Happy Paralives release day! I'm extremely grateful to have had the opportunity to play Paralives ahead of the release day - big thanks to the team for sharing the game code with me.
To celebrate, I'm sharing some of my favorite tattoo designs as custom tattoos for Paralives. I originally created this artwork for The Sims 4, but now your Paras can also enjoy it. The beautiful thing about tattoos in Paralives is that you can control the scale, the placement, and the rotation of the tattoo decal, so you can be quite creative with your choices!
Download for free on Steam Workshop* / Support me**
What's included:
6 tattoo designs
Fully recolorable (1 recolorable channel)
Adjustable opacity
Available for ages that support tattoos
*Log in to Steam or Paralives to view. Steam Workshop allows for easy downloading of mods and custom content for Paralives. It also enables creators to easily update any uploaded content, which in turn makes it easier for you to track the status of your mods. And, it's free!
**Your support means that I can continue publishing my custom content for free. Follow me: Patreon / Tumblr / Instagram / Bluesky
Not surprised there is already paid cc for Paralives out and about, but I am disappointed. It's an indie game with a dev team that is committed to no paid DLC, so it just feels... extra gross.
That said, I hope people realize the culture around cc for The Sims isn't normal and vote with their wallets and attention instead. Reward (and tip!) creators that do things for the love of the game, hobby, and community. -- And ignore those out for profit.
I hope the Paralives Community becomes chronically unprofitable for them.
Your parafolks now have to pay for diapers for both babies, toddlers and to bottle feed!
Cost:
Baby diaper: 20 paradimes
Baby bottle: 30 paradimes
Toddler diaper: 25 paradimes
Feed in highchair: 15 paradimes
(You can choose to breastfeed or let toddler use potty to avoid some of the cost.)
Note: Toddlers now cannot use the potty if their sleep or affection need is below a certain amount. Without this mod (default game) they could use the potty without any requirements.
If the household can't afford to pay for the items, they will go into debt and whatever amount is owed will be taken from any money added to the household.
So, I picked up paralives and while I have many thoughts (If you want to see my random commentary, I keep that to Bluesky, and this for more coherent things like stories or tutorials.
It's got some wonk but it also has some really promising bones. It is early access but I really think the modding community will make or break the game. So while I have played a bit, I've been focused on how to make mods. Starting with eyes, because that's my default starting point on teaching myself things at this point. I have my eyes in game now:
And my next step is working on default skin replacements because some of the harsh lines bother me no end that are baked into the skin.
I haven't shared the mod for my eyes yet on steam because I'm still testing it in my own game to make sure it works exactly as intended but, I did want to give a few pointers on how files are organized because I struggled with the existing documentation. More below the cut.
So I think Paralives is focusing their team on the big priorities which is good! It's by far my preference, but that means there's not a lot of things like pop up tips or detailed guides when it comes to modding.
But Paralives DOES have things built in to make your own mods wihout needing a third party program like Sims 4 Studio. For eyes, you'll need a texture editor (I use Photoshop). And something like Blender is needed for working on meshes.
File Formats and Locations
Paralives works with .png files for images and .fbx for models. Those are the formats you're going to want to save things into for use in your mods folder. (This is serious basics so I'm not getting into .ini or .config or other things that more advanced most might need.
There are two places that files are stored on the computer. On my machine, the main game files are here:
But you can look up both with Steam and Paralives respectively.
With Steam, you can right click on the game in the list of your games and from the drop down menu select Manage and then Browse Local Files. That will take you to the game files.
In Paralives, on the main menu screen, below Start New Game and Load Game, Settings, etc., there's an option for Mods, which brings you to this page.
Then clicking on the folder icon of one of your mods in the little bar(you can make a blank new one and name it with your project) will take you to the folder that Mod Files should be stored in for the mod you are making.
Finding Base Textures
Now that we know WHERE things are, we can get the textures that paralives is currently using. These will be stored in the main game files.
Anything that makes up a Para is under Equipment in how they refer to it. Clothes, Hair, Eyes, Skin, Teeth, Body Parts. It's all Equipment.
C:\...\Paralives\Main.mod\Species\Human
For humans kid to adult, this is where I found the textures I started with. You can just search through the different file folders and open up things to see what they are - that's the long route I took - but there is a short cut.
Back to Paralives, on the screen where I showed you how to find the folder for mods, start by editing your new blank mod then click on Control Panel in the top bar.
Eyes are Equipment so we'll go there.
I put in Eye to narrow down the search and it ended up being in 'EyeIrisGlobe', if you open up that, you can see all the details about that specific part. In this case, we want to look at the textures that are applied to the eye mesh. This is where we'll change the texture to a new one for the mod later on but if you go and look it up in the menu that pops up, a hover menu will tell you where that file is located.
So, it's a great way to look at what's point to what. While there's not a lot of documentation, this is SUPER helpful for figuring out what goes to what.
What's in an Eye?
A lot, it turns out. There are several different textures that make up the final look of an eye in paralives.
Since Heterochromia is a built in option, there's a mesh for each eye, what Paralives calls the 'greymask' texture and then a colormap mask for each eye.
There's also a greymask for the inner eye ring and each eye has two different colormaps, one for the simple whole eye color and one that allows you to change the whites of the eyes, the inner ring, and the entire iris.
The Greymask:
The Tri Color Mask
Eye Mask
Inner Grey Mask
This doesn't include the catchlights (the white highlights over the pupil), those are their own entry and have additional images in another folder.
For me, all I wanted to do was replace the base eye texture with a different one, same dimensions and same color locations for the different color wheel options, which meant I only needed to replace the greymask texture.
I'm not going to go over how to make a texture for an eye. There are better ones already out there, certainly. This one is just a remake of the eye texture I made for my sims default eye replacement.
Putting it into Paralives
To make the mod, I needed a right and left eye replacement in png format, and at the ratio that they use for textures (1024 x 2048). I strongly recommend using the base greymask of each to model exactly where your replacement is going to fit. Otherwise you'll end up with textures mapped to the wrong mesh as well. Background should be transparent of course.
Now back to Paralives to make it a mod. You'll need to make a New Mod, if you haven't already. Leave the files in whatever place you've saved them. For me, its a working folder on my desktop.
In the game, after you've made the mod, use the folder icon to open the folder window. Paralives automatically makes a folder for your new mod. The files for that mod need to go in THAT folder specifically.
This is the part that caused me serious issues. The game MAY NOT detect the files right away. What worked for me is to exit the game after storing the new files in the right folder and then return to the game.
You will know when the game finds the files as it will pop up a little notice like '2 files were reinstalled'. (Sorry, I didn't manage to screenshot the exact message. I was in and out a bunch of times trying to figure out why I couldn't find the files in the next steps of this. Its the only pop up you get like it. You'll know it when you see it!)
Once you have the files loaded and you've gotten the little pop up, it should go quickly.
Note: A friend who is also working on modding reported that turning the mod on and off has gotten the files to register as well. That may work for you as well! I had to exit the game to get it to show up.
So, click on the mod and then Edit This Mod.
You are now editing the Mod!
IMPORTANT: You will continue to edit this mod even if you go into game and out of game, it will remain in edit mode until you click the stop editing mod button. Which is great for testing. Not so great for not giving yourself a mild heart attack when you realize you're in edit mode and might accidentally change things because you're not paying attention.
Now, back to the control panel!
All we are going to do is replace the HumanEyeLeft.png and the HumanEyeRight.png to point to the new files you made and dropped in the mod folder.
Once that's done, you'll need to make sure that the settings (the wheel icon next to the texture name), match what they should.
The default eye settings for the base game eyes look like this:
For my eyes, that was brighter than I wanted them so I have 'Is Linear' unchecked personally.
The eye that is brighter has 'Is Linear' Checked, the eye that is darker has it Unchecked.
Great! Now you've changed the base eye texture for kid through elder! All that's left to do is repeat the step of replacing the textures and updating the settings for the 'ToddlerEyes' Equipment. That will make the baby and toddler match.
Final Pro Tips
Remember what I said about the 'now editing mod' staying on and the heart attacks?
It IS useful as well. So, if you leave the mod in edit mode, you can actually go into the game and tweak it live. When you're in, for example, Paramaker, Control+F2 will bring up the mod menu and you can make adjustments to the control panel and see them reflected as soon as you change the eye color.
My final word of advice is: BACK UP YOUR MOD FILES. If you delete the mod, it will destroy the mod folder it made for it and any files stored inside. DON'T put your only copy of a texture or a model you've made into the mod folder. Have a backup. For your own sanity down the line.
