So I've recently played a lot with Free Time hobbies and there are some things I've noticed. First of all, the showers on the Arts & Crafts secret plot are badly placed. My Sim couldn't reach the shower. He complained about a wall being in the way (I assume it's the diagonal corner one). Can I edit that plot to fix the routing issue or is it a lost cause?

Secondly my Sim, Kim, have full Hobby, 8/10 Creativity and can become super focused. But he can only make plates and heat protectors, nothing else. Does it mean he needs higher creativity? Or is the pot maker and sewing machine limited to only those two things? Or is it some hidden skill I need to increase? He can make custom paintings (either from in-game shot or from the harddrive) and he can actually play musical instruments quite decently (he got 600 in tip at one point!). Could anyone help me out here?

Edit. Sorry for my bad English it's not my first language.

There's a tutorial somewhere for editing hobby lots. I read through it once. It looked complicated and I never did it.

On the hobby stations, the sims will earn badges, just as with fishing, gardening, and the business skills. When they have made enough plates and potholders to earn a bronze badge, they'll be able to make vases and teapots on the pottery wheel, and teddy bears and curtains on the sewing machine. A silver badge will unlock more items, and finally with a gold badge they'll be able to make the best stuff.

Peni's right - editing hobby lots so that they'll stay that way is pretty complicated, and involves using SimPE. You have to change the subhood type, then the lot type for each lot using SimPE, then load the game, make the changes you want, then exit the game and change the lots and subhood back.

Here's a link to the thread on MATY. I actually helped with some of the testing all those years ago. It's complicated, but certainly possible to achieve if you take it carefully and follow lethes's instructions step by step.

Thank you all for the answers! I didn't know potmakery ans sewing depended on badges but now I know, so thanks.

It does sound complicated to edit Hobby lots. It's so strange that Maxi placed a shower in an invalid inaccessible place. Mindblowing. I guess I need to weight the costs against one another. But thanks anyway. That cheat could be useful if something else is placed in a bad spot.

I think lot building must consistently be the last thing done before deadline, since they've always been awful and in a lot of cases they've obviously never been playtested. One lot in Downtown in Sims1 had a counter placed backwards that I always had to change, and the houses in the original neighborhood one were, if not quite unplayable, always in serious need of remaking and apparently built solely with an eye on how they looked in neighborhood view. This has the knock-on advantage to the community as a whole that people start developing their building skills early and learn the importance of playtesting. But it is annoying to have to rebuild the same lots over and over, and then you get something like this, when you can't fix the problem once and for all without a lot of specialized knowledge.

I marked some things in bold.

1. What'd you mean with "houses in the original neighborhood"? What's the issue with those? (I assume it's Pleasantville?)

2. Yeah tell me about it. I've had to fix and rebuild some of my community lots several times over cos things didn't work properly (like a chair placed backwards or a decoration causing issues).

3. Yeah, it's tough. Maybe that's why I prefer custom hoods despise the fact I need to build everything from scratch. I know how to seek Sim info and edit it a small bit, how to change properties, find catalogue info and fix it. But editing hex and data stuff is above my ability.

No, I was still referring all the way back to Sims1. Most of the houses it shipped with didn't play well. One had an island with flowers on it in the middle of a swimming pool, but without a ladder to the island, so the flowers inevitably died. The same house had rooms that didn't communicate with each other, and nothing suitable for a bathroom. The houses in Magic Town were basically shacks for single sims - but in order to collect enough magic coins to buy one, I always found I had to work a whole family hard in the magic track to afford one. Some of the starter houses were so small, or so awkwardly designed, that you couldn't fit anything in them.

The trend continued in Sims2, with houses that didn't have a single room big enough for a double bed, back doors perceived as front doors, huge community lots with nothing to do on them, urinals in the women's restroom, and so on. All the noobish mistakes that people make fun of themselves for having done, the company kept right on doing. I bet Sims3 and 4 have the same problem.

The front door/back door issues is something I've encountered too. I always thought it was a routing issue tho? That maybe the back door was closer than the front door and so the paperboy/girl went there?
I know that the Universities has community lots which are huge but has barely anything (or that trap door shop in city), but I saw at those as purely decorative.
However I didn't know about the double bed and urinals in women's bathroom tho! Now that's such a mistake. ;/

I'll save you a lot of trouble now with the truth concerning front/back doors.

The last exterior door placed on the lowest level is treated by visitors as the front door. So if you build a house on a foundation and give it a garage, the personnel door of the garage will be the one the newspaper, date rewards, and visitors go to. If you build a house and place the front door first, then later place a back door, the back door will be treated as the front door.

Furthermore, certain doors are defined by default as "interior doors," and if you happen to use one as the front door, any other exterior door on the house will be treated as the front, regardless of when it was placed.

This problem can be mitigated on some properties by building a fence with no gate around the property, so that only one door is accessible.

I didn't know that. O.O

Not entirely sure what you mean by that first sentence. A lot of difficult words. Sims gets mad when they can't hug each other on a slope? But Nature hobby requires slopes and hills? Edit: Oh you're talking about the Nature lot being a bother cos it got a lot of hills and sims get annoyed because the hills blocks their path as they try to interact?

I got that hack. Maybe that's cos I didn't notice any problems before.

Because of the ups and downs on that lot you will see many sims with the slope icon waving their arms about because they can't greet each other or poke or hug or do whatever to each other while standing on those areas. That is what she means.

OK ... so my Sim being unable to buy jewelry on a particular Maxis BV lot (Twikkii ... forgot the name of the place right now) WASN'T my fault? (I thought it was a mod conflict. It's not enough to be a huge problem, but it is annoying.)

Not if it's the lot where they placed the stand backwards.

The boardwalk lot, yes.

This kind of stuff is one of the reasons why the community-lot buy enabler is a must-have in my game. The changes I make won't save, of course, but at least I can fix things as needed at the time I'm playing the lot, if I don't remember to go in in build mode and fix it first. Unlike miriamnz, it works just fine on vacation lots in my game; I don't know what the difference is between their game and mine, but...Well, like I said, it works fine for me. I do have the updated-to BV version, which is in the download's comments and which works for an all-EPs/SPs game. Perhaps that's the difference.

Works fine on vacation lots in my game also.

You can just do the community lot buy enabler thing with cheats - I have it on an alias in my userstartup.cheat file. I just have to type 'd' in the cheat box.

Watch out for the Twikkii Island South Beach lot where the male and female toilets have the wrong doors, too.