Chugging Train, Hidden Bullshit

A day at the hot spring/spa lot, including a totally-not-anachronistic mud bath.

No, I'm afraid not. I can't share the save file because: 1) It won't be "done" for a long time, if ever. I'm decorating while I play, concentrating on the area around the (currently) only household's lot and the community lots I've put down. I'll decorate more as more households move into the world, but that will happen very slowly.

2) The save uses the Kinky World mod because I need a few of its mechanics for the scenario's gameplay. So, unless a downloader also uses that mod, the save file would likely corrupt very quickly. And Kinky World isn't a mod that should be installed without giving it a lot of thought first. Once it's introduced into a user folder, it's a permanent commitment for every save in that folder. And even if a downloader uses that mod, I'm still not sure if a copy of the save file would work reliably. Kinky World is...sensitive and prone to corrupting saves if you aren't careful and sometimes even if you are careful. So, I would not feel at all comfortable sharing the save file for that reason.

I've "finished" this area of the world. (In quotes because I'll probably still poke at it here and there. Nothing I do is ever really finished.) The areas that you can see in the last pic that aren't covered with rocks and flora are empty lots. There are three of them, one of them overlapping the water on the left side and two across the footpath from it. Those will get filled in with stuff if/when those lots get built.

The clan's first-born, a girl.

"Mom" is the guy in the first pic. "Dad" is the woman in the bottom pic. Because, since I'm me, I'm doing funky things with sexes*, as usual. Since this is clan-based play, whether or not a clan-member is a genetic contributor to a kid doesn't matter when it comes to taking care of the kid, except that only the kid's "mom" can feed it until it's weaned. (And I wouldn't even have that limitation, except that the breastfeeding mod doesn't allow a sim who isn't a kid's parent to breastfeed it.) Other than that, in this scenario, it really does take a village to raise a child.

*Basically, some females can impregnate people and some males can gestate kids. So, this species has four sexes: Females who can impregnate, males who can impregnate, females who can gestate, and males who can gestate, with no individuals able to do both functions. How each sex behaves is controlled by NRaas Story Progression castes. A born-in-game individual's sex is determined at their child age-up by a combination of traits and, when that fails (if they don't have characteristic traits for any of the sexes by the time of their child age-up), by random number generation.

A library lot for this pre-tech world. Thanks to the NRaas GoHere mod, access to the building is restricted to residents with at least one of a handful of characteristics that allow them to be considered literate. Right now, only two qualify.

Decided to see if I could cover a hill with 3D grass. I'm not sure it's a good idea to do it, in terms of game performance, but I think it looks pretty good.

Also desaturated/yellowed/darkened the World Adventures bamboo so it blends in better with the other flora I've used:

Butterflies.

Here's another "sharing weirdness that I made for my own playing in case someone else might want it" thing.

I tend to play a lot of scenarios where, in my head, the setting is not Earth. So, I tend to use/make default moon replacements that don't look like Earth's moon. This is one of them. In a couple of scenarios I'm playing, I'm imagining that the setting is a habitable moon of another planet, and in this case I wanted a colorful gas giant planet. I couldn't find any usable images of such a thing online, so I decided to make one myself. So I and a gazillion Photoshop filters and layer blends did just that. :) So, if you want this freaky "moon," you can download it here.

Here's a few more pics of various phases with various cloudiness:

Please note that the "moon" is huge in the pictures because I've set it to be huge -- a radius of 600 -- in the lighting mod I use. If you don't use a lighting mod or if you do use one but haven't made your moon bigger in it, your "gas giant" planet will be the itty-bitty normal size of the moon in the game. If you are using a lighting mod and want a bigger moon but don't know how to make it so, feel free to ask. Doing so requires s3pe, but it's really easy to do.

(Also, for those who don't get it...The "title" pic is a reference to the 1930s-era song "It's Only a Paper Moon." Get some Ella Fitzgerald in your life, y'all.)

Slices of life. (Including totally-not-anachronistic spray painting! LOL)

Stormy night.

Misty morning.

A consignment store lot in this "clan-based raiding culture" scenario I've been developing in my head and have been playing lately to work on its rule set and such.

If all goes well and it all works like I want it to, the scenario as a whole will be a save using seven different linked worlds (thanks to the NRaas Traveler mod), which I'm imagining all exist in different areas of the same planet. Each world has a different environment, climate, and culture, none of which are based on anything in our "real world" and some of which utilize some of the supernatural "species." All of them are pre-industrial without electricity/plumbing and all of them are roadless. Once all of the "worlds" exist, they'll be played concurrently and rotationally, with both sims and goods being traded and stolen between them to produce a dynamic network of "international" diplomacy, with shifting alliances between clans within a culture as well as between cultures, and "trade" and shit. It utilizes very long life spans (currently, where one year is 48 in-game days) with proportional life stage lengths and pregnancy lengths (pregnancy is 36 in-game days) and such, so that I'll have time to play everyone before all the sims at the beginning of the rotation die. (I don't like "freezing" aging when I play rotationally because then you have sims who were born at the same time but who are very different ages, so I use long life spans instead when I play this way.) This makes for very slow going in the beginning, but previous stabs at this scenario where I used shorter life spans taught me that longer is ultimately better, and I think 48-day-long years will be the "not-too-long, not-too-short" sweet spot. I think. Maybe. Right now I'm still figuring out how it's all going to work, from a practical playing point of view as well as developing spreadsheets to help track and calculate various things, so this playing is really just testing, and along with that comes decorating the individual worlds to be used.

Anyway, this part of the "world" -- which is my edit of Guantuga -- is semi-arid and subtropical, and the look I'm going for is "overgrown mostly-grassland," with tons of grass everywhere, on and off lots, lots of shrubs and rocks, and fewer trees, interrupted by well-worn 'foot paths' both on lots and off. On lots, it uses a shit-ton of invisible fences so that sims can only walk where I want them to instead of walking right through the shrubbery. (Ni!) Since there's so much grass in the world, I'm using wall coverings and roof patterns that utilize grass. (Thank whoever it was that converted the walls/floors from Castaway Stories to TS3. LOL)