I've been working on building an entire neighboorhood from scratch. Custom houses, community lots, university, everything. I am starting to work on the vacation neighborhoods, but since I haven't played neighborhoods a lot I have a lot of questions (sorry)!
I've read that if you make a custom neighborhood you won't have a secret location. HUGE bummer when I found that out but.... It's ok I guess. But will I still have things like big foot and the ninja and stuff? Or am I really missing out on a lot? Would it perhaps be better to use a maxis neighborhood and delete the buildings I don't like (basically everything)? Or am I just going to have to let go of these things if I want full control of how my neighborhood looks?
Also, I would really like my locals to wear a variety of different things. For example, for my "far east" spot I want it to be a mix of Asian cultures. So I would really like some locals to be in the typical vacation outfit but some to be in other maxis looking Asian outfits (like the kimono types one or some of the anime type outfits), but is there a way to do this? I don't mind manually putting them into clothing, but will they switch back? As I said, I don't know much about bon voyage and where I can normally find a plethora of information from Google, I found very little on this subject.

Thanks ofr anyone who can help me!!

Yes, the hidden lots don't come with custom sub-hoods so you won't have a bigfoot though you will have a ninja. This is because the bigfoot (wise old man or witchdoctor depending on type of location) is tied to the lot while the ninja isn't. I thought you could create your own hidden lot and use a cheat to change it into a proper hidden lot but I've never done it do I don't know for sure. However, a work around would be to use the Maxis-made sub-hoods and knock down all the buildings and substitute your own.

Regarding the locals. If you have already added a sub-hood and have not used the empty templates, the locals will have already been created. You can change their appearance. I have custom locals and they have remained dressed in the clothes I gave them. However, I created them from scratch - that is to say I created them in CAS and then made them into vacation locals (using the townie gun). But I used empty templates when I did this. I don't know what the game will do if you don't have the empty templates and you make your own CAS vacation locals and then create the new vacation locale. The game might make a duplicate set. If you are not comfortable using the templates (and the no-respawn hacks), it might be best to let the game generate the locals and then change their appearance. You probably know how to do this but you can add them to a family and change their appearance and then add them back to the vacation local pool using the townie gun - or alternatively Inge's transporter cat.

Anyway, if you let the game make the locals, it will make 4 male adults, 4 female adults and two each of male and female teens for each location - except Twikki which for some reason has 5 adults males instead of 4. One of the reasons I made my own is because I wanted more variety in ages - I made two of each: elder, adult, teen, child. They all show up on lots.

Only 12 locals? That's really nice.

Could you please tell me something about other visiting sims? If I don't spawn them (and I use clean templates), will the game spawn them on their own or will they never spawn? I suppose I could avoid spawning them if I never use hotels, but I'm not sure.

Ive been making a custom vacation hood, but I haven't heard that you can't make the secret location. When you make a new vacation destination, you have to pick 1 of the 3 themes right? Depending on which type of vacation you pick, you just need the necessary item to make the secret lot work. For Far East, you need the tea set, Twikki/Island you need an electronic, and for the Three Woods/Forest, I don't remember what you need (possibly the radio?)

Anyways, I have a bookmark of a tutorial from TS2 exchange, but that is gonners now (or at least all the stories aren't publicly shown yet) :/ You change the lot with that lotzoning cheat but I dont remember exactly what to type. I haven't done it yet, but Ive seen people do it, so its not impossible.

lazzybum, I bookmarked it too. And I still remembered some of its details, I guess, but never tried it actually. This is the steps I remembered how it works:

• Choose a vacation destination to determine what kind of secret vacation lot you wanted. You know it. Far East for Wise Old Man, tropical for Witch Doctor, and mountain for Bigfoot.
• Start making the lot. It's better to start from residential lot for Tropical and Mountain while community lot for Far East.
• Remember that some objects are required in certain lots. For Far East, a tea table is required. For Tropical, at least one breakable object is included. For Mountain, a stereo is a must. When building, try adding bathroom and grills.
• After done, save it, use changelotzoning secretvacationlot , and go back to neighborhood screen (but save it again first)
• Here's the part I might forget. The tutorial said you need to move the lot to the lot bin, and then put it back to the neighborhood. The lot is supposed to be invisible now.
• After that, check your vacation lot by finding the map and visiting there. Everything should work fine.

If making the lot hidden didn't work in step 5, you might want to try hiding it from SimPE.

Hopefully it works... If it does, tell me!

You don't have to create 12 locals BTW - as I said, I created 8 and in different age groups. I think you could create as many as you like only that if you create a lot, the chances are you will never see some of them.

If you are using the no regen hacks as well as the empty templates, the game will never make any locals, townies or NPCs unless it absolutely must (so if you ring for a maid, it will make one but otherwise nada).

If you have been using the clean templates (and no regen hacks), the job is relatively simple then. Create your holiday destination then make your holiday locals in CAS. Put them on a lot with at least one other permanent sim. I'd use Inge's cat these days - select each sim, click on the cat and choose 'make me a ***** local' depending on what sort of local you want them to be. If you know about the townie gun though, you can use that instead. That's all there is to it. Save the lot on exit.

The vacation families/tourists are another group of sims. These get created when you make the neighbourhood new. If you used empty templates to make the neighbourhood, they won't have been created (I never made any tourists for Little Carping and so still don't have any). The game will actually make 48 of these sims (would you believe?). 48! I'd say with that many, the likelihood is there are some you will never see. Anyway, in a straight game the breakdown is this:

Tourists (36) in families
Hamilton FE 1 FA 1 MTn 1 FTn 1
Trimble ME 1 FE 1 MA 1 FA 1
Go ME 1 FE 1 MA 1 FA 1
Wade MA 1 FA 1 MTn 1 FC 1
Johnson MA 1 FA 1 FTn 1 FC 1
Turner ME 1 MA 1 MTn 1 FTn 1
King ME 1 FA 1 FTn 1 MC 1
Miguel FE 1 MA 1 MTn 1 MC 1
Dawn MA 1 FA 1 MTn 1 FTn 1

(Summary: ME 4 FE 4, MA 7, FA 7, MTn 5, FTn 5, FC 2, MC 2)

Also three families of 4 adults - FA and MA (12)
Fratster MA 4
Katson FA 4
Vijayakar MA 2 FA 2

The names might be the same each time - they have been for me but I've only tested it twice - or they might not. Knowing how Maxis usually organises these things, it is likely the breakdown (numbers of each age group and sex) will be the same each time. If you really want to do this, I'm pretty sure you can make them in the same way as for the locals though obviously choosing the 'make me a tourist' option on the cat. Tourists should retain family links though if they don't this is easily fixable in SimPE. I think family links also survived being made into locals too though I can't remember now for sure. Remember also, you don't need to make 48 (you will get bored long before that anyway, the most I have ever managed to make is 20 students (the game adds 50 students when you make a university)). With the noregen hacks in your game, it won't matter in the slightest that you don't have as many sims in those roles as the game will generate if left to its own devices.

Thanks for all the help guys! I knew there was a way to hid a secret vacation lot, but I didn't think that the special characters would still show up there. This is really exciting! Is there a vacation-specific noregen that I need? I have all the others (townie, etc.) and clean templates.

If you use Inge's Teleporter or (reportedly) the Townie Gun, your locals will not have the ability to perform the local gestures/dances/etc. To ensure they know the correct gestures, you need to turn them in to locals using Argon's Townie Brick.

That's a drawback? Personally, I loathe the gestures, the songs, dances whatever. I once let Marianne Taylor learn the pirate song. She had to be banned from community lots until I found out how to get her to unlearn it with SimPE. Still, thanks for the info.

Since the questions of the OP have been already answered, I want to ask related questions:

Can full custom vacation hoods be downloaded from anywhere? I really am not a builder, but want some variety in the game.

The problem with building is mostly island hoods, though. You can find all kinds of nice lots, but they simply don't fit in into your hood. As I read over the wiki or somewhere else, beach lots are extremely finicky. Either they cannot be placed, or they're flooded, or they leave a big strip of land behind.

It's ridiculous that, for example, ship lots from v1ind1care can't be put ANYWHERE. I swear I tried all the hoods in TS2 that had a possibility of beach lots, and they absolutely cannot be placed (without leaving a strip of land behind). I am still wondering where the creator could be using them, in some custom hood she never mentioned? I also tried downloading various piers, but none of them could be placed in any default hood with beach lot possibility. It's not just that they looked incorrectly, but they couldn't be placed at all! Therefore I made a conclusion that either you have to build an island vacation fully on your own, or you have to download a fully ready one. But I've never found a fully piratey looking island vacation hood (with ships and piers). So I wonder how you deal with custom island hoods, those of you who aren't fervent lot builders...

Vacation hoods for download:
http://www.modthesims.info/download.php?t=426792
http://beacon-falls.blogspot.com/20...prometedor.html

Another question:

If I set all weather to winter in Mountain Vacation, will all locals wear winter clothes or only normal clothes? I don't have it in my game to check now, but maybe somebody paid attention to that before or knows what will happen.

Basically, I want a custom location permanently covered in snow, and I don't know which clothes to search for locals: only normal or outdoors!

And another one:

Will snow cover the hood? I created a new location as a test, set all 4 seasons to winter, yet the dirt ground is snowless. Maybe you need to actually put sims to live over there in order to have snow cover the ground, but since it's supposed to be a vacation destination, no sims will be living there.

Babahara,
Keep in mind that when you take your sims on vacation, they will use the same season your sim's household was before they left. I never realized this till I went on an Island vacation during winter and my sims were in winter clothes out at the beach :/. So make sure your sims leave during winter. I would think locals will change into winter clothes when needed like normal, but there could be hacks to change the behavior of the whole winter clothes thing.

You can change clothes on vacation, you know! Your sims have all their regular clothes available, plus they can buy new. Getting into outerwear depends on the temperature outside on the lot.

My Riverblossom Hills sims often visit Twikkii Island during the winter, and they don't dress in winter clothes on the beach, lazzybum.

About the custom hidden lots:
-Bigfoot won't live in a small lot, for some reason. You have to build his lot on a medium sized lot (see here (It's the BBS). My hidden pagoda and mysterious hut are on small lots and work, it's just Bigfoot that needs space.

From my experience, here's what the lots require to work:
-Far East: only the tea table, wise old man is easy to please
-Mountain:
- a mailbox (start on a residential lot; when you're done building, move the mailbox and the trash bin somewhere else on the lot before turning it into a community lot).
- a coffee table and a table lamp, the small stereo
- a hammock
- Tropical:
- a microwave
- the cheap dishwasher
- a hammock

It works in my game, it's the result of the information I gathered, and of my testing (you do want to test the lots in fake neighbourhoods before building the real one). I'm not saying it's the only way or that I know all about it. But it's best to try and keep as close to the original as possible (i.e. add a stereo, a bathtub and such for the witch doctor, and so on), just less ugly.

Thank you, Maxon and Katya, for all the informations. I didn't use the townie brick and, as Katya said, my locals don't perform the local gesture. Time to create some more locals, I guess, this time with the brick

Hmm, can anybody tell me why the NPC maker gun doesn't see all my sims? I created 8 Asian locals, and it saw 2 of them, so I turned them into Asian vacation sims. However, it doesn't see my other 6 sims that I created to be Asian locals... Why? It also doesn't see sims that I created to be mountain locals at all, not even a single one of them.

What I mean is the option "make into vacation sim" on the townie gun, it gives you a choice of Island\Mountain\Asian and shows you a list of sim names, so you can choose whom you want to become a local. But it doesn't see my newly created sims, it sees only a few of them, but not all of them.

Is there another way to turn sims into vacation sims?

Yes! Read the answer by Katya Stevens, above! I used Inge's teleporter from here and it worked, with a flaw: the locals won't autonomously perform the local dance, greeting, whatever, therefore your sims can't learn it from them (although the locals know the gestures, dances and so on, as can be verified in simPe, they just don't perform them autonomously).

So you should use Argon's townie brick instead, like I am about to do (see link in Katya Stevens' message).
Be sure to remove the brick once you're done as it has been reported to conflict with I can't remember what, and you don't need it permanently in your folder anyway.

I hope you (and I) have better luck with that method, it's really worth it, I love my local sims :lovestruc

My problem is with tourists, they are in the main hood and not in the vacation subhoods where they should be. I didn't have time to look into that problem since I created my custom vacations hoods, and people seem happy without tourists so I can't find much help around :D

If you want to do that, you shouldn't need to create anew - just yank back the ones you have already created, make them part of the family again and then use the brick to make them vacation locals again.

I remember looking at the brick when Argon made it and decided against using it - I would guess because of the gesture issue though I don't remember exactly why now. There was an issue when BV was released that the coding for the locals behaviour got out of hand and infected your neighbourhood excluding everything else (usual hamfisted EAxis thing). They could learn from each other and then you found everyone was doing it. I think it was mainly the songs/tai chi or whatever it was they did (do) but I decided I didn't want it in my game. I think there have been hacks since then to tone it down.

Oh you're right, I could do that too! But I was planning to make more of them anyway.

I think the problem is mainly with tai-chi, at least I don't mind the other features which are just interactions among others (I much prefer hang loose rather than stupid pillow fights ) . Tai-chi, on the other hand, is like a plague, sims never ever will do anything else! So I use Tai-chi in Asia only by Alexx58 from here and it's really all you need, in my opinion: no autonomous tai-chi except while visiting far east.
Thank you!

When I put it into my game, there's an endless row of errors, and if the debug mode if off, then sims keep resetting each second or so. It does conflict with something.

Anyway, somehow the gun did finally see the sims designed to be locals, when I entered a different household. I used something else in conjunction with it, also made by argon, but not a townie brick. It's called argon_make-vlocal or something, and it should have the same function of keeping the autonomous gestures. As far as I remember, when I was downloading it, it was described as an older version of the same thing, prior to the creation of the townie brick. I didn't check how it works in AL, though, as the hoods aren't ready yet to send sims over for a visit.


This is strange, indeed. Hopefully you can solve this problem somehow!

I had the townie brick in my Downloads at some point (to see what was on its pie menu and such) and I didn't have errors (the debug mode is activated in my usercheats by default too) or jump bug. So yeah, I guess it 's some kind of conflict in your folder.
I must say Paladin's HCDU never spotted any conflict for me, I always had to find them the hard way, by the 50/50 method. Well, the long way, rather, let's be honest, it's not that hard :p

As for Argon's make vlocal, I had it in my DL folder when I created my locals so either it doesn't help with the gestures, or I, this time, had a conflict preventing it to be effective. And I think they're different things, the vlocal file being a mod, while the townie brick is a hacked object. Unless I got it wrong, which would explain a lot of things 8D

So.. to be continued, I guess!

Lastly, the tourists: OK you can do without them, that's true, but there's a bit of a spooky atmosphere in my mountain resort, with my sim alone with the creepy bellhop and the other rooms empty. Norman Bates/Jack Torrance anyone?

The reason why the snow isn't covering your neighborhood is because of your graphics card

Not tied to lot...what? I thought HOBBY lots WOULD generate in a custom hood...but don't remember; tell me more?
As for vacation lots, I HAVE made them from scratch AND MADE THE SECRET LOTS. But I've forgotten how, and on another thread I never got all the answers. One thing I DID find out was you need to use one of the three vacation TEMPLATES to get it to act like a vacation hood; and then it creates it's own secret lot ...so I don't know how I made a FUNCIONING vacation hood, with MY OWN secret lot before!!!????

If I need to make a separate thread for this question, I can. It just seemed to fit into this discussion ...
I've been playing a "Tarlia's" Cleaned version of B.C. and Strangetown....and have been using TwoJeff's Simblender to create the townies and downtownies.
However, when my playables ( in either hood ) go on a vacation to their neighborhood's Twikki Island ( there aren't any custom vacation hoods made) ; only a teen tourist shows up. No one else. Like a poster above said... it's a little creepy to stay at a hotel or wherever and be the only guests there.
Is there any way to make tourists for Twikki Isle. or wherever with TwoJeff's Simblender ?
Think I'm doing something wrong, since I tried to create some tourists --- while on vacation --- with either the Simblender ; or , the tombstone of life and death ( ..."make an adult male..." choice ). The newly-created sims just show up in the main hood as townies and do not appear at the vacation hood anymore.
Just left with the lone tourist teen (which, incidentally, I aged into an adult )

Wanted to add if anyone knows if Inge's Teleporter cat or the "Townie Brick" will conflict with TwoJeff's Simblender ?
Checked around this site but didn't find an answer ; if someone knows about a thread on this topic they could point it out ---TY !
I'm thinking that if the teleporter cat or townie brick are used, I could create custom vacation (tourist) sims. When I downloaded the clean neighborhoods, I also installed completely empty SubHoods and empty Stealth Hoods.

Hi! I'm sorry I didn't see your post sooner. Yes, after some trials and errors, I finally have completely functional tourists! They visit the exotic community lots, and check in in the local hotels, it's great
I don't use Tarlia's Twikkii, so you tell us if there's a problem there, hopefully not. And like Maxon said, just re-summon the defective tourists you already have, and re-turn them into tourists, this time effectively!

Edit: Yes, teleporter cat, simblender and townie brick all play nice with each other, however, the townie brick does not create tourists, it's for making locals.

So, basically, the holy trinity of creating tourists seems to be:
-the townie brick, nah, that's for creating locals
-the sim blender for teleporting, setting relationships, turning into townies, and so on.
-Cyjon's Fewer tourists and his NPC Maker Fix mods. With those mods in the downloads, spawn the NPC and townie maker (colourful gun)
-summon the future tourists, make them selectable, while controling them, click on the gun, and on "make me a vacation sim..." and pick a family, 1, 2, 3...
-make them unselectable again and "using teleport/clear off.." on the sim blender, evict them from the lot.

It works, I'm testing now and they are checking in while my sim is digging for the map to the hidden lot^^
(Heavily edited after new testing)

This is for the tourists, I still have to test the locals (made with argon's townie brick). (Edit.: works too, see next page)


Good luck and keep us posted! PM me if needed, as I tend to not visit the site at all for lengthy periods and miss posts like this.