I was just wondering what you guys do with your desert NH's if you have seasons - do you have summer all year round or use other seasons such as spring or autumn?

For my desert environments, I tend to set the seasons as Spring-Summer-Summer-Autumn. I find setting all of them to summer gives me too high a chance of heatstroke, and spring gives an indication of a 'rainy' season. I'm still debating over the use of autumn though -- in a place where it doesn't get cold, why would deciduous trees start to lose their leaves.

Hmm, maybe I should remove autumn the next time I play Strangetown :P

Technically speaking, a desert is any are which has very little to no precipitation during the year. Because of this, the North Pole qualifies.
And I can attest that the Arizona desert and Death Valley can get mighty darned cold.

That aside, I think the Spring/Summer/Summer/Autumn approach is about the best you can do to simulate the American southwest.

Death Valley has really cold winters from what I've heard. It beats the plains states in extreme temperatures!

I tend to do Summer, Summer, Spring, Spring, because even deserts usually have a rainy season. Though I have debated whether it should be Summer, Summer, Summer, Spring.

I have this for Strangetown and have Summer Summer Autumn Summer, just for a bit of variety. Autumn is quite near Summer, but adds a few different things like tree colours and leaves on the ground, I find one season all 'year' round can get a bit boring and I tend not to appreciate the EP as much, especially with Summer all the way through because there isn't as much difference between the base game weather and Summer as there is with Winter, for example.

My favorite and main hood is a desert (based on Roswell, New Mexico) and I only have Winter removed and replaced by another round of Summer. (Summer-Summer-Fall-Spring). As long as I don't get snow, it all seems realistic enough to me.

I have summers, with one spring at the end of the year, but i miss autumn. Falling leaves do look wierd in a desert, but i miss being able to add them to the compost bin, lol. Plus there's the higher skill building factor. I like the spring summer summer autumn setting, i might change to that.

I NH based on Roswell sounds really interesting jooxis - do you upload your stories or pictures?

I really only play the one NH and it's a Sp-Su-Au-Wi NH. However on the rare occasion I play Strangetown I do make it summer all year round.

If it didn't snow in deserts, New Mexico couldn't have a skiing industry.

I'm actuall planning on posting more pics and maybe even a blog, once it becomes a bit more populated and I make a some more community lots



Well, I know it does snow in some "desert" areas but I guess this is more of a make-believe world for me. I've never been to New Mexico or a desert area so I'm really basing it off how I envision such an area to be (plus, I hate snow in real life :D).

Putting autumn in - for variety, could perhaps pose as a extra hot season, causing draught and death of trees? Just a thought, since I play 'hoods with classic Spring-Summer-Fall-Winter kinda patterns myself

Good point!

I usually do Summer-Spring-Spring-Summer (; [[off topic]] cause i lived in the desert since forever and it only snowed once O;

Depends on where regionally it is. I've had deserts that were autumn-winter-winter-winter (I lived in a place with an altitude of 7000' and 9" of precipitation, annually. 28 days frost free on average.) I've had deserts that were summer-summer-spring-fall. If I count apocalypses I've had all winter deserts. I haven't had any deserts that were all summer. I save that for tropical rain forest neighborhoods. Heat is dealt with by water-balloon fights and water wigglers. But it does seem to me that 'take a cold shower' ought to be an option on the showers
I'm also just picky enough that my sims can only grow tropical trees in neighborhoods where it doesn't snow: no lemons or oranges for any sims who have winter. Conversely, real apple trees need a cold season, so if my sims are in a neighborhood where there is no winter, then no apples.

There's a mod for that: http://nene.modthesims.info/download.php?t=286932 :P

For my desert dwellers, I do Summer, Summer, Summer, Autumn. There are 2 reasons I add Autumn...1) It adds a bit of variety so my poor little Sims don't get too bored. 2) Sims learn quicker in Autumn so it makes it a little easier to get skill points in the neighborhoods where I don't use cheats


Sunbee - I had never thought about the tree thing!!!! OMG! Now I'm going to pay attention to that! DUH!

For my Uni hoods, fall-fall-fall-fall so they get the most of their education and so I don't have to spend a lot of time watching them earn skills. They can spend more time at the community lots and having friends over.

For my other hoods, I usually have fall-fall-spring-summer, or spring, fall, fall, fall.

Either way, I don't pay much attention to what the terrain is because I know that there is enough variety in different regions that I can have varied climates all over the place, and different climates in my subhoods. But my favorite season for most of my hoods is fall, so I often have a bunch of that. And summer-fall-summer-fall for anything that I might make a desert landscape. Maybe. It just depends on my mood for that hood/subhood. But in the end it doesn't matter too much because I just try to make the neighborhoods all different. If I really want to see one of my sims playing in the snow, I can just use weather hacks or something. Or wait until one of my other subhoods has that for weather and let my sims go to a community lot to hang out. Although generally, winter is my least favorite season in rl and in the game, so I just don't use it.

As others have said, it's a misconception that deserts are always warm. Deserts are defined by the amount of precipitation (rain or snow) an area gets, not the temperature. Most of the coldest recorded non-polar temperatures were recorded in deserts. Speaking as one who lives just outside of the US Southwest in Colorado, at an altitude of about 8000 feet and a precipitation level just a smidge above desert, our climate is mostly clear, dry, and sunny. We have sunshine, on average, 335 days a year, but it's certainly not always warm! We experience all four seasons, in fact, although the summer tends to be quite short, due to altitude more than anything else.

But to answer the question, I set my desert 'hood at summer-summer-spring-spring, to attempt to simulate an equatorial desert rainy season/dry season kind of thing. Trouble is, it tends to rain a lot in the summer, too. Sometimes it seems like I have a never-ending thunderstorm going on. Now I'm wondering if there's a way to control how often it rains in the summer, so that it "feels" a little more authentic...

spring summer summer fall.. cos it makes sense..

People should just create the weather they want to see in the game. Personally, I don't try to make my game a reproduction of my life or real places I know. Some of my hoods aren't even on earth because the sims aren't human so I feel free to create an environment that is unlike any possible or known to me.

I enjoy the game but try not to make it too real. And the less it resembles life as I know it, the more I can enjoy playing. For the most variety, you can make different subhoods and have all the different weather patterns you want.

The summer season in the sims doesn't seem real to me because it rains much too much. I think the developers were a bit too impressed with their thunderstorms because they happen with more frequency than I like, or is reasonable for summer. Summer is too much like spring. I like the look of trees and the leaves on the ground in the fall, but I think it is unnatural that fallen leaves causes my sims environment score to drop so drastically. It isn't trash or garbage, it is just leaves, get a grip. I wish there was a hack that would boost my sims' moods when they see leaves on the ground. Then I could stop avoiding so many trees in my lots.

I don't like winter in real life, but in my game it was more cold than snow, and a bunch of thunderstorms. What's the point of my sims having outerwear if they are just going to freeze all the time when outside for just a short while as if they were outside naked?

I don't want to make real places in my game but I sure wish I could tweak it so that summer was more like the summer I imagine - hot and dry. And fall's colors would be enjoyable for my sims. As it is, the seasons don't make sense, so they should be called something other than spring, summer, winter and fall. O maybe have extreme winter, mild winter, extreme summer, mild summer, etc. That would be much more fun and easier to get the weather patterns we really want for our hoods.