My name is GraysonKP, call me Grayson, call me K.P., it doesn't make a difference to me. I'm a man (>18, <21) (vague so I don't have to update it), and I like Sims. I've been playing TS2 since I was 15 in 2021, and I never put it down. I consider myself technically intelligent when it comes to The Sims 2, though I don't know as much about other titles.
I enjoy fiddling with the game. Expect totally random mods and pieces of CC to come from my blog and simblr.cc page.
You can do whatever with my uploads as long as you credit me. Include them with Sims, heavily edit and upload, minorly edit and upload, it doesn’t matter. No paywalled content. Paywallers are blocked on sight. Early access is acceptable and encouraged. I don’t do it because my stuff isn’t of such quality and is too derivative for me to be comfortable with charging for it, even temporarily.
I don't particularly like tumblr so my posts might be rare or random. I don’t accept asks or most forms of communication. That’s not what I’m here for.
I will usually only interact with Sims posts. I block politics. I know what is happening in the world to my people, I don't need a reminder. Harassment towards anyone will be blocked. (It’s more common than you’d think…)
I avoid shipping discourse. Illegal relationships are blocked on sight. Usual DNI criteria. I am horrible at tagging. Sorry.
If you're looking for my gameplay rules, they're here.
If you're looking for my downloads, check the #ts2 download tag.
you ever have a half finished project stuck in your savedsims folder that you know you should finish and it’s been several months and it’s literally just a color swap of an already finished project
hello everyone, have you ever found yourself cursing the sheer amount of face there is in this franchise? truly, so many eyes and noses, how are we ever supposed to keep track?
well friemds, on this wonderful wednesday i am bringing you the only slider you will ever need again. who needs to worry about eyebrows and jawlines when there is no face there at all? that's right! this slider will vanquish that visage, shrink it right down until it is no more! incredible! totally not horrifying at all!
is this the answer to your woes? of course it is. do not debate. you can download it, the most useful slider ever released, in the below location:
GET IT HERE!!!!
this is in fact an april fools joke, but it is also an actual slider you can download and have in your game if you so very wish and i hope you get as much or as little use out of it as your heart desires
disclaimer i do not claim responsibility for any nightmares encountered or passing resemblances to arseholes as a result xoxoxo
unhidden maxis objects with modified objects.package
for a while i've been using objects.package modified by me to unhide most objects that sims use during interactions and it's now a MUST HAVE for me when it comes to no cc decorating!
they're all in the decorative -> all category and cost 0$ except for sellable objects like those from flower station, sewing machine, etc (yes, i unlocked these as well!), those have their original price so they won't be at the beginning of the catalogue
objects don't disappear if you share a lot with someone, so it's really cool for custom neighborhoods and lots
download
INSTALLATION INSTRUCTIONS READ PLS!!
this file doesn't go into the Downloads folder, so please don't place it there, for this to work you have to replace the original objects.package here:
Program Files (x86)\EA GAMES\The Sims 2 Mansion and Garden Stuff\TSData\Res\Objects (if you have Ultimate Collection or Legacy Collection the Mansion and Garden folder is called SP9)
i dunno if there's any potential consequences, but i recommend having a backup of the original objects.package file in case something goes south, personally my game is fine though and it's been like a year since i've modified the file
This is one of the coolest mods made in a long time I’m so glad I got to be a tester! I can definitely say that it is very useful and I’m sure it can be used in ways I can’t even imagine.
OFFICIALLY there's now a booty/archive of paywalled newer sims 2 cc called Nut So Fast Paywallers!
I spent quite some money on it and safety measures so I hope y'all appreciate it 🙏
Once I have more money/others will help obtain more content, NSFP will be updated! You can also donate on ko-fi, ALL donations will be spent on obtaining more cc, NOTHING ELSE
GET YOUR OWN COPY TODAY
ALTERNATE LINK
ANOTHER LINK WITH CC THAT NEED FIXING FOR PEOPLE WILLING TO WORK ON THAT (TYSM IN ADVANCE)
Also, Paywallers, fuck you, y'all actually stink
31.08/1.09 - first update! Thanks polythene pam for making it possible 💚
4.09/5.09 - second update! TYSM both Sonikku3 and Bobobrains for helping with obtaining more content 💚 1 non-assigned mesh replaced with a version fixed by me
7.09/8.09 - third update! thank you Anons for providing more content! also 1 hairstyle fixed by @nonsensical-pixels YOU DID WATCHER'S WORK 🙇 delete the files with "GLO_box-braids" in the name and replace with "np_glorianasims_4t2_GLOboxbraids" in the name!
Warning: there's a Grim Reaper default in the "defaults" folder, so don't put it in your game if you already have one!
What do you mean one of my followers decided to vague post about me being traumatized on a Discord server? What the hell?
I’m not really bothered by the fact one of my followers did that I’m just confused why you would even follow me if you decided to block me on Discord because of the terrible things I’ve done such as… ask for people to be considerate of my PTSD?
Forgive me if this has already been discovered, but I always wondered why objects with a missing texture would flash instead of being a solid color. Then I noticed a while back the most subtle detail this game has. When you hover over an object, it very subtly flashes in the same way soup flashes. I have a video. It is extremely hard to see, and is probably impossible to notice if your eyesight is very poor.
It's only visible in dark lighting, and I do have a lighting mod installed, but I'm sure this is a regular feature in everyone's game. Try to notice it in your game, maybe someone can get a better video of it. If you didn't notice anything (I don't blame you) maybe try color picking or something to see if that shows anything.
A few days ago @rudhira kindly let me join the moderating team at the TS2 default database. I've had time to treat all the pending submissions and Rudhira was able to solve the captcha problem that kept anons from commenting (let us know if you're still having issues).
Hundreds of defaults have been added in the past few days, thank you for the submissions and please keep them coming!
Just so you know (and for me to keep track of what I'm doing), @pforestsims @sims-for-semi @nosferatusim @narcysims @sillysoraya @pinguninisims all of the defaults on your tumblrs as of today are on the database.
August 3rd edit: same for @amybabyssims2 and @notyourplatypus1.
I was worried that it wasn’t going to get updated even though I know some of the mods there are still active. But I’m glad it’s updated again! And I still wasn’t able to anon comment, but I ended up just making an account anyway. It just said that I couldn’t do a captcha at this time.
Some of you might have seen my TS1 inspired UI floating around twitter, tumblr, discord etc. I've been having people test it in the Lazy Duchess discord but i've decided to upload it here for others to test and so no one else can claim they made it themselves lol. Sorry for the lazy photos but basically it's a recoloured version of the original UI. Pretty much all the elements are done. I'll keep updating until it is done basically. It's made to suit my resolution which is 1920x1080 but I will add the options for wider screens at a later date. Also not sure how well it works with Legacy editon so just be aware that it might display weird
Things to be added:
-Animated loading screens (yes I worked out how to do it ;) )
-Updating some of the existing recolours to make them cleaner
-Fixing any bits I missed lol
Install instructions
Place the TS1 UI folder into your downloads.
These are the main files needed
Download
Then place this file into your base game UI folder which should be in a directory similar to this "Program Files x86\EA Games\Sims 2\TSData\Res\UI"
This file replaces the background on the main loading menu as it looks weird without it. It is a placeholder.
Download
Do not delete any of the files in your UI folder. (Please)
If you are already using Clean UI or any other UI replacement, Please uninstall them first. They cannot be used together
Special thanks to @greatcheesecakepersona for their templates as they were insanely helpful
Common misconception for TS2: "every neighborhood needs 4-character folder names"
as it turns out, you can name a neighborhood's folder basically whatever you want, however long you want, and they will still show up in-game. i'm not sure if there's a limit to characters (like how the game doesn't read files in your downloads if the path is over 255 characters long)
in this example, i cloned desiderata valley and riverblossom hills and renamed their folders (and their files within). and i edited the thumbnails so i could tell more easily lol
desiderata is MaryHadALittleLamb.p.p.p and riverblossom is just Riverblossom Hills (because i wanted to see if it handles spaces. it does!)
kinda hard to show that they appeared in the neighborhood list when they have reia files but whatever. it gets the point across
they work in simpe as well!
you could make ur neighborhoods folder look cute this way lol
(there's a risk of scripted events and neighborhood albums breaking with pre-existing hoods, but it's whatever. not a new thing)
I’ve seen errors pop up for mods like Story Progression if you use names that aren’t 4 letters. You can do this, the hood will load, no corruption, no errors in an unmodded game, but certain mods expect a certain number of characters. Personally I’d advise against doing this, you can have tons of hoods with unique names using the 4 letter way. One the subject of changing hood names…
Marticore explains it in this video! It requires using a renaming program unless you have several monotonous hours to kill.
A quick-ish guide to the culture of The Sims 2 modding community.
Are you new to The Sims 2 community? Are you coming from more modern games, either in The Sims franchise itself or other contemporary games? Are you excited to start your #brand and become a #simfluencer and post your #earlyaccesscontent to support your #sidehustle?
Have a seat, then! Let's chat.
Hello, friend! My name's Pooklet. I've been playing since 2004 and creating since 2007. I'm by no means an expert in most forms of content creation itself, but I've been around since the heyday of The Sims 2, I've watched how community opinions have shifted (or not) since practically the beginning, and I'm hoping to give you a basic outline of the community culture that you can expect to encounter as a newcomer.
A very brief history of Sims 2 content monetization:
People have been trying to monetize content since there has been content to monetize, all the way back in the days of The Sims 1. We tend to call them "pay creators" and their websites "paysites." Some big names in this arena include The Sims Resource (their free-with-ads model is a relatively recent development, which is why you will find people to this day calling them T$R), PeggySims, Newsea, and many others that you can find on this handy website:
Paysites Must Be Destroyed
Now, if you have a glance at that website, you might be saying to yourself:
"But, that's illegal! I own the copyright to my custom content!"
Alas, no! Due to the wording of the End User License Agreement for The Sims 2, no custom content creator owns their creations for this game (or The Sims 1, or 3, or 4, for that matter, but we're talking about 2 right now). It all belongs to EA at the end of the day, and by installing and playing the game, you have agreed to these terms. Which means you have no individual, protected copyright, and it is perfectly legal for someone to download your paywalled content and then reupload it for free for others to enjoy. And they will!
Furthermore,
You are not making anything alone.
Everything from modding resources, to tutorials, to the mods required to fix disastrous glitches in the game code and make it playable at all, to the third party programs used to make any and all custom content, such as SimPE—all of these have been provided to you for free by other creators, many of whom have a usage policy that asks that people not use their freely-provided tools to make a profit. Although no one can be forced to follow a creator's policy, it is generally considered good manners to not try to make a profit off of someone else's free work. And if you are using these tools to make paywalled content, that's exactly what you're doing.
Pay creators have been ignoring these policies since the beginning of time, and so free creators likewise ignore their policies against sharing their paywalled content. Pay creators have also tried lots of different ways to keep their content exclusive, everything from trying to track leaks with slightly altered files to actively filling their content with malicious code. It has never worked.
Free creators have always found a way around these barriers. In fact, it's taken as something of a challenge to undermine monetization efforts. As you can see from Paysites Must Be Destroyed, there are entire teams of players devoted to reuploading paywalled content for free.
A culture of sharing.
The Sims 2 is something of a time capsule. At 20 years old, it predates a lot of the hyper-capitalist hustle culture that has infested every creative hobby. It is from a time when monetization was an outlier rather than the norm, and a much maligned outlier at that. This attitude has persisted for 20 years. Believe me when I say, you won't be the combo breaker. Especially now, given that The Sims 2 is not the most contemporary in the series and the community has shrunk considerably, down to the people who have either been here for a very long time, or newcomers that understand the community culture.
Also, it's just kind of not a great idea in general to try to make money off of a 20-year-old game with a pretty small community?
Like, I get that The Sims 4 is really saturated with pay creators and it's hard to get a foot in the door. I get that you might look at The Sims 2 and think that the small pond will give you room to be a big fish. It won't. You might get a handful of people willing to pay for your content, but at least one of those people will be resharing it for free.
Paywalls vs. optional donations.
Okay, so hopefully you now understand why people don't like it when you put content behind a paywall. But what about those Ko-fi and Paypal donation links you sometimes see at the bottom of people's downloads? Why is that okay, but a locked Patreon tier isn't? Well, because they're voluntary. No one is obligated to pay for that content to be able to download and use it. It's just a way for someone who does have a little extra cash to basically "tip" a creator whose content they like. You have no way of knowing whether the person who posts those links is actually receiving any donations. And that's kind of the point. Whether or not they receive any donations, they are still sharing their content, because they enjoy the hobby of making and sharing content.
"I can't make a living off of that!"
No, you can't. Because that's not what we do here. That is not part of our community culture for all the above reasons. If you want to make a reliable income off of your hobby, you're going to need to get a different hobby. Try Second Life! That is a community that actively encourages monetization. The Sims 4 allows for "early access" monetization. There's options out there for you, if what you want is to make a profit off of your creations for a game.
"Fine, what about monetized link forwarding services?"
Link forwarding services historically have malicious trackers or viruses embedded. People will also strip those and provide direct links to each other. Or they just won't download your content.
"What if I want to make YouTube videos of someone else's written tutorials and I enable ad revenue on them?"
Personally, I still think that's a dick move. I love video tutorials, I'm a very visual learner myself, and although you might feel entitled to compensation for reciting the steps of someone else's tutorial into a microphone and then editing and uploading the video, you're still monetizing someone else's freely-provided content. I would consider this an 'ask permission' scenario, one in which you tell the person, explicitly, that you will be making ad revenue off their work. If they're fine with that, then you're good! (For the record, I'm not fine with that.)
edit: more of of my thoughts on monetized youtube videos over here.
"What if—"
Look, no one can stop you from trying to monetize your content, or worse, someone else's content. But you will have the exact same arc as every pay creator who came before you: your efforts will be undermined at every turn, your reception in the greater community will be chilly at best, and it will become a battle between you and the folks resharing free reuploads of your content until any fun you initially had making content is gone.
"The steady erosion of every known social safety net beneath the crippling weight of end-stage, line-goes-up capitalism and the yawning abyss of poverty over which I am dangling has imbued me with such anxiety that I cannot engage with a hobby that precludes monetization. I am exhausted. I know no other way."
I get it, friend! I have lived in poverty all my life. I do not begrudge the impulse to find a way to make passive income off of your every waking moment. Increasingly, it seems like that is the only way to survive! Unfortunately, you will not be able to do that with this specific community. We know that we have something special here, having resisted monetization's encroach for so long, which makes us fight all the more viciously to maintain it. You are entitled to try to find ways to supplement your income, just not here. Personally, I consider that a feature, not a bug.
Bonus Round: Remember, That's Not Just Yours!
I said it earlier, but I want to reiterate: you are not making any TS2 CC alone. You are making it with tools, resources, knowledge and code that people have provided on the condition that they not be used for pay content.
To use myself as an example, "my" hair textures are a blend of resources provided by other creators. Namely, Nouk's original hair texture was edited by Vintage D, which I then further edited over the years, using parts by the creators Ephemera and Helga. It would be extremely shit of me to say "well, I think that the time that I put into my edit is worth money, so I'm charging for it" when the edits that I made would not exist without the work of those people. And it continues on down the line with edits that other people have made of my texture blends and color actions, and the content they make with them.
(If you see someone charging for these, btw, lemme know. I'd love to have a talk with them.)
In closing,
The knowledge base, the resources, the coding required to make any and all working content for The Sims 2 has been compiled for 20 years. Please understand, I'm not trying to denigrate anyone's creativity when I say: you cannot bring anything wholly "new" to TS2 CC-making, something that uses no one else's resources or programs, something you can point to and say "no one helped me with that. I did it all on my own. It is my property." Nor should you aspire to! The fun of The Sims 2 community is to share and share alike, to credit each other for our contributions, to hype each other up and iterate on shared works and resources. We've been doing it for 20 years, and hopefully we'll be doing it for many more! Wanting to be a #simfluencer is utterly antithetical to the community culture. No one is influencing anyone else. You need to leave that shit at the door if you want to be invited in.
TL;DR:
Don't show up to the commie circle-jerk trying to charge for handjobs. We're already giving them to each other for free, and nothing about your wrist technique is special enough to justify the cost.
I don’t get why people insist on monetizing Sims stuff. I get it, I’m struggling myself, but making Sims CC is not and never can be a job. You can take donations. You can take commissions. You can make YouTube videos when you show off your mods or gameplay. But this isn’t a job. It can’t be a job. That’s just not how this community is, because you’re not the only one struggling. If you need to spend your time making money, do that, but don’t make things worse for the community by trying to monetize unmontizable content. The internet isn’t an infinite cash cow, it’s a way to communicate.
Last movie: It's been a couple months and I genuinely can't remember
Last series: The Amazing Digital Circus
Last book: Sunrise on the Reaping
(No pressure <3) @constantlymusing @lastpigeonparty @salmadoesshitsometimes @knighthans @high-on-kaolin @onyx-di-angelo @ramblingsfromthytruly + open tag :)
Last song: Lady Stardust - David Bowie (this one is cos of you Toast)
Last movie: went to the cinema today to watch a french film that was really good, it’s called La venue de l’avenir
Last series: rewatched one episode of Naruto cos I was missing my favourite character
Last book: Les sources de cristal - Gerard Burle it’s a french boon written by a friend of my grandpa, it’s a detective novel and it’s actually really good (and you can find it really cheap on the internet (i have absolutely no shame doing its promotion here))
I really wish that everyone who makes CC would test their stuff on dark skintones. I see so much stuff that I can't use on sims with dark skin because it has a little white edge to it that doesn't show clearly when used on light skinned sims.
It's not just a Body Shop thing either, and this is a fairly recent (last couple of years) piece of CC. This is still a problem.
If you recognize this top, please don't mention the creator. I'm not posting this to shame anyone, but to raise awareness. I've found white edges like this on clothes and makeup from a whole bunch of creators. Some of my older stuff probably does this too. I don't remember exactly when I started intentionally testing and previewing my CC on sims with various skintones, but I believe it should be a common practice.
this site fumbled @graysonkp - Tumblr Blog | Tumgag
