Tip One: Use Shortcuts to Build Lots
Do not--I repeat--do not, for the love of Mike, waste time building up every single house from scratch in your world, especially if you have well over 100 lots! This will take you forever and delay your world by several months, if not a year or more. To cut your building in half, resort to the following shortcuts:
Use pre-existing lots from your library
In your sims library, there are a bunch of EA-made lots that come installed whenever you install an EP, like venues (dive bar, lounge, private Showtime venue, etc.), skyscrapers, parks, community lots (the salon, fire department, consignment shop, etc.) and private houses. To fill up your town quickly, place them in your world so you're not spending months and months building every single one.
Build one house as a template, then copy and paste
When you're writing something online and want to repeat it several times, what do you do? You will copy the word, then paste it as many times as necessary. Guess what? You can do that when building a world, too! How? Build a house from top to bottom and save it to library. Then add this house to several lots as copies.
Okay, there's one particular problem using this technique. Obviously, you don't want your world to look like this boring place where all your houses are carbon copies of each other, so here's a trick you can use. Whenever you paste a copy of a house onto a lot, change it just a little bit so it looks slightly different from the others. Change the outside paint and windows, swap out one set of trees for another, have a different roof, maybe even add a wing and an additional floor:
Tip Two: Give Your Lots Even Sizes
When creating lots, it's always best to give them even sizes, such as 20x20, 20x30, 30x30, 30x40, 40x40, etc. Why? Well, in the above tip, I mentioned adding premade lots from your library to make building your world easier.
If you go crazy drawing odd-sized lots like 31x28 or 43x52 or 36x45, it's going to be very confusing and frustrating trying to figure out where to place premade lots. Making your lots uniform will make it a lot easier. Also, if you plan on sharing this world, having even lots will make it easier for people who downloaded lots to figure out where to place premades.
Tip Three: Designate a Front of Lot
Every lot has an official "front" that the sims enter through. Make sure that you have the right side of your lot marked as the front; otherwise, you will have your sims trying to enter it in weird and stupid ways.
Tip Four: Be Very Careful with Objects on Seasonal Lots
Think you can place any objects you want when decorating a seasonal lot for a particular season? Well, guess again! Unfortunately, there are some objects that can't be placed. Some, like the fire pit, will cause your lot to crash. (What'll happen is that when the new season rolls over, the lot will stay stuck in Construction Mode, and you won't be able to bulldoze it.) So a rule of thumb when building seasonal lots is to stick to seasonal and decorative objects.
Tip Five: Do Not Have Too Many Species of Trees in Your World
This is a biggie. Nothing makes a world look lovelier than having lots and lots of trees. Unfortunately, having too many types of trees can result in tons of lag. I don't know what the official threshold is for that, but from my personal experience, it's really best to keep the number of tree types in your world small. I generally use about 5-6 tops, no more than that.
If you find that very limiting, remember that you can change things up visually in your world by putting different types of trees inside of your lots. For example, let's say in your world, you only have: Eucalyptus, Oak, Magnolia and Redwood. For some lots, you can add Cypress trees, Cherry trees, Weeping Willows, etc. to break up the monotony of your world so that it's not just the same 5 trees everywhere.
Tip Six: Only Clone Empty Lots in CAW
In CAW, there's an option to clone lots so that you're not spending all this time redrawing the same lots over and over again. For example, say you want to build a section of six 30x30 lots. Instead of drawing each one out (how time consuming!), you can draw one 30x30 lot, then use the clone tool in CAW to duplicate it five times.
Now, there's a huge problem you can run into using this method. Let's say you have a house on a lot and you want to clone it in CAW. I have never confirmed it, but I have a suspicion that this results in glitches in the cloned houses. What I notice is that sometimes doors and windows will go missing in-game or the mailbox will glitch (you won't be able to move or delete it). This has only ever happened with houses that I cloned in CAW, so I can assume cloning is what causes the problem.
So word of advice, only clone empty lots in CAW. If you want to add duplicate houses to your world, do that in Edit in Game. Save the first house to library, then add it to each lot you want it on.
Tip Four: Be Very Careful with Objects on Seasonal Lots
Think you can place any objects you want when decorating a seasonal lot for a particular season? Well, guess again! Unfortunately, there are some objects that can't be placed. Some, like the fire pit, will cause your lot to crash. (What'll happen is that when the new season rolls over, the lot will stay stuck in Construction Mode, and you won't be able to bulldoze it.) So a rule of thumb when building seasonal lots is to stick to seasonal and decorative objects.
Tip Five: Do Not Have Too Many Species of Trees in Your World
This is a biggie. Nothing makes a world look lovelier than having lots and lots of trees. Unfortunately, having too many types of trees can result in tons of lag. I don't know what the official threshold is for that, but from my personal experience, it's really best to keep the number of tree types in your world small. I generally use about 5-6 tops, no more than that.
If you find that very limiting, remember that you can change things up visually in your world by putting different types of trees inside of your lots. For example, let's say in your world, you only have: Eucalyptus, Oak, Magnolia and Redwood. For some lots, you can add Cypress trees, Cherry trees, Weeping Willows, etc. to break up the monotony of your world so that it's not just the same 5 trees everywhere.
Tip Six: Only Clone Empty Lots in CAW
In CAW, there's an option to clone lots so that you're not spending all this time redrawing the same lots over and over again. For example, say you want to build a section of six 30x30 lots. Instead of drawing each one out (how time consuming!), you can draw one 30x30 lot, then use the clone tool in CAW to duplicate it five times.
Now, there's a huge problem you can run into using this method. Let's say you have a house on a lot and you want to clone it in CAW. I have never confirmed it, but I have a suspicion that this results in glitches in the cloned houses. What I notice is that sometimes doors and windows will go missing in-game or the mailbox will glitch (you won't be able to move or delete it). This has only ever happened with houses that I cloned in CAW, so I can assume cloning is what causes the problem.
So word of advice, only clone empty lots in CAW. If you want to add duplicate houses to your world, do that in Edit in Game. Save the first house to library, then add it to each lot you want it on.
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