I’m in the process of changing up Boothbay, my custom hood. (again).

At the bottom, there are the main playables (who all live on the same street lol) and small community lots. In the central area are tall brick buildings like Apartments, clubs, lounges, stuff like that (with the exception of the library, it was tall and brick so I put it there). From that, we have town hall (hood deco) and the strip of 1x1 businesses. Not pictured is the secluded area on the edge where I will put farm houses.

I’m gonna add more houses to the suburbs and more apartments and a central park to the central area, but I need more ideas. What kind of community lots can I put in the central area? You know, stuff that goes in big cities, anything that I can put in a tall brick building. I don’t want tall high-rises, maybe something up to 5 floors tall. Definitely more clubs, maybe a dive bar here or there, different lounges etc. Also.. I think I might do stacked lots. Maybe.

Ideas?

A big shopping mall is a good idea. Not practical to use, but looks good in neighbourhood view.

Some places for teens to hang out - a youth club? Sports grounds. More run down spaces for the dodgy people to hang out. Different date venues, perhaps a singles bar.

For tall lots, remember in cities a lot of buildings like that, the top floors are home to offices or apartments. So either stack them or just leave the top 2-3 stories empty or with fake offices in them. Something I like to do is to imagine a place for every career in the game - so build a fake hospital, police station, fire station. Offices for the business career, journalism career, etc. I never visit them but they look good in hood view, like TS3 rabbitholes (you could visit them if you wanted, and use the visitor controller to ban anyone not employed in the appropriate career.)

Where do down-on-their-luck sims live? Do you have very small cheap apartments? Or some kind of communal home or hostel for sims who can't afford to rent anywhere. Stuff their inventories with statues or other useless items every time they earn so that when they accumulate enough value they can move out and sell the contents of their inventories while in the apartment lobby.

Taking note of that!


The sideways-H shaped building are the cheap 1 room apartments with 8 units. The story I'm going with doesn't have anyone living there... not right now, at least.

Banks. Office buildings. Lunch counters. Pocket parks where office drones can eat their lunches and get a break from office politics. Bus stops. Public transportation hubs. Museums - one for art, one for history, one for science. Newsstands. Small shops selling the small things you might need to pick up on your way home - flowers, groceries. Condos.

It's shut down now, but for decades there was a parochial school, attached to one of the Catholic churches from which it was across the street, on the Riverwalk here in San Antonio, squeezed between two hotels. It was a two-story building with a playground surrounded by chain link on top.

City parks, abandon buildings, places like these the homeless tend to hang around.

Peni, I read that as flowers, groceries, condoms to get on the way home. Condos are a good idea too though. I'm still laughing.

Flowers, condoms, and a bottle of wine sound like a good gift combination, actually.

I completly forgot to tell soulfire that the Boothbay hood looks really nice.

Thanks! I just used some premade terrain (I think? I actually have no idea what terrain I used :S) and there is a ton of empty space. There's a lot more to be done and I don't think it'll ever be finished, really.

All of Mootilda's "Moo's Nightlife Mews" http://modthesims.info/download.php?t=489422
And "Moo's Mews" http://modthesims.info/download.php?t=387319

Just remember you can recolor them how ever you want and they can go side by side like a strip mall.

What ARE condos, anyway? I try googling them but it's all legal speak and makes no sense to me. How are they different from normal apartments or houses?

A condo is an apartment (usually a luxury one) that you buy. A company owns and maintains the building, but you own your unit.

Oh ok, that makes sense. Thanks!

Just what I would like in my 'hood, but the game doesn't seem to tailor the clientele to match the function. You build a hang-out joint for teens, you send your teen there ... and it's full of elders. (I've got a lot of elders at the mo, so they crop up everywhere.)

And whenever I send a single sim cruising for a date, everyone down the club etc is unsuitable. Usually wrong sex, or partnered if the right sex, or too old etc. (I normally get eight additional sims on a community lot, and I can pretty well bet in advance that at least five of them will be the wrong sex.)

There's a mod called the Visitor Controller, with which you can ban everyone but teens from a teen lot, etc.

lmao you guys are fuuunny .... fire station, police station, beachside boardwalks, city airport, city community college, npc apartments, mini strip mall, dance clubs, news paper/publishing, travel agency, telemarketing firm, banks/realestate/investment skyscraper, public school, downtown daycare center, the projects, thriftshops, music stores, gas stations, mini shops (7-11), city graveyard, alley lots, subway stations, bus stops, mini cafe's, kfc and mcdonalds (in city buildings), nail salons....post offices, dock shipping services,

Also your fire department, police station and hospital can be more than decorative, mine are all residential working business lots.

Visitor controller or the Business selector will give you a teen hang out with no elders.

Not all Downtown areas have to be poor and sketchy. Add in some of the higher class apartment buildings (you can download some here at MTS) that attract Techies and Socialites too. In my city (Toronto), there are condos going up by the lake shore, and they're quite luxurious... but you really do need a fat wallet to move in to one.

in most major cities downtown areas no longer offer cheap spaces for office or living, everything is really expensive. in major cities the poor and working class have been pushed into the suburbs and edges of the city. also because space is at a premium major cities downtown areas are upwards, no sprawl. If you decide to build a mall build upwards. Office spaces and shopping are a must. In addtion to museums you could add deparment stores, playhouses, movies theaters, nightlife, opera, drug stores and convience stores, tourist shops, at least one university campus, one major park like this park willl be huge with areas that completely screen out the city, there will also be a few small parks scattered around, street vendors and street entertainers. the city's main library will also be downtown this library is huge and has books, dvds, computers for pretty much any and all media it will also have spaces that the wealthy can rent for private functions...I mean just some of everything will be in a downtown for a major city.

Yep, I use the visitor controller obsessively on every community lot, filtering by hobbies and careers usually to get the "right" kind of crowd (and banning dormies from anywhere except uni lots), age where applicable (only teens and kids at the youth club, elders at the senior centre), occasionally different things - the singles bar only allows singles, the gay bar only allows gay and bisexual sims, etc etc.

I have my maxnumofvisitingsims set to 14 but obviously it depends on your computer.

I have found that if you set it to "rich only" that screens out most if not all townies and NPCs, which is a pain.

The one's Ive listed above are also all playable lots! that I have had in game ...just be creative and have fun.. invent new "stores" and "shops"...if you run out of ideas page through your local yellow pages. ...Maybe focus on your residents needs...for me in the beginning all my sims start out poor, except for the mayor - everyone has to gain their wealth so they start out with nothing....so to start I have furniture stores, bed and bath shops ,lighting stores,food/groceries/ etc.....some more ideas for you of lots Ive had in game-downtown- marriage counseling, family therapist office, vamp only clubs, spas/salon combo, dojo-karate, interior decorators, city planner office, city hall/divorce court, plummer, butcher, fabric factory, magazine publishing, photo studio, modeling agency, exterminator office, boarding school/orphanage, police academy, small auto dealerships/repair garages,

...Dentist's office, doctor's office, bank, flower shop, toy shop, laundromat, video game arcade, dance studio, tattoo parlor, comic book shop, post office, movie theater, library, electronics store, pizza parlor, hotel/motel, gym, community pool...

I have a thing for launderettes. I'm always building them. And churches. God knows why. I'm not religious. And pubs - lots of pubs, which is ironic in a way since pubs are fast disappearing over here.

One little thing you can do with class/wealth level and apartments is:

Use the hack that allows for townie apartment dwellers
Make your own townies

Doing this means next time you move a new sim into a new apartment, the game will use the last townies you made because that's what it does (same with the students BTW). I'm just moving in some new middle class (moderately well-off) and lower class (poor) sims into new apartment complexes. I made, just before I moved the middle class sims into their nice-ish flats, some fairly well-to-do types (or people who should be fairly well-to-do like teachers, nurses and firepersons) to be neighbours. I'm doing a slum next and am making some glorious oiks along the lines of Mama Hick (and some nice but poor people) to go in it. You might think this means you need to make new townies every time you do this but you don't. You can use existing townies by summoning them to a pre-existing family lot (I have one especially for things like this), make them part of the family, save and then make them a townie again. Thus, the game sees them as new townies. The family you use for this gets some of their cash of course but you can adjust that either in-game or in SimPE.

I keep meaning to build a launderette and keep forgetting.

I have so much shops for different items, all OFB sim-owned

How about using the OFB bandatron?