Is there any way to get Cyjon's Bigger Bills to affect only one neighbourhood? As far as I can see, he's set it up so changes to the default only affect the hood they're made in, but the mod itself affects every hood - and even the 0 Level setting makes significant changes to billing that I don't want in Riverblossom Hills.

If it can't be limited to one hood, is there some other mod I could use to increase bills in one hood but not another?

Is there an easy way to turn default replacement hair into custom hair? or is it as long as the opposite?

As a general rule mods affect the entire game so the only way with that kind of thing to have it per neighborhood is to remove it when you don't want to use it. As for is there something that's usable per neighborhood, I'm not sure but have you tried any of Monique's computers? I don't really use them but I know they do have various functions to do with a Sims' finances.

Make your hood in a new sims 2 folder. Each folder is separate and can have different Downloads.

Okay, a really stupid question... I apologize if it's been asked before. Why do so many folks still play the Maxis hoods?

I played around in several of the Maxis neighborhoods in 2004 when I first bought the game and have pretty much ignored them ever since. I prefer playing my created Sims in my created hoods. I honestly don't understand the fascination with the default hoods. So what drives you to still play those original hoods?

For me, I can't make my own Sims. Well, I can but I can't connect to them the same way the premade Sims do in the default hoods which is probably why I only play an Uberhood with every single shipped hood (except University subhoods because of personal rotational gameplay issues). So many stories to be told and so much to learn from each Sim. :D

Well I just made an Ubber hood recently after never really playing the pre-mades at all. I had loaded up the Pleasant's, Don, Goth's and a few Strangetown families years and years ago and played maybe a day or two. All my other families have been custom families in custom hoods. many in those other hoods that came with EP's I never even loaded and deleted right away.
I figured after 15 years of not playing them, that they would actually be something fresh and new for me to play. Not to say how long it will last and I might just play the few that I find interesting but there you go. I do find it strange though how many people play and continue to play pre mades for years with hardly a break, for me that would be really boring. I do think that some of the Pleasantview and Strangtown pre mades have interesting stories compared to those other hoods, Riverblossom and I think Dessie something valley? Lol I can't even remember the names of those places, they seem as interesting as dishwater.

I'm the opposite. I feel way more connected to the sims I made myself, and the premades ended up getting left behind and never played. The only premades I liked were the ones I integrated into my own families, so that's just what i do now. I ignore their stories and just treat them like townies- ignored until a use arises.

Thanks, Misty and Jo. I have three EA Games folders that spawn automatically: Sims 2, Store Edition and Double Deluxe. I just use the Double Deluxe folder, but could I use one of the others? Or would that lose Nightlife? I might opt for just moving the mod in and out, if it doesn't cause reset issues. My other option, I suppose, would be to give each family in the Poverty hood a huge starting deficit, then have them borrow the money to cover it from the Loan Jar (they haven't room in their tiny rentals for a computer).

HobbesED: I don't think I would play a lone Maxis hood again, but I wanted to try an uberhood since I only recently found out how. My other hood is one I made myself.

I'm not familiar with Double deluxe or Store addition. I simply rename my sims folder and it produces another. I would try just renaming your sims 2 folder, loading the game and seeing what it does.

I know this wasn't the question but the reason I don't play with the game 'hoods is because someone made up a bunch of drama then the Sims, tossed them all into a neighborhood, used testingcheats to fix them all up and that kind of drama is just not for me. Instead I like the stuff my Sims come up with on their own, like when I decided Goopy Gils Carbo was going to die in a fire for a red ghost, only what happened was instead of him dying Bethany (Legacy founder's daughter) went running into the kitchen and died in the fire instead. Fortunately the Founder managed to win with Grim Reaper and she was spared but then came the extremely sticky situation of getting her bars up high enough so she wouldn't end up starving to death. I moved a bed into the kitchen, had her lie down to sleep, then when she'd had enough sleep have her eat a little bit of food and kept doing that until she was better.

Then there was the time Bethany wanted to get her kids into Private School and her mother had ten points in cooking so I decided to give it a go. The trouble was I didn't realize the time and in the midst of Dagmar (the former Romance mail lady who had married my Family Legacy founder) was cooking the Lobster Thermidore the Grim Reaper came for her. By the time that was all said and done dinner was burned. No one else could cook well but I figured better to at least feed the head master so moved the headstone outdoors and got someone else to cooking. In the meantime the headmaster disappeared and when I finally found him he was just standing quietly out near the grave. He finally left without accepting the kids to school and Bethany had a nervous break-down because she was already kind of messed up from losing her mom and her worst fear was confirmed when her kids got rejected for Private School.

Maybe for someone else that's not enough drama but it was pretty exciting for me.

I haven't made Sims for a really long time but I have a nice collection of other people's I downloaded. I know when I do make them the whole while I'm thinking about them, what kind of character they are and such. By the time I've finished I've grown fond of them. I also have a nice collection of other people's Sims I've used on a few occasions for making Townies. Those are so much better than the ones the game generates, even if I'm using the in-game Townie maker.

I've been wondering this myself. While I think their backstories are interesting, I'm like inspiredzone in that I connect better with the sims I make. The default hoods have never really interested me because for some weird reason I always feel like I'd screw up the "intended" stories for the premades by adding my own. No idea why.

What I'm curious about is what interests people about uberhoods? I don't think I completely understand what they are or what their purpose is. Why would you choose to play one of those rather than a smaller hood?

The Ubber hood allows me to have Pleasantview sims meet and form relationships with Strangetown sims, that appeals to me. If I wanted to I could have Cassandra Goth marry Vidcund Curious -I don't know, I find that amusing. I am pretty sure this will be short-lived amusement but it sure beats my crashing main custom hood right now.

I have already started a new Custom Integrated hood called Wattle Creek as well.

I, almost exclusively, play pre-mades and I connect them, not literally in an Uberhood (for technical reasons), but by mixing them among the hoods in the same way. I can say why I do it.

First, I am absolutely story-driven, but not at all the stories that Maxis set up. For instance, I have never and could never follow the whole scenario set up with the Pleasants and the cheating and Lothario not marrying Cassandra and all that - all that seems incredibly boring to me, but... I love discovering the sims histories and watching them reveal details about themselves.

I also focus almost exclusively on setting up lots and scenarios so that the sims behave as autonomously as possible. This randomness and autonomy makes them feel "real" to me as if they are little people living their real lives in a strange but self-contained little sim world.

I am about world building and finding those odd little connections that then drive my imagination. And my stories range far and wide, rather like a very long running soap opera that twists and turns through the years... in that sort of fiction, writers don't plan every detail of the plot far ahead of time, they let the characters drive the plot and discover connections as they go.

Without the history/surprises of the world Maxis built, I would be creating every detail of each and every character from scratch which would not feel as real to me, not as if I am discovering a world in progress. And, I would, certainly, end up creating a lot of similar characters and such rather than discovering and inventing based on random ones that I never would have thought of.

I do, occasionally, create a character when a story I'm brewing calls for someone specific, but I think it's fun to recycle sims that are already there, so I sometimes pick a random townie to become the character, rather than go to CAS.

I absolutely ADORE my uberhood. I've also added all the hoods that have been converted to subhoods that I can find. Still waiting for Aileen Landing, though.

For me, personally: The genetic possibilities! Less chance of inter-marrying, inter-breeding or whatever you call it (take note I also have Multi-PT & Multi-PlantSim mods). All the Sims get to meet each other. Some Sims you thought would get along actually despise each other, other Sims you thought would not get along become BFFs etc.

That's my biggest reason why I love, love, love my Uberhood(s)! :D

Uberhoods are too much for me, the most I can manage is Megahood of Pleasantview+Strangetown+Bluewater Village.

Those are also the only three premade hoods I really like. I never was a fan of Veronaville (neither the clumsy, badly executed Shakespeare parallel, nor the Sims themselves, nor the houses except for the two Monty villas) and the EP hoods have all those families like the Roths and the....sporty family...(can't even remember their name) that I can't really seem to care about.
There would just be too many families for me to take care of, especially too many families I'm not invested in.

But I find it really cool to read about the Uberhoods of people who do manage to keep them going.

Is there a chance card fix for the Politics career? I found another random blog that confirms the issue. Basically, if you get the chance card at the Lobbyist level, it seems that the outcomes are switched (aka wrong). Or am I and this other person reading it incorrectly? (Image attached).

I think that's just really, really weird wording.

The way i understand it the "Lobby For" option is "Lobby for the Senator to vote against the preservation bill." And the "Lobby against" option means "Lobby against the Senator to vote against the preservation bill"
It's really awkward wording and kinda sounds like someone wrote that when they were really tired or something.

Haha yeah, I thought that could be a possibility, too! (After I got the outcome I didn't expect). We probably did read it "wrong". Ugh, stupid words!

I play Veronaville because the Sims that I love live there.

I came to the game quite late, in 2012, only a few weeks before EA shut down the official Sims 2 site. I read through little manual that comes with the game for a few weeks before I installed it. In some ways I would have liked to have started with a custom 'hood, but that would have meant learning to build before I could start, and I was anxious to start playing. If there had been a 'hood with houses and shops but no Sims, I would have chosen that, but the 3 'hoods included with the game all had Sims in them. In the end I chose Veronaville to start, in part because it only had 3 playable families. The first thing I did was start CAS, and create a teenage boy, Andrew Jones. Then, because it wouldn't let me save him without an adult relative, I added his mother Gloria. I moved them into 19 Chorus Court, because it looked quite nice and cost less than the §20K they had to spend. And then the sheer quality of the game blew me away. Andrew and Gloria were just such complete, believable and fascinating characters. The strength of the bond between them took me by surprise. In short I think I fell in love with both of them within a few Sim hours of starting to play. Over the next few weeks I introduced a couple more households: Garry Mackay, a boyfriend for Gloria, and the Moltke family, including Julian, a boyfriend for Andrew. In my first months I played these three families pretty intensively.
That's more or less what I did with the pre-mades in my early game, except that I don't like the idea of "using" Sims. My Sims could, and did, befriend Sims they met, both townies and pre-made playables. Eventually some of the pre-mades began to work their way into my own Sims lives, and I started including their houses in my very loose rotations. Today they are all integrated onto the community and they can all, including the ones who are still townies and Downtownies, avail themselves of their rights as full citizens of Veronaville.

So I go on playing, and enjoying Veronaville, but the town has moved on quite a way from the way Maxis left it. I don't think I'd be interested in constantly restarting and playing the pre-mades opening stories over and over again. If I'm honest, I probably prefer playing my own Sims (and even the ex-townies) to the pre-mades, but, in a spirit of live and let live, they have just as much right to live in the town, and they undoubtedly make the place a bit more varied -- for a start, some of them aren't gay!

To a much lesser extent I have played Pleasantview and Strangetown a little, just in order to meet for myself some of the Sims I've read so much about here.

P.S. I also think the half-timbered houses of Eastside Veronaville are beautiful, old and impractical for modern living though they may be.

A person doesn't have to build much even starting with a bare 'hood before they play. My very first TS2 'hood was a custom map I'd built in SC4. It wasn't until I tested it in the game that I realized just how little space there was (camera mods weren't out yet) so had to take it back to the drawing board and fix a few things. Somewhere along the way I lost that map and really wish I hadn't. At any rate, whether or not a person starts out with a single Sim or a few families of their own, a neighborhood can so easily and nicely be built as time passes. You start with one family and the Townies. What do you have? Maybe a quick-stop to grab some groceries? Or maybe a little coffee shop on the corner? As the population grows it's so easy to grow the neighborhood with it.

On the other topic of that old neighborhood. I realized that the duplicate Sims are Vacation Sims. For whatever reason there are six Ninjas and every single family in duplicate. I used Hood Checker to trouble shoot and used SimPE to help with some memories that were wonky. I wouldn't go to this much trouble for just any Sim family but these guys are the special ones. They started out as my first Legacy family, and on the F generation of children I realized the neighborhood wasn't going to last much longer. I never did quite get over losing them so this neighborhood was my attempt at trying to relive those glory days and it was turning out pretty well with its own version of surprises along the way.

Thanks Misty!

Actually I do start off my custom 'hoods with tiny populations and hardly any buildings. My very first custom 'hood, Teston Woods (a test 'hood as you can guess from the name) started off with one playable Sim living in a remote roadside cottage in the midst of the vast Arbordale terrain. There was one shop (Mootilda's mini-mart) and a handful of restaurants as the first thing I wanted to test was the non-appearance of the restaurant chef. The game generated one townie and then I got it to generate another 30.

I started New Desconia with 2 playables and 5 CAS townies. In addition to their houses, there was one shop (Mootilda's again) and a park. I soon added 3 more CAS townies as everybody was turning up at every community lot visit.

But back in 2012 when I was starting, I was a total newbie, and hadn't a clue how to start building. And,after reading the manual for weeks, I was desperate to start playing. I did actually attempt a community lot very early in my Simming life, as I wanted a swimming pool for my Sims. But when it first opened there were no working toilets, as I didn't know how to make them. And, as a result Andrew got caught short! (And he won't let me forget it!) When I eventually added them, I was only able to do it by studying how Maxis had built them at Stratford Strip (in Veronaville). The pool is still open, and very popular with my Sims, but today it has very good facilities including a poolside restaurant. All in all I think my decision to start with Veronaville was a rational one, and I don't regret it. Like my Sims I'm proud to count myself as a Veronavillian.

So, I've a question about neighborhood stability and houses. I'm understanding to never use a furnished house that's been played for uploading because Sim information can get stuck to objects. As far as the objects go is there anything that's safe to leave in a house? Is it safe to have a new set of Sims move into a house in the same neighborhood that was previously occupied and still furnished (I had used Inge's shrub to keep the stuff in the house)?

I remember trying to build a second floor in the original game. I got the walls and floor put in then couldn't figure out how to get furniture up there. So yeah, there's always a learning curve. I just tend to dives into something like this head first, though, and usually find myself landing on the deep end. You should see how many of those little citizens I starved to death in Banished before I realized my head-long approach was a really, really bad idea. It's either that or my over-cautious side will get the better of me and I'll end up not doing it at all.

If the house doesn't leave the neighborhood, it doesn't matter how many sim references are stuck to it. You can leave everything in a house, including gravestones, if you don't send it to the lot bin, which is a space outside all neighborhoods.
You furnish upper floors the same way you furnish ground floors: open the catalog while on that floor, select, place. If you want to move existing furniture from one floor to another, select a piece of furniture, change the level you're on, and set it down.