Welcome to Enigma Academy!

Provisional Description:

Hidden within a former industrial district, where the land itself seems to behave differently, Enigma Academy stands as both an institution and a relic. What is now presented as a prestigious private university was once a factory, a training complex, and something far harder to define. Fragments of those original structures remain, partially restored, as if the past refuses to loosen its grip.

The academy is known for attracting students who are brilliant, influential, or dangerously curious. For years it served almost exclusively the elite, though its recent return to scholarship programs has reignited old social tensions. No one speaks openly about what happened the last time scholarship students filled its halls, yet incomplete records and persistent rumors continue to circulate across campus.

Surrounding the main grounds lies a long-abandoned town, recently acquired in full by the academy’s board. Once home to workers, families, and small businesses, it fell into decay after unexplained closures and population loss. Officially, the purchase marks a controlled expansion of university facilities. Unofficially, some buildings remain sealed, others repurposed without explanation, and a few appear untouched, as if time simply stopped there.

Beneath its academic facade lie unconventional faculties, laboratories absent from official maps, and student societies whose secrets are never mentioned in any handbook. The nearby harbor, the sealed-off pier, and several areas marked as “restricted” are part of everyday university life, though students are advised not to visit them alone… advice that is rarely followed.

Enigma Academy is said to be built upon a telluric nexus, a place where experimentation comes more easily and consequences are far harder to contain. Perhaps that is why some students never return, others come back changed, and a few seem to know far too much. Between rival fraternities, nocturnal celebrations, conspiracy-obsessed students, and inherited secrets, history appears to repeat itself, as though the academy itself were watching.

Here, knowledge is power.
And power always demands something in return.

But the question remains: will its students ever make it to graduation?




Contributors to date: Yinepu, ed95, Higginserted, Sokisims,


Guidelines:

How To Build University Dorms In The Sims 2

Tutorial: How to Create a Custom Subhood Template

Tutorial: How to Change the Neighborhood Type




Antique Information: (3rd Oct 2024)

As I’m nearing the final touches and additions of Service Area and Jeans Shaker Oasis, and with Aberon Garden coming along nicely with a well-defined story, I thought delaying the start of the university project didn’t make much sense anymore. A project like this needs time so that anyone who wants to participate can have time to send in their contributions!

Here’s the idea: We choose a map and a concept and go from there. I was thinking of a grey or earth-toned map, turning it into a sort of cc-free military-laboratory-university with its respective faculties, fraternities, dormitories, community lots, and houses. If anyone has other ideas or wants to expand on this concept, I’m all for it! I’d love for this to be a project where everyone has a say. ^^ I had also thought about a kind of private academy that gives scholarships to poor sims in the region where there is a secret and evil society with sims disappearing... xD

While I’d like the starting point to be based on the Cassidyverse, focusing on government conspiracies, everyone is welcome to add lore from their own Custom Hoods, Maxis, or create their own lore characters, whether they tie into my lore or not. I think mixing random ideas with different lores could result in a wild and unique university. You can always make up random college sims that have a normal life XD! Nor do I intend for my neighborhoods to be the protagonist, with having some reference to rich people who study there, lodges, and mad scientists, I have enough, your families or your lore can be the central axis! Everything is welcome! Aliens, magic, random things... ^^

The idea is that the university has its own story regardless of whether it has any reference to our neighborhoods, so I think that starting with a university with industrial, mountain, dirt, lakes or seas, or something like that, maybe something extravagant with different terrain levels and some conspiracies... It would be cool.

I participate in whatever tasks others might not want to do, so the more things you send, the better it will be. I don’t intend to take control, you can add whatever you want.

Feel free to send whatever you’d like: dorms, faculties, community lots, houses, Sims (with or without bios)… You can extract Sims from your own games or use lots you’ve already built, though it would be great if you could clean them up a bit first. If not, I can take care of that. Also, it’s preferable to build the lots in clean neighbourhoods without Sims, ideally, universities with no Sims where the base neighbourhood also has none, so that they can be extracted and sent over. But if anyone is unsure how to do this, just send it to me, and I’ll clean it up later.



As for credits, the idea is to create a group where we all share the same credit, and the load appears on our profiles, so this university could be useful for many different Hoods. If there are people who just want to collaborate without that, whatever they want! They will be named in the lot or sim. It goes without saying that everything has to be your own creation!

Everything will be published and debated here, and if someone wants to take the reins in terms of how to organize the lots or edit the hood, there will be no problem, the objective is that it looks nice in the end.

So, we could start by deciding on a map and a bit of the story if you'd like… Does anyone have a map they think would fit the concept? If no one sends a map within a few weeks or months, I’ll start looking myself and reach out to creators to ask for permission.

It doesn’t matter if you think you’re not a great builder or if you feel a bit lazy, there’s plenty of time! Variety is what will make the university even more unique!

Regarding the name of the university, it would be ideal that when things are more advanced we put it to a vote.

I've been meaning to reinstall my disc copy of SimCity 4 for some of my other projects, and since I was going to do that anyway, I'm just kind of curious, would you like me to attempt to create a terrain for us all to use? Definitely something with lots of roads for us to have enough space to build and create!

Yes, go ahead! Try to see what comes out. Remember that you have to lower the terrain a little so that it is not too high in the game. I was waiting to see if people confirmed their participation. If each person sent a house or one sim the project would be viable, but if no one participates it is impossible... xD I guess the best thing is not to be in a hurry and see if in the end someone is encouraged.

Hi again to both of you, @Sokisims and @HarVee!! I would like to say that... ¡me apunto! Count me in!! Unfortunately I'm just getting back to work and school, so my time is very limited, but I' d love to contribute something to a project with both of you, since you're both so cool and talented creators!! I would like to make anything (specially characters or lots, but I like everything about making hoods!), and I like your proposed theme, Sokisims.

I had thought that if no one wants to send constructions, which is what usually makes people lazy, I could search for lots published here and ask for permission and give credits, as has been done previously in other hoods. XD

Thanks to both of you for your offer, I'm counting on you then, @ed95 let's see if @HarVee makes a cool map!! and we can start deciding the approximate number of lots needed. XD

I would like the difference in social classes to be noticed on the map and the rich students were in the higher areas xD. And have many medieval or ancient buildings such as faculties or some residences, and other simpler or eccentric or post-apocalyptic and industrial ones and some beach area with a port. xD And towers and places with basements and things like that. I am quite in favor of the gray color for the floor of the map, although it is not realistic it gives it a nightlife touch and can differentiate it from other universities.

About sims or families, if you can think of any sim for the uni, send it ^^. I haven't thought about any yet, but it would be nice if in some cases we added family relationships, even if only through siblings. I wonder if we can make some teachers parents of students? There wouldn't be any problem in a cc free hood, right?

Hi again!

OK, so I have some ideas for getting started on the Uni.

Continuing on your idea, @Sokisims, I've toyed a lot with the idea of a Uni with a nearby village associated. We could have an old, (Center?) European town where a factory (or a military base?) was built, going for a mix of really old, decrepit buildings and renovated ones with mechanical parts. This was a little village on the bottom of a gorge where a concrete factory was built; but however it was eventually abandoned. Right now, an university sits on there.

The old factory buildings have been repuropused into university ones, and the (abandoned) village has reopened its business and used old houses for student's accomodation. The technique for stacked lots could become really handy here.

However, the university itself has decided to go for the "pricey, private" route, and has built an entire avenue with residences for them on the top of the gorge. There's also a mysterious "out of bounds" zone right on the other side of the gorge...

Uniting this with the story of the Uni, popular protest has led to theme opening an art division for scholarship, poor students (my sims are intended to be art majors). However, the ridicously powerful and shady student council (that could be a fraternity household), won't let them study at THEIR university!!! Maybe they're trying to hide something shady...?

This could accomodate for familial relationships between students and professors, although I'm not entirely sure if the game reacts well to that. Special sims, like the coach, should be no trouble. Maybe one sim is the son or daughter of the old cafeteria cook? There's a veeeery old mod that allows for adult to enroll in university, but you need a base hood for that and they act like young adults. Nothing could stop us from making some of the students older-aged, however.

We could go for a Dark Academia/steam/cyberpunk aesthetic, just as Victor_tor has made on his hood. Some visual ideas for this...





(Maybe it could be a fish farm instead?)

I've also drawn a (very sketchy) map of my idea. I'm not really a very good map builder; your ideas surely are better, @HarVee.



Around the Uni campus, we could put some perimeter roads like the beautiful ones you use on Plot of Land, HarVee!

@ed95 I completely loved how you described the story. The map, the photos and the ideas about the council, the disputes and everything, I find it fascinating! And I say yes!!

The only thing is that I would like to make it consistent with what you say that many rich students had already studied there before for several generations... Maybe the Academy was just a small area on the map and over time he bought the entire map with the promise of give scholarships to poor students but are clearly failing giving clear preference to the rich? XD

I have been very interested in some event that could have occurred in the town decades or hundreds of years ago. I would also like there to be a secret government laboratory where more advanced science, medicine and other students work on dark secret projects. (So ​​we could add some abomination or something like townie xD)

Regarding mods like stacking, I hope you agree to avoid any mod and try to make the uni as cc free as possible. And if any mod is added, let it be minimal and optional.

Edit: Maybe I would try to make the map a little more centered and the houses in the rich area not be so close to the limits. But I love everything.

Oooh I like that!!! Maybe we should have an (implied) underground tunnel under the buildings of the town and Uni??

The idea is of course a work in progress tee hee. I like your idea of a very dishnoest owner of the Uni -and a mutant townie!! I also like the idea of giving dormies bios and complex personalities.

Factories really were started on the 1700's. They could have been closing gradually the factory as the owner of the Uni was buying it ─or maybe the people behind it are still there, and want a cover for their less than licit activities?? I like the idea of an event that altered the town. Maybe an escaped mutant that is now part of the local folk legends?

Don't worry about mods! Stacked buildings can be used without any. You just edit the position of the lot with an outside program. Although, given the magnitude of the story, maybe we could consider giving an option to have two versions of the uni (one on the main hood)??

I think it would be better to leave it to a board of billionaire shareholders, royalty and so on, without limiting it to a single family. It was one of the places where the rich educated their children and then they bought it. So the owners are the different shareholders. This way we don't limit the importance to a single family. :D

And yes, I love that there are still sims that belong to families that are behind the event that happened a long time ago, including owners of the uni. It is not necessary to use mods, they can be sims without a family tree beyond a brother or if we do a test to see if it works well with townies or npc. But the imagination does the rest.

I think that the stories that we say and the scenario that you have shown can be done without mods, many players prefer it and it is much more accessible, in addition to preventing future problems and I also want this uni to be easily added to my neighborhoods or other neighborhoods without having to configure anything. If you say that making stacked houses is viable without mods for the player, perfect, no problem.

Edit: If you want to make the mutant a part of an ancient legend, we can make the legend of a mutant student condemned to repeat a grade forever... xDD There are always ideas for not using mods xD!

Edit2: Although of course, regarding what I have said, in reference to the director, or rather son or sons of the director of the uni, it could be a surname and family exclusive to the uni. Directly involved in what happened. Could it be that they wiped out the town's inhabitants? Or did they sacrifice someone? Or did they do experiments? Or all at once? XDD

Edit3: I suppose that one thing is the son or sons of the director of the Academy-University-Industries whose last name could be the name of the town or something invented. And then there are the sims children of the shareholders' meeting who could be the Ravengolds of the Cassidyverse, (with one or two sims I will settle). Some Landgraab families in reference to HarVee's neighborhood and some of yours, ed95. And then if more people join. And then sims exclusive to this hood with no reference. Same with sims who aren't rich... Although we could also add a descendant of a poor or ex major who lived in the poor area who has arrieved to study and seeks revenge and has a last name like the town...

I love your diagram @ed95 ! I am going to use it as reference for the terrain, but to have the perimeter roads we'd need to use Criquette's Rural Lane neighborhood CC Set, and idk if we should use CC for the sake of making it more accessible. Although the set is very small in size, wouldn't be that hard to have it maybe as an optional thing.

I agree wholeheartedly about not using mods. Some optional CC, I like it too!!!

Thank you both for your feedback! I'm pretty messy making nhoods, so all comments are very appreciated. I agree we should have different families, the board of shareholders of the facility/compound/factory. I have an idea, I'll test in my game if there's any problem about putting a cementery in a uni hood; thay way, we could have some ancestors, just for story. Of course, that's if you like that idea; given how many dormies the game creates, it's better not to bloat the nhood with characters.

Although something interesting could be made given we can use the Resuctonomitron...👀

Great that you like what Ed has done, @HarVee ^^

@ed95 Brilliant!! Let's see if we can add a cemetery as you say. It's great that the story is starting to develop. ^^ If not, we can always invent something and have the graves be in a residential lot with a funeral touch. xD The dormies can be created in the body shop and then added. Mods can be used so that random dormies are not generated. We should try to make the NPCs have interesting faces too xD

Not sure if it's really that good, I tried to go for a rockier landscape inspired by the photos @ed95 shared. So, I abused SC4's terrain erosion and deep canyon terrain tools... a lot. I abused them so much I'm surprised they don't go and charge me for it! I also kind of forgot that TS2 inverts the roads and terrain from what you see inside SC4, but the result still is somewhat similar to what ed95 shared. The road up to the mesa/crater thing was something I just did randomly, but when I finished doing that, I decided it could be a base for a zombie test center, or a mad scientist lab or a military base. Y'know, things you'd want hidden. I liked the Uni center idea, but I did make it a bit smaller and added two parallel roads inspired by Strange town.

I didn't decorate it in these images and used the default grass terrain for demo purposes. I suppose we could always change it to whatever if we decide to use this terrain.

btw I just named it Mystery U as a demo name, but oddly I do kind of think the name fits. But it's up to a vote to what the final name will be, of course.

Wooow I like it a lot more than my map!!! The road disposition feels more natural than what I had envisioned, and it also has a lot of nooks and crannies that make it look a lot bigger than it is!!! Congratulations!!!

Mystery U is a name I also like a lot. If it was named after someone or the founding family, "Mystery" sounds like a good last name.

EDIT: @Sokisims, I just read your edits! Tee hee I was just imagining just that, a perennial student, with a bio that reads something like "He hopes this is his last semester. After all, it's already the 39th", and is part of the legend surrounding the uni. Of course, as you say, the name of the uny must be the surname of one of the founding families! Maybe even the founder is somewhere in the uni to be found... I'm thinking he has ties to the Secret Society and/or the cowplant.

On the terrain and the map I prefer to let you two debate and come to an agreement.

But woow! I really like the area with the lakes!! (maybe slightly larger lakes?), the mountains and how the areas feel separate, and also how it looks from above!! Love it @HarVee My imagination flies! Although it would be great to see it in grey! :D

Maybe the "blocks" where the urban centers are located would be a little taller and maybe it would add a few more squares to what would be the center. But you can debate that.

The only thing I am quite inflexible about without being able to avoid it is with roads very close to the limits of the map!! xD Also I would also like the university-academy to have a lot of night life, young-adults are the life cycle that suits the most having parties. and I imagine it with parties at night with the fog xD!

But love! Thank you very much for publishing a map, I want to we start deciding the rest

On my part, I find the terrain just perfect! We can always edit it and add onto it. I would agree roads should be more on the center of the map, since not all people can see all the edges of it. I agree too that the uni should have a lot of nightlife; for a spin, I would use the idea of having old buildings as hangouts. Keeping most of those together would give it a more close-knit air, just like the Maxis ones.

I like the idea of something veeeery shady that the shareholders did to the people from the village. Specially a sacrifice; given how rocky and serendipituos the terrain @HarVee has done is, maybe it's not too strange that people tend to disappear around. Since there are roads very close to the lake, there could be suspicious a boat pier there.

I'm quite flexible with it, but I think it's really up to you @Sokisims and @ed95 to come to agreements on what you'd like changed.

Anyway, I'm going to upload the terrain file itself, so you can see how it looks in the game and such. Also, if you have SimCity 4 installed, you are free to make edits...

Link

Well, everyone uses camera mods and doing it with that in mind would be strictly restrictive, we all make neighborhoods with necessary camera mods. It was more in the aesthetic sense that when people use horizons or do not use them at all, the limit is seen too much and it is always good for the lots to have a certain atmosphere around them to take advantage of the setting. Although compacting a little without going overboard would be enough.

The rest seems very cool to me and just by smoothing out some mountain peaks (that can be done later or in the game itself) and if you want to edit something else or raise some area a bit that's all I have to say. Also see it gray. xDD

Edit: I'm seeing it in the game and it's really cool! Looking at it carefully I see that it is really centered and geometric, something that I love, I guess the proximity to the relief confused me! As I look at it in detail, seeing each part, I really like how each area looks, and how you've made uneven ground but left the areas where the houses will be smooth. When it has decoration and houses it's going to look really cool just it is! I imagine a tower or an antenna or a laboratory on top of that crater! ^^

Seeing your photos I see what a great job HarVee has made!! I would only edit it in-game, to me it looks pretty fantastic already!

OK, so what do you think should we do next? Jot down the story, make some concept art or visual identity...? Or even start making characters?

I'm going to try to edit what I said about the map edges in sc4, but if it doesn't look good or you don't like it, I'll leave it as is. I already like it like this, I was just trying to see if I can do what I'm saying. But it will be a minimal change, as soon as I have it I'll show you. ^^

I think that now it would be about creating characters or also seeing if we can come up with some random lots, and when we have more or less decided how many sims there will be distributed in fraternities, houses or residences, we could decide how many lot of each thing will be needed... I don't know. If you can think of another order or another way to start? About the photos and so on, I think that as we have the characters and their bios we will be able to mix the story and decide on the photos, and write texts, right? Although we could also start writing things like we have been doing with the ideas we have given, and then go editing. xD

What would be great for me is if with the current map you could indicate again what each area is @ed95 @HarVee since it's a bit difficult for me to remember with the new distribution! XD

Okay so I circled each area in a different colour. The Purple is university center, the red is kissing point, the teal blue is the poor area, the lime green is the rich area, the white/ice blue is the crater mesa, and the orange can be whatever you want. Maybe a parks area or an industrial zone or something, or just make it part of the poor area too...

I've smoothed out some uneven roads where the houses were and I've revised the roads at feliefs, although I don't know if I should leave a square or the shape that HarVee had made. In that part I've also added a road that leaves the city. Does that seem okay to you? Or would you rather leave just the other road? Now I'll look in the game to see how it looks.

You suffer from that particle effect glitch too? I'm still trying to figure out how to fix it...

Terrain looks okay to me; I'll have better feedback definitely once I see it in-game!

Thank you so much for including me! You really brought a smile to my face

I'm happy to help, but I'm not good at anything except writing, naming, and maybe CAS. I also don't have a stable internet connection. So I'm not all that useful, but I'd love to vote on any additions!

I have edited the roads and the levels, I have edited the crater a bit, although those new peaks that I added would need to be smoothed out a little xD. Let's see if you like it!! If you want to continue working on the landscape or roads? @HarVee I've tried to compress the roads that were close to the limit a little, I hope that's okay. Although if you want the kissing point it could be one square more to the limit, so that everything is more centered. (edit: Well I'm seeing it and I'm going to do it xD)

Great! @cookietheinnocent having more sims or bios will be great! We count on you! ^^

https://www.mediafire.com/file/7ijo...y+U+V2.sc4/file
Mistery V2