Hello, I was reading this thread http://www.modthesims.info/showthread.php?t=502525, and I was wondering how you get sims to live downtown? I have heard that there are houses there you can move your sims into before, but have no idea where to start. Does anyone know?

Sorry if this is really obvious!

Thankyou

Go to your Downtown subhood and you can access the family bin there like you can in your main neighbourhood. From there you can either create a family, or if you already have families in the family bin you can just move them into a house Downtown :-)

Does that make sense? I'm kind of tired....!

Well, you have to have the Nightlife expansion to have a downtown (obviously). Other than that, it works the same as any other neighborhood; you pull up the downtown neighborhood and move the Sim family of your choosing into a residential lot. The downtown neighborhood has the same families bin and lot bin as the main neighborhood, so to move someone currently living in the main neighborhood downtown, you would just move them out of whatever house they're living in and locate them in the family bin while you have the downtown neighborhood pulled up.

What Laura said. I just wanted to say that, since AL, I tend to rip out all or at least most of the single-family dwellings downtown (the Maxis ones are typical-Maxis-stupid, after all) and replace them with apartment buildings, mostly ones I've downloaded since I'm usually too lazy to build them myself. I have a range from down-and-out to ritzy. It just seems more realistic to me. Of course, if you don't have AL, you can't do that.

Once you move a family into the sim bin they will show up in the sim bin of both your downtown and your shopping district (if you have them attached to your main hood) Then you just move them in like you would in the main hood.

It is obvious when you see how to do it, but it took me a while to spot it.

I presume you have already created the default downtown and your Sims are able to visit community lots there. If so, select the 'hood you usually play in the main menu. (I always play Veronaville.) At the bottom of the dialogue, you will see a downtown icon just above the Play and the Cancel buttons. It is circled in red in the picture below (Play Veronaville.jpg). Click on this icon to bring up the Choose Downtown dialogue. In it you will see Play and Cancel buttons just like the ones in the first dialogue. Click on the Play button, and Downtown will open in Neighbourhood view allowing you to see all the houses and community lots. Then you just play it the same way as you play your main 'hood.

Unfortunately (because of alphabetical order) my 2 screenshots are in the wrong order. ("D" for Downtown comes before "V" for Veronaville!)

I've now got 5 families living Downtown!

Oh thankyou very much everyone! That doesn't sound as complicated as I thought, I'm going to try it! I have got Nightlife and Downtown.

Thankyou for the pictures AndrewGloria, they're very helpful.