Did you ever come across my old tutorial I wrote YEARS ago on how to add multiple inhabited downtown subhoods to a neighborhood, but thought it was too complicated? Well, things got wayy easier now with the most recent SimPE (0.77.69) update!! ^^

Why do I need to do this?
By default, unfortunately only the first downtown subhood added to any neighborhoods will have its inhabitants. If you add a second/third/fourth/etc. downtown subhood, the game just won't add any more sims. The newer downtown subhoods will be just empty!

For instance, if you add EA's Downtown first and later meetme2theriver's Belladonna Cove as a downtown subhood, you will have the default Downtownies, as well as the hidden Tricou family. But you won't have the Belladonna Cove families. On the other hand, if you'd add Belladonna Cove as a downtown subhood first and EA's Downtown second, you'd be greeted with all the iconic Belladonna Cove families, such as the Cordials or DeBateaus... however, you'd also end up with no downtownies, as well as no Tricou clan!

Do I need to do this only for Downtown subhoods?
The same is unfortunately also true for vacation subhoods of the same type. While you can have multiple inhabited vacation subhoods if they differ in type, i.e. Far-East, Mountain, Island subhoods can all be added at once with no problems. You cannot have multiple inhabited Far-East subhoods for instance. The second/third/etc. Far-East/Mountain/Island vacation subhood will be just empty!

While you CAN add multiple inhabited university subhoods at once, unfortunately, ONLY the first university subhood will keep its dormies/NPCs. The second/third/fourth/etc. university subhood will only come with its playable sims. The game does this to prevent having too many professors/cheerleaders/mascots/etc. at once... but maybe that's exactly what you want? Especially if you download custom university subhoods like Quadington University which has customized zombie professors/dormies! In that case, you'd still need to add the university subhood using this tutorial.

The only subhood type that is unrestricted in terms of adding sims is the shopping district subhood! Which is why, we're temporarily going to change our subhoods to shopping district subhoods, add them as such in the game and eventually change them back to their original subhood type! With the new version of SimPE, we can finally do that without any problems! No risk of accidentally creating stealth hoods or anything!

Sounds good? Alright, let's get to the tutorial then!

The Tutorial:
For this tutorial, you'll need
- SimPE (0_77_69)
- Mootilda's Fix Subhood Selection (Duh!)

Step 1: The first downtown subhood will always have its sims if it's inhabited, so we can add as we'd usually do. For this tutorial, I'm adding EA's Downtown to Pleasantview.


Nothing out of the ordinary.. all good to go!


Now, if we'd add a second downtown subhood, you know what would happen! So we'll have to find another way of adding the other downtown subhood(s) to keep its inhabitants. You can quit the game for now.


Step 2: Now, open up your second downtown subhood (located in Program Files/Origin Games/The Sims 2 (Ultimate Collection)/The Sims 2 Double Deluxe/EP2/TSData/Res/NeighborhoodTemplate) in SimPE and go to ID Number (IDNO). Under "Neighbourhood Type", change Downtown (0x03) to Suburb (0x04), commit your changes and save. Repeat this with all the other downtown subhoods you wish to add.

Note that if your custom downtown subhood already has a shopping district version available, you don't need to do this change and you can just use that shopping district subhood instead!


Step 3: In game, you can now add your second downtown subhood as a shopping district subhood to your neighborhood. It will now also add all the inhabitants of the second downtown template without any problems.


It will have the shopping district loading screen instead of the downtown loading screen, but don't worry, we'll fix that in a minute!


You can add your other downtown subhoods as shopping districts now if you wish to add more. Once you're done, you can quit the game now.


Step 4: Now, go to your Documents/EA Games/The Sims 2 (Ultimate Collection)/Neighborhoods folder and select your neighborhood. In my case, it's N001 because I'm using Pleasantview as the main neighborhood. In that folder, you should see 2 files per subhood labelled as N###_Suburb###.png and N###_Suburb###.package, where # can be any number.

Since I only have one shopping district subhood and I'm using Pleasantview, it's N001_Suburb001 for me.


Rename both files (png and package) to N###_Downtown002. If you have other subhoods you wish to convert into downtowns, they should be renamed to N###_Downtown003, N###_Downtown004, and so on, where N###_Downtown001 should be the downtown subhood you first added in game.


Step 5: Once you've renamed the files, open up the subhood files (inside your main hood!) in SimPE. Similar to Step 2, select the ID number (IDNO) and change the "Neighbourhood Type" from Suburb (0x04) to Downtown (0x03), commit your changes and save. Repeat this for all your subhoods.


Step 6: You can now also change your main downtown subhood template (located in Program Files/Origin Games/The Sims 2 (Ultimate Collection)/The Sims 2 Double Deluxe/EP2/TSData/Res/NeighborhoodTemplate) from "Suburb" back into a "Downtown", as you no longer need to add it as a shopping district anymore.

Step 7: Now, if you open up the game, you'll see that your second downtown subhood (or any other downtown subhoods you've added) have all been moved into the proper Downtown subhood section.


And if you go into the Shopping District subhood section, your subhoods should no longer be in there. Yayy!


Also, if you load into any of the new Downtown subhoods, you should see the proper loading screens and they should also function as such, i.e. Mrs. Crumplebottom, the grand vampires, slobs, the diva, Mr. Big, etc. may all randomly appear in your community lots.


Unlike the old tutorial, you don't need to fix the Storytelling folder or change any ID numbers of the neighborhoods! So it's all much simpler than ever before!


As you can see, the residents of Belladonna Cove made it all safely into Pleasantview. Finally, I can have the Tricous, as well as the Cordials at the same time. Yayy!


Alright, that was it! I hope things are clearer now. Especially using this new method!

Note: This tutorial was written for custom downtowns, but the same procedure can also be used to add additional vacation subhoods or university subhoods (if you wish to keep the dormies/NPCs of the later university subhoods.)

Oh, and a common misconception among simmers is that in order for downtownies to be added to a neighborhood, the subhood needs to be a downtown, otherwise they would be added as regular townies. This is NOT true! Neither will any regular townies (family ID: 0x7FFE) sitting in a downtown subhood template automatically convert into a downtownie upon addition.

Whether a sim will be added into the Townies or Downtownies pool has nothing to do with the subhood type, but more with what family they are in. So you can have downtownies sitting in your main hood (family ID: 0x7FFC) without even actually having a downtown subhood attached. They won’t appear on community lots but they can be added via shopping district subhoods and will also appear in downtown subhoods if you add one later on.