#anyway*‚ this was one of a very few films made with a pioneering two tone technicolor process that was quickly abandoned in the face of

[mariocki]

Doctor X (1932)

"If you ask me, I think Dr. Xavier is using very unethical methods."

"Necessity has no ethics, sir."

[dramallamadingdang]

I really like your new hood. What kind of visual editing are you doing? Also, what exactly are the rules of this hood? I tried looking it up with the tags, but alas, it wasn't explained fully. Is this a Zombie Apoc challenge? I'm doing a variation of the one on MTS2, but it takes place in post-War California, circa 1939, if Germans invaded the US. Please let us know your rules for this hood! Thanks! child_of_air

Oh dear, this is going to be really long, sorry. :)

1) The pic-editing. I made a Photoshop action to do that. At first, I was going to edit pics of that neighborhood in a warm, low-contrast sepia-tone. Because I like sepia-tone. So, I fiddled with an existing sepia-tone action I had (one meant for regular photographs) to make it work with Sim-pics. It does everything non-destructively, with adjustment layers, so the original image remains intact "underneath." But then I decided that I wanted SOME color but still low-contrast and matte and kind of grainy. So, on top of the sepia-toning layer group, I plopped down another copy of the original image and set a "Soft Light" layer blend with the layers below to merge it with the sepia-toning. THEN I edited a "film" Photoshop action that I had on hand to make it work better with Sim-pics, then ran THAT on the copy of the original image. Again, it works via adjustment layers, non-destructively. Then I reduced the opacity of the "film" layer group and the second copy of the original image so that the sepia-toning below merged better with the added-back color, resulting in the kind of images I've been posting.

THEN I recorded ALL of the above into a one-click Photoshop action that'll work on most Sims-pics. It'll sometimes need to be further adjusted, especially if the original image is really dark, like an outdoor nighttime pic with little or no light source, but for many pics, it's just one click.

I could share the action, if anyone would be interested in having it or fiddling with it for their own use, but it is still dependent on the other two actions that I edited. I'm not sure how to share all three together since one of the dependent actions is bundled with about a dozen others. I don't know how to extract just the one. I suppose I could just share the whole bundle, though. It's a very nice bundle that offers lots of nice effects, actually! :) I'm pretty sure it's one of the hundreds of free ones my hubby has, since he has the ones he paid for in a different folder on the networked external archive drive... Well, if anyone wants it, let me know, and I'll look into it. :)

Now as for the rules....

There really isn't a hard-and-fast set, I'm afraid. I'm kind of making things up as I go along. Initially, this was SUPPOSED to be just a neighborhood to test out some of Sun & Moon's stuff and some playing ideas prior to using those things in another neighborhood I'm developing but where I don't want to experiment. Then it kind of took on a life of its own. *laugh* It has BACC elements merged with the "backstory" of an Apocalypse that can also easily be a "pioneer" or “homesteading” kind of thing with no apocalyptic undertones. :) There are also some elements of an "integrated" playing style. In its pure form that would mean that everything has to be "built" in-hood, with nothing just appearing out of the air. I don't want to go full-on with that -- too tedious and therefore un-fun, IMO -- but I do have some supply chains. More on that further down.

Basically, it goes like this: The end of civilization was coming (Plague, nuclear war, zombies, who knows? And who cares? :) ), and only one person seemed to realize it. That one person was in college at the time. So, rather than focus on his studies so much -- After all, civilization was ending so there goes that MBA and lucrative corporate career, right? -- he focused on making as many friends as possible and convincing them that, "Hey, world's gonna end, we need to get outta Dodge and make a new world." Slowly, he gathered a group of friends -- people who lived in the dorm, a few professors, hell, even a cheerleader -- who believed him and started to make preparations. Everyone else made fun of them, of course, but who cared about that? They were all gonna die or whatever. After graduation, they left, trekking out into the wilderness with (in my imagination) enough stuff like preserved food and potable water and seeds to plant and candles to burn and shovels and saws and stuff like that, to get them by for a while.

And sure enough, they were right! Civilization collapsed. Infrastructure was destroyed or became nonfunctional. Telecommunications systems were gone even if there'd been electricity to run such devices. This group of 16 is out in the wilderness, and other survivors/escapees/whatever are wandering around, too. But the core group has a collectively-agreed-up mission to work cooperatively to make a new and better and simple-living world: Peaceful, completely egalitarian, communal, a world where money and power neither exist nor are desirable, where everyone works together, willingly, for the good of the collective, a world living in harmony with nature. (Basically, my ideal world. *laugh* I really am a communist at heart, only without the oligarchical totalitarianism that modern attempts at communism have been corrupted by.)

At first, they all lived together in one place, sleeping in quickly-built, rough cabins, doing potty business in bushes, collecting rain water for makeshift showers, and eating food that they brought, that they grew/gathered, or that they caught. All the while, they were busy putting together the "raw materials" they needed to build individual houses to live in, each dedicated to a specific function that benefits the community as a whole, the fruits of which would be shared equally with the entire community. Each time a production goal was reached, one person/couple could move off the communal "raw materials" lot and into the lot that could be "built" from the gathered raw materials. And the community grows from there.

Meanwhile, there are those other folks, wandering around alone and frightened and helpless in the wilderness, having escaped whatever the disaster was that occurred. Sometimes, members of the community meet up with them while they're out scoping out the territory. Those poor souls can be brought into the fold as well, added to the communal lot and becoming contributing members of the community.

And that's as far as the "story" goes for now. :) Bear in mind that my neighborhood is age-modded with this mod, so my Sims have PLENTY of time to live out their lives. Not sure playing this way will really work with the standard-length lifestages. You'd have to figure out ways to speed things up rather a lot, I would think or else your founders will be dead before they can even earn a house, much less reproduce and stuff. :) But anyway, the "rules," such as they are, so far:

1) No careers. No vacations. No Uni after the initial "gather your founders" part, if you do that. No subhoods at all. And no money, so if you want to you can give your households a million simoleons because it simply doesn't matter.

2) No electricity. No indoor plumbing. (I intend to add those things as they are "earned," down the line, but only at the earliest when the first born-in-game generation are adults. Haven't figure out exactly HOW it'll be earned, though.) No phones. No nannies, repair people, maids, gardeners, etc., unless you want to set up some sort of in-neighborhood system for that. (Which is certainly doable; I plan to do it later, once my supply chains are in place and I'm looking for "employment" for new people.) No vehicles except "vehicle horses." (Only once you have a horse farm!) Use candles for light sources. Use only charcoal grills for cooking. (Unless you want to download an historical-type oven, but I'm trying to run this with less CC, not more, and I want there to be some big rewards for earning electricity.) Don't use an electric fridge. (I'm using this one.) Use an outhouse, not indoor flush toilets. Use mods so that water has to be gathered to use to fill bathtubs and sinks. Stuff like that. 

3) I recommend using the Visitor Controller to ban all but playable Sims from every lot. Also ban mail and newspaper delivery. You COULD make the neighborhood from empty templates and no stealth hoods, yes, but then you're going to lose the "meet people by hiking" thing, which is how "new blood" gets added to this neighborhood. That function draws from the NPC household that includes things like the BV tourists/locals and the hobby leaders and stuff like that. If you use empty templates and whatnot, you won't have that.

4) Get yer founders. I did this via sending Komei Tellerman to Uni and having him focus on making friends amongst the dormies, professors, and Uni NPCs so that all the founders would at least have a strong relationship with him, if no one else, but you could just make a bunch in CAS if you’d rather skip that part. Or if you don’t have Uni installed, of course. :)

5) Build an initial lot to dump everyone on. (I teleported them with the Sim Blender, aged them to regular adults, gave them the extra want slots they should have as college graduates, etc., since they weren’t yet playables in Uni.) Include everything they need for basic motive-filling but not much else. (You could put a working stack of books somewhere if you want them to skill, but really? With no careers, skilling isn't really all that necessary.) There will also need to be ways to make/gather raw materials. Here's the layout of the one I made, with some useful links to stuff I used on it. This lot houses the founders, any new members added to the community, and ALL born-in-game Sims once they reach teenhood, until they earn individual lots.

Note: For me, I did not want kids on this lot. They have to wait until they earn an individual lot for that. So the only place to autonomously woohoo is the park benches I used as seating for eating. But, I have ACR set so that woohoo on sofas/park benches requires privacy...which is hard to get on a lot with no real walls and a bunch of other people living on it. :) If you DO want them to have kids, then they could woohoo in the cabin-tents, but ACR doesn't enable autonomous tent-woohoo, so...yeah.

Note 2: I let the communal lot run pretty much entirely on free will, only commanding certain Sims to do certain things at certain times. That way, the residents form their own relationships and either succeed or fail at taking care of themselves. They also develop different sleep schedules, which is nice for the player, less of them to keep an eye on at any given time. :) It's also easier to NOT micromanage 16 or more Sims at once, naturally. But this, of course, would be up to the player and how you like to play.

4) Earning a lot: The communal lot has choppable trees, the mining rocks from Sun & Moon's mining set, and Nixnivis's blacksmith station on it. I have fiddled with the trees and the mining rocks to make them autonomous, and the rule is that Sims can never be commanded to chop trees or mine ore. They must decide to do that themselves, so production is limited by how industrious your Sims are. Further, the mined ore has to be "refined" (into things like nails and other things that go into a house). For this, I use the blacksmith station, just having a person make that object's basic single horseshoe object as as "stand-in." (This isn't autonomous; it's one of the things that Sims can be commanded to do.)

NOTE: I could share the edited autonomized choppable trees if someone wants to use this idea; I don't think Beck would care. But sharing the edited autonomized mining rocks would break Sun & Moon's policy, so if you want that, you'd have to do the editing yourself. It's not hard, if you can run SimPE.

In order to earn each new individual lot, the communal lot must produce 75 bundles of chopped logs and 40 horseshoes. And each horseshoe “requires” 2 buckets of ore, so you need to keep track of how many buckets of ore you have in inventories and subtract out the appropriate number of ore buckets when a batch of horseshoes is made. (Just sell them "to the air;" money doesn't matter. Much of the crafting in this hood will work the same way, too, with "prerequisite" objects that need to be produced somewhere first, so get used to the technique. *laugh*) So to get those 40 horseshoes, 80 buckets of ore have to be (autonomously!) mined first. Once you have the required materials, remove them from inventories and sell them to the air. Then, you can build an individual lot and move whoever you want to own the lot out of the communal one.

(You might want to adjust the requirements needed for how you play. For instance, if you don’t want to go pure free-will, you should probably have much higher requirements. If you don’t age-mod, then you’ll want to adjust simply because you just won’t have time to earn lots with enough time left over for your Sims to have kids to keep the neighborhood going. So, yeah. That’s certainly not set in stone; it’s just what works for my set-up.)

5) Supply chains and stuff: Before you build your first individual lot(s), you're going to want to choose what that lot will be dedicated to, because that will dictate how you build it. My list of possibilities -- so far, that is; it's ever-growing as I get new ideas and figure out how to implement them -- is as follows:

RobotsFlower ArrangingToy-MakingPotterySewingSpinning/KnittingWeavingCattleChickensHorsesPigsSheepGoatsWineryPaintingDog/Cat BreederBeesBakingMarijuanaCandle-makingFishingHayCornMaxis OrchardBasketryHerbs/WildflowersHunting/TanningTrappingApothecary (Plus reagents, if witches)Blacksmithing

Some of those are Maxis things. Some of them are CC. Some of them don't actually exist and I'm using stand-ins instead. (Like, for instance, candle-making. Sun & Moon's beekeeping set produces beeswax as one of its end products, along with honey. They didn't yet make a candle-making station, though, so in the meantime, I'm just gonna use the robot station or something and pretend. They can make toy robots that can be one-for-one "exchanged" for functional candles, which can then be distributed. It's easy to do because money doesn't matter.) Most of them have "prerequisites." I'm not going to go into how all of these will work because I'd be here for days, but I'll give you one example of a supply chain and its prerequisites and stuff.

Let's talk about the sewing supply chain, clothing and blankets and stuff being the ultimate end-products of that supply chain. In order to have new clothing and towels and quilts/blankets and other nice decorative things like that, first, at the very bottom of the "pyramid," you gotta have someone who'll grow hay. Because you can't have sheep (and other livestock) without something to feed them. And you can't have wool without sheep. (Or growing cotton or flax for linen or making silk or something, and if I can figure out how to make THAT happen, I will. I have an idea brewing for marijuana -- think hemp -- but for now...sheep.) And you can't knit a sweater or produce fabric without cleaning and spinning that wool into yarn/usable fiber/thread. And you can't have fabric without someone with a loom to weave it. And you can't have leather (for shoes and stuff) without someone killing some kind of animal (domesticated or hunting wild ones) and tanning the hides. ONLY THEN can you have someone making new clothing. And at each step, there's a kind of conversion. Like "1 spun basket of wool = enough yarn to make 1 sweater." So, you sell the basket of wool (obtained from the sheep farmer) to the air, then "spin" (via a CC spinning wheel plus an invisible sewing machine to make a few potholders or something as a "stand-in" for the process), then you sell those potholders to the air and use Beck's knitting ball to make one piece of clothing which can then be distributed and used to "buy" one sweater or whatever.

That's how everything basically works in a supply chain, some of which have more steps than others. Producing new clothing would be the longest one I've come up with so far. So, when building your lots, if you want to use supply chains at all, you must start out with the "anchors" of the supply chains you want to have. If you don't want to be that complicated, you could just pick randomly or pick whatever appeals to you.

6) Individual lots: Plop down a lot. On that lot, build a house but leave room outside for the lot's function plus the outhouse, the outdoor fridge, a well/water pump and a garden. (Eventually gardens can go away, once you have enough food-producers that can consistently produce enough to distribute amongst the population. But until then, folks will need to grow stuff.) The size of your lots is gonna depend on you and how you play. Me, I like smaller lots and I don't mind cramming large families into small houses...which suits a "pioneer" sort of lifestyle, anyway. So, my individual lots are no bigger than 3x3, and the house itself (they're all the same, just different colors, different furnishings, and oriented differently on the lot), for a child-producing household, is a 9x9 square with a 3-tile deep front porch across the front. Floor plan here.

7) Unlike a BACC where CAS Sims are “earned” by certain events, any new, non-born-in-game Sims have to be met via hiking. (It’s one of the possible outcomes of hiking.) It’s a substitute for being out “exploring” or “looking for wandering domesticate livestock to capture” or whatever. If a non-pet “someone” is met, that person gets added to the communal lot, joining the “queue” for an individual lot. (I just use the Sim Blender to teleport them into the communal lot and add them to the household.) I prefer to age up any children to teen and age down any elders to adults, but that’s up to you, of course.

Annnnnnd that's about it, really. I have yet to figure out exactly how the "economy" is going to run. At the moment, the individual lots are still producing stuff with not enough to distribute yet and I don't have any full supply chains yet...but I need to figure it all out soon. I'm leaning toward just equally distributing end-products in truly communist style, but I'm not sure yet. I could list some more miscellaneous rules...but I think that's enough for now. *laugh*