#anyway ugh i gotta start getting together all the cc my sims use AND their lots

[mercysimming]

on that note, it's probably important to add that Returning Dawn is (regrettably) on hiatus until uhhhhhhh. whenever i can get a new laptop. while this laptop is still running, it's definitely on it's last leg and can't handle running games (it barely could before honestly lmao), so despite the fact that i was finally getting fully back into RD, there's just no way to continue the story atm. i should be getting a new (and better!!!) laptop in december, but here's hoping i can manage to get it a little earlier

[glowyjellyfish]

Gather round, children, for the legend of Grimwood Abbey

(that’s the tiny pre-MCC I mentioned the other day. I only came up with this concept, oh, over a year ago. Dropped it to play a nice easy modern Megahood. I don’t have much wherewithal.)

...so I have spent two days on the weekend so far just working on getting my CC sorted out so I can consider starting this. Yesterday the big issues were a. realizing it was super inefficient to delete stuff in-game one by one even though it’s nice to be able to see it, and becoming paralyzed with indecision about whether to take the time to hunt down unidentified files by hand, or continue spending time deleting dozens and dozens of recoiled by hand… eventually I did a little of both, but boy I gotta use some kind of tooltip renamed now huh… b. I am not good at Delphy’s Download Organizer. I don’t understand it. Why is there no “how to use” documentation. So then I set it to scan for orphans or duplicates, stare hopelessly at the results unable to figure out what is the best course of action, and then quietly quit it to yet again… move files around manually. Don’t get me wrong, I was able to use it to shove several file types into correct folders, but my real issue would be so easily solved if there was a thoroughly explained duplicate scanner that I was able to trust. Ugh, I probably should have started by moving all the files to one big folder and sorting them from there but WHATEVER.

Because, you see, like many simmers, I have been collecting my cc since roughly 2004. I legit cannot remember if I have lost the whole thing and had to start over, but this collection can certainly be traced back to my first laptop that could run the Sims 2. For the longest time, I merely collected a big pile of everything shiny and cool that caught my eye, resulting in a big mixed-up mess combining modern and medieval fantasy and sci-fi and random fandoms and steampunk and everything I ever enjoyed. That… was not sustainable. I tried keeping individual folders within Downloads for specific genres, with the idea that I could swap them in and out for different hoods. Alas, that was too time-consuming for my taste, and I ended up with the same basic downloads folder but very lightly sort of organized but not really.

Sometime within the last ten years, I started trying to cultivate different downloads folders of broad genre categories, all neatly saved on a big flash drive. That’s all well and good, but copying and backing up that shit took away precious hours I could be using to play. Not only that, but it was very rough trying to separate my downloads folder properly—some stuff worked well for multiple genres! So I ended up making copies of the whole downloads folder to build these alternates, which I could then whittle down to only the stuff I actually wanted in there. This medieval alternate downloads folder therefore also contained the folder I’d labeled Medieval CC in my last attempt at organizing, and just to be sure I copied everything over and back repeatedly. And you know how it goes—every time I got excited about the idea of an MCC, I had to go out and download anything new or shiny. And oh yeah, had to stock up on defaults because now I could be using a solely medieval downloads folder! And this new CC would get plonked right into the DL folder, nary a care for organization because I needed to play before I lost interest!

So I had at least two, possibly three copies of all the same content in a collection of medieval CC that’s been building for, let’s call it 15 years more or less. I can’t trust the download organizer—like sir are you showing me all of them? do I throw all these out or leave one behind?—and doing it by hand is extremely tedious, carefully removing all txt and preview files to improve my load time. And actually playing a year-old story concept is delayed yet again.

I’ve got a Megahood set up that I can start converting to medieval whenever I get my act together, and I still that that sounds like fun but also waaaay too big a project for me (latest issue: wait if the capulets and montagues are traditionally alike in dignity is it wrong to make the Capps gentry and the montys merchants? But if I make them both gentry it’ll be an entire damn subhood of nothing but gentry!). I also have the same old MCC hood I started building a year ago, restarting after years of having the concept ready (this one is Algary and it is the one i was building a castle for; it has a few interesting rolled families to start with such as the gentry family having no sim older than teen and me choosing to set that up as the direct heir and some cousins, and a peasant family that involved two elderly ladies who were in love and joined households after their obligatory husbands died, pooling resources to care for their families, but one of them was gonna feel obliged to head off to the church and repent while the other cared for the kids and became a midwife). And then there’s the new guy, Grimwood Abbey, whose concept is only a year old but I sure hope I can follow through on it because it is quite small. Even then I can’t decide yet whether to start with one household (everybody living together for protection!), two households (the church vs the knights), or several households (each knight beginning in their own household with their squire). The latter would make it easier for each knight to earn their own money and compete to purchase gentry approval from the church… but idk.

Anyway. After all that I am really hoping I am about ready to actually play a bit. Even just making some sims and buildings. Today I need to progress further in weeding out CC, try to find a way I can do that more efficiently, maybe find some nice standardized set of makeup and default eyes and skin to use rather than the haphazard collections I barely touch (I prefer to lean toward maxis match over Shiny Realistic skins where everyone has auto makeup, but I’m sure there is something nice out there that suits my needs), and I unfortunately saw some nice medieval clothes I don’t have while downloading a whole fresh set of Sun&Moon Star Factory stuffs (which, I had multiple copies of! Didn’t know what was updated and what was outdated or what! So I threw out everything I had and re-downloaded the entire collection, which may have been a bit drastic but it definitely worked. Also, why is there no complete user guide for this. A “how to get started” or something. Whatever.), so I also gotta download that. Then maybe I can make a test sim to make sure defaults and stuff work okay, and then maybe download some medieval lots to speed up the building process? And then I can play one of my various hood concepts finally actually? Maybe?

TLDR: I am getting frustrated because I have so many downloads, many of them duplicates within folder within the main folder, that it’s taking me all weekend just to straighten them out (and even then I might not be able to finish, despite it being a 3 day weekend where I live). I swear, it would be faster just to throw it all away and start over, except I can’t do that because I am clearly a CC hoarder and I might need a piece of CC that can no longer be downloaded.

...thus goes the preliminary legend of Grimwood Abbey and the horror story of Getting It Set Up. Someday, someday...