If you’ve noticed my Hood Cleaning Spree, you may wonder how it’s done. Let’s say you’ve got a hood with no sims, is it really clean and empty?
Or… say you have a nice hood that wasn’t created in an empty game environment, so it can’t be converted to a subhood as it is, but you’d like it in your megahood.
This method is for perfect for that.
It’s best for creating empty hoods like the unoccupied ones I cleaned by Kalisa, Voleste, and Phaenoh.
But, this is not a beginner tutorial, barely even a tutorial at all. It’s more a checklist that may help to give some order to a lot of tutorials – a way to see how they fit together or just a reminder as you go through to make sure you’ve done everything.
So, here’s the checklist for my cleanup method with links to the sources of info I used to learn to do this:
Clean & Emptify Method
1) Start a clean, empty hood in a clean, empty game environment. See Moo’s tutorial on creating a clean, empty game for building subhoods. I use the no AGS method.
2) Use Moo’s HoodReplace to copy the OLD hood terrain and deco to the new one you just made. You can leave the defaults checked.
3) In SimPE, rename the new hood you made to something meaningful in CTSS and change the IDNO to a unique identifier. Note: In order to have working scripts for the premade hoods, there can only be one hood in a Neighborhoods folder with the UIDs 1 (for PV), 2 (for ST), and 3 (for Verona), so to avoid breaking scripts in those hoods if yours is in the folder with them, change your UID accordingly.
4) Rename all (4) files to use the IDNO you assigned. I use BulkRenamer for renaming.
5) If the hood has no lots, you’re done. If it does, back up your work so far as a clean, empty version of the hood before adding lots, so if you mess up going forward, you can revert to this one.
6) Get the lots from the old hood using Moo’s tutorial for deleting all characters from a hood. This will involve extracting all LTXTs and their corresponding text lists (STR$). Note that many hoods contain extra, unused STR$ that the game and creator used at some point, but did not delete. I prefer to move only those I want into the new clean game. This is a little tedious, but I prefer to clean, thoroughly. See Moo’s tutorial for matching the numbers.
7) Add the LTXTs and STR$s you want into the new hood. Make sure they match. You should have one more STR$ than you have LTXTs – the additional one is for the Default FAMI.
8) Copy the lot files from the LOTS of the old hood into the lot folder of the new hood.
9) Rename the lot files to match the IDNO you used for the new hood.
10) If the lots have been played, they will contain controllers, such as those for illness, scheduling for the headmaster, etc. These can be cleaned out one by one with Chris Hatch’s LotCleaner.
11) Finally, if the lots have been anywhere near Sims, you can quickly clean the lots of all sim references with LotCompressor in just one click for the whole hood.
12) Replace or remake the neighborhood png.
You’ll note so much of this is about Mootilda here. I am forever grateful for Mootilda’s incredible generosity in all she contributed to the game and the community. Thank you, Moo! We still miss you! In addition, a huge thank you to Chris Hatch who continues to share his expertise with us all.