Currently I'm using my old user name, never got around to update on my name, I'm stw402, on the exchange.

Anyway this is copy of a little guide I've made on how to make vacation worlds, I was thinking this will be far more useful around here than people uploading to the exchange.


So your about to start a new save, or wish your Sims to visit a new holiday location, now you can.

You don't need to download a new vacation world, you can turn any world into a vacation world, complete with adventures, and holiday time.


To cut the length of this guide in half, first download this file

http://www.sendspace.com/file/xt1j7i

You will also need the latest version of S3PE found here:-

http://dino.drealm.info/den/denforu...5j6&topic=189.0

It's very simple to do

1. Download a world from the exchange

2. Install the world

3. Rename the world France, you will find the file in your my documents/sims3 folder/Installed worlds

5. Next install and open S3PE 6. Next click open in S3PE and navigate to My documents/sims 3 folder/installed worlds, the file should be now called France

7. In S3PE click on resource at the top of the screen and Import from file.

8. Import the file you download from me, it should be called S3_296A6258_00000000_0000000000000001%%+UNKN

9. Save and exit S3PE 10. Now we are going to replace the France world, so make a backup of this world first, you will find the file here:-

C:\Program Files (x86)\Electronic Arts\The Sims 3 World Adventures\GameData\Shared\NonPackaged\Worlds

11. Next move the file from My documents\Sims 3 folder\installed worlds and place the file in C:\Program Files (x86)\Electronic Arts\The Sims 3 World Adventures\GameData\Shared\NonPackaged\Worlds

12. Next start a new game, start a new world and enjoy your visit to a new world.


If the downloaded world contains no Base, the first time you visit when you try to return back to your home world you will be asked to place a new Base.

This process will also work with EA made worlds, but please be aware, store worlds are copy protected and I will not include instructions on how to remove the copy protection, on this thread.

Will this work with already made save games?

If you remove the France_0x0859db50 and France_0x0859db50ExportDB from your saved game folder and then follow the above instructions, when you reload that save in and go to the France holiday location, the game should spawn a new vacation location for that saved game. But how safe this will be to your saved game, I'm currently unsure, so you do this at your own risk. If anybody does test this for a long time, please share your findings. Follow the Golden rule BACKUP your save.

Can I make a vacation world, using CAW?

If you include the file in a caw made world, people who download the world will be unsure on how to install the world, feel free to post them this link. Saying that it's useless really for making vacation worlds and uploading them to the exchange, most people will never see this thread and the world you spent weeks/months building as gone into the recycle bin. So to be honest if your going to make a vacation world, then your best uploading to a site where people need to read descriptions and you can answer questions, mod the sims for example.

Just on a side note it works both ways, should you remove the file S3_296A6258_00000000_0000000000000001%%+UNKN

you can turn France into a base world.

You can see more info about this on this thread,

http://forum.thesims3.com/jforum/posts/list/271048.page

I have questions.

How do adventures work, without tombs? Does the game just not spawn them? What about foreigners? Does the game automatically spawn them?

Do they wear the clothing of the world that was replaced, or do they wear regular clothes?

Does the file you have us place in the world belong to one specific world, or is it an overall kind of thing? As in, will it make the edit world or map music French, Chinese, Egyptian, what? Does it determine the sim's clothing? This is an important thing to know.

Can sims still get quests to go to X location even after you replace it? Can lots still be designated as buyable?

Do we *have* to rename the "installed world"? That seems like it would break the original. Can we just copy it and rename the copy, moving that one to the other folder?

I will do my best to answer your questions, just remember this is very new and I'm still currently testing much of this, If I find anything new I will share my findings.

How do adventures work, without tombs?

To what I can see, when you arrive at the new holiday location, it sets up holiday adventure board, you can click on the board to get adventures. The adventures it seems to pick are the challenges from the Base world, not the adventures from the Holiday Vactions, so the challenges can be completed.

What about foreigners? Does the game automatically spawn them?

In testing the game it did seem to spawn the foreigners, I tested this in a completely empty world and the moment I arrived I was meeting people. Editing the new world to include Townie lots will be needed.

Do they wear the clothing of the world that was replaced, or do they wear regular clothes?

Regular Clothes

Can lots still be designated as buyable?

No the place will act like a Holiday location, so if you wish to have ownerable lots or buyable lots then you will need to edit the new location, this is set up to replace the France location, to edit the location to include townie house's, ownerable, buyable lots then you will need to edit them yourself.

Do we *have* to rename the "installed world"?

Currently this is a replacement, you can't have more than 3 holiday locations, so rename the downloaded world France and you can use this world instead of the orginal.

Sorry if I'm not full of info at the moment, I'm still testing stuff, but this seems to be a very good way of including different locations. Feel free to test this out yourself, you will see how this works in much greater detail, just remember backup the original France File

This sounds interesting. A lot of work though, but when I get some time I want to try this out.

The next step is for someone to automate the process (that's not a request... it's a... suggestion... yeah, that's right... a suggestion... ) so you could switch back and forth between WA worlds and CAW worlds before starting the game.

I do wonder, though, if it would be possible to trick the game into thinking the WA worlds are installed twice... or something... then you could keep WA worlds and add others. There's a general "other's have tried this" statement going around, but who are these "others" and what exactly did they try, and why did they not succeed? Just curious, really, I don't know enough about coding to double-check anything they say, of course.

I've not fully investigated everything I can do with that file yet, my actual objective when I started this was to make a working base world, from the French vacation world. The world contains over 4700 files, I just started narrow down the search step by step, until I had one file left. I've been concentrating more on getting the base world working first, but I will return to this, I can see it can be useful.

Removing the file turned the world into a base world, so my objective was complete, but I did see the file that was left over could be used to make a vacation world. My knowledge of what to do with this file ends about here.

What I was thinking, if you you made a world and used the file to turn into a vacation spot and then possible link to the file using the phone so you could have more than 3 vacation spots, but you would need a hacked phone, that's probable beyond my ability. The other way would be swapping saved game files, prior to visiting the world, this can be done but it's messy and if you marry a Sim from another world, you end up with a duplicate Sims.

If you're playing on a Mac I could easily put together an Automator workflow for you. If you're on a PC... You could make your own batch file?

Adding more vacation worlds is probably a core mod. The UI.package can be modded with XML and CSS to add more slots to the town map view upper left corner, but modding phones/computers so your sims can actually go there smacks of core. Or... let's ask Twallan for a script injector mod!!! :-D

His mods already poke into the computer menus, so he could add that... but we'd have to help him find the script that loads up the new map, makes a copy of it, adds a database, and finally sends your sims there... Frankly, swapping different world vacation files sounds more doable!

But a simple itty mod to replace the icon shown in town mod could happen, so when you swap vacation world files you can also put in a package to replace the appropriate... *digs around files, mumbling to self*

Thank you Tamlo31 for posting this! Tried it and it worked perfectly. The only difficulty I found was because I intended my Sims to have a vacation home, and after I changed France to a small island in the middle of nowhere it became very hard if not impossible for my Sims to reach Visa level 3 (some adventures requested me to go inside a tomb and retrieve an item from it, which could no longer be done since the tomb's gone). So I used the mod that alters Visa level difficulty, switched it to the easiest, and was in no time able to reached Visa level 3 by only talking to some people and brought nectars.

Now that I think about it I might be able to complete the items-acquiring challenge by using buydebug, but that I am not sure.

Just for interest, there is some more information regarding flagging a world as a vacation locale in this thread:
http://www.modthesims.info/showthre...50#startcomment
The investigation is regarding the same resource that Tamlo31 has isolated in this thread.

HugeLunatic has a quick table of world resources she found while playing around up at https://sites.google.com/site/hugelunatic/ts3-misc I'm not sure how it might help and she wasn't sure either it sounded like when she told me she'd isolated stuff, but if nothing else it's a tidy tabled list of resource changes.

Thanks bakafox, I was looking at that earlier. I'm most curious about the export modes, that's new to me! The world names we discovered in the thread I linked, but we didn't know the identity of Sunset or Riverview. Good information, thank you for linking!

My objective was to replace France with kiwi_tea's RiverblossomHill. I did the steps, and when I go to France, it's Riverblossom Hills, but that's where the problems start, the problem being that the game doesn't let me return to base world.

I go to France, make one lot a base camp, then return home. I get the "returning home" loading screen, but when it's done loading, I'm back in a clean RiverblossomHills. Any changes I did to the town, are not there. I tried returning home by going to Egypt, and then hoping I could return to my base world from there. I get the Egypt loading screen, but when it's done loading, I'm back in an un-modified Riverblossomhills.

The above scenario, is from an already existing world.

When I tried to start a new game, with the modified France, I started a new Bridgeport, went to France but now, I'm in a base world mode, I can't go to edit town because it tells me I can't save the game without a base camp, and I can't add a base camp because I cant go to edit town.

So, obviously the game thinks RiverblossomHills is still a base world, even thou it should now be a vacation destination.

Just wondering has anybody else had this type of problem when editing a vacation destination.

------ edit ----

Scrapped the previous attempts, restored my backups, checked France was working and tried again. This time extracted the needed file from my own France world, just in case the downloaded one was corrupted.

Now instead of never getting, home I get crash on desktop when I'm returning home from Riverblossomhills. Tried this with another world, it worked fine. Tried it again with Riverblossomhills, first attempt to get home resulted in Riverblossomhills being loaded again, on the next attempt of trying to return back to the normal hood, it crashed to desktop. The only big difference in these two worlds, is that Riverblossomhills is inhabited, while the world where this worked, is not.

---edit---
Never got Riverblossom hills to work, but I did get several other (un-populated) worlds to work just fine. Hopefully I can manually populate the world I chose as my new France, without it breaking the game.

My experience with the switch.

As I mentioned I never got Riverblossom Hills to work, but I did get other worlds to work fine. But, not without some problems, which I thought to share.

1. The relationship panel got broken. If I entered a household with multiple Sims, the Sim who was selected when I saved and exited the last time, his relationship panel got loaded, and if I switched Sims, it still showed the panel of the sim who was selected when I exited the game.

2. The relationship panel didn't get updated during game-play, so if somebody became enemies or friends with another Sim, it did not the change.

3. There was a "foreign friend" in the relationship panel, but it had no picture, or name, just a red square. When I had Sims chat with this red foreign Sim, they would become un-clickable, not reacting to any commands, until the phone-call was over.

4. Some of my people from my hood moved abroad, I tried calling them and inviting them over but they never come. Some of these people were living in my hood and were playable, some were dead, one guy who died as a YA, was now a child and living abroad.

I had one guy successfully travel to the new France, and after he came home, I continued to play him for several days. He has a sister, and she visited him, and he visited her and it was all fine until I went to edit town so I could play the sister's house, when I noticed that she had dissapeared. When I got back to the guy's house and checked his panel, I noticed that she was now listed as a foreign friend (he didn't have the red foreign friend icon so his panel got updated during game-play).

Removing the new France, and replacing it with the backup I took of my game before I did the switched fixed many of the issues I had, and no additional people have been moved to abroad. The red foreign friend issue remains, and the interface problem, but only in households were the is a red foreign friend. I'm hoping this issue will get "fixed" when everybody who knows the red foreign friend dies.

I have never visited China yet in my current hood, so I'm still planning on changing that. And then I can see do these problems occur again.
Lessons learned. Maybe it's not very wise to switch the vacation worlds if you have visited them (I had visited France before I decided to switch it). Or, maybe I just did the switching wrong.

Ani, was that still with switching France for the populated world? I think perhaps you're right about the pre-played vacation destination- your sims will possibly have relationships with the locals in France, so switching it for another populated world could cause problems. Thanks for the detailed feedback, great information!

The world I switched France for, was not populated.

A few other things I forgot to mention, and these were in France when my guy visited it. First, I saw the post-man, I've never seen him in an EA vacation world before, and the Grim Reaper was the bartender.

I still think switching worlds has potential. But it needs to be automated, and program that does the switching should make all Sims forget any foreign friends they know in the world you are switching.

How come when I try to go to the link about making France a baseworld in the forum ...it says I don't have permission to read it. And I really want to make France and the other vacationworlds into baseworlds

The link works just fine for me, LongLiveHarryPotter7.

Also, there is information about that in this thread:
http://www.modthesims.info/showthread.php?t=424374

The first download file is not available.

yannickvanloon, this tutorial is slightly outdated now, as we have mods which allow your sims to travel to any world for a vacation.
http://nraas.wikispaces.com/Traveler

However, if you still wish to make a default replacement for the EA vacation worlds, then you can extract the file mentioned in the first post yourself from France.world, and import it into your world.

^ the other post talks mainly about flaging worlds into cities, to make a world a spot vacation will it work fine to just import this file from a EA WA world into my own? I wonder about the tombs, adventures, also, there is not some topic about how turning the Paris world made by The Sims Key into the France spot? thanks anyway

vlad-sch- If you import the resource from an EA vacation world into your own then those worlds will not show up as playable worlds on the menu, since they will be flagged as vacation locales (which do not show up on the world list). You can use them to make a default replacement for the EA Vacation worlds, although the opportunities will not work since you won't have the required tomb lots.

If you just want to make your world have the music, transport style, foreign names etc., from the vacation worlds then use my tutorial to flag the world as a vacation locale:
Tutorial:Flagging a World as a City or Vacation Locale^wiki