#ts4tutorial

You will need

Sims 4 Studio

TS4 CAS Tools

Before we start

Hide in CAS means hiding the item from view in Create-a-Sim. You will not be able to see it or select it in the catalog.

Disable for Random means preventing the item from appearing on randomly-generated sims, A.K.A. townies.

It is entirely possible to hide something in CAS, while still allowing it to appear on random sims - or the opposite, disabling something from appearing on random sims while still being available in your CAS catalog. With this tutorial, you will be able to do either or both of these things!

Let’s get started!

Open Sims 4 Studio and enter your desired name into the “Creator Name” section on the bottom right.

Under the blue “CAS” button, check “Override.” Then hit “CAS” again.

Navigate to the item that you want - you can use the options in the top bar to narrow down the results. (Such as species, gender, age, game pack, etc.)

When you see the image of the item that you want, hold shift and then left click. This will select all the swatches. If you hover your cursor over the thumbnail, you’ll see the name of the item. That’s what I name my .package files for clarity’s sake.

Remember to hold shift when clicking to select all the swatches!

Hit “next” on the bottom right and a window will come up asking where to save your .package file and what to name it. Do so and hit “save.”

Now open TS4 CAS Tools and go to the “Clone Package Editor” tab.

At the top, you will see the box for “Select Package” - click “Select” and navigate to your override you just made.

Now your .package file will be opened in TS4 CAS Tools.

The first thing you’ll want to do is look in the box on the upper far right side.

If you want to prevent sims from wearing this item when randomly generating sims in CAS, you need to uncheck “Allow for CAS Random.”

If you want to prevent random sims from wearing this item in-game and around your town, you need to uncheck “Allow for Live Random.”

If you want to hide this item from Create-a-Sim, uncheck the box for “Show in CAS UI.”

In the “Property Flags” box, you may see the flags “OccultAllowedForRandom” If you’re creating an override that disables for random, you can delete these flags if you’d like. I find it doesn’t make too much of a difference as “Allow for CAS Random” and “Allow for Live Random” seem to override it.

Now click “Commit Changes”, then “Save Package” and you are done! It’s necessary to hit Commit before Save or else your changes won’t be saved to the package file.

And there you are! Let me know how it goes for you or if anything in this tutorial was unclear. Thank you! ♥

Bonus note:

If you’re curious about what the “Disable for ...” options at the top mean, that prevents it from showing up in CAS for that species only. So say you’d like an item to only show for aliens, you’d check “Disable for Human” and “Disable for Vampire” while leaving the alien option unchecked. You will need to leave “Show in CAS UI” checked for this to work, as this option will override all others.

Example: An item that only shows up in alien CAS, versus an item that does not show up in CAS at all.

If you want to allow this item to appear on randomly generated sims of that species, you will need to add an “OccultAllowedForRandom” flag in the “Property Flags” box.

1. Build two rooms on top of each other.  These will be your lower and upper levels.

2. Lower them into the terrain a bit.

3. On the flat terrain, outline your middle level.  You have to leave one tile of space between the two sections because of the terrain dip.

4. Put spandrels across the walls facing the center of both levels.  This is so you can add your stairs.

5. Add stairs from middle level to bottom level.  You may need to raise your lowered room up a click or two until it’s just right the stairs will fit.

6. Add your stairs from the middle to the top level.

7. You can build a floor on your middle level so it’s actually a room.

8. Slap some roofs on those bad boys.  You won’t be able to extend the roof over the middle level to be against the bigger section, so you’ll have to extend just the eave (holding shift).  I hadn’t done that yet in this screenshot.

9. Now we need to hide where the terrain dips down at the walls.  Make your top level one tile bigger than your lower level all the way around.  (Note: if you want your house to have a walkout basement, you don’t need to bother with the back side.  I didn’t on this example.)

10. Make one wall as a guide to create a 1 tile half gable roof that is the same height as a wall.

11. Place the roof with the “wall” facing out along the length of the house.

12. Do it for the front too.  (And the back, if you’ll be doing that.)

13. Then place a 1 tile roof on the open edges to make them neat and square.

14. Place walls back where the spandrels were, and across the open side of the middle level.

15. Ok, I guess I didn’t take screenshots of this process because here it’s done.  Select any flat, plain object to use to make “walls” in all of the places you can’t place walls but would want some--the outside walls and by the stairs.**  Use multiple ones and move them with 0 and 9 (or for me it’s ctrl + 9) to stack them up to the ceiling and roofline.  I used the base game 1 tile lockers because they’re tall so I need less of them.  That rectangle block from Get Famous might be good too.  I also considered using a bookcase by the stairs so it will look like there are shelves in the stairwell.  Ooh.

**If you’re using Peacemaker’s vaulted ranch windows, then instead of the lockers at the outside wall, you can put just a full length window with a clerestory on top.  To do that I had to back off a few walls so I could put the window in place without it snapping to other walls.  Then moved things back.

16. Ta-da!  So it’s not perfect of course, but I mean, they don’t let us do different levels so we do what we can, right?

El fin.

Open the .package file in Sims4Studio

Under the “Type” section on the left side, select “CAS Preset.” If it’s a pack of presets, there will be multiple. You will need to adjust each individually.

On the right side, look through the options until you see “ChanceForRandom”.

This is the value we need to change!

If you set it to 0, it will not appear on random sims. If you set it to 1, it will appear.