Well, today is usually supposed to be a celebration for me. Today marks my 6th Creator Anniversary, it is also my 160th upload. Like usual I'm bringing something interesting to the table, but it's bittersweet. On July 3, my beloved cat died. She had been wasting away with stomach cancer for over a year and though we'd had surgery three times to remove tumors, she lost the battle. She'd been part of our family for 11 years, not long enough at all for an indoor cat by any means. She had been 'my' cat for the first half of that time. I had picked her out at the pound as a spritely kitten when I was 15. After I went away to college, it became apparent that she had been Mom's cat all along.

To help deal with the loss of her, I've spent the last few weeks gathering photos of her and creating as faithful a sim cat version of her as I can. Early on I ran into a stumbling block. She has a very unique 'eyeliner' marking on her face and just the very tip of her tail is white. Neither one of these has anything even close to it in game, so I had to figure out how to make custom coat patterns. I'd figured this should be relatively easy, Pets has been out for around 5 years, surely we know how to do that by now. However, I found that this was not the case! Apparently there is an issue with the custom group preventing patterns from working correctly and it was never solved (and still is not). There were some other issues as well but those I was able to work out relying on my bodyshop modding knowledge. I'm *very* close to making custom pet eyes, but it is also entirely possibly that while close, the rest of the way is impossible, so who knows.





These two coat patterns will appear in front of all the other patterns, just as every other custom CAS bit does. They also have the CC star, custom tooltip, and display it in the coat layers panel. (All of those things were not working when this project was abandoned.)



I'll be posting a tutorial on how to make your own coat patterns soon, but it's super late now so look for it over the weekend.
If you are interested, I have a photobucket album of some of her pictures up (only from when she was healthy, nothing depressing!)

To install, place all three packages in your downloads folder. Pretty simple!
If you want her personality to be 'accurate' as well, give her these traits: genius, mid-active, mid-independent, aggressive, and finicky.

I hope no one finds this terribly morbid, but it's really been helpful dealing with the grief. I was fortunately to visit home the weekend before she died and my mom was with her when she passed. She went quickly and was not in pain. The funeral was hard, but it was very lovely. She has a pretty grave up near the shade trees and we planted her favorite yellow flowers for her there. I miss my kitty so much.

- Phae, and sim Bootsie Cat

Custom Content by Me:
- Boostie Cat as Custom Breed
- Custom Eyeliner Pet Pattern
- Custom Tail Tip Pet Pattern

Additional Credits:
Echo and WesHowe for laying most of the groundwork for me.
Huge thanks to my bf, pointycollars, for rescuing me when I needed a few extra pictures taken but would have had to wait until after work to take them myself, thereby missing my deadline. He's never played the game before, but was able to get me the last two images and saving my butt! Thank you so much hunny!