Even custom downtowns get dead Tricous - Jon Smith (?) or Jonathon (depends on whether it's Engilsh-English or not - mine is a Jonathon) and the rest duly appear when you add a custom downtown.


I'm not sure it does. They are tagged as downtownies at creation and remain so, so why shouldn't the game recognise them as such (it does for everything else it does with them)? The location of the files is not really relevant and this only seems opaque to humans looking at them because we only see them from the outside so to speak and can't tell what they are without a tool like SimPE. The game can see the files and contents just fine. Also the files get added into the characters folder in the first place. It's not like the game moves them when you delete the Downtown and dumps them in with the rest, they're already there and they're already part of the neighbourhood. Having said that, I have no alternative explanation to offer. Personally, I'd put it down to someone forgetting to get the game to put in a flag or run a checking routine or something like that. Actually now I say that, what it might be is something like the game runs a routine to check for an existing Downtown when you add a new one but is only able to recognise a downtown that is in existence. The routine itself can't recognise when a downtown has been added and then deleted because it checks for the sub-hood file or something (and not townies or the marker in the neighbourhood file). This is likely because the game coders didn't recognise there might be a situation where someone added a downtown and then deleted it again. In other words, though they gave us a delete button for downtowns, they never imagined anyone would ever delete one just like they never imagined anyone would play a neighbourhood for more than a few weeks and so didn't bother writing clean up routines when deleting sims and so on (corruption - yay!). That's my explanation anyway and I'm sticking to it. Typical EAxis.

I got the same result as marka93.

I added a custom downtown to my neighborhood and I didn't get the Tricous, nor the downtownies.

Now, I'm not sure why some people get the downtownies and some don't.

Can I ask a question - What actually happens if you don't add the maxis downtown and just straight up add a custom downtown (i.e. you build your own)? Is it a bad thing? Will the graves that are in the maxis downtown stay in the maxis downtown because you haven;t added it to your hood?

Because I was reading through the thread, and that I was getting confused because everyone had different results - and now I'm just confused.

If you build a custom downtown, there will be no graves in it.

If the dead Tricous are generated for this downtown (and there seem to be different results on this, possibly due to different EP/Mod/Computer system setups), they will not have gravestones and will exist only as character data, until and unless you spawn a grave. They will, however, have the six related teens, who will presumably be able to resurrect them - I have not tested this and don't know of anyone who has, but it should work.

One reason this is confusing is that we're still figuring out how it works, and different people are testing different things, in different conditions - or not testing at all, just forging ahead with playing and reporting on gameplay. If you're thinking of adding a custom downtown to an established neighborhood, and want to know how it will work for you before you do so, I suggest adding one to a test hood and seeing what happens. It should, at least, be consistent for the same user in the same system.

And always back up your neighborhood before adding any kind of subhood! Safety first!

I wasn't aware that could be a bad thing. In my new hood i'm working on I have 1 downtown and it's custom. Hoodchecker DID find the tricou's and whatever popped up for them, but it was able to remove everything from them that it reported on too. So...I guess i'm ok? o.O

Edit: I do have nounlinkondelete if that helps any in this situation

You should be okay.

Nounlinkondelete shouldn't matter here (though of course you should have it) as it's designed to prevent the shredding of character data when a grave is removed. The dead Tricous in the subhood are generating without the grave and are just as they always were. They appear to have full character data, so they won't be any more dangerous than the Tricous you'd get with a normal downtown.

What would happen if you added a Maxis downtown as a second downtown (with character generation suppressed) to a neighborhood that already had a custom neighborhood and the Tricous without the graves, I wonder? Would the graves at Gothier Green Lawns and the House of Fallen Trees just not be there? That seems more likely than that they'd hook up to the dead Tricous. But it's also possible that the character suppression would shred the Tricous represented by the graves. Anyone who wants to test this should definitely do it in a throwaway hood.

I have it where my hoods dont generate downtownies unless i do it myself. So i add a clean version of downtown to my hood and just get all the lots. Then i add a custom downtown to move sims to.

I was looking through my Simblr and found out (I had forgotten) that I added the Maxis downtown AFTER adding a custom (blank) downtown. I didn't know then that it might be a VBT.
I have re-started Strangetown several times and it seems every single time I do something WRONG because I always think I know all the VBT's and then something new comes along that i've already done..again.
Should I start all over again?

Edit: While it's frustrating to stay the least I do love Strangetown enough that I wouldn't mind too much. It's just frustrating how I *say* it's my favorite town but never get very far with it and keep re-starting. When I re-started before it was because I didn't know about Tarlia's cleaned templates so it wasn't as much of a pain, because it was before I knew about VBT's and I was only in my second round. This time i've done 1 round but that includes all of La Fiesta Tech and it's premades, and a couple bin families, so i've done a lot. But there are things I wouldn't mind having a do-over game wise. It's all just annoying.

Accidently did that to my main hood. The graves don't appear nor do extra Tricous appear in SimPE so it seems that it linked with the graveless versions. I did note that where some of the graves should have been instead there were decorate flower vases, I compared the version I had to pictures of the unaltered version (more accurately the version when the maxis downtown is the first downtown added.) So it seems to have both linked the Sims and delete the graves.

I did just look in SimPE upon finding out I had done that (I knew I had a custom and maxis downtown in strangetown but just realized the order in which I did it looking through my simblr, I haven't played it in awhile) and just like you said, no duplicate tricou's here either, so i'm guessing mine has done the same thing.

I'm not really as annoyed as I thought I would be at the prospect of starting over, even though with nounlinkondelete, which I had before I started anything, I probably don't even have to but thinking about it, I kinda want to .

@wickedjr89 you may want to give my The Beginning of Strangetown a try and see if you like it. http://modthesims.info/download.php?t=522185

Sounds like that's not a problem, then - no graves, no unlinked sims, should mean no corruption. Good! I don't think you have to start over at all, Wicked.

Already did, I have other reasons for wanting to start over though. Nice to know for future reference though that it's ok

I've gone into the subhood selector to activate downtown districts and used to have to activate the default one before activating my custom one from an empty terrain in the past on myold computer though that's not the case anymore with the subhood seletor Mod installed which actually changed it so I can just jump straight into usind any blank terrain for any shopping district or downtown I want without even adding the defaults first unless I want to activate them.I found the only issue might be losing track of sims if you grow the town too quickly because you'd be adding way too much all at one so I recommend taking your time and adding these things slowly over time.I'm taking ti slow in my BACC and won't be rushing to add tons of things in all at once and will add them very slowly over time as a town would grow in real life.

Provided that the hood is in fact completely empty the only thing that you would be doing is adding a map to the hood No extra Sims will be generated. Perfectly safe.
If you want an inhabited attachment go for meetmetotheriver's clean templates which can be downloaded as shopping districts which don't corrupt the game.

I've never added more sims just by activating a shopping district or downtown from the terrain templates because mine are all empty ones and I just added more in for more choices when activating new districts to expand into having multiple neighborhoods in my town.I do it from in the game so I can have a new district ready for my town to begin expanding it's population without running out of space for housing.