the teen lot this round, and keeps track of how they finished in the challenges, ranked from 1st to how ever many sims are on the lot. Once all the challenges are over, they'll be assigned a total rank, based on how they did overall. The boy with the best score is paired up with the girl with the best score, continuing down the line until all sims of one gender are paired off. The remaining sims have their score transferred over to the second sheet, and will be used for the spares in future groupings (again going in order of score, but paring off the oldest sims first.) The only way a sim is not paired with a sim of the opposite gender that has the best score is if they are related. For instance, my current leaders for each gender are siblings. In that case, they marry the sim with the second best score. I'm fairly certain I had something more to this, but seeing as I've been obsessing over my Prosperity Challenge 'hood, and not my ToT one lately, I can't quite remember all my details.~VP