Hello,

By looking at some of the files in the back up I blundered across, I figured out I had downloaded most of my remaining Hobbit/LoTR stuff from Comhair at different-worlds.net/sims. I was able to pull it up on the wayback machine, but when I click on the download links it takes me to a screen for something called "FilePlanet" that wants me to sign up for a membership to download. I may be crazy, but I try not to be stupid and I don't think I'm going to do that.

http://web.archive.org/web/20070202...lots/index.html

Does anyone know if the files from this site are archived somewhere?

I don't know if it contains what you're looking for, but YoNonna uploaded a huge quantity of stuff to https://simfileshare.net/folder/166957/, and it includes some Comhair stuff.

You can also find some hobbits, elves, fairies, and other fantasy creatures at Andrasta's World:

http://doortomore.net/simblesse.html

But I think you're already aware of that.

There's also another aggregate CC archive on the Internet Archive -- in case it helps with some of the content:

https://archive.org/download/sims-1-cc

Thank you both. Those look very promising. I think part of my problem is not associating names with sites. For instance I only figured out today that Hooty Holler and Minthas Garden were the same. I’ve found a handful of their stuff archived, but apparently moonsims was active until recently and I’m not finding stuff archived.

Ive got a trash compactor, dish washer, and fireplace that all say they belong in Tom Bombadil’s house, but no stinking clue as to where I downloaded them. Opening up a zip file and finding a note from the creator and a jpg of the item is like opening up a plastic Easter egg and finding a couple of pieces of good chocolate instead of generic jelly beans.

Oh well, that’s on me for deciding to start playing a game that’s old enough to buy its own beer.

And a game whose community content was created in the earliest days of the web. You can always ask for help, though. We have community members who have been around long enough to remember.

One thing that made this community special from the start is what we remember every single site we ever discovered, because each site was a treasure trove.

The Internet Archive's Wayback Machine can sometimes help -- especially if the site has been around until recently, and had a classic download link structure:

https://archive.org/

If you know the URL of the site, you can enter it, and go back in time to visit the site -- even if it no longer exists. If the site had a classical download link structure, you may even still be able to download the items right from the site. But you can also see things like any name changes to the site through time, etc.

In this case that doesn't help, because the author of the site hosted the content of FileFront, and FileFront is a filesharing site that disappeared, that was closed down -- though some of its content has been preserved by the different online communities.

A limited selection of the Sims FileFront content is still available on GameFront (the site that replaced FileFront), but it's a totall mess in terms of navigation (and I don't think you'll find the content you're looking for there):

https://www.gamefront.com/games/the-sims?page=1

Edit:

Oops, I just realised this author was actually using FilePlanet, not FileFront. That's even worse! I don't know any content that was hosted on FilePlanet. The author was using their Gamespy account to host the site and downloads/content. That's a really bad idea, not at all sustainable.

I imagine this content would have been hard to access even back in the day when the site was alive and active.

Yes, some of the stuff on the Wayback Machine feels like watching very old commercials recorded in videos. (an old VHS tape of the Chicago Bears 1986 Superbowl comes to mind) It was a different internet. Interesting to see that some folks were trying to monetize CC back then, but to be fair web hosting isn't cheap.

I came across this http://treasuredtwice.space/index.html which is an archive of Sims content on Yahoo Groups. I'd forgotten about them, but some of the names jogged a memory. I may never find Bag End, but I now have the rest of Tom Bombadil's kitchen and I'm enjoying my scavenger hunt.

There is also some Comhair stuff in this archive, under the yahoo groups folder:
https://simfileshare.net/folder/144507/
If you want the whole lot, I would recommend the torrent:
https://archive.org/details/sims-1-cc

The amazing thing about these archives is that they all seem to have different pieces of the content. For example, the zip for Hooty Holler on one list has files that are different from Hooty Holler on another list, and if I combine both folders in a file in my computer, there might be one or two duplicates, but not a lot of overlap.

I'm also shaking my head about the file sizes. Do we even measure anything in kb anymore? Granted, my first PC in the 90s had a "huge" 100MB hard drive that I thought would take forever to fill up. I don't remember how big my year 2000 hard drives were, but I think they were less than a GB and a TB was science fiction.

I didn't organise the files at all, I just zipped up the ones that weren't compressed, and used better compression on some of them. The origin is this MTS member who kindly donated the files before they deleted them forever:
https://modthesims.info/m/showthread.php?p=5767562
I had to upload them all seperately to SFS, but the archive accepts the whole lot as one, and will share a torrent link too. I would strongly recommend that everyone who has Sims 1 stuff on their hard drives should upload it to the Internet Archive, as well as other file sharing sites. I can give people invites to Simsfileshare if they'd like one.

I remember when we splashed out on a 6GB hard drive, and my better half said, "we'll never fill that up!"

The core Sims game was under 300 MBs, and that was HUUUUGE!

Compared to most DOS games it was, anyway. From under 10 MB to under 300 MB is not a small jump.

Then in the next few years, the GBs kept on rolling up on The Sims with each new expansion pack and all the CC, as our hard drives kept expanding.

Our FAT storage Windows computers. 🤭 (That couldn't store a single file that is more than 4 GBs in size.)

In the beginning, the game took up less than half the space on a 700 MB CD. By the end, in a few years, you needed two or three CDs for each expansion pack, and they hardly fit on the CDs!

Then came the DVDs as data storage. Then the USB flash memory sticks. Until in the end we threw everything away for vast amounts of hard disk space and everything downloadable and streamable through the web. (Something that was completely unimaginable in the 2000s.) All over a period of only 20 years.

A 7 MB file took 17 minutes to download back then, 20 years ago. A single MB took 2 and a half minutes.

If you released a 14 MB mod back then, people would be waiting 34 minutes to download it -- provided that the Internet connection did not get interrupted in the meantime by a bad connection, or by a phone call! 😅

A 30 MB mod/update? Forget it!! (You'd have to be truly desperate to keep persisting at attempting to download it.)

You’d set it up to download overnight and then cross your fingers that it would actually be there when you got up in the morning. I paid to have a separate phone line installed so my father would stop complaining about my modem tying up the line, then added DSL to it when that came out. It was so exciting when they came out with an improved modem, but cable internet was “the bomb”.

An old, archived medieval/fantasy themed list of Sims sites:

https://web.archive.org/web/2008122...topic.php?t=274

Lists of other themed Sims sites:

https://web.archive.org/web/2011021...topic.php?t=284

(Most links to the threads don't work, but some do -- some have been archived.)