#dl:mods

I unlocked the Base Game garbage bin, ash pile, and every single piece of trash! You can find them under Appliances > Large

Multi-PT Set 1 (with infant faces!)

I've been wanting to do one of these for a while and I finally got around to doing it. This mod keeps the Maxis PT and adds three of my own making, complete with infant faces! One of them is just a Maxis face template with larger eyes and pointy ears, and the other two are various alien sims I created for my own game, just with all the CC removed.

This theoretically should be basegame compatible, none of them use assets from any of the expansions. I also tested to the birth of the babies and you can see the babies in the last 3 screenshots, in order of the parent (the victim sims had Face 2 so you can easily spot the differences in the infant faces).

Here's this lighting mod I cobbled together, up for public consumption for anyone who might want to give it a try. It's a "default" lighting mod, which means it will affect all worlds in all saves that are in the same game folder as the lighting mod, except for the dystopian/utopian futures in Oasis Landing. So, if you use a custom or EA world that includes special lighting that you like, you don't want to use this in that game folder because it will replace that lighting.

Before I start babbling, here's the download link upfront.

There are two versions included in the download. One file includes default replacements for the clouds, sun, sun halo, moon halo, and stars. Then there's a folder that contains two separate files, the lighting mod by itself and the default sky objects by itself, in case you don't want the clouds, stars, etc that you see in the pics and just want the lighting mod. (Or if you don't want the lighting mod but do want the sky objects, I guess!) The pics all use the "combined" version, but you can install only what you want, if that's more your cuppa.

This mod's "base" is Burntwaffles's Dream Dimension lighting mod, specifically version 2.5 with Lucky Palms water and no auroras, except that I changed the sunrise/sunset times back to the standard 6AM/6PM because I use NRaas Retuner to create appropriate seasonal sunrise/sunset offsets instead. It still has Lucky Palms's water, both because it's my favorite and because I don't know how to change it, but pretty much everything else has been altered at least slightly, from slightly brightening and color-adjusting the color ramps to mucking around with light angles and distance fog settings. So, not too much is left of Dream Dimension except the basic colors, but it's still at its core. I also looked at lighting mods made by @boringbones and @gruesim and compared the values they contain to Dream Dimension's values. None of the values I ultimately used are from any of those mods but they were all guidance that helped me to pinpoint values to change to get the look I wanted, so credit to those creators.

My goals for the mod, all of which I more or less accomplished, were:

1) Less-intense shadows, mostly in order to reduce harsh shadows on sims, especially in outdoor lighting, as well as too-dark bits of building exteriors, like covered porches and recessed entryways.

2) Desaturated but bright colors with less contrast, because my old eyes don't tolerate saturated colors and high contrast for long. Somehow, EA's lighting manages to be both very color-saturated and dark and often dismal at the same time. Meanwhile, most lighting mods are too bright and/or too saturated for my likings. I wanted less saturated but brighter, which seems to be a rare combination. Dream Dimension is already desaturated, which is why I like it, but I increased the brightness and warmth a bit on the color ramps because it could also be a bit too dark and "cold," in my opinion.

3) Improved natural-daylight indoor lighting. I somewhat accomplished this one, though there are still issues like too-dark ceilings and some too-bright walls, which I don't think are fixable with just a lighting mod. However, lowering the light angles seems to make the EA windows with fixed lighting (that mod is linked behind the cut) work better and gives pretty good results, which you can especially see in the WIP pics I've posted, since I didn't include a lot of interior pics on this post. I can make no promises about this issue on lots with custom windows, however.

4) Dark but not unrealistically black nights, including darker ground level lighting at night. Dream Dimension already had this, but I lowered the contrast so it's not so hard on the eyes and also made it a little bit brighter so that if you've got your sims in an unlit area far from from any artificial light sources, you can still see what they're doing. It also doesn't have the obnoxious blue tint that EA night lighting has.

Like the WIP pics I posted here, here , here, and here, the above pics have no Reshade or Photoshop editing applied to them at all, other than cropping/resizing in Photoshop. They are all taken in various EA worlds instead of all in my rebuild of Meadow Glen, as all the WIP pics I've posted have been. They are best viewed at full size, and I think they give a good representation of what the thing looks like, including flaws, assuming that you use the same appearance-improving stuff that I use on a decent-enough machine to run all this crap and still be able to play the game. I have tried to be thorough and transparent about my machine's specs and the other mods and stuff that I use that contribute to what my "naked" game looks like. That's all behind the cut.

The WIP pics I've posted have a larger sun and moon than you will get from the mod as uploaded. You can see the "included" sun/moon sizes in the above pics. I like those things to be larger, so my personal copy of the mod has larger sun/moon sizes, but I figured other people mostly wouldn't like that. The mod as uploaded has I believe slightly larger-than-EA values for those things, but not ridiculously-large like I like. As uploaded, there is also no sun halo, which to me results in a sun that looks like a ping-pong ball floating in the sky, but whatever.

I was going to write up and include instructions on how to mess with sun/moon sizes and other things in this post, including how to "reactivate" Burntwaffles's "auroras" if you want them. (Those are really just colored clouds, though; I prefer to use this mod for auroras, and it is shown in one of the pics above.) But I've decided to do all that in a separate post or two at a later time because probably no one will read this massive wall of text as it is. :)

For the sky objects replacement: They began life as parts of @wasset-asekara's "Enchanted Environment" mod, but I have edited them over the years. I don't remember all that I have done, but I do know that I edited @nilxis's clouds a bit and put that in there, and that the stars are an edit of ShojoAngel's starfield because I like its gazillions of tiny stars better than EA's sparse field of large globs that are apparently supposed to be stars. (One day I will make my own starfield from scratch that's more of a "happy medium" between those two, but that day hasn't arrived yet. LOL ) I'm pretty sure I didn't edit Wasset's sun halo, though, and it's included. You can see it in this pic, but as I said the uploaded mod has the sun halo size set to zero, so it will not appear unless you go in and fiddle with the sun and sun halo sizes yourself. As I said, I'll make a separate post about how to do that, if you don't already know.

And now for the section where I'll list my computer's relevant specs, mods that I use, and other stuff I have installed that affect how my game looks, for transparency's sake and so that you can get some of this stuff if you don't already have it…

I'm thinking that I might try out @simspaghetti's TS3 Globetrotter Challenge, and when/if I do, I'm going to use @nilxis's Saaqartoq for the first stage of it. So, I wanted an as-authentic-as-possible Greenlandic Tempest preset to go with it. So here we are.

This preset is based on Ilulissat, Greenland, shown above, which is one of the largest towns in Greenland, though, being Greenland, "large" is very, very relative. I chose Ilulissat because it is known for its icebergs, and Saaqartoq has permanent icebergs in its water. The real place sits on the western coast of Greenland, above the Arctic Circle, so this climate is a true polar tundra climate. This means lots of cold, but less precipitation than you might imagine, because the poles are deserts.

This is a preset for use with the NRaas Tempest mod. General info about this project as well as installation/use instructions are here, and here is a link to the tag page for all the presets I’ve posted so far.

The download contains two files. One is a "default" version of the preset, which you can use regardless of the season lengths you have set. The other is a version which requires 12-day seasons to work properly. In that version, each season is divided into three 4-day "months," just because this gives more granular control over what kind of weather can happen when within a season. I made both versions because, if/when I do the challenge, I'll be using 12-day seasons for all the worlds, but I didn't want to lock everyone who might want to use this preset into that. So, you have choices.

For extra immersion when using this preset, I would recommend using NRaas Retuner to offset the seasonal sunrise/sunset times so that you have (sort of) 24 hours of daylight/darkness in the summer/winter. I'll put offsets for all four seasons behind the cut.

Download the preset here.

There's more detailed info about the preset behind the cut, if anyone cares.

A preset based on my hometown. Because. :)

Telluride is a tiny town in the southwest corner of the Rocky Mountain state of Colorado, USA. It sits in a box canyon surrounded on three sides by mountain peaks, at an elevation of about 8700ft/2650m. It has a drier continental climate, with its precipitation happening mostly as snow in the winter and short but intense thunderstorms in the summer, and because of its elevation, it's colder than its latitude would suggest. It regularly still snows in early June and then regular snow resumes in early October, so it is not an area friendly to growing things. However, the area gets, on average, about 335 days of sunshine a year, so it's a mecca for outdoor activities year-round.

I made this preset to use for the "Prosperity Challenge" that I'm going to play in Great Bear, which is a mountain world that reminds me of home, and I figured I'd share it. There are two versions of it, both included in the same download. One is a "default" version, which means that you can use it with seasons of any length. The other is the version I'll be using in my save, which requires using 18-day-long seasons. In that version, each season has three 6-day sections, each with different temperature ranges and weather patterns, to represent the three months within the season. This version is more realistic because breaking things out this way gives you more control over what can happen when, but it will not work properly unless you set your seasons to be 18 days long. That's the trade-off.

This is a preset for use with the NRaas Tempest mod. General info about this project as well as installation/use instructions are here, and here is a link to the tag page for all the presets I’ve posted so far.

Download the preset here.

More details behind the cut, for those who care. :)

Since I'm doing the Globetrotter Challenge, I wanted to make a new climate for the second, tropical stage of the challenge, even though I already have a "general Caribbean" one. I wanted something less rainy than that one. (I need to redo it one of these days; I think I went a bit overboard with the rain. LOL ) I do already have a climate based on Aruba, but it's a very non-standard one that I made for a specific save, and I wanted something less specific and more widely useable, so here we are.

Aruba, unlike most islands in the Caribbean, is semi-arid, featuring cacti rather than lush, flowering foliage. So, this preset is more arid as well, with rainfall being very seasonal. However, like the real Aruba, it is sunny more often than not, and since the real island is close to the equator and heavily influenced by the trade winds, the temperature hovers around 80F/27C year-round, day and night, so that's what happens in the preset, too.

This is a preset for use with the NRaas Tempest mod. General info about this project as well as installation/use instructions are here, and here is a link to the tag page for all the presets I’ve posted so far.

There are FOUR different versions of this preset in the download folder for this one, because I just couldn't make up my mind what I wanted for my own use. I've written up a "ReadMe" text file that's included in the download and that explains the differences between the four versions, instead of turning this post into a novel. If you read through it, you can make a more informed decision about which version(s) of this preset you'd like to use. You are, of course, free to keep all four if you think you'll have a use for all of them.

That said, in all four versions, some things are the same:

Fireplaces (if you have any in a tropical world) will not autolight.

Any fallen autumn leaves (if autumn is enabled) will be removed during winter (if winter is enabled).

Insect spawners will spawn year-round.

The possible temperature range is the same year-round in all versions, with no difference between possible day and night temperatures. The minimum is 75F/24C and the maximum is 85F/29C.

There is no snow (obviously), fog, or hail, so the only weather patterns you'll see in all versions are rain or clear/no rain. How those two patterns behave and the relative chances of them happening depend on which version of the preset you're using and what time of the year it is in the game, which is detailed more in the included ReadMe.

I don’t know if this has been done before, but I made want disablers for the cell phone, MP3 player, and handheld game player. Thank you, MidgeTheTree, for the tutorial! 🙂

If you want to enable any of them, simply open the file in SimPE and delete the one you don’t want to be disabled.