The History & Laws of Crescent Island

When I started this neighborhood on clean, empty templates, my goal was to drastically change my play style, which had become stuck in a rut of power leveling Sims as children & seeing them become permaplat in the first few days of their post uni career. I also wanted to move away from the sameness of every Sim household: no matter the career, the personality, they'd all end up with chess tables, easels, computers, bookcases. They'd all 'go to work' for a few hours in careers that seemed totally disassociated from their lives. 'Space pirate' is hardly something you could commute to every day like an office job, and having to leave home to be a 'Freelance Web Designer' is the stupidest thing I can imagine, even in this game. I wanted to have more individuality, with only few Sims owning things like easels & chess tables, and I wanted them to have work be more intrinsic to their lives. I also wanted to grow a community from scratch, starting with two playable Sims, and generating townies as a population base.

I'm using some challenge inspired restrictions in this neighborhood to achieve my goals, but it is not a challenge. It is not scored at all, and my restrictions are tailored to growing a community in the long term, and maintaining the atmosphere of a remote, rural community. While I do have some restrictions I consider set in stone, like the organic gardening law, most of them are flexible and can be abandoned if I find they are impeding the growth of the neighborhood. Since one of my goals is to have more individuality, I often impose extra restrictions on individual Sims or families, and give some immunity to certain restrictions.

Some Credits: I used emptied templates when creating this neighborhood, so that the shipped Maxis townies, downtownies, dormies and NPCs would not be present in ths neighborhood. I generated townies for the game using the townie gun (formerly townie tree). Some of the downtownies generated are made from the NL downtownie templates, so you may recognize a few of them. The rest were generated based on the default replacements I'm using.

The cleaned up templates & instructions on how to use them are available in the Peasantry section of the More Awesome than You forum. The facial default replacements I am using are by Selzi at MTS2. I should note, the only four Sims I created for this neighborhood, Mystery Founder, Chess Merchant, Ash Brown and Kelly Green, were made by generating random Sims in CAS until I got something I liked, then selecting clothes, hair, etc. So credit for them goes to Selzi, too. I have custom eye colors that are binned & townie friendly, by two creators at Mod the Sims 2, "Keen Eyes" by Phaenoh (I use all 3 sets: I linked to the third set) and "More Less Cartoony Eyes" by Dicreasy.