Is the subject possible? I made a mistake with choosing the terrain for my uni, unfortunately, now I really need it to be lush for gameplay reasons, not sand. It would be nice if it was possible without creating a second uni subhood to be a copy of it, for it will spawn more professors and NPCs.

Try the cheat:
terraintype [desert temperate dirt concrete]
When in neighbourhood view. You will probably have to lotbin any lots to make the terrain of those change, and sometimes the median strip can be problematic. As such, I would recommend to backup your neighbourhood before doing anything.

To update your lot terrain, you can just pick up a lot and place it down again; you don't need to move it to the lot bin.

The problem with changing the hood terrain occurs with the strip of land between the sidewalk and the road. For some reason, the terrain type for this strip of land is stored in the neighborhood memories. SimPE doesn't give you the option to change it, so you have to extract the record, make the change using a hex editor, then import it again.

That cheat works, thank you. Although the result was really strange. But maybe it's my fault, I wanted to change the terrain for the game template hood named "Aridia', but it's not just desert, it's a reddish desert with pines on it. A strange template. So, I guess it's because of its reddishness that lush looks yellowish on it, as if it's autumn over there, and when I tried to make it sand again, it became a very strange shade of sand. Well, I'm pretty sure nothing can be done about it

Mootilda, I always bug you wish questions! Can you please tell me which record must be extracted with SimPE and which are the values for lush\sand\concrete? (I just have to marvel at how people manage to gain knowledge about such things...)

This is the definition of the record:
http://www.simswiki.info/wiki.php?title=NGBH

In SimPE, it's also called "Neighborhood/Memory". You will need to change these two fields:
DWORD : Textlength n
n : TerrainType

The possible values for TerrainType are:
concrete
desert
dirt
temperate

and "n" is just the number of characters in the word, ie concrete has 8 characters and dirt has 4.

The reason that you can't change the terrain type in SimPE is because SimPE doesn't allow you to add or remove bytes from a record. You will need to replace the entire string by adding or removing characters in your hex editor. If this is too complex for you, you could extract the NGBH record, zip up the extracted files, and attach them here, and I'd be happy to make the change for you.

I have no idea why your desert has a reddish hue. Could it be the season? I believe that the Seasons EP changes the color of the light for each season.

So I need to extract the NGBH record from the uni package, open it with a hex editor and replace this with 9:

And then use "replace" on the NGBH record in SimPE to put this file back, right? Just making sure that I'm not getting anything wrong.



As for the terrain, it originally looks reddish:

It only looks like this in the hood view, when you play lots it's a normal hue. Maybe some paint was put over it in the hood view, so much of it that it distorts the colors. I think it's not supposed to be a desert, because pines don't grow in deserts, that's why the red hue.

No. If you are trying to change from desert to lush, then you need to change the 6 to a 9, add three additional bytes into the record at the end of the word "desert", and then change the word "desert " (ie "desert" plus the additional 3 bytes) to "temperate". If you don't have exactly the right number of bytes in the record, the game at least lose all of your sims' memories, inventories, badges, etc., most likely corrupt your entire neighborhood, and at worst crash every time that it tries to load your neighborhood when it attempts to read too many bytes from the record.

The reason that you need to extract the record, make the changes in a proper hex editor, and then replace the old record with the new one in SimPE? Because the hex editor included with SimPE does not give you the ability to add or remove bytes from a record.

Since this is a very risky change, you'll want to be sure that you have a valid backup before attempting the change.

Note that I have done this successfully on multiple neighborhoods. The only real risk is that you have to correctly change the size of the record by adding or subtracting bytes in the appropriate location.

Thanx, I fixed the file and will try to play the game with it in the evening.

The result I got yesterday was a little strange. So today I made screenshots.

First off, even though I fixed the file, the uni terrain still looked like desert in hood view. However, when I loaded the dorm, I saw that the road curbs were lush all over the terrain, only the terrain itself was still desert. So I decided that I must've used the terraintype cheat, too? Anyway, after I used it, the terrain in the hood view looked green:


But when I loaded the dorm, the terrain looked like this:


So it's again how it looked at first: only the curbs are green. it isn't visble in the picture, but the terrain behind the orange tiles is desert. Just like the terrain all over the map is desert, too, only the road curbs are green.

I checked several times that I indeed saved the fixed NGBH, by extracting it and looking at it in a hex editor, that's how it looks:


Everything seems to be correct, and it definitely says temperate, not desert, so it's a fixed NGBH record that I'm using in the game for sure.

I'm puzzled, is it supposed to work that way? Or is something not quite right?

Did you follow the instructions for resetting the lot terrain? ie, pick up the lot and place it down again in the neighborhood view. This step should reset the lot terrain to match the hood terrain.

The terrain type is stored in three different places. All three must be changed.

1) The main hood terrain is stored in the neighborhood terrain geometry (NHTG) record. This is the terrain which is modified using the TerrainType cheat.

2) The terrain underneath the road is stored in the neighborhood memories (NGBH) record. This is the terrain which you change by extracting that record, modifying it, and importing it again. Why EA didn't change this with the TerrainType cheat is beyond me. Why they stuck the terrain type in the memories record is even more mind-boggling.

3) The lot terrain is stored in each lot description (LTXT). You can reset the lot terrain by picking up each lot in turn in the neighborhood view, then placing it down again.

It finally worked! It looks like the culprit was the terraintype cheat, it wasn't working correctly. But it took on after I simply exited the game and reloaded it, without making any more changes. Before that I was setting it to different values right in the game to check how it worked, but it did not take on fully, no matter what terrain I set it to. So I guess it means that this particular cheat requires a restart of the game.

Thanx again, Mootilda, you really know a lot about this game! This is great.


Maybe they wanted to make a joke Otherwise, I have no idea why the curb terrain is related to memories, haha.

Well done Babahara!

Thanks for the great information, Mootilda! I really learned a lot in this thread.

You're going to shoot me for this......

It's Memory Lane?