I think we have it! I think we have our terrain! I like the changes, they're subtle but they add that extra bit of layer to it. The road going out of kissing point was something I was actually thinking of doing when I put the roads down, but I didn't do it because I wanted to stay close to @ed95 vision, but after seeing it in the game, I really like it. The crater area looks better now too I think, and good you flattened out that one area in the rich area, that will make it easier to build!

So when can I get to decorate this beauty? That's always been my favorite part of 'hood creation. placing down little trees like Bob Ross.

@HarVee That's it, I edited one thing that i missed, I was going to edit the landscape more, but all the time I ended up destroying the crater! xD If you want to start decorating, go ahead! I look forward to seeing it! ^^

https://www.mediafire.com/file/3sd6...y+U+V3.sc4/file

Meanwhile, let's see if these days @ed95 and @cookietheinnocent and me can start thinking about sims and other things! ^^ Has anything occurred to you that you would like to comment on?

Wow the ideas are awesome! You mentioned the Ravengolds but I'm not familiar with any of the Service Area families yet. Really has me tempted to take a look~ So is there a single sim that should be started with? I've read previous comments mentioning the director's and general's descendants.

The Ravengold family is the royal family that rules Aberon Garden, they are similar to the Laandgrab but more monarchy-oriented. In Service Area live Walter and Rita Ravengold, who are distant relatives of theirs and left Aberon Garden for Service Area to leave their obligations behind and perhaps prevent General Xi going too far, but apart from that, they don't have a very deep history, so they are not very relevant at the moment. Let's say that there are good Ravengolds and bad ones. XD

But we have already said that this university must have its own history and its own sims with made-up names and surnames. So since I assume HarVee is decorating, I'm going to take the lead and give an example of what we might need, obviously you can say what you think or if you want more stuff or change it or whatever:

Inhabited Houses:

-House where the son or sons of the director of the university/old factory live, they could be spoiled sims with some enemies and a dark past. The last name would be unique and proper of the lore of the uni. (We could create a bodyguard for these sims, who is also a student.)

-Fraternity where the children of the board of shareholders of the university live, these could be custom sims, or a mix with also some sims with references like the Ravengold, Laangrab and others.

-Poor Female Fraternity

-Poor Male Fraternity

-Poor Mixed Fraternity

-A few sims that live in different houses.

-A few groups of sims that are living in residences or in the family drawer.

Uninhabited lots: (Here I'm going to say what we've said so far, but there may be many more missing, tell me what you think.)

-Suspicious dock
-Secret laboratory that is also the science faculty.
-Kissing Point
-Out of Bounds zone
-Big Green Zone
-Main Campus
-Sports stadium
-Restaurants, bowling, nightclubs...
-Secret society
-Faculties, (could we boil it down to skills and make about four buildings. I don't know if any of you have more experience.)
-????

*It would be nice if when you decorate @HarVee, you add empty lots so that we can get an idea of ​​what each thing could be. We could use the mod to resize the lots to fit the roads as well.^^

Sims or lore in development:

-An event occurred a long time ago in which many scholarship students died in strange circumstances, the newspapers spoke of a strange cult, but the rumor stayed there. The academy stopped giving scholarships and only accepted rich people for a long time, but over time the town became uninhabited, and the board of directors ended up buying the entire map, with the promise to the community that they would give scholarships to poor sims again. So history is repeating itself... And some sims are dying in strange circumstances.

-An abomination resulting from experiments, it belongs to the era of sacrifice and is very creepy and crazy. But maybe not bad? It could be a deformed sim and maybe a zombie.

-The academy is one of the places where the rich sent their children to study and in the process they took advantage of the poor with high abilities to work on all kinds of projects, be it cloning, elixir of life, hybridization, inventions and everything you can think of, since the area is on a telluric portal and it is easier to experiment.

-The port has a reputation for being dangerous and it is advisable not to stay alone there, but many sims visit it for the party.

-There is a crazy killer on the ground in the uni, and he is not the abomination, he is a descendant of the original owner of the factory, who was murdered and robbed by the ancestors of the director of the university. So this poor and murderous sim seeks revenge, he kills poor sims so that everyone believes that the killer is one of the rich. And he is planning to kill the director's children. Maybe I could hate one and be in love with the other.

-The director's children and members of the lodge do have a secret society and do rituals and such and are also villains, but they didn't expect someone to be seeking revenge and are nervous about what's happening at the university.

-Some alien students.

-Poor students obsessed with conspiracy, a group of goths, modern lgtb wicca, arts... also normal people and everything else you can think of. Also a werewolf. xD

-Maybe I would make the rich people more related to sports, politics, cheerleaders and so on.

-Not all rich sims belong to the lodge/secret society, some might not know anything, even if they are from the same family.

----

Regarding the name of the university, "Mistery" seems a bit redundant to me. Perhaps I would prefer a proper name or, if there is a reference to mystery, something more refined, as I said, "Enigma Academy", but there is still time and we could think of something more elaborate or a more unique proper name. Obviously, it will be a vote.

Engima Academy would work fine for me, not a bad name IMO. Mystery is redundant I agree, I only named it that because I didn't know what to name it since we didn't (and still don't) have a final name for it. It's just kind of a working name, meaning it's there for placeholder purposes. I do that a lot with my 'hoods. Plot of Land itself was the second working name I used, but I stuck with it simply as the name implies it's not only a literal Plot of Land but that the story itself is a 'plot'. Kind of a double entendre. The original working name was bad for Plot of Land, it was originally "Desertplace". Now that doesn't sound exciting.

Anyway, I am almost finished decorating. It looks great so far, but I don't want to show pics just quite yet... But it looks good for mostly Maxis content. I say mostly as I admittedly did use 1 piece of CC, Maxis boulder rocks made smaller by SiramKirk , they won't be required to run the 'hood, but you will lose some of that rocky aspect without them.

Well, Plot of Land seems like a good and descriptive redundancy to me, just like Service Area XD! As you say, it fits the story. ^^

Wow, how cool that you've been decorating, I can't wait to see it!!

I have continued editing Service Area memories these days... -.- Let's see if it gives me inspiration and I invent some characters for the university these days! ^^ I suppose that when we have the map with the empty lots we can decide what each thing is and divide up the work xD

I'll be helping with the sims themselves once the 'hood is decorated, one step at a time and all that

Btw, would you like me to place down some empty lots so we have a general idea of what we're working with, or do you only want decorations?

There is no hurry, I was just wondering if I could think of any townies XD

Yes ^^ add empty lots, that will help us a lot to start seeing what looks best in each place. ^^

Justin Thyme. I don't know what his backstory would be, but I like the name.

Hey, I'm back!! Finally! Tee hee

I like a lot all of your ideas, I see this is starting to take form!! I like the idea of a killer running loose on the faculty, @Sokisims, and Enigma as the name of the academy. It could be the acronym of the founders, for example. I'm itching to see how you decorate the terrain, @HarVee

I have to test in-game some ideas that could push the limits of the game -without mods, of course!! Specially on buildings. Since I mentioned having an European look, that (making stacked buildings, or very close ones, or lots that go above the road...), could make the nightlife look more vivid as @Sokisims wanted (and myself too tee hee). Since I was itching to do it, I drawn a proof of concept of a bulding, with a fusion of styles:


(As you can see, I envisioned the building with a bistro-like bar on the gound floor and a residence or several on the upper ones).

I like Justin Thyme as a name since you mentioned, @HarVee, and that kind of names! He could be the kind of sim that gets himself into lots of trouble, but always finds a way to make everything work... just in the nickle of time. He could go around campus telling his own telltales that most of his peers don't believe, but find entertaining nonetheless.

Please, @cookietheinnocent, feel free to mention any idea you have!! The good thing of this project is that everything is very welcome!!

I propose we set the original building of our factory around the 1700s (some buildings from that period remain, but not all on very good conditions). The university started as a Freemason-like lodge that wanted to provide training and knowledge to their younger and future members, of course giving their own skewed view of the world. The owners of the factory were members of it, but a secret project (the mutant?) made them go bankrupt and the lodge started buying land.

Heh, thanks a lot! When I have time, I should make more drawings I'm thinking about. After all, the game can be somewhat limiting if you start with a blank canvas.

Yay, I like your idea! Masons where really prevalent in Europe during the 1700s, that's why I choose them. I I prefer to keep it ambigous, as you say, also because I like the idea of The Sims universe being somewhat different to ours, or having its own equivalents of "our things". We should think a way of adding story to the households with the limitation of uni.

I love that idea for Justin. Nobody believes he has really been places because he's actually time travelling tee hee. He could may be be a central character, I'd like a story like that.

Totally, I find it quite funny xD Justin is already an icon and he doesn't even have a face yet xD

Regarding how to make families adapt to the uni, I suppose we basically adapt it to the fact that everyone is a student, some of them are siblings, and the bios do the rest. The murderer is a scholarship student posing as someone normal, Justin came from the future to study at the university... I had also thought that the director's children could be twins (Male/Female), I don't know if they live in the factory-mansion or in their own house, leaving the factory as a community lot. They could also have another brother who lives with the poor. Like evil posh twins + Humble brother.

Reading all of this thread made me think about something, what if there was a student in the university who was secretly an android that was created in the laboratory? I think that'd be pretty neat.

I had already thought about that idea, but servos can't live at the university. I looked it up the other day on the internet xD. We're trying to have as few mods as possible, so having a normal sim with a custom skin would seem a bit boring to me. Although we could make it mentally programmed or, as you say, a kind of biological android. It's a similar plot to the one I have with Tyler and Cassidy in Service Area and Jeans Shaker Oasis, although in that case they are clones, not androids. I wanted to add something related to the clones but I was still waiting for the uni lore to take more shape, since I didn't want the clone issue to be something very important in the plot. Maybe a sim with very specific face, makeup and clothing to look like an android? xD (But without cc!)

I know we can't actually make an android without CC (sadly), so what I had in mind was to make a sim and just like, imply they're an android through their personality (LTW, OTH, memories and aspiration too).

Great ^^ Well, I think it's a very good idea ^^ Do you want to take care of it?

Sure! I'm fine with making that sim.

Hi I'm back, finally finished the android sim, I also made a male variant for funsies.



I spent a whole day thinking about how their outfits would be like before I remembered CAS debug was a thing.
I'll see if I can upload their files later, since I plan on doing some minor changes to them in bodyshop. I'll also put specifics like their aspirations, LTW and that type of stuff in their bodyshop bios.

The truth is that those costumes fit the character! ^^ Maybe an eye shadow or something? But they are very cool, take your time if you want to finish them. ^^ As you say, add their personalities and aspirations :D

I have spent these days organizing memories for Service Area, let's see if I update soon... xD I guess the rest of the participants have also been busy with their projects these days ^^. I look forward to seeing the hood decorated @HarVee!! :D

I've been busy visiting family so haven't had much time to Sim

I'll have it for everyone to see sometime next week when I get back home.

Great @HarVee I hope you had a great time these days ^^

I was thinking, is it possible to modify a face to fit this? xD Has anyone ever achieved it? Although I imagine that even if they succeeded, the babies would come out deformed... xD

Hey I'm back, took a bit to actually edit the androids since I decided to make some other sims for the university, I didn't include all of the ones I have finished since I still need to make a few adjustments to them in bodyshop.

I have seen them and they are very good, my favorites are the androids because they have a quite unique face, for the rest I would change the shape of the eyes and nose a little to try to make them have different features between them :D

Thanks for the feedback, I'll try to adjust a few of them later and upload them when I get the chance.

Okay, finished adjusting the students I sent earlier as well as the other ones that I hadn't shown yet.