#s3ps

cheerfulness. mother with daughter. Comet and Nyasia 

tiny forward: thank uuu!!!! it feels nice to log in and see people still liking and sharing s3ps. i am too old / don't have time to edit and post my 1,000,000 screenshots that i've been sitting on for half a decade to try to have the ~kewl simblr~ i dreamed of when i made my account, so if creating and sharing s3ps is the only tiny mark i make on the simming world, i am content :-)

i've had some questions about s3ps' best use cases, or why it exists at all when cc magic is right there, so i wanted to share my sims 3 cc workflow. it's similar to gruesim's cc cleaning/sorting process, because that's what i used when i started playing, but with additional steps for s3ps.

i imagine every ts3 player knows these things already, but maybe this'll land in the hands of someone coming into sims 3 for the first time ...maybe jumping ship from ts4 teehee.

i download a lot of cc. too much cc. i dump everything lazily into a folder named something like "skjfslg".

if there are sims3pack files, they go into a backup folder and are converted to .package files using s3ce or delphy's sims 3 pack multi-extractor (except patterns. yes, i have tried following this tutorial. no, it has not worked. i am too tired and not smart enough to try again).¹

i use ReNamer² to remove special characters from all filenames. everything is alphanumeric: no punctuation, underscores, or hyphens. i do not add prefixes or any additional identifiers to tell me where files belong. that's what s3ps is for!

once everything has been converted and renamed, i open my "skjfslg" folder in s3ps and sort everything by category by clicking the Type column.

i keep a separate folder structure that is a 1:1 match of my cc magic folders/subfolders, so i bulk select files in s3ps by their category and move them into their respective backup folders.

i open a second explorer tab and navigate to the folder where i keep s3rc redux. in my first tab i go to a folder where i've moved new cc into and copy and paste³ the files into the second tab + drag and drop them onto s3rc / use a .cmd file to compress everything.

after compressing the duplicate files, i move them into a third tab where Documents > Electronic Arts > The Sims 3 > Downloads is open (where files go to be ingested by cc magic).

i open cc magic and import the files. i import one folder/category at a time because a) it doesn't overload the program, and b) i can shift+click to select all the newly imported files in cc magic and know exactly which folder to drag them to, rather than having to sort them a second time.

repeat steps 6-8 for each folder/category that contains new cc.

and that's it! i throw everything into cc magic except mods + counters. i have read that adding (non-script) mods to cc magic is fine, but i prefer to keep them separate. i don't delete duplicate images or sort every single piece of cc in s3pe, but gruesim's post has more info if you want to go the extra mile.

the main benefit of using s3ps over cc magic to organize custom content is that you can categorize your cc backups before importing files to be merged. and you absolutely should keep backups, because show me a sims game that hasn't borked something somewhere. i've also had issues with cc magic not showing correct categories or not showing categories at all.

there's a tiny update i've been wanting to make to s3ps that i've been dragging my feet on, and i'd love to work on a version for mac! but i take so long to do anything, so the best i can do is spend an unreasonable amount of time writing this post instead. goodbye!

footnotes beneath the cut, i've gone on long enough