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I did a lot of experimenting with Castaway in terms of mods and CC and stuff. You might be interested in this tag on my Tumblr:
http://dramallamadingdang.tumblr.co...way+experiments
In my experimenting, I found that Castaway seems to like Seasons versions of mods, even though it has some stuff from Bon Voyage in it. Some later mods will work. Some won't work at all. I have no idea about CustomPostEffect, as I don't use that mod. If you're a picture-taker, Live Camera mods will work; neighborhood camera mods will not, or at least the one I use in TS2 does not. Some mods don't work unless/until you've completed the guided story, though. (ACR v1 is one of those, and even after that it sort of goes wonky, so eventually, I didn't use it in the scenario I was playing in that game.) When it comes to mods in the game, you just have to experiment, and my advice is to look for mods that are compatible with, at the latest, Seasons.
Here's a post on my Tumblr that contains a screenshot of the mods folder for my Castaway game. That's by no means a comprehensive list of what WILL work; it's just what is useful for the scenario I played (and that I'm soon rebooting) in Castway.
In terms of making stuff look better, neighborhood deco custom skies/horizons work (On-lot sky domes do not) and show through on lots with stars/moons/shooting stars visible without using the Skyfix mod, so it must not have the broken skies that Seasons has. Lush terrain defaults work, lush being the only terrain the game has. As muridae said, the game was designed to be lower-res and to run on lower-spec machines (like laptops of the day), so it probably has limitations in terms of how much high-res/high-poly crap you can stuff into it, and probably has the same texture memory processing issues that TS2 has (which causes pink flashing in TS2), so you'd be wise to be somewhat conservative in that regard. That being said, I didn't hit any sort of limit when I first played it. So: All CAS default replacements meant for TS2 will work so long as the item you're replacing exists in Castaway.
(I'm busy making a full set of dirty/bedraggled hair defaults specifically for the game.) All CAS CC ought work so long as it's not dependent on any Maxis meshes/textures that don't exist in Castaway. Overlay boxes (like for body hair and tattoos) work. Build/Buy CC also works, with the same limitations as CAS stuff, but it will appear in strange places in the game's Buy ("Barter") catalog since the category structure is different. Most neighborhood deco CC works.
Overall, the game is surprisingly flexible. I was quite honestly surprised how much it could be modded, and I'm not really entirely done with experimenting in that regard.