I've been working on revising Sunset Valley, adding new community and residential lots, and I'll be ready to start testing the lots probably tomorrow (Thursday).
I can send my active Sim to the community lots to see how they play, but what about the 38 residential lots? Will I need to add 38 households to the town (my stupid questions)?

After testing the lots, I plan on using NRaas Porter to add all of the residents from Isla Paradiso to this version of Sunset Valley, but I'm not going to porter until I know that everything works as it should (but I know that there's always something that can creep up later).

ETA: I'm not thrilled with the unpopulated file size of 32 MB, but it is what it is.

If the world is unpopulated, you can move your sim from house to house to test. As the game begins to populate the world, if there is a house you need to test that has a sim living there, you can move them to another lot that you have already tested. I suggest testing in a copy of the world, so the original remains sim free. if you change any lots you can save the new lot to the bin and then replace the one from the original world.

@attuned - Thank you much for the guidance. The larger houses should be quick to check but I was a little concerned about some of the houses with smaller bathrooms. Using an active Sim to check on those will be best. So happy that I won't have to add 38 households to a test game I'll keep an untouched copy to use later when I'm ready to populate the town.

Say if I wanna make a haunted house, can I put both the ghosts from the basegame and the Ambitions ghosts in the house? The basegame ones, can they be residents? I can also use fog from the fog emitter I guess. Anyone have any tips for this type of lot?

All ghosts can be residents, like the Goth family in Moonlight Falls or the ghost couples in Isla Paradiso or Aurora skies. There is also the Monty ghost living with his wife in Monte Vista. You just have to be careful with moving those ghost households around in Edit Town. They may lose their gravestone in the process and this breaks them terminally. I think the one human in the MF Goth household is some sort of safety belt to guarantee the household integrity.

There are various ways to get haunted houses with ghosts.

- Steal graves from other games and place them on your lot. Ghosts tied to graves export like furniture and if you place them in a different world the ghosts will import without problems.
Or
- create a household and kill all members except for one. Use this one to place the graves and then evict the last living one before you save the lot to the bin. You might need to do this in a world that has a mausoleum, in case the urns get transported off the lot. Without a mausoleum they might be lost forever.
- create a household of ghosts in CAS, move them in and tell each one to return to the netherworld by clicking on their graves in their personal inventory. You might need another "control" Sim, too, whom you evict before you export the lot.
- move in a regular household and use MasterController Immediate/Occult/Add Occult Status (might be named differently, cannot recall ATM) and chose the ghost types. This will transform the Sim into the ghost of your choice and add an urnstone in their inventories. It saves you all that killing time. Insta-Ghost.
- Have a Supersim with all kinds of goodies in its inventory, including urnstones of deceased Sims (and relics, rare books or whatever) that you use for the final furnishing touches of every lot you build. Move it in furnish with urnstones, move it out and then save the lot to the bin. That way I have made a graveyard lounge for Twinbrook that has all the vampires from Bridgeport in it as various ghosts (mummy curse, electrocution, vampire thirst, burning, meteor). I killed them in Bridgeport with MasterController, had my Supersim collect the graves and moved the Supersim into the lounge (re-categorise as residential first and then make it a lounge once the ghosts are placed and the Supersim moved out), placed the graves and saved the lot for use in Twinbrook.

The only caveat is that you should not mess around with such a lot, once placed, like moving the lot somewhere else in a world or deleting it without removing the graves first. The ghost data might stay in the world data or even duplicate. But that rule applies to all lots containing occupied graves. You should never delete a graveyard from a save, unless it is empty of occupied graves.

Cheers! i'll defintely use the nraas method. But what about the ambitions ghosts?

Ambitions ghosts as in the ones that your ghostbuster eliminates from lots-- or that haunt lots when you move in-- those generate automatically when you have Ambitions installed- you really can't do anything with them once you have caught them with your ghostbusting equipment but sell them to the science lab.. those are random kind of like LTW wishes or career opportunities

Ah you mean those ghostbuster spirits that come in various colours? They are tied to a spawner and only become visible when a ghost hunter "reveals" them. The game places these spawners randomly across town in every new game.
You could probably fake them, however, with a fog emitter code. But that'd mean that they will be permanently visible on a lot.

By mere coincidence I am currently preparing a save in Midnight Hollow where I intend to turn every pre-made resident into a ghost, just to see how that works out.
If you intend to play with ghosts as inactive resident neighbours you will in any case need a mod that prevents babies and toddlers from hibernating when the parents or older children are away. Otherwise the game will eat them for good, i.e. they won't be returned once the parents come home again. AwesomeMod does this and surely one of the NRaas mods.

The "Sim ghosts" that are part of the higher level ghost hunter jobs (Angry Ghost Invasion and SomethingSomething Presence) I would leave untouched. They are not really meant to be made playable.

I had a small lot and didn't have a place to put it. I finally got enough money to move to a large lot and I specifically picked a house with lots of extra room.

Now my Science project thing-a-ma-jigger is gone. It is not in my family inventory anymore! I thought I'd just buy one using testing cheats enable + buy debug. I don't see it even when I filter on University.

How can I get this thing back? It's the great big thing with red, green and blue "tie nodes".

@Emmett Brown - Here you go, UL Group Science Project Un-hider
http://www.modthesims.info/download.php?t=502707

Epic! Thank you! I didn't even think of a mod, just coming to "mod the sims" to whine about it.

You're welcome! I came across that mod a while ago when I spent too much time looking for the blasted thing in the catalog. Unlocked and Unhidden mods are some of my favorites. Why on earth EA hid our junk from us is beyond me.

I didn't detect a whine, had a couple of glasses of the other wine earlier so *cheers*

This is related to Origin and I'm not sure if this is in the right section, but I'd figured I'd ask anyway.
I have the disk versions of ts3 installed on an old Oriign account that I was locked out of for some reason. I created a new Origin account and most of my ts4 games are on there. I want to downoad some ts3 EPs, but will they be okay with the new account? Will I have to uninstall and reinstall my games onto the new account?

If your base game and some EPs are registered to one account on the old sims3.com website (and hence your old Origin account), but the ones you wish to acquire now get registered to your new account, I don't think this is going to work. It's possible that you will need EA Customer Support to combine everything into one account for you. Though note, and they should warn you about this if it's a possibility, you may stand to lose any TS3 store purchases you have made along the way.

That’s cool ^^ I’ll try to contact them. I have t made any store purchases, I think.

What field do I have to fill in for locations to have them actually named such when having party invites?
What I mean is, when I get my Sim invited to a party, the party invitation pops up and the Location part is empty.
Time: X
Location:
Dress Code: Formal Attire

I tried putting in houses I built myself and have the name "Papaya Path 1" in the big field, but the location section for party invites is empty.
I tried putting the same Papaya Path 1 into the smaller field, where the Description goes and it's still empty.

I believe it is usually the address that goes in the location field, on party invites. I know there is an Nraas mod that allows you to set the address for a lot, but it escapes me right now, which one it is. I think maybe it's DebugEnabler? But I'm not sure.

Where can I find the Food Truck parking space thingy? I'm certain I've seen it before somewhere, I was positive it was in BuyDebug, but I can't find it, now that I need it.

Isn't it only visible in BuyDebug by a mod? In my game I'm positive that I made them (both the truck and the parking space) visible with the help of this very valuable mod thread:
http://www.modthesims.info/showthre...100#post3390100
(the mod packages can be dowloaded directly from the thread)

Awesome, I'll check it out, thanks!

That would be NRaas Tagger. The option is available from the Lot menu in-game.

Oh, right! Thanks for clearing that up

I would need another NRaas mod? No thanks. It's not too big of a deal, so...

Okay...
How do you build a castle properly? Mines always seems so dull or more like a fort than a castle. I gave it 2 story walls, towers at each corners, crenelations & ramparts. Then at the center, a boxy typical early middle age English castle than something cool like late middle age or the renaissance. The damn thing looks so dull like a motherfucker & when I see the castles for download on MTS & some other sites & how cool they are makes me feel like a fucking amateur...
I tried going fancy, but I seem to have a problem of not really knowing what to do with all the spaces than leaving it blank, making the whole thing looks dull, depressing & hollow instead of being cool...

Start with the exterior. Take tips from the good castle lots out there. Download and reverse-engineer them. But definitely only do the interiors once you're satisfied with the outside shell.