If so what's it like?

The closest I get to dystopian is the way I make Downtown look run down, and put in adult services and crime.
I do have a game plot I'm dying to try out, involving battles with bad witches and good, cowboys and horses, alien's and the army, all set in a dessert strangehood, with strange areas of mists and areas of rainbows. Sims will fight according to Pescado's fight club rules, they'll use Simvac's to suck up skills and make their enemies dumb, and they'll poison each other with drinks from PBK. I'll have real sickness and maybe try Pescado's Zombie apocalypse. The adult services and crime will thrive here. I will have a couple of families based there with children trying to go to school. It will be glory chaos, with graveyards and ghosts everywhere,

I like to play Post-Apocalyptic neighbourhoods on occasion, and tend to play them as dystopian military-run settlements.

The General is the leader of the neighbourhood and lives in a large house with his family and live-in guards and staff (imagine the houses of the leaders in Handmaid's Tale, but without the handmaids).
Then there are a few Officer families who live in less grand, but still nice houses. Together with the General's family these represent the Elite, who get to have running water and (limited) electricity and access to medical services.

And then there's, basically, the Serfs. Who don't have electricity or running water (I use outhouse toilets and Sun and Moon's fetching water mod for that) and are forced to farm the land for the Elite. Male Serfs are also conscripted into the military for the latter half of the teen life-stage and the first 10 days of adulthood. Unless they get a chance card promotion, they are not allowed to become Officers (the chance card promotion symbolizes them distinguishing themselves in battle enough to join the Elite) Some of the Serfs are also selected to become servants or guards.
Aside from being Chance-Card promoted, the Serfs can also reach a higher status by becoming famous gladiators (the Athletic Career) but that Career poses the same dangers as the military ones (getting fired is interpreted as dying in the arena)
The Serfs also don't have much access to medical services,and if they get sick, they die.

There is a war going on with other settlements and if a member of the Military Career is fired because of a chance card, then I interpret that as them being KIA and they die. But I don't play the other settlements (that would be too many sims for my taste)

There's however a group of Rebels which I play. They are mostly comprised of Alien-Hybrids, Plant Sims, Werewolves, Vampires and Witches (all interpreted as Mutants). They live in the Wasteland and are banned from most careers except careers like Adventurer and Life of Crime. If a member of the Military and a Rebel meet they have to fight and the loser dies.

Sometimes I also include Zombies, but their only function is to serve as an additional danger (If a Sim meets a Zombie, they have to fight, if the Sim wins, the Zombie dies, if the Zombie wins, the Sim becomes a zombie)

The Dystopia can be overthrown by a Sim becoming Mayor and re-establishing Democracy. But the Mayor is still in danger of being assassinated and has to establish a Police Force (a Sim reaching the top of the Law Enforcement Career) and a Juridical System (a Sim reaching the top of the Law career) in order to permanently abolish military rule.

I quite like playing like that, because I start from a horrible situation in-game which my Sims then can improve over time. I like storylines like that.

Yes! I play a version of the Apocalypse challenge across a whole hood. So far, I haven't managed to make it without everyone dying. I think I may need to either relax the rules, or improve my tactics.

I'm playing a post Apocalyptic Strangetown hood.
Gen Buzz is remarried and keeps Lyla's tombstone in the back yard to haunt them both, and is somewhat estranged from his sons.
I've posted more about my hood in other threads so will not bore everyone here with the ongoing saga of survival.
But, yes, it's a lot of fun ! (For me. )


Sometimes a medieval hood.

And I've dabbled with turning Belladonna cove into a post apocalyptic disaster zone... with the poor witch sisters having to restore peace and order.
But never got very far with that one.

I've got plans to so something similar with a TOT challenge where they'll be starting with settling in the new world in the 16th and 17th centuries as an attempt to colonize a new land with the threats of Turkish forces taking over Europe which was happening at that time.

My old testing hood was also a post apocalyptic dystopian mess. No challenges except for the Zombies constantly attacking uninfected
it was a lot of fun.
inhabited by 4 families of colony drones, birth queens and their offspring. a zombie apocalypse, temporal anomalies, supernatural entities, ancient spells brought to the forefront, gravity defying architecture and Arks to preserve uninfected.

Right now I'm not interested in playing a dystopian or apocalyptic neighborhood.

I'm living in one...

We play the sims 2 so we can escape our dystopian lives we are living for a happy, safe, and FREE neighborhood, not to make it worse by amplifying our real lives with nightmare fuel.

Everybody is allowed to play the way they want. And only because you might not like that playstyle doesn't make it "wrong".

Also engaging with a frightening topic in a fictional context can actually help to reduce anxiety about it.

When they say "We' they may be referring to their own household... themselves and their partner lets not jump to conclusions.

As for me, never played one I like current hoods or historically older medieval-type hoods.

I made over Bluewater Village to look ruined from a catastrophic event as a setup to play an Apocalypse Challenge. Since I'd already played that challenge a few times, I got bored by the third generation, but it was a ton of fun to do the hood's makeover.

I'd love to try once (something inspired by Resident Evil series!) but like any other themed game it would requirestake too much cc and I'd need some default replacements, at least for buy/build... And the game looks too "cute" light-wise to match the theme, but I guess that's just me being lazy CC hunting/committing to the right neighborhood mood lol

I would love to try one, one day. It sounds like a lot of fun, but it's also really daunting. I read a lot of dystopian novels so I have plenty of inspiration tucked away in the back of my mind.

Oh, I forgot to mention the Cult of the Cowplant. A secret group of fanatics that worship the Cowplant and feed Sims to it in order to gain everlasting youth.

Also the biggest problem I usually run into is how many Sims to have. With all the dangers a Post-Apocalyptic world poses you need enough in order not to run out of Sims, but not as many as to make the neighbourhood unwieldy/large to play.


There's quite a bit of overlap, as I described in my other post, I use quite a bit the Pulmbob Keep mods, such as "Fetching Water" in my dystopian hood, and I basically have a Feudal System.
it's mostly the aesthetic that's different, I guess.

I have a hood called "Hell's Butthole". all sims are armed with lethal weapons by "SimWardrobe", and either ride horse and buggy, or really beat up old cars. Minimal fridge (Medieval fridge baskets), pot bellied cooking stoves, outhouses, outdoor "showers", crude and/or distressed furniture, and rusty tin sheds for houses that are patched together and look like crap. Marriages are arranged, to form alliances. Enemies are killed on sight. Cheating other sims, stealing etc. is common. YEP! It's a real Hell hole.

Well, great thread, got so many ideas, rebel's, gladiators and simwardrobe phasers.
Time for me to get started on my Strangetown, cause Chris Hatch has released new Becks horses
The Cowboys are moving in - The rest will follow later.

I've got plans to use transport horses in my TOT challenge as one of the transport options for my settlers.

The problem is I have to keep my "Dystopian" hoods on a separate laptop (Lenovo T420/nVidia/Win7). I don't want the dirt roads, and other "Dystopian" effects showing up in my "normal" hoods. I keep my main hoods, and game on my Daily Driver.

I'd like to keep both on the same computer, but haven't figured out how to do that yet, and keep them separate. I know there's a way, but I don't know how to do it.

The easiest way to do that is keeping two different Downloads folders.
The Downloads folder is the one under C:\User\Documents\EA Games\The Sims2(or Sims2 Ultimate Collection) where you put all your CC. You can actually copyt he downloads fodler from your laptop put it on your Daily Driver and into a separate folder from the game (I made mine under Documents and called it "ApocalypseSims" so my setup looks like this: C:\User\Documents\ApocalypseSims\Downloads) and a also make a seperate folder for your normal Downloads folder (for example C:\User\Documents\OrdinarySims\Downloads) and put a copy of your normal Downloads folder there.
Then you can swap the two Downloads folders depending on whether you want to play a Dystopia or not. (If you want to play the dystopia, copy the Downloads folder from your ApocalypseSims folder into your Sims 2 folder and if you want to play a normal game copy the Downloads folder with your ordinary CC into the Sims 2 folder.

I hope I explained it alright, I know @JoandSarah77 has a similar setup with her Medieval hoods, maybe she can exsplain it better than I.

@Kunder

I have a disk setup but I believe it should work on the UC.

Go to Documents>EA Games>The Sims 2 (or the path you go when you want your Download folder)

Rename your 'The Sims 2' folder, to anything that you like. I think the UC might have a small trade symbol at the end of it and you might have to keep that. (A UC playing needs to chime in on this)

Run your game after renaming the folder and your game will make you a fresh vanilla 'The Sims 2' folder. You can rename and force the game to make as many of these as you want. It's handy to have one for testing purposes, one for age specfic CC like medieval or futuristic.
The game only reads the folder called 'The Sims 2' so you make sure the folder you want to play is called that while the other folder/s (however many you have) have names like "Apoc", medieval" "Dystopian" "Test" So long as your computer can handle it you can have as many Sims 2 folders as you want.

So you want to switch from that Dystopian over to the Apoc? You rename the current "The Sims 2" with your Dystopian files to "Dystopian" and you rename the "Apoc" folder back to "The Sims 2" The game will read and load only that folder ignoring all the rest. This means each folder can have it's own unique defaults. It's own set of CC. This means smaller download folders without wading through CC you don't want and corespodingly better loading times.

I tend to use abbreviations. So Coral Bay my modern hood is simply 'The Sims 2 CB" Even adding one letter to the folder name will stop it loading. If I played Dystopian I would probably just call it "The Sims 2 Dys" when not playing it. Then carefully rename folders when switching. Don't want to accidentally hit delete.

^ The only difference for UC is the game runs from "The Sims™ 2 Ultimate Collection" folder (without quotes) instead of "The Sims 2"

So after renaming it, is the new folder the game produces also called "The Sims™ 2 Ultimate Collection"?

Sounds like more of a pain to rename but the same principle should apply.

You don't have to change the whole name of the folder - just tack something on the end of the folder name to identify which game it is. When you want to put that folder back in your game, just delete the tag on the end of the folder name.

The Sims 2 > The Sims 2-zombieapoc

The Sims™ 2 Ultimate Collection > The Sims™ 2 Ultimate Collection-medievalgame

I do this by creating new folders and copying or moving the entire contents of my TS2 UC folder to the new folder after renaming it.I just did that recently so I could have my main folder available to my current user-account on my computer since I actually have two on my laptop.I just switch folder contents in my Sims 2 game folder out if I want to play with other content or have NPC's installed in one and want to remove them wihch can only be safely done if you backed up the game folders' contents before instaling the NPC files.I could easily install those now since I just recently backed my game files up and would have versions from before NPC's got installed so I can go back if I wanted to.