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Alchemist
Original Poster
#1 Old 18th Oct 2018 at 6:35 PM
Default Requesting tips for making a neighborhood feel like a large city
The game was meant to simulate the suburbs, but I'd like to have some urban areas and want to find ways to capture the city experience. I downloaded a mod that creates more vehicles and walk-bys, some small lots (1x1 etc), plus some city hood deco. If you have a hood that's supposed to be the big city, please share your tips, pictures of your game etc.
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Link Ninja
#2 Old 18th Oct 2018 at 6:54 PM
Maybe download some big lots, maybe not to play but you can use to fill in blank spots. Here are some good ones just to lay down to give it a city feel:
Le Theater
Indiana Theater
City Hall
Abandoned warehouse
Hospital

^ Actually, check out all of Zarathustra's lots - there's a lot there you can use to make a city feel more urban (he created the warehouse and hospital I already linked)

Other Lots you can use to create a more urban or city feel:
Parks
Shops/businesses
Tall apartment buildings
Plazas

Edit: Pics of my custom down towns for reference:


Uh oh! My social bar is low - that's why I posted today.

Forum Resident
#3 Old 18th Oct 2018 at 7:02 PM
I use small lots (1x1 and 1x2 and so on), and build more than one building on a single lot, and then stick two or more of those next to each other. I use apartment buildings more, and then build 'alley ways' out of those 1x3 and 1x4 lots. One knacky thing to do (that I always fail to do really) is plan out the city in empty lots first. Place and name each one so that you have all the lots you're going to use laid down. The reason it might work is that this way you can make sure all of the lots you're placing fit perfectly next to and between the others BEFORE you start to build. I don't know if you've ever run into that issue where you go to place a lot and it won't sit next to another, so there's now an even bigger gap between the buildings? I feel like placing the empty lots will give you a way to work around that or fix those issues before you build walls and things. Then you'll only have little two tile gaps from the normal building restrictions. Sometimes hood deco can be used to fill gaps as well.

Another way to 'cheat' that multiple buildings on one lot look, is to build a single family house and maybe an owned business, and make it look like multiple buildings from the outside. I've done that as well.
Mad Poster
#4 Old 18th Oct 2018 at 8:41 PM
Fill in all the gaps with hood deco. The new light-up hood deco in particular. Use them to create features like parking garages, airports, sports arenas, factories, medical centers, movie theaters, and office complexes that would be too much work for too little verisimilitude if you built them as lots; and then build the playable lots around them.

Make sure there's lots of bus stops, subway stations, hood deco buses, and other visible indications of the ways people get around, some as hood deco, others as small visitable lots. Make lots that are primarily "places people walk through" like plazas and fill them with human statues, break dancers, food carts, newspaper kiosks, coffee stands, and whatever else you can find. Have some playables own small businesses like newsstands and food carts. Use 1x3 and smaller lots to build suitable parks, bus stops, lunch counters, and so on along the road frontages of the areas you've defined with hood deco. Instead of sending city-dwelling sims straight to the place they're going, use the "walk to" and "clickable neighbors" features to simulate the trip from home to destination, so the sim who is walking to the corner store for groceries also visits the park, salon, and plaza that lie between the two points, or the sim who is going to a distant part of town has to wait at the bus stop for awhile.

Make multiples of each type of venue in different parts of town. Maybe base this off the AL social groups, or the economic levels of different parts of town. Make soup kitchens and hostels and the YMCA.

Place streetlamps in a consistent manner. Probably some residential areas only have them at major intersections, but the business areas should have one or two lamps per block, so make sure you add them to your playable lots as well as placing hood deco ones. Different parts of town may have different streetlamp styles, so bear that in mind. Use banners and billboards generously.

For residential lots, start with a small footprint and build up to simulate the high land value in densely populated areas; not just apartments, but three-story row houses with no side yards and tiny walled gardens out back; or lots where every square foot is built on and the roof functions as the yard. Make home businesses in which the business is the bottom floor and the living space is above. Learn to make stackable lots so your sims can live above a deli owned by somebody else.

Take out anti-redundancy so you don't see the same NPCs over and over, and make MOAR TOWNIES, using every skintone, every face template, every age group, every style of dress. Get soldiers walking around in uniform. Get nuns and priests and little old ladies in hijabs and young men with sidelocks and bald women in orange draperies and blind people with canes. Get scruffy-looking stray pets, and urban coyotes. Put Sophie-David's lot-down effects everywhere, four or five pigeon (and gull, if it's a seaport town) generators on every lot. Get PBK's "natural pet food" and put rat generators in the nasty parts of town.

Periodically tear down and rebuild, or repurpose, lots. Every town has that place that has passed through the hands of four or five different franchises and also been used as a florist, a law office, a storefront church, and a rec center. Take more than one play session to build, each time leaving a lot in a condition that looks like a different building stage, and make judicious use of hood deco building cranes and so on, so that you can see "construction" from nearby lots.

The hardest part is noise generation. Cities are never silent, but the game's ambient noise is geared toward suburban environments. One possibility would be to get mp3 files of various urban sounds and add them to the playlist for one of your music stations you don't normally use much, and hide speakers for that station on lots that should logically be noisy.

Ugly is in the heart of the beholder.
(My simblr isSim Media Res . Widespot,Widespot RFD: The Subhood, and Land Grant University are all available here. In case you care.)
Mad Poster
#5 Old 19th Oct 2018 at 12:41 AM
You can use the lot adjuster to create row-houses. There's a mod on MTS for apartments and shopping on the same lot.

I was looking for pics of my row-houses, but I don't seem to have taken any. You have to know where you're going to have them line up: all of mine are exactly five squares back from the front of the lot and exactly ten squares deep, where they connect to the next at the edge of the lot, so they line up in whichever order. I suggest you make them in an empty copy of your terrain.

I'm not sure where it is (thought I'd bookmarked it but can't find it) but there's a tutorial somewhere for how to superimpose lots, so you can have owned businesses under owned residentials, or multiple business lots on the same space, etc.

Pics from my game: Sunbee's Simblr Sunbee's Livejournal
"English is a marvelous edged weapon if you know how to wield it." C.J. Cherryh
Top Secret Researcher
#6 Old 19th Oct 2018 at 12:46 AM
Mad Poster
#7 Old 19th Oct 2018 at 12:54 AM
Quote: Originally posted by Nalia
Is this what you are looking for? http://modthesims.info/d/352602


That's the Apartments and shopping mod, yes.

There is (I think it's on a tumblr, maybe) a tutorial to put two lots physically one on top of the other. When you aren't playing one of them, the lot imposters look like one building. I haven't tried it: it's one of those "This is so cool, but I bet my computer would be really unhappy" things. My computer does not love the lot imposters of Zara's lots (and forget actually loading them), so probably would be pink-flashy about that technique as well.

Pics from my game: Sunbee's Simblr Sunbee's Livejournal
"English is a marvelous edged weapon if you know how to wield it." C.J. Cherryh
Mad Poster
#8 Old 19th Oct 2018 at 1:44 AM
Alchemist
#9 Old 19th Oct 2018 at 1:58 AM
Lot Adjuster was mentioned, but I use it regularly just to move lots much closer together. I like everything to look walkable. You could use that to make things more urban, too.
Alchemist
Original Poster
#10 Old 19th Oct 2018 at 3:54 AM
Lots of great suggestions. Thanks.
Mad Poster
#11 Old 19th Oct 2018 at 7:34 PM
Quote: Originally posted by Peni Griffin
Take out anti-redundancy so you don't see the same NPCs over and over.

This might work for Windows users, but I wouldn't recommend it for the Mac Super Collection. No BV patch was ever issued for Macs so there is no other fix for the bug where the game keeps spawning some NPCs without stopping. It's safer to leave antiredundancy in the game and just use the townie gun to spawn extra NPCs if you want them. You can spawn a whole set of base game NPCs at once if you want to, or spawn each NPC individually.

Never use the "kill" option to reject "ugly" NPCs though, or your character folder will fill up with these rejects. If you don't like the results, back out without saving. Most NPCs that can be interacted with can be made over, so even that isn't usually necessary.
Test Subject
#12 Old 20th Oct 2018 at 1:15 PM
The best urban thing I dowloaded is the Urbania neighbourhood template http://modthesims.info/download.php?t=267198 The small grid system is much better than the wide open spaces of all the Maxis templates, and the grid just carries on off screen so it feels like you're zoomed in on a neighbourhood of a larger city rather than having open space at the edges of the neighbourhood and roads leading out to the next town.
Mad Poster
#13 Old 20th Oct 2018 at 2:42 PM
Quote: Originally posted by Nalia
Is this what you are looking for? http://modthesims.info/d/352602

Quote: Originally posted by Bulbizarre
Is this it?
https://threadandsandpaper.dreamwidth.org/5129.html


Lol, when you forget to hyperlink words.

P.S. Sorry for my bad english.
Mad Poster
#14 Old 21st Oct 2018 at 1:00 AM
I was going to mention Zarathustra's tower lots, but Charmful already did.

Panmines made a SimCity map - http://modthesims.info/download.php?t=543982
The screenshots can give you some ideas to use in a city layout even if you don't use this map. This page has a lot of links to decorative neighborhood deco buildings. I haven't checked them all out to see whether all the links still work.

Panmines also made several enormous tower buildings for use in a city. These all seem to require Numenor's Custom Walls Repository and Scriptorium (they're so big that they exceeded the in-game limit on the number of wall sections you can use ). A a good camera mod is also recommended. Probably best avoided if you don't have a really good computer to handle lots/buildings this big, but I thought I'd mention it anyway. At the very least, these might be nice 'hood deco (I have a couple of big buildings from somewhere that I never play and only placed because they look cool).
http://modthesims.info/browse.php?gs=0&u=3893484

Quote: Originally posted by Enoby
The best urban thing I dowloaded is the Urbania neighbourhood template.

twelvecolonies made two Urbania neighborhood maps. The second one has a few small changes:
Quote: Originally posted by twelvecolonies
This is a evolution of my previously uploaded neighborhood, Urbania. There are two main differences:

- A little bit of variation has been introduced into the road layout
- NO camera modification is required to view the ENTIRE neighborhood

http://modthesims.info/m/1539639
Mad Poster
#15 Old 21st Oct 2018 at 8:43 PM
So here are some row houses in game. The currently played lot is a four-apartment building. There are two separate residential lots on one end, each is on a 1x1, and one on the other. The two corner lots are designed to line up with other row houses--they have the one wall segment sticking out on the back as well as the side--but I'm not done building those yet.
Screenshots

Pics from my game: Sunbee's Simblr Sunbee's Livejournal
"English is a marvelous edged weapon if you know how to wield it." C.J. Cherryh
Mad Poster
#16 Old 22nd Oct 2018 at 12:42 AM
Another thing you can do that makes a surprisingly large difference is to choose a few things to do the same between lots... If you look at a city street, the sidewalks will be a fairly consistent width, benches, light poles, etc. will be consistent, and a bus stop on one end of the street will usually look pretty much the same as one on the other end. Think about what aspects of a lot would be managed by the city, and have a mental idea of what policies that city would probably want to have in place for those aspects of it.

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Lab Assistant
#17 Old 22nd Oct 2018 at 1:16 AM
You’ve got some great tips here already, but I’ve been working on a city for a while now, and I thought I could offer some of my finds. Hood deco is key in order to get the right feel, an there are some marvellous skyscrapers and buildings out there that are lit up at night, such as these by deelee and some others by deelee with lights added by criquette. Criquette also has a lot of other great stuff, like tramcars and railways. Some of it is available here on MTS . AD Incorporated has some great deco buildings. The terrain I’ve used is The Brille, but I had to change some of the roads in SC4 in order to fit in everything I wanted.
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