.. still livin on earth ..

What you need to know is that, to add new premades, you need to assign them to a specific world either as a townie or as a resident of a specific lot. Assigning townies requires overriding a region description, and these overrides conflict*, so you will need to carefully consider what region you want to use. For example, my Aliens Reloaded mod uses Sixam to add townies in order to avoid conflicts, as Sixam is the aliens world. You can safely add multiple housed sims to the same region even with different mods/files, so long as they're assigned to different lots. If different households are assigned to the same lot, then generally only one will get successfully added. Please communicate to your mod users what region or lot you're using.

[*It may be possible to add townies to the same region via script injection - I am currently investigating this and will update this blog if I find a method.]

To ensure safety if someone does not own a pack, or if they disable a pack, please make sure to edit the group number of the world description and/or world file so it matches the pack the world is from - for example, Get to Work, or EP01, has a group number that ends in "03". The latest version of Sims4Studio will allow you to select the DLC in a dropdown and will automatically set the group number for you.

If you are making a special NPC or special NPCs, then to protect them from Neighborhood Stories and MCCC make sure to also set their household status to "Hidden" in the Premade Household Tool. You can edit this in the edit tab.

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Creating Two-Form Occult Premade Sims

Occult sims are a bit more complicated to create than regular premades - especially if they have two forms, like aliens, vampires, mermaids, and werewolves. First, make sure when you save your save file they are in their human form. It is important to extract their household data using the Premade Household Tool when they are in their human form or else the extraction will grab the wrong information and they will spawn incorrectly with missing data.

Second, these sims need a few additional steps. They need premade household templates and premade sim templates to be added to them, and you also need to separately extract their human and occult form SimInfo data from your tray files using Sims4Studio or another program (just make sure to save them to your library first).

To extract using Sims4Studio, go to "Content Management" -> "My Library", right click on the household you want and export to whatever folder you're using. You will see three files exported. Human, Occult, and Sim. You only need the Human and Occult files. You can safely delete the Sim file.

These two files (Human and Occult) must be imported into a package file, preferably with your premade household and premade sim templates. Since the instance numbers of these two files are the same, please change them before importing, as importing these files without changing the instances will result in only one file actually making it into S4S.

Here is an example of the editing you should do - paste the new unique instance between the exclamation points as shown. This should be a unique hash of some kind to prevent potential clashes:

The new SimData must be referenced in their premade sim templates like so:

Once that is done, you'll need to open the household data in the Premade Household Tool, navigate to the Edit Household section, and paste in the instance number for your sim's premade household template into the household section, then go to Sim -> Gameplay Data -> Premade Sim Template to add in the instance for their premade sim template.

Please note that this process only works for creating a premade occult sim. There is, as of the moment I'm writing this blog, no way to create an occult sim with a specific look from a tunable sim template. So if you want to make a special two-form occult NPC that has a specific in-game purpose, you will need three templates - the premade household and sim templates to add your sim of choice to a new save, and a tunable template that will create a randomly generated sim with the proper traits and skills in users' existing saves (or if your premade dies or is otherwise unavailable/invalid).

Spellcasters are not two-form occults and, if you are creating a premade spellcaster, then you do not need to do the extra step with the SimData. If you are creating one from a tunable template, just make sure to add their spellcaster trait so they are recognized as a spellcaster as it isn't possible to add occult simdata to a tunable sim template.

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Occult Sim Fixups

Keeping on the subject of occults, you will likely notice that some data does not survive the process of the sim getting turned into a premade. Things like occult rank, perks, and unlocks will need to be manually set through different types of fixups. Spellcasters specifically are a bit of a pain and require a special process, as NPC spellcasters are not coded in such a way that they can actually learn spells and fixups (adding in additional data to "fix up" a sim) can only happen when they are actually added to an active household.

For Vampires/Werewolves: these fixups are best done via loots. If you are using a script file to deliver relationship loots on new save start (like my Premade Sim and Relationship Overhaul mod does), then you can have your vampires or werewolves deliver these loot from themselves to themselves and set their appropriate rank and unlocks that way (I will share more on this process later). Alternatively, you can assign them a self-deleting trait. Trait -> loot on instance -> have the loot set rank, etc -> have the loot delete the trait so it won't fire the next time the sim instances in.

For Spellcasters: spellcasters are coded differently than other occults. The most important thing to know is that only spellcasters in households that have been played at least once can do magic and everyone else is just faking it. "But why do spellcaster premades, townies, and the sages have spells when I add them to my household?" you might ask. That's because the devs gave them hidden fixup traits. You will need to do the same with your premade spellcasters. This fixup trait should have your spellcaster's rank, unlocks, and spells specified on it, and will take effect when the sim is added to an active household and is no longer considered a NPC.

For examples of how these fixup traits are supposed to look/work, please see any of the simInfoFixup_Magic_Spells traits. You can check them through tools like the XML Extractor, the TDESC Browser, or directly in Sims4Studio.

You can add extra loot to make these self-deleting, but I have not bothered as users won't generally see these traits unless they're messing around with MCCC.

Mermaids and Aliens do not require fixups, as they do not have skill trees unless you are playing with mods. If you are playing modded, generally the abilities are added through hidden traits, and you should assign these through the standard Premade Household Tool process to avoid potential errors on new save start if someone disables a pack (I will expand more on this in a later blog). The premade Aliens Reloaded aliens generally use this method.

--------

Milestones Fixups

Milestones fixups follow a similar logic to spellcaster fixups. Without mods, premades, townies, and NPC sims that have never been played do not have any milestones. Existing Maxis premades have fixups on their premade sim templates that add these milestones when the sim becomes played. However, this does not work quite so well for our purposes, as users without Growing Together get errors on new save start if you try to add milestone fixups via a premade sim template - even using the group ID trick. At present, only Maxis/EA premades can use this method safely.

I'd recommend instead using a self-deleting trait to assign the milestones via a loot. The procedure is trait -> loot on instance -> milestones loot -> delete trait. You can add a test to the loot on instance to make sure it only runs if the sim is in a played household.

Make sure the trait and your initial loot have the group number for Growing Together (EP13 = 00000036). If you have a milestone that belongs to another DLC (not Growing Together) it should be chained inside of the Growing Together loot, using an action to deliver a second loot with your DLC-specific milestone. The second loot should have the group number specific to that pack. Please be very careful when assigning milestones, as they are very unsafe and may cause save issues for users. Test thoroughly!

What you need to know is that, to add new premades, you need to assign them to a specific world either as a townie or as a resident of a specific lot. Assigning townies requires overriding a region description, and these overrides conflict*, so you will need to carefully consider what region you want to use. For example, my Aliens Reloaded mod uses Sixam to add townies in order to avoid conflicts, as Sixam is the aliens world. You can safely add multiple housed sims to the same region even with different mods/files, so long as they're assigned to different lots. If different households are assigned to the same lot, then generally only one will get successfully added. Please communicate to your mod users what region or lot you're using.

[*It may be possible to add townies to the same region via script injection - I am currently investigating this and will update this blog if I find a method.]

To ensure safety if someone does not own a pack, or if they disable a pack, please make sure to edit the group number of the world description and/or world file so it matches the pack the world is from - for example, Get to Work, or EP01, has a group number that ends in "03". The latest version of Sims4Studio will allow you to select the DLC in a dropdown and will automatically set the group number for you.

If you are making a special NPC or special NPCs, then to protect them from Neighborhood Stories and MCCC make sure to also set their household status to "Hidden" in the Premade Household Tool. You can edit this in the edit tab.

--------

Creating Two-Form Occult Premade Sims

Occult sims are a bit more complicated to create than regular premades - especially if they have two forms, like aliens, vampires, mermaids, and werewolves. First, make sure when you save your save file they are in their human form. It is important to extract their household data using the Premade Household Tool when they are in their human form or else the extraction will grab the wrong information and they will spawn incorrectly with missing data.

Second, these sims need a few additional steps. They need premade household templates and premade sim templates to be added to them, and you also need to separately extract their human and occult form SimInfo data from your tray files using Sims4Studio or another program (just make sure to save them to your library first).

To extract using Sims4Studio, go to "Content Management" -> "My Library", right click on the household you want and export to whatever folder you're using. You will see three files exported. Human, Occult, and Sim. You only need the Human and Occult files. You can safely delete the Sim file.

These two files (Human and Occult) must be imported into a package file, preferably with your premade household and premade sim templates. Since the instance numbers of these two files are the same, please change them before importing, as importing these files without changing the instances will result in only one file actually making it into S4S.

Here is an example of the editing you should do - paste the new unique instance between the exclamation points as shown. This should be a unique hash of some kind to prevent potential clashes:

The new SimData must be referenced in their premade sim templates like so:

Once that is done, you'll need to open the household data in the Premade Household Tool, navigate to the Edit Household section, and paste in the instance number for your sim's premade household template into the household section, then go to Sim -> Gameplay Data -> Premade Sim Template to add in the instance for their premade sim template.

Please note that this process only works for creating a premade occult sim. There is, as of the moment I'm writing this blog, no way to create an occult sim with a specific look from a tunable sim template. So if you want to make a special two-form occult NPC that has a specific in-game purpose, you will need three templates - the premade household and sim templates to add your sim of choice to a new save, and a tunable template that will create a randomly generated sim with the proper traits and skills in users' existing saves (or if your premade dies or is otherwise unavailable/invalid).

Spellcasters are not two-form occults and, if you are creating a premade spellcaster, then you do not need to do the extra step with the SimData. If you are creating one from a tunable template, just make sure to add their spellcaster trait so they are recognized as a spellcaster as it isn't possible to add occult simdata to a tunable sim template.

--------

Occult Sim Fixups

Keeping on the subject of occults, you will likely notice that some data does not survive the process of the sim getting turned into a premade. Things like occult rank, perks, and unlocks will need to be manually set through different types of fixups. Spellcasters specifically are a bit of a pain and require a special process, as NPC spellcasters are not coded in such a way that they can actually learn spells and fixups (adding in additional data to "fix up" a sim) can only happen when they are actually added to an active household.

For Vampires/Werewolves: these fixups are best done via loots. If you are using a script file to deliver relationship loots on new save start (like my Premade Sim and Relationship Overhaul mod does), then you can have your vampires or werewolves deliver these loot from themselves to themselves and set their appropriate rank and unlocks that way (I will share more on this process later). Alternatively, you can assign them a self-deleting trait. Trait -> loot on instance -> have the loot set rank, etc -> have the loot delete the trait so it won't fire the next time the sim instances in.

For Spellcasters: spellcasters are coded differently than other occults. The most important thing to know is that only spellcasters in households that have been played at least once can do magic and everyone else is just faking it. "But why do spellcaster premades, townies, and the sages have spells when I add them to my household?" you might ask. That's because the devs gave them hidden fixup traits. You will need to do the same with your premade spellcasters. This fixup trait should have your spellcaster's rank, unlocks, and spells specified on it, and will take effect when the sim is added to an active household and is no longer considered a NPC.

For examples of how these fixup traits are supposed to look/work, please see any of the simInfoFixup_Magic_Spells traits. You can check them through tools like the XML Extractor, the TDESC Browser, or directly in Sims4Studio.

You can add extra loot to make these self-deleting, but I have not bothered as users won't generally see these traits unless they're messing around with MCCC.

Mermaids and Aliens do not require fixups, as they do not have skill trees unless you are playing with mods. If you are playing modded, generally the abilities are added through hidden traits, and you should assign these through the standard Premade Household Tool process to avoid potential errors on new save start if someone disables a pack (I will expand more on this in a later blog). The premade Aliens Reloaded aliens generally use this method.

--------

Milestones Fixups

Milestones fixups follow a similar logic to spellcaster fixups. Without mods, premades, townies, and NPC sims that have never been played do not have any milestones. Existing Maxis premades have fixups on their premade sim templates that add these milestones when the sim becomes played. However, this does not work quite so well for our purposes, as users without Growing Together get errors on new save start if you try to add milestone fixups via a premade sim template - even using the group ID trick. At present, only Maxis/EA premades can use this method safely.

I'd recommend instead using a self-deleting trait to assign the milestones via a loot. The procedure is trait -> loot on instance -> milestones loot -> delete trait. You can add a test to the loot on instance to make sure it only runs if the sim is in a played household.

Make sure the trait and your initial loot have the group number for Growing Together (EP13 = 00000036). If you have a milestone that belongs to another DLC (not Growing Together) it should be chained inside of the Growing Together loot, using an action to deliver a second loot with your DLC-specific milestone. The second loot should have the group number specific to that pack. Please be very careful when assigning milestones, as they are very unsafe and may cause save issues for users. Test thoroughly!

1. Create your own custom pictures: step by step

Remove your mods and launch your game - in order to avoid paintings from reference to be tagged as CC.

Start a new save file, to make sure of not messing up with your own save file - there are potential issues with hollidays when editing a save sile using Sims 4 Studio, and make picures easier to find - as you might already have taken some pictures in your own save.

In this new save file, Create a Sim and go on an empty lot. You might want to give your Sims a good camera from buy mode to access all the picture sizes (or use my mod) and some painting and photography skills to avoid gomes and blurry photos, and be able to paint by reference:

testingcheats on

stats.set_skill_level Major_Painting 10

stats.set_skill_level Major_Photography 5

Take as many pictures or paint as many paitings from reference as you need to create.

You can place them on a wall and save the room for later, and use this mod by Scumbumbo later to remove the grainy filter that is added to paintings.

Camélia presents her collection of gloomy pictures from Willow Creek. You can download this room as tray files here if you want to get started quickly.

Save and close your game, and open you savefile using the Sims 4 Studio.

You can filter by the word "Custom" in order to only list the pictures (1 then 2) - If you haven't updated S4S, if was previously the word "Phone" or "Texture"

You can then navigate and find the pictures you cant to replace. To be able to know what size of photo or painting is the element you are currently displaying, you can look at the dimensions written at the top left (3):

Small Photo : 432x324px

Medium Photo: 576x432px

Large Photo: 768x576px

Small Painting: 384x384px

Medium Painting: 768x660px

Large Painting: 1024x576px

You can now prepare your own pictures to import using your photo editing software. I recommand respecting the sizes of the initial pictures in order not to bloat your save file too much, but if you plan to enlarge an object, you can use a bigger picture as long as it has the same ratio.

Click on Import (4) to import each picture you want, and click on Save (5) to save your changes.

You can now open your game and see the modified pictures. Place them on a wall and save the room in order to use them in your regular save-file!

Some examples here: you can use picures directly or imagine a lot of other stuff like posters, vinyle covers, magazines, etc. The panoramic picture is created using two large paintings rotated using the TOOL mod.

2. Ready to download pictures from my save

See the whole picture in a bigger format here.

I couldn’t resist the urge of preparing a lot of pictures for my upcoming save file, to add even more lore! Some of them evoke their past, some their current relationships, or others their accomplishments… and some of them are just a little bit spicy.

A huge shout-out to the many pose creators that made it possible, it’s hard to cite them all but here are some of them: @maysbat, @surely-sims, @katverse, @welcometowillowsworld, @simmireen, @simmerianne93, @grownasssimmer, @pasosgrandes, @rebouks, @ratboysims, @herecirmsims, @legacythesims, @dearkims (sorry for the ones I didn’t cite, I have some poses from a long time ago in a folder and the name is not always in the file name 🥹)

They will be included in my save (if I’m able to share it one day!) but in the meanwhile, I think some of them can be pretty versatile and can be used outside of it 🤗 I made a small selection including vinyl records (you will need TOOL to move them after the room is placed), movie posters, event posters and magazine covers.

Place them in your Tray folder to find them as rooms (I also uploaded them in my gallery, under my EA ID, Down-In-Simsland)

Download: SimFileShare

Don’t forget to credit me if you use them, that’s also nice :)

Step 1)

Export the adult sim animation you want to transfer (=your source) to Blender.

Open a blend file with a child rig (=your target).

Append the adult rig with the animation to the child rig in Blender (File > Append > Select the blend file > folder "Object" > select rig and mesh there)

Select the animation from the adult rig for the child rig (select the child rig in the Outliner menu > select the scene tab in the properties panel below > in "S4S AnimationTools" select the adult animation as the "active animation")

This will get the job mostly done, but the animation will be offset and jumping around, as you see below. To correct for that you will need to set up several constraints as described in step 2.

Step 2)

As you see below the height of the ROOT_bind of the adult sim and child sim differ by about a factor of 0,7:

You can check the exact location in edit mode:

The ROOT_bind of the child rig is located at 0.6920, the ROOT_bind of the adult rig at 1.0112 on the Z axis, which gives a factor of 0.6920/1.0112=0.6843354430379747

With that information you now need to do the following (see image below for comparison, I also uploaded my blend file with the set up here):

In the Dope Sheet menu, select "Action Editor" and press "New Action" there to make a copy of the selected animation.

In the Dope Sheet Summary uncheck ROOT_bind (thus disabling the animation on the root bind for the child rig)

In the Transform menu type in -0,6920 on the X axis for ROOT_bind (thus resetting its position to 0 in the animation; can't properly explain why X axis is chosen here instead of Y but it has sth to do with how local rotations of a bone are determined according to pancake)

Create a "Copy Location" constraint for ROOT_bind of the child rig targetting it to the ROOT_bind of the adult rig (this is done in the Properties panel > Bone Constraints), set Influence to 0.6843354430379747 (factor calculated above), deselect "Z"

Create a second "Copy Location" constraint for ROOT_bind in the same way but this time deselect "X" and "Y" and instead select "Z" and check "Offset".

The animation will now play as expected:

Step 3)

All you need to do now is bake the animation (thus applying all the constraints you set up). Select Pose > Animation > "Bake Action...", then check "Visual Keying" and "Clear Constraints" in the pop up. The animation will now work stand alone and you can delete the adult rig.