Heya everyone. I'm looking for the best packs for CAS. The steam Halloween sale is this month and I wonder what to get. My play-style is mostly middle-class families so no flashy flashy stuff. I actually like the EAxis style of clothes. I've tried CC but there are no clothes even close to EAxis. I might be thinking of getting HELS or Diesel but I'm not so sure. Thanks!

Bump? Hello?

What do you want? Stuff packs or entire EPs?

The CAS parts of Showtime and Pets are good, but has it's own share of weird stuff. A bonus is that both are sold dirt-cheap separately as a bundle with the base game. There should be around $6-12 savings when you buy them both that way.

Fast Lane stuff has this certain good outfit for male Sims, and lots of good hairstyles for female Sims. Lots of good cars too.

12 responses will give you 12 different answers. The best thing is to research them and see what you like best. We all have different likes and dislikes.

And there must be tens of thousands of CC items. Surely you can find things you want? If no, you are probably being way too specific.

I have to concur with the OP here. Try finding Maxis Match CC to their standards, or to mine, and you'll be sorely disappointed. There isn't even enough of it to make up a single Stuff Pack. This isn't TS4, Maxis Match doesn't even really exist. There's only a few good CC creators for TS3, and nearly all of them have moved on or left the community. And since TS4 to TS3 conversions aren't a thing either, for whatever reason, that's not something you can count on either.

But to answer your question, OP, I've always found University Life to be very interesting fashion-wise. Obviously the clothing in it is pretty hip, and there's a bunch of different styles going on. A lot of it is very hipster, and there's some rebellious and preppy-looking clothing too.

That's a lot of what I play, too (when I'm not doing something like using mods to dump a lone, slightly feral werewolf child in the swamps of Twinbrook so they can raise themself). Carl's Sims 3 Guide has a list of the stuff packs and what comes in them. I don't have any of them but HELS, so I'll be going mostly with what I can spot in the pictures. Hopefully someone will correct me if I'm wrong

High End Loft Stuff has a modern looking household items and young adult/adult clothing and hairs. I like the furniture for certain houses but not really my family homes.

Fast Lane Stuff is mostly cars. Again, all of the clothes and hair are for young adults.

Outdoor Living Stuff might work for a middle class family. It's mostly stuff to go out on an elaborate patio, with several nice hot tubs (which will still work if you don't have Night Life). The no stretch child series will enable kids to enjoy hot tubs as well. The down side I can see is if you get Seasons, winter and rain will keep your sims from using their patio as often. And again, the clothes are for young adult/adult only.

Town Life Stuff id about making your town not as bland looking. It has some nice playground equipment and will enable you to do laundry if even if you don't have Ambitions. Wow, I hadn't realize just how little clothes EA had made for kids and elders. There's a few clothing pieces that would be nice for parents- young adults/adults.

Master Suite Stuff... that would be for Mommy and Daddy's time away from the kids Romantic bedroom and bath stuff and the clothes are underwear for young adults and adults.

Oh poor, maligned Katy Perry Sweet Treats...Actually I think this in no longer being made. Should you find it, it looks like a candy factory blew up and your sims made their house with the debris. That's not to say that you couldn't find a use for it. A daycare center, a candy shop, a child's park, combining it with Supernatural to make the witch from Hansel and Gretel... All of the hair and clothes are young adult/adult and all but one outfit is for females.

Diesel is a clothing line so not surprisingly Diesel Stuff pack is mostly clothes. They aren't that bad of clothes and it's nice that there's a pack with a better supply for men but no kids or elders.

70s, 80s, and 90s Stuff would only work if you were looking to have a family with a house that hadn't been updated in years. The clothes gave me flashbacks to my childhood, and I now have the song "Let's Get Physical" stuck in my head, but nothing for the kids. That's kinda sad, you would think some of the 80s clothes would be teen enabled so you could have the stereotypical mall rat teen girl. I also protest the lack of ruffled white socks to go with bright red pumps.

Movie Stuff is very highly themed. Unless you want a house that looks like a saloon or the Bat Cave out of the old Batman staring Adam West, you'll probably want to pass. On the up side, it does have a bit of clothes for the kids.

Overall, stuff packs are really if you want to make a themed house and are looking for stuff for adults. If you are looking for actual expansions rather than stuff packs, Generations is kind of a must have for people who play families. Ambitions is nice too and I think Twinbrook is a nice place to have a family live.

70s, 80s & 90s Stuff is also pretty useful if you like a bit of hipster style - a surprisingly large portion of its content added value outside of its intended time periods. It ties into the retro/nostalgia trend of recent years pretty well.
Just don't buy it for the 90s stuff, because there isn't really any. Consider this image, showing all female outfits. 12 in total. One 90s outfit, two 70s outfits, TEN 80s outfits. And considering we're mostly about them 90s lately, this pack may not be your cup of tea.

Otherwise, both Town Life and Outdoor Living are pretty good for the generic-but-not-boring style.

I suppose it'd have been better if they'd focused on one decade instead of three - the Stuff Pack format does not allow for enough content to adequately cover three decades. Still, it's definitely odd that none of these decades have been augmented by Store content. The Store, after all, has sets that compliment all the other themes in TS3. There's fantasy sets, medieval sets, futuristic sets, Art Deco sets, noir sets, mid-century sets and whatever else. A bit of 70s/80s/90s wouldn't have hurt...
...though now that I think about it, I can think of at least 3 Store items that I own that go very well with the 80s themed world that I have....in a Breakfast Club sort of way.

Glam rock was a subculture, you wouldn't see people dressed like glam rockers out and about in the same way that you don't see groups of clearly identifiable gamers or whatever just walking about nowadays.
So when dressing up a world, or the Sims in it, I can't just turn them all into a collection of particular clichés. There has to be some degree of realism to it.
I have this photo album of pictures my dad took in the late 80s, and they're pictures of regular everyday people he met or hung out with. So I know what to aim for.
Sure, there's a guy in acid wash jeans with a mullet, and some of the girls kind of look like Madonna, and in one of the pictures of himself he's dressed like Sonny Crockett (the jacket's too big for him even by 80s standards), but it's way more interesting to replicate the mundane and the generic.

So with all that in mind, I can't wait to move on to the 1940s. I love me a challenge.

I do not play by decades as too much will not match, such as vehicles, sims with cellphones, other sims with wrong clothes and hair, etc. And I play legacy style so it would not make sense as in theory would have to change every 10 years as the family ages. My legacy family I played for 34 generations. I would not want them stuck in say the 70s for 30+ generations nor would want to change the world around them in theory every decade.

Yeah, that would be horribly inconvenient if your Sims aged. Which is why mine don't.

Here's a picture of Bob Ross.

Now why am I showing you this picture, you may ask?
When Bob Ross started the television program that made him a legend, back in 1983, he decided he would always dress the same. Why? Because, he figured, an outfit like this would be "timeless", and therefore generations to come could appreciate the program at face value without it looking dated or stupid.
Now, decades later, in the era of widescreen HD television and a total absence of perms or 70s facial hair, ol' Bob is anything but. And while we hardly care about how the guy dressed, no one would say that he looks good.
Since The Sims is absolutely not timeless, I would never pretend it was. Each Sims game is from a distinct time with distinct trends, technology, and certain tastes.

I hope they will. I think I'll come to remember the 2010s fondly, in the same way that my parents both came to remember the 1980s fondly. And probably not even because it was an interesting time for us ourselves, but because both decades have been genuinely interesting in terms of things like societal attitudes and pop culture. So in that regard I think it'll be very interesting to come back to TS3 in 20-30 years' time to see how I think of it then.

Towns and premades are irrelevant to me, that's not what I play The Sims for.
And can you please stop responding to every one of my posts both here and on the official forums? This is not a private chat, nor do I want it to be one.

For clothes, I think the Showtime clothes for both genders have several neat looking ones.
Supernatural has some good shirts/coats for men. Not a fan of the female witch/fairy stuff, though.

The aging and story progression are some of my fave things in 3. I cannot imagine playing with aging off. I want to see Sims live from birth to death and then see generation after generation. I like watching the genetics. Who ages up to look like whom? I like to see the relationships change/grow. Dad plays with son as toddler, does things with him as a child, teaches him to drive as a teen. Sees him grow up and have kids. A static family would not hold my interest. I want to see the family evolve over the years as we do in RL.

I couldn't imagine with aging on. The idea that Sims could grow older and change, and eventually even DIE seems horrible and depressing to me. There's no fun to be had in that. Getting older is never fun, not in real life and not in a video game. Especially at Sim pace, where Sims age so rapidly that you don't even get the chance to grow truly attached to them like you grow attached to a pet or a dear friend. Instead, they're just throwaway beings that you consume for fun. That's like having a TV show where two-thirds of the cast is replaced every 3 episodes. I don't see how that's much better than sticking them in a room and burning it down.

Sure, I like the idea of seeing younger Sims mature. I like imagining what 29 year old Amber, who was once 23 when I started playing with her, will be like when she's 45. But I wouldn't want to commit to that. Personally, I'm terrified of the day I'll turn 30. Worse yet, 40. It's a large part of the reason why I've decided it will now be 2017 forever in Bridgeport. I can't be playing with 30-something year olds, that's not who they were meant to be.

It might just be me, but I really like a lot of the clothes that came with University. There's a few staples in there I use all the time and I love the preppy aesthetic of some of it, which might fit with your play style.

I like how a lot of the clothes of UL look comfy or cool and work for everyday and athletic. Just wish they had more presets that didn't have stencils.