@BeckyBoo8 -It's possible to place the lots in the town screen from in the game though placing roads is a different matter as I've often started in blank terrains without lots or decor and had to add that myself.

Right, I meant that I like to plan out my towns start to finish. Like I know exactly what sized lots I want to use, and it would be nice if I could in TS2 place roads according to the lot sizes, since the grids don't match up perfectly when transferring from SC4 to TS2.

My main hood is pretty rural so there's a lot more flexibility with roads since I can just use the extra space to place hood deco, farming fields, trees, etc. I'm currently designing a Downtown to add to it and I want it to be a city with a tight grid road system, so I have to be a lot more specific with my road placement.

I've had an issue with my garden requiring too much care and plants dying despite the care so I downloaded a Mod to remove most of the plant decay which would've helped a lot if I'd known to download it sooner.
@BeckyBoo8 -I've got no plans to add any outside districts to Dodge until it's population is big enough to require a second district and that would be a shopping dostrict to start with.I'll add a downtown when the main district starts filling up even with multiple shopping districts.They'll start off empty and get slowly built up like how I started my town out.

@TadOlson that makes sense! I do things a bit differently. Right now I just have the main hood. I am adding a Downtown next because it's going to start off with just suburbs. But, they're also going to build a highway and a train station. Taxes are being put into the railway and highway construction to bring more Sims in. At the railway station right across the street is going to be a large office building. The idea is that once there's a railway and large office building, there will be more reasons for Sims to start settling in Luna Canyon. Eventually the Downtown will expand to have more modern buildings. By that point, I'm hoping some families will be wealthier. My Shopping District is going to be a high class boating town (inspired by Page, Arizona). The private school will be built there too. Until then, all Sims are in public school. Luna Canyon is a brand new town built from nothing so mainly lower class families have been moving in. Adding a Downtown is going to add a lot more housing and job opportunities.

I'll have my town adding a shopping district first which will add more job opporunites like farming and woodcutting and a few other trades and make more room for farmers in their own special district so the town center can eventually start changing from a famring distict to a residential and working one.A second shopping district opens up even more farming and encourages more families to settle in town and start working their way up from poverty.Downtown is added later on and will have more high density housing and mostly sims from lower income fmilies living there in rental housing while higher income ones live in higher rent apartments and smaller higher end homes.

Pet peeve - whatever sorting method Homecrafter uses when making wallpaper. I make a set of panelled walls, labelled 01-70, no breaks, same prices, same category. How do they show up in the game? Shuffled like a deck of cards. Ultimately it won't matter in the end because I'll put them in a collection and hide them from the catalogue, but I have to find them first, jumbled in with the other new walls I've made, and then manually sort the collection so they're in order at last, and WHY ARE YOU LIKE THIS!?

@sushigal007 -That sounds almost as bad as how the game "organizes" pictures taken using the ingame camera which is why I use the print screen key on my keyboard and save the shot with Paint.I fell just like you about the game's camera and photo "organization" system.

Oh lordy, the Storytelling folder. I remember recreating all those images for the genderswapped uberhood. Figuring out which ones in that jumbled mess went with which hood/family was a nightmare. NEVER AGAIN.

A while back, I made wall papers using Homecrafter depicting 27 different storefronts each consisting of between 3 and 6 sections that I used in one of my stories to create a downtown look from the street. I really wanted each store section to be grouped with the other sections for that store so I could find them easily. After much testing, I finally determined that if they all had the same price then they were scattered randomly. But if I made them different prices, the pieces with the same prices tended to be grouped together. It worked for me, maybe that would work for you the next time you make wallpapers. Since it was for storytelling, I didn't worry about the prices of the individual sections.

What makes me go "GRRR!"? Building!!!
I have made at least fifteen attempts to build a legacy house I want. Every time, it looks like a box. In all seriousness, does anyone still take commisions to build houses for Sims 2 anymore? I'm about to chunk my laptop out the window, here. lol

You Sims were invited over for a birthday party. That does not mean you can just go take a bubble bath like you live here!

I think i post to this thread too much (i swear i love this game to pieces still!) but i had something new in mind as i have now played the game again for days.

My former cheerleader NPC sim. I have a mod that supposedly deletes all the NPC behavior (and moved the sim in first before marrying them with other sim) and it does to the point that the sim doesn't run around and wear llama mascot costume randomly anymore, but she still barges uninvited to other people's (not her friends) houses and even keeps visiting the dorms constantly despite being adult sim. It's very annoying and i have to keep moveobject deleting her when she appears. I knew about the NPC behavior before making her playable and i thought it'd be nice little quirk but it just proved to be annoying. She even gets into apartment houses with locked doors!

Yup. I made that mistake once. Never again. It reminds me of the Kramer/Steve Urkel crazy neighbor character on sitcoms, who barges in uninvited to rapturous applause from the studio audience.

Some of that behavior is outgoing sim behavior, though. Outgoing sims, if they are friends with those on the lot, will invite themselves in all the time. Now, her still visiting the dorms does sound abnormal, and like leftover npc behavior. You can always ban her with the visitor controller though.

And @Noir Moon, what I do is browse house plans with a good looking roof that I like and think I can recreate, then "simmify" it. For me that means adding extra bedrooms, or bathrooms, or shrinking closets, etc. You can also do the same with lot downloads. I still haven't found a good way to browse lots outside MTS & TSR, but luckily there's plenty of stuff on just those two sites. Anyway, search by your preferred lot size and when you find something you like, take a look at the layout to see if you can gut it and reconfigure it to your needs. One of the things I love about MTS uploads is that MTS makes everyone include a top-down-view/layout shot of each floor, which makes this easier to do. (Idk why so many simmers outside of MTS don't want to include this shot, as it's the most useful, imo, but eh. What are you going to do?) Anyway, most of the time you can adjust a lot's interior layout, as plenty of builders tend to use a lot of great rooms and open-to-below-second floors, or they just leave a bunch of dead space around that can be reworked into additional bedrooms or bathrooms. So if you really want to do minimal building, you can.

My current pet peeve is when you think you've finally found that great floor layout--everything is flush and fits well and you're like 'yeah, this works. Finally.' Then you stare at it for another 10 seconds and you realize that you forgot a feature/room you wanted to include (lately for me these are laundry rooms, utility closets, and space for a second car). Or you find that you enclosed a room so that it has no direct access from the hallway and can only be entered from a bathroom.

Against former Uni NPC visiting dorms Cyjon made a mod NoAlumniWalkbys. And Kestrellyn's mod nohomeinvasion helps against uninvited quests.

I have Double Deluxe as my base game because when I went to the store to look for Nightlife (many years ago), they didn't have the expansion by itself anymore. I've got all the expansions, and I'm pretty sure Double Deluxe has Celebration Stuff too. I don't know which expansion added what I'm about to talk about and I can't launch the game right now to look it up, but... I hate when I age up my Sim babies and the default everyday toddler clothes or pajamas are one of those fursuits! Ugh, I hate them. There's a ton of them and not many other toddler outfits in the game without CC, so they win a lot of dice rolls. Also, the toddlers spend more time in their PJ's than any other clothes because they spend a lot of time sleeping.

Aww, I think the fursuits are cute! Some of their other outfits are a bit too grungy, though, and then you get one that goes too far the other way and some poor little mite is supposed to negotiate coat tails while learning how to use the potty.

Sure. I'd like to know how to recategorize Maxis clothing. Winter outerwear as everyday is a bit awkward in the desert hood and not only for toddlers but for all ages.

I hated how some outfits were catagorized and went to town editing as much as I could to change things in BodyShop.I got some underwear set to also show up as Pjs and pjs to show up as underwear because having short underwear looks very out of place in a cold mountain town in the middle of the winter when they're having arctic conditions.

I used this tutorial. Highly recommend. I wanted to recategorize clothes for years, finally did it a few months ago and it turned out to be not as difficult as I thought it would be.

I used to have all these Maxis clothes that I never used that were categorized as every day. Nightlife was the worst offender- so many suits, and so many outfits with jackets and coats that I would never pick, because who wants a fur-lined peacoat every day in the summer? Now I have all these "new" formal, outerwear and gym outfits for my sims to choose from. Same with adding ages. My elder male sims went from 10 outerwear options to 30+.

Thanks. I bookmarked it and will do if I have a time.

My teen family Sim is going steady with the boy who gave her her first kiss. She has rolled the want to go steady with another boy who she gave his first kiss. She has the fear of breaking up with her boyfriend and of being rejected for going steady by this other boy. She is tempting me to put her in a nunnery.

The Santa Claus & Mrs Claus outfits!! They just refuse to be hidden no matter what! I have no use for them... GRR.

Have you tried default replacements for these outfits? I found the following defaults for the Santa and Mrs. Santa outfits:

Mrs. Santa: Lottie-Sims has this red dress (lower right corner).
https://lottie-sims.tumblr.com/post...equins-replaced

Santa Claus: couldn't find any for this outfit except for one that made it look like a medieval Father Christmas.

Euro Santa: There are three options at the Sims 2 Default Database: sweaters with jeans, vest with trousers (looks like a business suit without the jacket), Yuxi's long mandarin coat
https://sims2defaults.dreamwidth.org/93735.html

Oops, forgot to mention that I've got the Mrs Santa.. Thank you for reminding me, haha! The "Euro Santa" doesn't show up for me so that one isn't a problem. Pesky Santa Claus, that's the only one that's bothering me right now but at least it's just one. Still, grrr.