Hood project: German Veronaville + 4t2 Windenburg redux
 

UPDATE: I've decided to use Eifel/Rhineland-Palatinate as an inspiration source for my Germanized alt Veronaville . The hood base I use is the Clean Veronaville by redandvidya/Simstate. The timeline I imagine for this hood is 2004 - 2006 a.k.a. the mid-2000s.

UPDATE2 [apr '24]: currently I settled down on eastern Rheinland (NRW) for Veronaville builds. But for Windenburg I take inspiration of various towns of the border area between NRW, RLP and Hessen.

Why I use Germany as inspiration of Veronaville instead of England: https://daydreamingdrawerette.tumbl...A%20veronaville

Resources for building German houses: I have private Pinterest boards where I gather pictures of houses and rooms I get from real-estate agencies. If possible, I use Geoportal and Street View for details such as Lot size and degree of hilliness.

Work in progress
* Building new lots (mainly Windenburg)
* Creating new Sims
* Giving vanilla Veronaville Lots a makeover

Want to do
* Build a lot/restaurant for Antonio Monty
* Build houses for my semi-OC households (Townie makeovers/recreations)

German abbreviations used in this thread
FWH = Fachwerkhaus:häuser (half-timbered house:s)
EFH = Einfamilienhaus (ye regular single-family home)
ZFH = Zweifamilienhaus (two-family apartment)
MFH = Mehrfamilienhaus (apartment for more than two households)
WGH = Wohn- und Geschäftshaus (a building that's a combination of a commercial + a residential unit)
EG = Erdgeschoss (ground floor)
OGx = Obergeschoss (x = 1st/2nd/3rd floor)
DG = Dachgeschoss (top floor, usually an attic)
UG = Untergeschoss (basement floor)

Old OP:

Not German myself but your description reminded me of the Black Forest region, I can definitely envision an alternative Veronaville version in a valley with the Fachwerk houses, surrounded by hills and forests. That would be very cute
(then I imagined the Summerdream family with traditional carnival costumes and that is kinda terrifying )

Lovely idea! When doing a quick google search, I stumbled upon Schiltach, but I want to build the lots more in an "open construction" manner instead of a closed construction.

Here are my pics of both pregame Veronaville as well as my modifications on redandvidya's version:


Pre-made Veronaville

Agricultural village and


Redandvidya's Veronaville modified with a natural-looking stream and more hills (used the modifyneighborhoodterrain cheat + gridlines for desert terrain mod). Still a WIP.

I want to add more lots to the hood (either inhabited or as filler houses) and tweak further the hood deco.

Already renovated one of the half-timbered lots into a Fachwerkhaus.

Southern Niedersachsen (sometimes translated into English as Lower Saxony). I'm a bit biased, because I've lived there. (I'm Scottish, not German, but I studied for two semesters at Göttingen University.) There are hills around Veronaville, so it must be far enough south for the plains of the north to have given way to the beginnings of the Mittelgebirge. On the other hand the Roman influences, especially the aqueduct, which I see as Veronaville's trade mark (Warenzeichen) might make you want to place Veronaville further west -- say somewhere around Trier. I think that's Nordrhein-Westfalen.

For myself I think I prefer to keep the precise location of Veronaville rather vague. Despite obvious American features (like yellow school 'buses), it's whole look and feel is clearly European. The actual name is the Italian city of Verona (the setting of Romeo and Juliet and some other Shakespearean plays) with the French ending -ville (=town) added on. It is widely seen as having an English side and an Italian side, divided by a canal where Venetian style gondolas ply for trade. In my game I see Veronaville and Downtown as parts of the same town, with Veronaville as the old town (Altstadt) and Downtown, a short taxi ride away as the modern commercial, shopping, and leisure centre. Personally I like the canal. There is a canal in Göttingen too, though it's much narrower than the Veronaville one and definitely not navigable. (I think its purpose must have been to bring water into the town, possibly supplying power to watermills.) I've definitely seen ducks swimming on the Göttingen canal, and I think I've seen them on the Veronaville canal too.

As you've noticed, the Veronaville Tudor houses are not all that different from German Fachwerkhäuser. One difference in a village, is that a German village will often contain a fair number of agricultural buildings (often old and quite possibly in the Fachwerk style), whereas in England, as a result of "Enclosures" from the Tudor period onwards, barns, pigstyes and cowsheds have been banished to large farms outside the village. So to make Veronaville look more like a German village, it would help if you added a few such buildings.

I haven't moved Veronaville to Germany, but I'm sure you've noticed that I've got a German family living there. I mean of course the Moltkes, a family I added very early in my game, back in December 2012. The family lives at 100 Via Veronaville. Julian, the oldest boy (he pronounces his name the German way), recently married his long-term boyfriend Andrew Jones, and moved in with Andrew and his mum at 19 Chorus Court. Still living at 100 Via Veronaville are Julian's parents Martin and Manuela, and his younger siblings Brigitte (13) and Hans (8). I believe Manuela originally comes from somewhere in Latin America.

The church that I built for Veronaville actually looks more German than English. I'll post about it in your WCIF thread.

It's interesting that you should think of Schiltach. I've never been there, but it's the location my friend chose it for the location for his model railway! An interesting idea to move Veronaville to Schwabenland, but one of the reasons why I play with aging off is to get away from the "Schaffe schaffe, Häusle baue" ethos that the vanilla lifespan tries to force onto my Sims! I prefer a rather more relaxed playstyle. As Manuela Moltke might say, "Mañana!"

[EDIT] You definitely can see ducks in the Veronaville canal. I saw a mallard today today, swimming in the canal beside the Moltkes' house at 100 Via Veronaville.

Thank you for the detailed answer!! This is very helpful.

I was also thinking of an German area with more Roman influences. Trier lies in the west of Rhineland-Palatinate btw (just checked Wiki), but I already was thinking of letting VV set in that state. The reason I want to pick a certain state is to involve some regional cultural aspects, like the way they celebrate Carnival and the German slang words they use.

I understood that a single small German village usually has a small creek flowing through instead of a river/tributary. I've already modified the channel into a more natural looking current in redandvidya's New VV version, but I was thinking of narrowing down the stream into a creek if it makes more sense for a German village. I want to add swans as well for a running gag in my story where my OC Sim regularly gets in a fight with them during breeding season.

When I played VV for the first time, I didn't knew back then that UK also has those timbered houses and the Shakespeare influences, so I associated it with Germany and created a story with my OCs that's set in Germany.

I haven't built a downtown yet because I am waiting for a 4t2 version of Windenburg (in my story, the nightlife facilities are far away from the village). However, I do want to create a shopping subhood to let the Townie Sims live there, such as Kendra. Which premade hood terrain would suit best for a German village, you think?

Ooh I'd love to find a German style church! I was planning to build more lots anyway since German villages are usually more closely built.

Regarding transport, I can always adjust the bus color or let teen/child Sims go to school by bicycle or walking out of the lot to an imaginary bus stop.

I also play with aging off because I want to create more stories for my teen sims.

I don't know much about the geography of Germany, but my head cannon is that it would be in the Rheinland-Pfalz because I always wanted a Sims nhood near the famous Nurburgring race track...

Bavaria and Baden-Würtemberg were the first ones that came to my mind, though there are Fachwerk houses in lots of other areas of Germany as well.

One of the cities most famous for its Fachwerk style buildings is Rothenburg ob der Tauber in Bavaria, if you want to google for inspiration.

Definitely Bavaria :lovestruc

I am German and the original Veronaville does not remind me of any specific region. The way the houses and lots are arranged seems too atypical and too much like suburbia for me. I guess it will all depend on how your houses will look like.
There are many different variations of half-timbered houses in Germany. Maybe google for "Freilichtmuseum" (outdoor museum) and have a look at the houses from different museums to find your favorites and read the background information provided on these websites. As Rothenburg already has been mentioned: Maybe also google Colmar. It is part of France today, but has belonged to the Holy Roman Empire in the past. Colmar has a river that could inspire you how to include the Veronaville river.

Within a region, there is usually a predominant roof type (gable roof, hip roof, half-hip roof, etc.) and the dormers also look rather similar.
If you want to have farm houses, you might want to have a look at different house layouts at Wikipedia. At the bottom of the page, there are links to several other house types. You also could google different typical farm layouts (everything in one building, two, three and four-sided yards etc.). Your preferences for roof and layout might help you to decide on a region.
If you want to have town houses, you should be aware that there usually is no garden in front of the house and houses are built without gaps inbetween or with very narrow gaps. Building space in towns and cities was expensive. Therefore, many houses have less space on the ground floor and more space on upper floors as these floors protrude in direction to the street (see house on the right). If the original house owner was an artisan, it is quite likely that the ground floor was a workspace and only the upper floors were used for living. Depending on the profession of the original owner, many houses - even within towns and cities - have big gates. More expensive houses have a gate and a front door, less expensive houses only have a gate or the front door built within the gate.

You should look up how much stone is available in a certain region and whether brickstones were produced nearby. If there is lots of stone/brickstone available, houses usually were built with stones/brickstones. If there is only a limited amount available, the ground floor usually is built with stone and the upper floors are half-timbered. If very little is available, even the ground floor can be half-timbered. In the second and in the latter case, the use of stone is an indicator of wealth. Thus, the bigger and more expensive a house is, the more stone parts it contains.
You also should decide whether your Veronaville should be located in a catholic or protestant region. As far as I know, decorations are more common in catholic regions (although they also can be an indicator for wealth). In catholic regions, it is also quite common to have a madonna figure madonna figure or a crucifix on the outside of the house on a cornice or in an alcove.
Regarding the river/creek discussion: Both is possible. Water supply was important for establishing a settlement. As rivers enable trading by ship, settlements next to a river had a better chance of becoming a town or city, but not every settlement next to a river has turned into a town. As long as you do not plan to have a historic setting, the river should be the more realistic option as many creeks have been canalized within built-up areas several decades ago so that you cannot see them on the surface anymore.

If you combine some of these elements, you can make your Veronaville look like the region of your choice.

Thank you for the detailed answer, tips and links! I'm gonna check those links you've sent .

Since I want to retain the Italian/Roman influences, what are your thoughts about letting it set somewhere in Rhineland-Palastinate?

I haven't decided yet to involve catholic or protestant influences -- also because I couldn't find much variation in timbered walls that also match with plain white plastered walls.

The original Veronaville buildings had stone walls on the ground floor, but aren't the ground floors with stone walls usually used as cellars?

For the sake of ease in building houses, I was thinking of building mainly detached houses with gardens, but with the lot plots next to each other, so the construction type isn't too open. Is this type of construction in villages a regional characteristic, or not? And where can I find which roof type is mostly predominant in a certain region?

On a side note, I've managed to transform the Veronaville channel into a natural-looking tributary kind of river and elevated the hills ^^. But I still have to think about how to decorate the hood with farm fields and more trees.

Italian/Roman influences: Here is a list of aqueducts or part of aqueducts in Germany. As there is no English overview for this on Wikipedia, I had to link the German version. When you click on one of the articles, you can see on the left side whether there is also an English version for this particular entry. Most of the articles are about the Eifel aqueduct or certain parts of it. This aqueduct connected the Eifel region with Cologne (both located in Nordrhein-Westfalen).
The Italian/Roman-style houses are not typical for Germany at all. They remind me of Tuscany, but maybe I have the same kind of stereotype thinking as some people have about Germany/Bavaria.
If you go by temperatures, the Upper Rhine Plain is pretty much the warmest part of Germany so that this kind of architecture could fit there better than in other regions.

Ground floor/cellar: Ground floors were not suitable as cellar because the temperature was not constant enough. If you want to have cellars, vaulted cellars would be the most typical ones. In towns, the stairs are inside the house while on farms, they also can be inside a subsidiary building or outside.
Stone and brickstone was the preferred material for buildings as they are stable and durable. Thus, if they were available in your region and if you could afford them, you would use these materials for buildings. It also was a way of showing of your wealth and if at least the ground floor was made from stone, there also was a lower risk for fires due to the fireplace in the kitchen. Sleeping rooms usually did not have any heating so that the risk for fires was lower on the upper floors.

Detached houses: I think that detached houses really are an exception so that having more than one or two of that type would look unnatural. The space of towns was limited by town walls so that people tried to squeeze in as many buildings as possible. In the middle of the town, you have a few buildings that stand out, like church, town hall, maybe the house of the major and priest. These buildings might be less jammed than the other buildings and even might have a bit of green around, although not on all four sides. Then there is a ring of buildings that are built without any unneccessary gaps inbetween, frequently adjoining just small alleyways, not bigger streets. In the outskirts, you might find some houses that have a small garden behind the house. Even in rural areas with farms, buildings usually are very close to the buildings on the next lot (some exceptions exist, but mainly in northern Germany). Houses and subsidiary buildings frequently are arranged in a U-shape or in a rectangular shape with a paved yard in the middle. As no wall limits the village, the lots can be very long with a big garden behind the buildings. There also might be a small, decorative front yard, but more than just 1-2 ingame squares would be too much imho. Fields and meadows are outside of the village. A few farms also are located outside of a village, but these farms are surrounded by many, many fields so that usually there is no other building and no big road nearby. Most detached houses have been built within the last 100 years and are not half-timbered style anymore. Thus, I think that for a realistic atmosphere, you will have to use the lot adjuster.

Roof type: I do not think that there is a single website that provides you with this information for every region. The best option should be to google for "Freilichtmuseum" and have a look at different houses on the website of each museum. They usually have lots of information on where the house originally came from, when it was built, the profession of the owner etc.

Location somewhere in Rheinland-Pfalz: I think it is difficult to use today's 16 states to define the location. These states have been formed after the second world war. Both the half-timbered houses and the cultural elements that you want to include are older than this. While the Holy Roman Empire, the German Confederation etc. existed, there were a few hundred individual states, imperial cities etc. Thus, some regions with the same culture are part of different states today while there are big cultural differences within one state.

I looked up some more towns and villages with half-timbered houses so that you get some more impressions. I just picked on picture per place, but there should be many more for each place. I mostly chose places in Western Germany and close to the Rhein.

Bad Dürkheim
Neustadt an der Weinstraße
Bad Bergzabern
Ladenburg - also has many walls dating back to Roman times, although they are not Veronaville style
Weinheim
Bensheim
Marburg
Monschau
Freudenberg

Thanks for the links and suggestion! I will take a look at the Upper Rhine Plain for hood deco inspo. However, I was thinking to give the Italian-style houses a German touch, but with southwestern influences (e.g. südwestdeutsches Einhaus or Lothringerhaus).



Do you know by chance which regions in the west/southwest had more stone available?



I guess I'm better off building 2x3 lots or 3x3 (bigger houses) if they have a long backyard, but I have to keep some space for like two cars since it's not possible in the game to park cars on the sidewalk AFAIK (I want to give every household a car because village). I will also mix in some newer houses that aren't Fachwerk because I understood from my googling that most villages have a mix of modern houses and Fachwerkhäuser. I want to give Veronaville small/rural-village characteristics instead of a town, with the exception of those premade mansions by Capp/Monty/Summerdream :P

Were small/rural villages also limited by town walls? Can you find pictures of a "ring of buildings" and U/rectangular shaped buildings with a paved yard in the middle? Is it comparable with a "hofje"?

Also, do you have any suggestions what kind of lot/deco would be sensible to place within those "turnaround" kind of roads at the Monty side? I was thinking of a playground or a church but it doesn't have to be Italian-esk.




I understood that there are many cultural and regional differences (is it comparable with the variety within the US?). Eventually, I want to keep the exact location of Germanized Veronaville ambiguous, yet I want to make some sense of the geography, architecture and cultural aspects I want to throw in into my storytelling (and it's fun for me to learn more about the history and architecture about a different country )

Thank you for the images!

Giving the Italian-style house a German touch should work. The most important thing is that the open arches are gone as winters can be cold in Germany.


No, I do not know this. I assume that stones were not the type of product that merchants would transport long distances as they were heavy and the profit was not big enough. Thus, the situation can be completely different in two villages that are just a few kilometers apart from each other. I would suggest that you have a look at Google Maps, pick the name of a town and then google pictures for that town and "Altstadt". That way you will immediately see whether a town has old stone houses, half-timbered houses or modern houses (usually if the town was destroyed during WW2).


Close to the center of a village, most lots only should have a width of 1, a bit further away from the center of the village, I could imagine a width of 2 for some of the houses. A width of 3 really should be an exception, not the rule. The density of population in Germany is seven times higher than in the U.S. while having only very few really big cities. Even new single family houses usually just have 100-120 m². Judging by the length of beds, 3 ingame squares equal 2 m. Thus, a two-story house would have a layout of 12x12 or 9x15 or something like that and a three-story house a layout of 8x10.
Most old houses usually are smaller than that because several children used to share one room and the families as a whole owned a lot less stuff than we do today. As you want to go for a village setting, the original owners (farmers, winegrowers, a miller, a shoemaker, a smith etc.) of the houses also were rather poor and not the ones that cold afford big houses.

Regarding cars: Half-timbered houses were built at a time when there were no cars. Thus, it is not realistic that the layout of all lots leaves space for cars. I would suggest to use the rotable driveways mod so that you can place cars on the street/sidewalk. This is the way how most cars are parked in Germany. If your house has a gate or if there is an arch to a yard, you also could place a driveway extension in the ground floor or in the yard and place a car there. I would go for an old-fashioned gate or arch, not for one of the regular garage doors and I also would only place an extension without a driveway so that you can build the house close to the street. I assume that not every car animation will work, but the cars still should be functional.

Mix of older and newer houses: The old houses are protected which means that you are not allowed to demolish it and have very strict rules for changing the house, especially on the outside. Thus, when there is a mix of old and new houses, that is usually because some older houses got destroyed (fires, wars etc). The style of the newer houses can vary a lot depending on when they were built. During the 70th, a lot of "construction sins" were built, but in recent years, most communities have lots of rules on how new houses have to look like. That is why new houses match neighboring houses better than houses that are a few decades old. In the centers of towns and villages the percentage of old houses is higher, in the outskirts it is much lower and there even might be development areas with just new houses.


Town walls: Villages usually do not have town walls. You might have some buildings with fortifications, like a wall around the church and the graveyard with some small towers with arrow slits. When there was an attack, people would leave their homes and go there to be protected. There are also fortified houses ("Festes Haus" - e.g. this house from 1291 ), however, your Veronaville might be too rural for something like that.
Space in villages was limited, nevertheless. A local noble ruler had to give his permission for a settlement and definied the area for this settlement. In the beginning usually there only was a linear settlement alongside a street and only when all the space next to this street was taken, more roads were added. Roman settlements usually have to main streets and the crossing of these two streets is the city/village center and a forum is located there. I do not think that the Veronaville terrain matches either option.

Regarding "Hofje": As far as I understand, these Hofjes were just for living and for many households on one lot. Dreiseithof und Vierseithof are a combination of house(s) and subsidiary buildings, mostly farms, but also vineyards or homes and workplaces of artisans. There usually is one house for the family of the current owner and maybe a smaller house for the parents of the current owner. If there is no separate house for them, the only house would have an area that is just for them. All the other buildings are subsidiary buildings although some of them nowadays are converted into houses or apartments as well.

Here are some examples of U-shaped farms ("Dreiseithof"):
Example 1
Example 2
Example 3
Here are some examples of rectangular farms ("Vierseithof"):
Example 4
Example 5
Example 6
I am sorry that I could not find better pictures.

All the pictures show farms, many of them located outside of the village to which they belong. There are no rules on whether there should be one big building or several individual buildings and sometimes buildings also are placed slightly diagonally. The lots in villages are more narrow, the ones outside of villages are a bit wider. Please be aware that the bigger farms from the pictures above are from other regions within Germany where it was usual that a sole heir would inherit everything. In Pfalz, Baden, Württemberg, Rheinland province and big parts of Hessen (thus, all the regions in discussion as location for your Veronaville) the heritage would be distributed between all children (bigger parts for the sons upon the death of the parents, smaller parts for the daughters as dowry upon their marriages). As the average number of children usually was higher than two, this means that with each new generation the people got poorer and had less land and less income. Maybe look up "Flurbereinigung" on Wikipedia (There is an English entry for that term). Even with Flurbereinigung, I think that the standard neighborhood decoration fields are too big for a Veronaville located in (south) west Germany. Maybe you can place some more different looking fields and make them overlap so that it looks like there are many small fields?


For the turnarounds: Definitely not a church. The church usually is in the center of a village. The turnarounds look too remote for that. When you place the church, there should be enough space for a square next to it and most of the other important buildings (school - nowadays usually repurposed, house of the priest, maybe an administrative building, sometimes also a barn to store the tithe - nowadays frequently turned into a town hall for events) should be built around this square, a maypole can be placed on the square and the village green with a small lake also should be somewhere near. A playground might be possible if the previous buildings were destroyed somewhen.


I cannot really tell you whether it is comparable with the U.S. as I do not know enough about the U.S. You should be aware that Germany was not a united country in the past. It was just a union (sometimes a closer one, sometimes a less close one, sometimes there even were wars) of a few hundred different states with individual rulers. The emperor was above these rulers, but that mostly meant that the rulers had to pay a bit of money and send some troops as support in case of war and apart from that they were free to do whatever they wanted. The states had different laws, different currencies, measuring units etc. People did not even have a common language, but very different dialects. Martin Luther was the first one to establish some kind of harmonized language when he translated the bible to German. However, this harmonized language is mostly for written language and many people still have some dialect and it can happen that you do not understand what other people are saying when you are in another region. Germany was settled (mixing with the already existing population) by several Germanic tribes during antiquity which means that some cultural differences and rivalries have their origins more than 2000 years ago.

Thank you again for the suggestions and more modding tips!

Your neighboring country, where I live, is even more densely populated, but I notice in the countryside area of the villages/towns that the farmhouses are widely spaced (but I guess those houses aren't *that* old, and/or it's easier to build like that on flat grounds).


Which regions/states are more known for those bigger farms instead that were inherited by a sole heir? Bavaria, BW, NRW, or rather further in the north or east?


Which roads of the Veronaville would slightly work to build the village center with a kinda-sorta square and the important? The open area on the Capp side? (I'm aware that mansions aren't common in small German villages, though)
Or would it otherwise make more sense to add a separate subhood with a more "Euro-realistic" terrain to utilize that as the village center and picture the main Veronaville as the "outskirt"?

I also wonder, what kind of "community lots" did a countryside village usually contain during the 00s, besides playground, small Tante-Emma-Laden shops, bakery, butcher and the football club? Supermarket, Kiosk, restaurant, Biergarten, basketball club, small bar/pub, Gemeindezentrum (e.g. for arcade stuff or bowling)? And are most rivers/tributaries/creeks safe or clean enough to swim if there isn't a lake nearby (I want to create a beach community lot at the river)?

I do not think that the landscape really matters. Many houses close to the Alps also are bigger than the houses in the regions that we discussed so far. I think that it mostly is related to the heritage system. Any kind of bigger property was sooner or later divided and distributed amongst the heirs. There are a few bigger farms in these regions as well, but they usually are isolated farms outside of villages and they mostly were built after the Flurbereinigung.

Btw: Germans like curtains and they do not like when someone is able to look into the house. In many houses, thin curtains in light colors cover the windows permanently. If you are in the house, you can see through them to look outside, but from the outside, you cannot look inside (unless the light is turned on). If the window does not have rolling shutters or folding shutters, there might also be a second curtain with a thicker and more opaque texture that are used at night. I do not know whether this comment is useful for you as there are a few countries with denser population, but at least for the people from one of these countries, having lots of curtains might seem strange and unusual.


As far as I know, having just one heir was common in the north of Germany, like Niedersachsen, and in Altbayern (part of Bavaria). In most of the south and east of Germany all children or all sons were entitled to inherit. But as always: Germany consisted of many different states and each state had its own law. Thus, there are exceptions, special stipulations etc. in many places. In east Germany, it is not possible to see anymore whether the heritage was divided or not because after WW2, farmers in East Germany were forced to form bigger cooperatives with other farmers (similar to kolkhoz).


I do not think that the road layout is typical for either village center or the outskirts of a village. Usually the main road does not cross a river and in Veronaville the bridge is pretty much in the middle of the village. I guess it is better if you use your imagination and make necessary adjustments instead of just adding a subhood that you otherwise do not want and need. Here is a link to the most common village types in Germany.

Some additional information regarding "Weiler" (as this layout might look like the best choice for you): Weiler are smaller than villages and usually consist of less than ten houses. This type of settlement would give you the option to have big lots. However, these settlements usually only consist of residential and subsidiary buildings - no church, playground, shops etc. The origin of the term "Weiler" also could be interesting for you as it is derived from "villa" and in the narrower sense referred to the main building of a big farm. In the broader sense, it included all the buildings nearby which also consisted the residential buildings for farmhands and all the subsidiary buildings. Veronaville has too many lots to form one Weiler, but you maybe could have three Weiler on one map - one for each of the families.


Your list is much too long. In rural areas, villages usually have less than 1000 inhabitants and the inhabitants are used to go to a nearby town for many activities. You do not have Tante-Emma-Laden, bakery, butcher, supermarket and kiosk. If you are lucky, you have one of these shops, many villages do not have any shop anymore at all. If you plan to have a farmer family, this family maybe could have a small farm shop.
Football club/basketball club: Usually there is a sports club that covers everything and shares the gym and football ground. I do not think that villages usually have enough people who are interested in basketball. Frequently there is a gymnastics group for children and table tennis is popular for middle-aged and older men. The building frequently also contains a restaurant although nowadays these restaurants usually are permanently closed because it is not possible to operate them in a profitable way.
Which leads us directly to the next point - restaurant, Biergarten, bar/pub: Similar to shops, more than one restaurant would be unrealistic, many villages even do not have any business like this anymore. If there is a restaurant, it usually has a regulars' table where older men meet to have some drinks. The restaurant also could have a terrace. I would not use the term Biergarten for that because Biergärten used to belong to breweries and there are some legal differences (e.g. you may bring your own food to a Biergarten). In many villages, the restaurant (if they have one at all) is open only on weekends and for special events while the owners have regular jobs from Monday to Friday. In regions with wine, there also is a special type of business: Vineyard owners may sell their own wine and non-alcoholic drinks along with simple dishes to guests for a limited time per year. These kind of "restaurants" (Häckerwirtschaft/Heckenwirtschaft/Besenwirtschaft/etc.) works quite well even in small villages as the owners have another business (growing and selling wine) and because the "restaurants" attract people from further away. Traditionally, these "restaurants" have a besom placed somewhere visible from outside so that people know that it is open.
Gemeindezentrum: Not as a place where you can go whenever you want to. Most villages have some kind of multi-purpose building for elections, as meeting place for the village youth group, rehearsal place for the choir and the music society and as rentable location for celebrations. For bowling, you would go to a town or city and I have never seen arcade stuff outside of amusement parks. Arcade games have disappeared from restaurants in the 90ths and I have only seen them in amusement parks and on annual fairs since then. Maybe, they still are in some pubs in cities, but not in the ones that I visit. In several villages that I know, the former parsonage now serves as building for the communnity and is still owned by the church, not by the state. In some places, people are allowed to harvest from the garden of the parish building.
In addition to the above-mentioned buildings/lots, villages usually have a church with a graveyard, a kindergarden, a playground and maybe a primary school, a fire station for the voluntary fire brigade (frequently with some sort of big hall that can be used for parties for the whole village), a central square (with a decorative well - in many parts of Germany extensively decorated with painted Easter eggs during spring - and a may pole) and/or village green ("Anger" - could be turned in to a small, rather natural park) and a fire pond. Not a real community lot, but something that also marks the villagescape: In the outskirts of many villages, there are small lots with gardens without houses. These gardens usually belong to the people who live in the village center in houses without gardens/with small gardens. If you go for one of the village layouts except for Weiler, you might also want to add an old-looking stone oven somewhere. Not all inhabitants of a village had an appropriate oven for baking bread at home so that there frequently was (and in some villages still is - although it is not used anymore) a stone oven for the whole community.
I do not know the percentages, but many rivers and creeks are clean enough to swim. In some places the water, after some processing, even is used as drinking water. The fire pond is filled with clean water so that you also can swim in there. During cold winters, they also can be used for ice skating.

At my home, we also have double curtains (thin curtain + inner roller blinds or thick curtains), though my country is known for people who leave their curtains open or don't even own them despite being even more densely populated.

I would love to hear more details about the typical German interior in family homes! Were Shrankwands a thing amongst Boomer/Gen X parents during the mid-00s? What kind of hobby/fun utilities does a big backyard usually have? Are a Gartenhaus and/or harvestable gardening ground common if there's enough space in the yard, or is it also in villages a thing to have public gardens instead?



Thank you for the link! This image is very helpful for me.

Do you know by chance any custom hood terrains that have more sensible road arrangements for a small European/German village? (I don't own SC4).
And is it correct that Fachwerkhäuser were still built in rural areas until the 1950s?

I think you are very knowledgeable about the history and urban planning! Have you done a study in a field like that?

Renting/House ownership:
Germany has the second lowest quota of house ownership in Europe (only Switzerland has less) with about 50 % of people living in their own houses/apartments. In rural areas, the quota is higher as houses there are cheaper than in cities, but there will still be lots of people who have to rent because they cannot afford a house or want to rent because they do not (yet) want to be tied to one place. Smaller houses usually are rented as a whole, bigger houses might be devided into several apartments.
In average, Germans only move 4,5 times in their lives. Most of the moves take place as young adults related to university and the first job afterwards. Then they can save some money (because you need some own capital to get a credit for a house) to buy a house, if they want to. When people buy a house, that usually is the place where they live until they die.

Regarding the interior:
Half-timbered houses usually have small rooms and sometimes also strange layouts as the purpose of the rooms has changed. The older the inhabitants are, the more likely the layout still is like that. If younger people buy such a house or if it is renovated before being rented, people often try to have a more open layout by just leaving the wooden parts of the half-timbered structures and removing the mud/clay/straw parts inbetween. Google for "Fachwerkhaus innen" and you will find some good pictures. Maybe you can have something similar by using columns and half-walls.
For modern houses, you just can look up house plans of companies that sell houses to get an impression.
Many houses have cellars. In modern houses, you have a room with a central heating for the whole house in the cellar and heating elements in all heated rooms (or floor heating). Tubes usually are hidden within the walls. In older houses, there were no central heating systems so that you might find night storage heaters in every room unless a central heating was added during a renovation.
For the walls, I would suggest painting most of them in one color (per room), occasionally with a wall tattoo. The wallpapers look extremely old-fashioned. I guess wallpapers like that were used maybe in the 70s and now should have fallen off from most walls. Today, the most common wallpaper is white woodchip paper. This is very common for rental objects as the wallpaper can be painted several times before having to be replaced and tenants usually have to paint all the walls and ceilings before moving out. Walls usually have to be painted in a neutral color that does not lower the chances of the landlord to find a new tenant. Because of this, people usually choose white as color to be on the safe side.
In bathrooms, floor and walls usually are tiled. In kitchens, the floor is tiled while there only is a backsplash on the wall. A bigger house can have a small pantry room next to the kitchen to store non-perishable food there and maybe to have a second fridge and/or a freezer there.
When you go into a house, you usually are a stairwell first. From this room, you can go into the hallway (sometimes, the stairs also are in the hallway) and from the hallway you can reach (almost) all the other rooms of that floor. Thus, a front door will not lead directly into the living room like frequently in the U.S. In the stairwell or hallway, you also have a shoe cabinet and a coatrack so that you do not have to bring shoes and coats into your living room, bedroom or wherever.
En suite bathrooms are quite unusual. A small house usually just has one bathroom (plus maybe a half bathroom) even if there are several bedrooms. For bigger houses, having two bathrooms (plus maybe a half bathroom) is common, more bathrooms are quite unusual, except for mansions. When there are kitchens and bathrooms on several floors of a house, they usually are in the same position on each floor so that the water tubes can be used for more than one room.
In rural areas, it is still common that three generations live in the same house. In such constellations, the grandparent(s) usually live on the ground floor (to avoid stairs) or garden level floor (on sloped lots) and the younger generations live on the upper floor(s). On garden level, you usually have a separate apartment with a separate entrance. On ground floor, you usually share the front door and it can be a separate apartment, but it does not have to be.
When the older houses were built, the attic usually was left in a pretty basic state and used as a storage (for old furniture, baby and children stuff etc). In newer houses and some renovated older houses, the attic is fully usable as living area.

Regarding furniture:
Houses in Germany usually are empty when being sold. Bathroom appliances, kitchen furniture, built-in closets (not just for clothing, also in other rooms to store stuff) lights etc. are the only stuff that still could be in the house. Thus, the furniture usually depends a lot on the people living in the house/apartment.
Schrankwand: I guess the zenith was quite a bit before the 00s. I only would place them in the house of an elder, not of adults. Maybe also google "Gelsenkirchener Barock" if you want to make your elderly sims suffer. Nowadays, you would rather have a set of several matching items that can be placed however you like and that does not look so massive. Younger people usually buy their furniture at IKEA or similar shops. As buying a house is expensive, many people take their old furniture with them to the new house and will start replacing it some years later, one room at a time, if they want to. Antiques may be passed on to children and grandchildren, but may also be sold - depending on the character and personal preferences.

Hobby/fun utilities:
Swing(s) and sandbox are the most common things. Paddling pools (small ones for children, but also bigger ones for adults), tree houses, climbing frames (maybe combined with the swing) and trampolines also seem to be relatively common. Water slides (lying on the ground) like in Sims 4 also might be an option with CC. Outdoor pools are relatively rare as they are expensive and due to the temperatures. Some wealthy people have a pool in their cellar. Whirlpools and saunas/sweating huts also are not that common. Cosy outdoor sitting areas and barbecues are quite common and outdoor kitchens are becoming more and more popular (also due to Corona).

Gardening:
When you have a garden, it is quite common to have an area for growing fruits and vegetables. Some people without a garden next to their house even have bought small pieces of land at the outskirts of their villages for gardening. When you have a garden next to/around your house, you usually have some flowers in front of the house and maybe next to the way leading to the front door. Some people have big bushes close to the lot boarders to block the view on the lot for neighbors and people on the street. The area for growing harvestables usually is behind the house and the size just depends on how much time you can and want to afford for gardening. The remaining garden area usually is a meadow where you would place all the hobby/fun stuff mentioned above, maybe have some fruit and/or nut trees and maybe a terrace.
Gartenhaus: As far as I know, garden sheds for gardening tools, lawn mower etc. is quite common. Bigger garden houses are not really common.
Green houses also are not that common. I just know them from people living in towns with a very small garden who are trying to get the maximum of harvestables out of the limited area. For villages, cold frames are much more common. Raised-bed gardening is also a common thing, although I do not know how to do that in Sims. Winter gardens also are relatively common. However, they usually have a regular floor, e.g. tiles, so that the gardening options are limited. The winter gardens that I know usually are used as an additional living room, e.g. for parties, as a place to store potted plants during winter and for the first days or weeks of growing certain vegetables in pots before planting them in the garden when it is warm enough.
Public gardens are not that common in Germany as there are other options like Schrebergarten and Kleingarten. If you live in a city or town and do not have a garden at your house/apartment, you can rent a Schrebergarten or Kleingarten from an association. These gardens have standardized sizes and are relatively cheap. You have to use a certain area of that garden for growing harvestables, but there is also an area for decorative plants and for recreation. In these kind of gardens, garden houses are quite common (although limited in size by law). These kind of gardens frequently are rented by the same people for decades and they spend a lot of time there during summer, some people even live there during summer although that is not legal. In rural areas, there usually are no such associations, but if you need some land for gardening, you usually can buy a small plot of land somewhere in the outskirts of the village or a few hundred meters outside of the village quite cheaply and without the legal limitations. In some places, there also are weekend cottages (Wochenendhaus) close to villages for inhabitants of nearby towns and cities who also do not want to comply with the legal limitations.



Custom terrains:
None that is really fitting imho. Although that maybe is not possible in Sims 2 anyway because the only options are straight or 90° turns. There should be one road from one end of the map to another that existed before the village did (more roads to the end of the map are okay, but not needed). That road usually is relatively straight unless the terrain makes a turn necessary. Other streets should be connected to this street like an arc (thus, my problem with the 90° turns) with some intersecting streets as additional connection.
I had a brief look at the terrains here on MTS, but pretty much all of them lack the main street. Either there is just one road leading to the village and the village then forms the end of the road or there are several roads, but with unneccessary turns or they lead to two parallel streets so that there is no main street. Usually the terrains also are built for medium-sized and big lots which is not fitting for a village center and symmetrical terrains also are no option as hardly any village was built with a preplanned layout.
Another thing about Sims terrains is that there frequently is free space between lots and there is neighborhood decoration within the settled area. This is not usual for Germany. One lot is directly next to the other and apart from a few exceptions, you have lots on both sides of every street. If there are no houses, there usually is no reason to built a street.
Please keep that in mind when you look at the following neighborhoods:
- West Weasels: It is really a pity that the two roads from the end of the map just go to the ring street instead going to the middle of the map. The good thing about this terrain is that you automatically will have smaller lots in the middle and bigger lots in the outskirts.
- Port White Water: This terrain has a main street. Unfortunatelly, it ends in the village. You could use the three small squares (quadrats) and the rectangle as village center with older, smaller houses and the big square and the remaining roads for newer, bigger houses.
- Jackferry Point: This terrain has a main street that seems to continue to the ends of the map. The number of streets on this map might be too low and the streets enclose too much space for a village center.
- Bitville: Has two main streets. You would have to completely fill the two rectangles with houses to make it look realistic.
- Arbor falls: Also has two main streets that would have to be filled with houses. The streets on the hill could be some development area with bigger lots.
Sorry for not using links, but as you can find them all on MTS, I am too lazy to do this. As they all are neighborhoods and not just terrains: Mootilda created a Hood Replace Tool (also here on MTS) that you can use to copy terrain, roads and even decorations from one neighborhood to another without copying lots and sims. If you want to use any of these terrains, that should be the best way of doing it.

In Germany, classical half-timbered houses only were built until about 1900 in bigger numbers. The last one in my home village was built in 1908 and it already has brickstones within the gaps instead of clay etc. Nowadays, for similar constructions usually other materials are used, e.g. steel instead of timber and glass for the gaps. Other houses might look like a bit like half-timbered houses, but the construction is made in a different way or the timber is purely decorative without being a supporting structures. As there apparently are a few companies in Germany that still offer to build classical half-timbered houses, it is possible that a few half-timbered houses even have been built in recent years, but considering that I have never seen such a house, I assume that these companies make the biggest part of their turnovers by renovating existing houses instead of building new ones.

One more topic: Streets and sidewalks
The standard streets and sidewalks do not look very German at all. Most sidewalks are tarred and there is no gap or green between sidewalk and street. The sidewalk is a few centimeters higher than the street and they are separated by a curb with drain gates, where needed. Squares and the sidewalks close to them can be paved instead of tarred for decorative reasons. Street lamps are on the sidewalks every 20-50 m in built-up areas.
Streets in residential areas usually are tarred without any lines on it. Bigger streets may have white broken likes. Streets in residential areas usually do not have traffic signs like the neighborhood decoration stop signs. People have to give way to the right, thus making traffic signs unneccessary. The crosswalks also are not needed as there hardly is any traffic and you usually do not have to wait for more than a few seconds before you can cross the street. Bigger streets might have priority so that there might be traffic signs next to these streets, but even then you usually have a give way sign and stop signs only are used at intersections with a high risk of accidents.

Thank you! No, I just have a degree in a completely different field. But I like history and old buildings and for vacations, I prefer sightseeing to hiking or going to the beach. And I have a good memory (except for those things that I have to remember) so that I can compare your postings with my impressions of several dozens of villages and towns. Although frequently I just have a first thought that your descriptions and reality do not match, but then I have to think a bit longer to figure out why and google some terms and pictures to be able to explain that.

And just for the record: I am trying to give you as good an impression as possible, but of course it is completely up to you how much of that impression you include in your neighborhood.

Thank you again for giving me impressions! I haven't visited Germany for 15 years and cannot visit it soon for obvious reasons, hence I have to rely on the internet, media, and my own frame of reference based on the infrastructure in my country. I understand German to a certain extent -- if some translated text looks off, I can hover to the original language.


Thanks for the term! Do you know by chance where I can find ceiling beams (links aren't needed)? When I tried to google it myself, my results got cluttered with TS3 and TS4 stuff despite excluding those keywords.

When I was browsing for architectural inspiration, I noticed terms like "Zweifamilienhaus" or "Einfamilienhaus", so now it makes more sense to me. In my country, it probably less common to live with three generations in small villages. My house has a single hallway with the staircase and built-in meter closet in one room, and the coats and shoes are stored in the vented staircase closet. We also have a small bathroom (WC) adjacent to the hallway.

In the case of a medium to large-sized house, is the dining table usually located in the kitchen room, the living room, or a separate room (only if there's enough space)?
Is the floor in the hallway usually made of stone or wood, or highly variable? Do the bedrooms and hallways on the upper floors usually have wooden floors or carpet?

On a side note: I've understood it's a common social habit over there to take off your shoes in the hallway when entering a home, but since that's getting complicated to apply this detail in TS2, I'll leave it to my imagination.

Thanks for the hood suggestions and details! Do you know by chance which hood and sidewalk road replacements would work best? I have Criquette's 2008 rural road mod on the radar but I'm not sure if it's still up to date. I yet have to find a European-style sidewalk hood replacement, though.

And I wonder, can you recommend to me some objects (buy or build mode) that would be fitting for a German-inspired hood and houses, such as certain type of streetlights or public waste bins? I already want to look for separated waste bins for the households, and here on MTS I've already found German Farmers Kitchen "Bauernmalerei", though I don't know how old-fashioned it looked if the story is set in the 00s. And I've already found 3t2 madaya74's tilt-and-turn windows, which are also typical windows for Germany.
Links aren't needed if it's too time-consuming and I can easily find it myself through Google/MTS.

No, unfortunately, I do not know where to find ceiling beams. I play with very few CC because I really like short loading times. And, a few years ago, I decided that my sims live on another planet. Thus, I do not even try to built anything too realistic.


Zweifamilienhaus refers to a house that has two cleary separated apartments. Thus, not every house where three generations live is a Zweifamilienhaus and not every Zweifamilienhaus is inhabited by relatives. It also can be a house with two apartments of similar size and the apartments also can be rented to people completely unrelated to each other and the landlord. The two apartments can be on different floors or in different sides of the house. There can be one or two entrances. The house is built on one lot so that garden etc. are shared.

Doppelhaus is similar, but not identical to Zweifamilienhaus. A Doppelhaus consists of two separate houses that share one wall with each other. They usually are built on two neighboring lots and have separate entrances, gardens etc. Both houses usally look very similar. One of the reasons for building a Doppelhaus is that for an Einfamilienhaus, nowadays, you have to keep a certain distance to the lot boarder. Especially for smaller lots that can be quite limiting regarding the house layout and you might end up with a small garden strip all around the house but without a really usable garden area. By building a Doppelhaus, you do not have to obey the distance to one lot boarder and might have a bigger, more enjoyable garden that way. Doppelhäuser are quite common for as new houses also in rural areas. You can built them relatively easily with the help of the lot adjuster. In towns and cities, you also might find terraced houses, but in villages they are not that common.


Dining table: All three options exist. It depends on house size, room layout and the inhabitants' preferences. Kitchen island counters usually are just used for preparing food, not for eating. If you want to have an alternative to a regular dining table, a higher bar table might be an option (e.g. dining table in a dinging room and bar table in the kitchen).

Floors in hallways: That is highly variable. Wood, stone, laminate etc. I guess laminate is the most common option as it is rather cheap and not that damageable. Parquet might be an option for wealthier sims and tiles for pet owners. Carpet seems to be less popular today, but has not died out completely yet. Hallways on different floor levels frequently have the same type of floor. All bedrooms usually also have the same type of floor because you decide on a certain type of floor when you built the house and do not change it every couple of years depending on your sims' preferences. Thus, you will rarely find any loud colors. For individuality, rugs and maybe wall colors might be the better options.


I know that it is not possible to take off the shoes in Sims 2. I just wanted to give you an impression of what decorative furniture could be placed in these rooms. If you have a house with older inhabitants and a bigger hallway, there also might be a small cabinet with a telephone on top of it.


I do not think that there is any German-looking road default replacement. Criquette's default replacement does not look like streets in Germany as most streets in Germany are tarred and have a dark color, just without the lines on it. I use some defaults by dreadpirate that have a second row of concrete tiles to eliminate the grass. Unfortunately, the concrete is even lighter than the original concrete tiles so that the sidewalks appear very light in neighborhood view.


No CC recommendations, just some picures and terms to look up the real items.

Most street lights are rather simple ones like this one.
I think communities are free to choose the street lights themselves so that there is a lot of variety. More decorative street lights might be an option for squares and highly frequented streets with shops. (It is quite common that the ground floors of houses in the main street or another street with lots of shops are used as shops and the upper floors are used as apartments. If you also want to have this in your game, there is a mod that enables both on the same lot.)

For public waste bins it is similar to the street lights. Just google for "Mülleimer Innenstadt" to get some impressions (make sure that google does not try to change "Mülleimer" to "Mülheimer" because then you just will see pictures of a town called Mülheim). This waste bin seems to be quite popular as I have seen it in many different places.
If you also are interested in private waste bins: This type of waste bin should be used (almost) everywhere in Germany. Black is for residual waste, yellow for recyclable materials, blue for paper and paper card, brown for organic waste. People in villages usually have all four waste bins, in cities, there might not be a waste bin for organic waste because people used to throw too much waste of the wrong type in there in the past. One addition regarding gardens from my previous postings: Compost piles still are popular in Germany.

The kitchen set does not look like any kitchen that I ever saw (including old kitchens in old people's houses). Therefore, I do not know, whether "old-fashioned" is the right term as I do not think that this type of kitchen ever was in fashion. Bauernmalerei is common in Altbayern since the middle of the 20th century. Thus, it is not really some old tradition. And it is mostly used to sell "typical" Bavarian souvenirs for tourists and much less common for furnishing your own house. Thus, if you want to use that set, it might be better just to use one or two pieces per room. And even then, the items wih the green background seem to be "too much" for my taste. Or maybe add a mountain vacation subhood and turn it into the Bavarian stereotype.

Yes, tilt-and-turn windows are extremely common in Germany.
One more thing regarding windows: In older houses that are closer to the lot boarder than today's standard, windows might have opal glass so that your neighbor still can enjoy their privacy.

RE: Germanize Veronaville
 

What kind of floors are the most used for bedrooms? Laminate or carpet? In what cases are some of the interiors walls built of wood?
And what kind of fences are common around the lot border, besides hedges or big bushes? Were Jägerzaune lattice fences common during the 00s? Are outdoor modular stairs usually made of stone or concrete?

Now I've gathered many impressions, I'm ready to build/renovate some residential homes. However, how would you renovate Via Veronaville 26 into a countryside Fachwerkhaus style construction? What tile ratio would you pick for the foundation of such a house? Is the main roof ridge + gable usually pointed parallel or perpendicular towards the main street for detached Fachwerkhäuser? Is the wall dormer usually at the center or is putting the dormer at the end of the walls not uncommon? What kind of cross-gabled roof shape would look realistic here?
I want to remove the nook walls and make the foundation rectangular while retaining the front dormer and rebuild it on a 2x3 plot instead of 3x2, so the lot gets an elongated backyard and utilizes the empty space behind at the back street. I want to keep it a detached Einfamilienhaus but reduce the amount of space between the horizontal borders of the lot. I want to add a 2nd floor (attic) with the aid of a (wall) dormer, replace the hipped roof with a gabled roof and extend it to max 52° (perhaps I could raise it to 60° with cheats). I already had built a hallway + guest toilet since that's also common in my country, and already have collected floorplans through German real-estate websites. But I'm going to replace the stairs with 90° winding stairs now I've finally found that type as well. I want to build a cellar underneath for hobby/party and decorative storage and a single attic room at the dormer for e.g. sleepovers. I have to think about whether I want to paint the untimbered ground floor walls plastered or in stone.
Some weeks ago (before I posted this thread), I already tried to renovate it towards something more German-like, but the double dormers looked off to me.

Where I live, gabled roofs are also common, but farmhouses usually have huge hipped roofs and a big lot (probably just like in Northern Germany). For renovating the mansions of especially Capp and Summerdream, I want to look for images of Herrenhaus, Forsthaus and/or one of the Bauernhofanlage. For the Monty mansion, I will look for Vierzeithof inspiration and give it an Italian touch.

Floors:
I did a bit more research regarding floors and these are the most common floor types in Germany (in random order): parquet, linoleum, cork, natural stone, tiles, carpet, laminate and vinyl. Stone and tiles are not that common for bedrooms, but all the other materials are. Carpet still seems to be relatively common which surprises me because only a few people that I know had carpets in their houses/apartments and they all decided to replace it with some other floor within the last 10-20 years. None of the websites detailed how these eight floor types were picked. Thus, maybe it is related to sales as carpets have to be replaced more often.
In general, I would associate natural stone and parquet with people with average or higher than average income/wealth, linoleum and laminate with people with average or lower than average income/wealth and with rentable apartments. However, as it also is a question of personal taste, you will find plenty of exceptions. Cork and vinyl have become more popular in recent years so that I would use them in some newer houses/apartments or newly renovated houses/apartments regardless of wealth/income. Tiles are common regardless of age, income and whether you own a house or live in an apartment. I would associate carpets with houses that have not been renovated during the past 20-30 years, but that is just my personal impression as I do not know any people with carpet floor today.

Walls:
I think wooden walls just have a decorative function. Thus, you can place them whereever you like to. For half-timbered and timber houses, you simply can use the same wall outside and inside. Some people also like to have a (fake) wooden wall e.g. in their living room to highlight a fireplace, TV or the like. Most people would use special wall papers for that instead of really using wood. I think that this approx. 70 cm high wooden panels with wall papers above are not really common in Germany. Skirting boards for wall/floor and wall/ceiling are common.

Fences:
You will find pretty many different fence styles, but Jägerzäune were not really popular at that time nor are popular today. You might find them occasionally, but other types/styles are more common. You can google for "Zaun" to get an impression. Wooden fences are common, but the wooden parts usually are parallel to each other and not crossed. Metal fences and "Maschendrahtzaun" also are common.

Outdoor stairs:
I think stone is more common for that. Concrete can be very slippery when it is wet and not all outdoor stairs are covered by some kind of roof.

Tile ratio:
I think that 6-10 tiles width and 80-150 tiles per floor could be realistic. However, the big free space next to the house is not realistic. It is really a pity that lot sizes are so limited because 10 will be too small for your taste (and if all/many houses are that wide, it might also look boring) and 20 is too big to make it look realistic. A combination of lots that are 10, 12 and 15 tiles wide would be perfect.

Roof/gable direction:
Both options are common, but they usually are not mixed with each other. Thus, decide for one option for a group of houses (e.g. in the same street) or maybe for the whole village with just a few exceptions (like the mansions that you want to keep).

Dormer:
If you have just one dormer, it usually is relatively central (exceptions possible, as always). If there is more than one dormer, they usually are evenly distributed.
Regarding your picture: I think that it is a combination of several things. Your dormers are relatively big, the roof with ridge makes them look even bigger and having two dormers like that attracts even more attention.
Maybe go for two small dormers (just as wide as the windows like in this picture ) instead with that roof type for the dormer and if every room has at least one window (either a regular window or a dormer with window), it is also not necessary to have dormers on both sides of the house.
As there are different types of dormers, you should have some variety in your houses as well, but maybe it is better not to combine all factors in one house that make the dormer look so big.
Roof angle: Such high angles do exist, but the majority of Fachwerkhäuser has lower angles. The high angles are most common in very densely settled areas which does not really fit a 2x3 lot.
If the roof style does not look convincing enough to you, you also could try a half-hipped roof by using the hipped roof on the highest floor and the other roof on the floor with the attic.

Just for the record: It is called Vierseithof with "s" instead of "z". Although I think that Google would suggest to correct the spelling as well.

One more thing about the interior (although probably difficult to do in Sims 2): German kitchens frequently have the fridges inside a cabinet that matches the kitchen counters. Stoves and dishwashers are placed in an opening of a kitchen counter so that they are not placed directly on the ground but 15-20 cm above. The cooktop of the stove also is surrounded by the work surface and the dishwasher might have a matching hatch. It might sound like a little detail, but in Sims 2, it always attracty my attention because the colors of the non-CC kitchen appliances do not match the counters 100 % and the edges might not be in line either.
And if you plan to add washing machines: front-loading washing machines are much, much more common than top-loading ones in Germany.

Thanks again for the detailed answers, @ralna! Time for me to build and renovate houses

I just have tried to recreate this one in TS2 (an execptional case of a house with a wall dormer at the corner). However, I noticed it has two front doors but only one mailbox, so I wonder, what kind of house is this, you think? A Zweifamilienhaus, a duplex house or an Einfamilienhaus attached to a public facility like a restaurant?

Just a thought; if you have Apartment Life, and you enjoy playing Apartment, you could add some public housing-project looking apartment lots on one end of town for added authenticity. From what I know Germany has one of the largest percentage of apartment dwellers in...uh, it was either Europe or the (western?) world and even smaller towns and villages sometimes feature them.

@Softlism
I am not sure whether this is really considered one house. As the roofs have different colors and forms, I assume that there are two houses that may or may not have a wall breakthrough.
I would not pay too much attention to the mail box, as this type of mailbox (standing on a post) is rather uncommon in Germany. Usually, mailboxes are attached to one of the walls of the house or you might just have a mail slot in the front door. I cannot see another mailbox, but mail slots in the doors could be possible.

The dormer looks like it was added at a later point. The walls look different and the roof is the only part that is not bend in any way. Have a look at the windows on the left side of the house as well. As the opening on the third floor does not have a window, I assume that this part of the house is only used as storage or not used at all. The second floor apparently was not used for living either before the dormer was added. I assume that the bigger window on the right was added when the dormer was added. The small window on the left should be older and apparently was sufficient for whatever purpose that floor originally used to have. Depending on the floor plan of the two floors beneath, it might be a good option to have a bathroom there.

If you want to have some kind of business in that house, I could imagine one of those wine "restaurants". In that case, the whole building would belong to the wine grower and the upper floors might be used for living. The bigger left side of the house could be for the younger family with their children and the smaller right side could be for the grandparents.

You also could turn the house into an apartment lot. The smaller house on the right could be an apartment and the bigger house on the left could either be one big apartment or you could have two apartments (ground floor and first floor - second and third floor) or even three apartments (ground floor - first floor - second and third floor).

My personal preference would be turning the houses in two separate lots. With the lot adjuster, it is possible to make the houses look like they still are connected. The right house would be the home for one family and the left house either could be the home for a very big family or divided into several apartments.


@Ophalesion
May I ask where in Germany you have seen something like this? Because to me, it sounds quite untypical.

Being a tenant does not necessarily mean being poor and depending on public housing. Being a tenant does not even necessarily mean living in an apartment. You also can rent a house - this is especially common in villages because rents are more affordable there.

As I have mentioned before, Germans move house/apartment relatively few times in their lives compared with other countries. And when you buy a house or apartment, moving in there usually is the last move of your life. Reasons for this could be that the initial costs for buying (for notary, land register etc.) are higher than in many other countries. If you decide to move out and sell the house/apartment again, this money is lost. And it is more difficult to get a credit (at least compared with the U.S.) as banks require you to have lots of savings as own contribution which means that people have to work for several years and save a lot of money before being able to apply for a credit.
And it can be difficult to find a house that you really want to buy. Houses in attractive locations are rather expensive (even small terraced houses in not that popular cities cost more than half a million euros and in popular cities, you usually even have to pay more than one million). And new houses usually are in the outskirts of a city/town/village where not everybody wants to live. Therefore, it might be more convenient, to stay in a rented apartment. I know many couples (some of them with children) with high income who prefer to stay in their rented apartments relatively central in the city because there they are close to all places and shops that they regularly visit and can walk there instead of depending on a car. In a village, in contrast, you might need two cars as frequently the public transportation system is quite bad there.

Due to the German welfare system that includes several forms of housing subsidies, poor people are able to rent regular apartments/houses and the vast majority of them prefers regular housing.

Most public housing in Germany was built during the decades after the Second World War to replace the houses destroyed during the war because many people did not have enough money to build new houses themselves. Therefore, most public housing was built in cities as these were more destroyed than villages and insteadt of having big areas just with public housing buildings, the buildings are spread all over the city because they filled the gaps left by the destroyed buildings. Even if public housing was built at one end of a city back then, it now would be surrounded by the city as cities are growing. Villages did not need public housing as much less houses and apartments were destroyed and due to rural depopulation, some other houses/apartments became available.
However, most cities see less need for public housing nowadays and have sold most of the public housing to companies that have turned it into regular rentable or owned apartments. There are just a few cities that want to increase public housing again, but they usually buy existing apartment buildings instead of building new ones somewhere. Currently, only about 1 million of more than 40 million houses/apartments are public housing and I am quite sure that authorities actively try to avoid having bigger complexes of public housing as such complexes can get a bad reputation quite easily so that applications for jobs could be discarded by companies just because the candidate has the wrong address.

I didn't mean to imply poverty. Especially modern government subsided housing can be very nice in some places.

@Orphalesion @ralna: I'm quite surprised how common renting is in Germany and buying property is a bigger step over there! I just read that in my country approx 60 - 70% of the population has house ownership.

Anyway, I did another try on building a single-family home with a wall dormer and a half-hipped roof and here are the results:


Is this size somewhat sensible for a single-family home with 2 kids, or is it more likely affordable for a rich family or a family with more than 2 kids? I've tried out to start the shed-gable roof on the 1st floor instead of the 2nd floor, but I couldn't rotate it properly on 2x1 tiles long, and I want to keep the 1st floor as functional as possible just like in the original Via Veronaville 26 (though I still want to build a cellar underneath for hobbies etc). I was thinking to resize the foundation to 9x12.
Also, what's a common floor size for the terraced part of the backyard?

@ophalesion
There are poor people in Germany - that is not a problem. But the vast majority of these people live in regular apartments and if they have problems to afford the rent, the state will give them some money so that they can afford the rent.

Germany had about 4-5 million units of public housing in 1985, but today, only about 1 million is left. This means that the cities sold many houses while building hardly any new houses. Therefore (and for several other reasons that I tried to explain in the previous posting), new public housing projects like mentioned by you pretty much do not exist in Germany. The vast majority of public housing was built between 1945 and 1988 before some law was changed that made building such houses less attractive.

In total, Germany currently has more than 40 million housing units (regardless of whether they are houses or apartments). Thus, 1 million is a very small percentage of this. If you want to apply this to a Sims neighborhood, you would need 120-160 regular houses and apartments for each lot with 3-4 public housing apartments. And as already mentioned in my previous posting, most if not all remaining public housing is in cities, not in villages.



@Softlism
Regarding the dormer: You can use the hipped roof for the back part of the roof so that the tip does not stick out of the main roof.

I found some numbers for house/apartment sizes in relationship to the number of inhabitants. One person households in average have 68 m² (That number is a mix of mainly younger people who live in smaller apartments in cities and mainly older people, usually women, who live in single family houses in rural areas after the death of their spouses). Two person household in average have 99 m², thus 49 m² per person. Households with three and more people in average have 122 m² with 33 m² per person. Thus, the average number of inhabitants in this group has to be slightly less than four people.

If I have counted correctly, your house has 296 tiles which would equal 132 m² (when three tiles equal two meters - which would be realistic for the length of a bed). If you just go by size, that is slightly more than the average space for a household with four people so that a family with two or more children would be possible. As the parents usually will stay in the house even when their children have moved out, maybe have a wealthier family buy that house. A rich family, most likely, would buy a slightly bigger house.

Fachwerkhäuser have rather small rooms inside (compared to the sizes that we prefer today). Renovations usually concentrate on the living area (living room, dining room, kitchen). There, changes can be done relatively easily by (partially) removing walls so that two old rooms are combined to one new room. For bedrooms, this might be more difficult, as one old room might be rather small, but two old rooms combined to one new room might be too big. And removing walls completely and rebuilding them at another place is quite uncommon as this might affect the stability of the whole house and frequently even experts only can guess thee effects, but not predict them with 100 %. You might combine two old rooms for the master bedroom if the previous master bedroom was really small, but for the children's bedrooms you usually go with the existing size. Therefore, you might end up with more rooms than you need. In such a case, the house might be better for a family with three or more children or for a three generation family.

Terraced part: I do not think that terraces like this are common at all for Fachwerkhäuser. In a village, in the past, many people had some smaller animals like chicken and a garden to grow some vegetables. And depending on the profession of the inhabitants, they also might have needed a place to store tools etc. and there would be an outhouse somewhere. Thus, the place behind the house was occupied with something else and it does not seem the top priority of today's inhabitants to add a terrace. I would reduce the foundation to a size sufficient for a backdorr and small stairs and if your future inhabitants might enjoy something terrace-like, you could have an area on ground level that is paved or covered with natural stones.

Your house seems to have quite a lot and rather big windows on the front and side and the front door also seems to be quite modern to me. It might look more realistic, if you use smaller or fewer windows and move some windows from the front and side to the back of the house. The historic preservation agency cares a lot about the facade of old houses and only allows doors and windows similar to those that were common for this type of house in the past. They are less strict about changes to the inside of the house.

For more realism, you also could add signs with the street names at each crossing/intersection. Usually that sign is placed somewhere on the sidewalk, sometimes, it is also affixed on the wall of a house. On the wall of the house, there also should be the house number. That is obligatory in many parts of Germany or even everywhere. As mailboxes usually are affixed to a wall of the house or sometimes to a fence, I would put the mailbox at least next to a wall and away from the sidewalk. Waste bins only are close to the street when the waste is about to be collected, e.g. once every two weeks. For the rest of the time, it has to be placed on the lot itself and not on the sidewalk. If you plan to add a garden shed, you could place it in there. People also do not want it to be accessible to everybody because they do not want strangers to throw in additional waste. If there is too much waste or the wrong type of waste in a waste bin, people from the waste collection might not accept the waste. And in some communities, the waste bin is weighed before the waste collection so that the owners of the waste bin can be charged for exactly the amount of waste that was collected.

@ralna: thanks for the tips! I placed a shed hipped roof on the back of the dormer and it worked.

I've resized the foundation to 9x12 minus the nook at the front. I pretend that the four-person household that will live here is upper middle class since the house is spacious. My floorplan is based on the old house where those Sims lived, so I haven't started from scratch based on collected floorplan inspiration.

The number of tiles did not change very much so that my previous suggestions still apply.

The windows look more fitting to me. For some of the other houses, you also could use windows with wooden shutters. If you need more variety regarding the windows, you could use windows with 4-8 smaller pieces of glass for other houses and although white is the most frequent color for the windows, a few houses with windows in wooden colors also would be realistic.
As Fachwerkhäuser were built at a time when it was not that usual to have a bathroom in the house, I would use the same kind of windows for the bathrooms. As long as you use curtains, nobody can spy into the bathroom. In fact, I only know a few houses that have smaller windows for bathrooms - regardless of whether the house is old or new. Usually, the windows have the same size as the other windows, sometimes with translucent glass and pretty much always with curtains or there is no bathroom window at all.

The waste bins look good although I would replace the green one with a black one (black = residual waste). If you want to have them in front of the house, I would build something around them or put a fence around the whole lot.

I can understand that you decided to keep the regular mailbox because replacements would affect the whole game. I think that the placement on top of the stairs with the small windows above looks somehow odd. I would place the mailbox on ground level next to one of the other wall pieces.

Regarding the front door: It can have smaller windows. The Japanese-inspired (?) door from your previous version just had too big windows. I also am not sure about what to do with the wall tile next to the door. Due to the foundation and stairs, a 1-tile door seems the most realistic choice (because gates also were used for carriages), but the small window next to it looks rather strange.

Driveway: There is an invisible recolor for it here on MTS. That way you can place the car, but the street still looks normal.

Wall colors: Natural stone and stucco both are possible. If you go for stucco, white might not be the most frequent choice. The nook definitely should be the same color than the rest of the respective floor.
Many Fachwerkhäuser have more colors than just white and wooden brown and it is rather rare that all Fachwerkhäuser have the same color scheme. The timber can be painted e.g. red or green instead of being just brown and the parts between the timber usually have light colors, but cream seems to be as frequent as white and a few houses have completely different colors. And window shutters frequently have another color that matches neither the timbered parts nor the windows. As the EA timbered walls just provide very limited options, it might be an option to use more and different colors for the ground floors so that the houses do not look too similar to each other.
For the half-timbered part of your house: There should be more diagonally timbered parts.

Garden shed: The majority of garden sheds is quite small because bigger garden sheds require a building permit which costs money and takes time and cause recurring costs for sewage water/sealed ground etc. In 7 of 16 German states, the maximum size for a garden shed without building permit is 10 m³ (including ground plate, walls and roof) which means that the garden shed only covers an area of 4-5 m². Thus, I would assume that most sims also would have small garden sheds (if they have one) to store garden tools and machines. A few sims could have garden houses that are not used as a storage but to spend leisure time there. These types of garden house frequently have a roof that is bigger than the shed or some kind of canopy so that you have some weather protection while sitting beneath. Thus, you could use such a bigger garden shed as an alternative for a terrace.
Regarding the placement: Not too far away from the house and frequently with some kind of way leading there so that you could go to the shed during a rain without making your shoes dirty (it does not have to be a continuous way having one floor tile and one tile of grass alternating would be sufficient or several spots with terrain paint). Not in the middle of the garden, but rather close to one of the boarders (although the boarder on the back might be too far away for your lot) or close to the back of the house. Apart from this, it mostly depends on the layout of the garden and the objects that your sims will have and the activities that they will do. If they will grow fruit and vegetables, a small garden shed with tools would be close to that area. If they have a garden house for leisure activities, it would rather be placed on the lawn in a way that you have a beautiful view from there. You also should consider the orientation of your lot as the garden shed or house should not block the sunlight. Plants should have sunlight all day long and your sims might want to have sunlight mainly in the (late) afternoon and evening. If your sims have bushes or a high fence at the boarder of the lot or if your sims's neighbors have, the bushes or fence might cause shadow anyway so that you might want to place a garden shed within that shadow.

Bicycles: Both is possible although I think that the cellar is more common because most garden sheds are too small to have four bikes inside and garden sheds are less protected against burglars than the house. For other/newer houses with garage, the garage might be the most popular place for bikes and a few people might simply place their bikes somewhere behind the house (so that they are not immediately visible from the street) where they still have a bit of protection from the roof overhang.

Cellar: The exact material does not matter as long as it is solid and durable. Except for the hobby/party rooms, you even might not have a floor cover at all, but just the base plate, concrete or whatever material was used for the shell of the building. One more possible use for the cellar: DIY is rather popular in Germany. Thus, some people have one cellar room as workshop for such projects. The furniture (or even the garden shed) might reflect that.

Ground floor: Maybe consider replacing (some of) the half-broken walls by half-walls with wodden column on top and maybe place some wooden columns in addition to it. The winding stairs are nice, however, I do not think that spiral stairs really match. If you want to save space, the most common type of stairs would be having them on the same spot in every floor. Does that work with modular stairs in Sims 2? U-shaped stairs and very steep stairs also are common in Fachwerkhäusern, but the first would require using the CFE cheat a lot and the latter would require CC. If the attic is not regularly used, a CC ladder also might be an option for that floor.

First and second floor: The rooms are much too big for a Fachwerkhaus. It might help to do the layout with many smaller rooms first. Each of these smaller rooms should be connected to the hallway and diagonal walls are quite uncommon. Then, when the layout with small rooms is finished, you could remove some walls to make some rooms a bit bigger - although it might look unrealistic, if all rooms are big. The hallway imho is also too big.

As it just came into my mind:
Kitchen sinks in Germany frequently look like this and many new houses have roller shutters like this.

@ralna: thanks for the window tips! I was already thinking to add wooden shutters to some of the houses. I do have to look for blinds that are fitting for the bathroom *and* these windows. At my home, the bathroom window is opaque and covered with Persian blinds, but it must be noted that I don't live in an old house.

Garden: If there's a street right behind the backyard, are tall fences or tall shrubs more common? And would they have a second entry gate at the backyard in this case?

What were the usual tile size ranges for the original smaller rooms in Fachwerkhäuser?

Except for roller shutters on the outside of the windows, pretty much any option is possible for a Fachwerkhaus. The wooden shutters would be mostly decorative.

Garden: If there is a street behind the house, a fence should be more common than shrubs. For the houses with a street behind the lot that I know, a height of 1,0-1,4 m is common for the fence. And yes, a gate in the fence is common in such cases.

Room size: I did some research and there many results for "small rooms", but none that provided exact numbers. I looked up frequently suggested room sizes (bigger rooms are possible, but you will rarely find smaller rooms in new houses) for modern houses. For old houses, I would use these numbers as maximum for bigger houses and reduce room size for smaller and average sized houses
Living room: 30 m² (including dining area)
Kitchen: 10 m²
Bedroom: 12 m² (both for master bedroom and child's room)
Bathroom 8 m²
My own experiences in that regard are limited as I never lived in a Fachwerkhaus and as a guest you usually only see some of the rooms, but not all of them. For bedrooms, sizes frequently were 25-50 % less than the room sizes mentioned above (The only exceptions were a few houses for more than one family. In these houses, the bedrooms on groundfloor sometimes were 14-18 m², but usually there were just one or two bedrooms and if a family lived there all children had to share one bedroom). Bathroom size varies quite a bit because they were added to the house at a later point. Thus, sometimes they even are bigger than in modern houses. Living rooms also frequently were 20-40 % smaller, but they usually did not include a dining area. Many older houses have a dining area in the kitchen with some kind of corner bench.
Just keep in mind that the house size is average for a 4+ household today, but at the time when the house was built, it must have been for a bigger household. Old single-family houses in villages with such a base area usually have one floor less and old single-family houses in towns usually have a smaller base area.

Gutter pipes: Good idea. I think one at the backside of the house should be enough and for the front of the house, two should be enough. The pipes from the dormer roof would not lead to the ground, it would lead to the gutter pipes for the regular roof. The gutter pipes usually lead into the ground so that the water ends up in the canalization. If your sims like to garden, you might place some rain barrels in front of the gutter pipes. The gutter pipes usually have some kind of hatch that you can open so that the water from the gutter pipe can go into the rain barrel. Some (usually newer) houses also have some sort of drainage all around the house.

Placement of windows: It is better now, but I think that some rooms still have too many. And windows do not have to be placed in a symmetrical way. They were built where people needed a window, not where it would look nice.
The room on the left back of the ground floor e.g. has four windows for a 15-tile room. Two (one on each of the exterior walls) would be realistic. The same is true for the bedrooms that currently have up to three windows.
The entrence area looks much better now as well. Nevertheless, I think that it would have some source of daylight. If you do not want to place a window, it would be good to replace the front door with one that has a small window included.
The stairs and foundation in front of the house look unusual. One or two steps would be more usual and the door would be directly at the top of the stairs without a floor tile inbetween. I know that it is possible although complicated to have lower foundations and it might be impossible to avoid the floor tile. Thus, the game somehow limits the realism.

The half-landing stairs look much more realistic. I still do not think that the room layout is realistic, but unfortunately, I cannot tell you what to change to make it look more realistic.
On the first floor, I would try to get rid of the two diagonal walls behind the stairs and that one wall piece on the upper right as it does not really make sense that the hallway previously was divided into three different rooms - two is sufficient.
On the second floor, there is a room completely without daylight. It might be more realistic to separate the two rooms another way so that each room has one window.

In case it helps, https://www.immobilienscout24.de/ is a property search website for Germany. The houses often have floorplans there.

@simsfreq: Thanks, I also found some floorplans through Engel & Völkers. However, I will do another search through 'haus mieten' as I only used the keywords 'haus kaufen + [state]'.

@ralna: again, thanks for the feedback! I think I'm getting close to finishing the house (I already let my Sims move in with motherlode). However, I still have to gather some inspiration for "Fachwerk Innen" walls and columns.

Germans often have a home office room, or a playroom for children, although it would more often be on the ground floor. Maybe just a spare bedroom for guests? I haven't seen bedrooms being used to store clothing. Germans don't have very much clothing compared to American houses with walk-in closets!

Gartenschuppen doesn't sound right. Schuppen is not really like a shed. I couldn't think what the word was, but I went to see what they are called on the website of a DIY chain and they seem to favour "Gartenhaus", or even "Gerätehaus" (if it's purely for storage).

https://www.bauhaus.info/gartenhaeuser/c/10001006

As an aside, I have always loved the German word for conservatory - "Wintergarten"

I am not at all into gardening so could not tell you about that, but one thing which always surprises/amuses me is the amount of people who have a garden shower, and actually use it as a shower to wash in, fully naked, during the summer months! They are also useful if you have children who are all dusty, sandy, grassy or muddy from playing outside and you want to hose them down without traipsing them through the nice clean house first Children's playgrounds here are invariably sand-covered and if you have little ones it can seem like the entire beach content of the world ends up in your house all summer.

As the house is supposed to be an older one, I would go for a pantry. Central heating is common for new houses, but it is not that common for older houses because it is easier to put a night-storage heater in every room that needs to be heated. I do not know when exactly the change took place, but I know several houses from around 1950 that do not have central heating and several houses from around 1970 that have central heating. The effort and the costs to add all the tubes, wires etc. to an older house (and in Germany, people like to hide that kind of stuff inside the wall) are quite big and the lack of central heating usually is just one of several problems. That is why some of these houses already have been destroyed and replaced or families decided to build a second, more modern house on the same lot if the lot was big enough. Fachwerkhäuser usually are protected by law so that they may not be destroyed and people can apply for some financial support for renovations that might make the renovations a bit more attractive.

Hallway: If you want to place something there, you might go for a cleaning cupboard in the small nook. But I would not place too much stuff in a hallway.

Bathroom: As all the tubes had to be added at a later point, I do not think that a bathroom in the cellar is that realistic. The washing machine frequently is just placed in the kitchen or bathroom. Other laundry stuff like an ironing board could be placed in a domestic utility room, if you want to have one. If there is none, people place the laundry rack whereever they have enough space for it - even if it is the in the living room.

Piano in the cellar? Is that common where you live? I do not think that this is common in Germany at all. I guess the most frequent place for a piano would be the living room, even if it is hardly used anymore and more decorative. If only one child is interested in playing piano, you also could place it in the child's room, if it is big enough.

Left room: If you want hte parents to have the room on the left, you might need the hack for inaccessible beds as the room is quite long, but not wide enough. The door currently is placed so that it would lead into what previously was a separate room. It would make more sense if the door leads to the hallway.
Of course, the parents also could have their bedroom on the top floor. Maybe check their active/lazy points first. Lazy sims might prefer less stairs, active sims might prefer the better suited room, regardless of the amount of stairs.

Bathroom: At the time when the house was built, there was no bathroom inside. People would use an outhouse or something like that. Thus, a room had to be repurposed when creating the bathroom and the size can vary a lot. If the bathroom is big, you might put the washing machine and tumble dryer there and/or lots of bathroom cabinets. Nevertheless, I think that it is quite uncommon to have a wall breakthrough in the bathroom.

Second floor: If you want to close the room at the front, you can place a door with MoveObjects on. When you save and exit the lot and then reload it, the door should look and work like a normal placed one.
Use the rooms in whatever way your sims would like. You even can leave one or two of the rooms unused if your sim family currently has no use for it.
At the time when the house was built, it was supposed to be for the grand-parents, one or several children (plus spouses, if present) and several grandchildren. Until about 1875, the average number of children per woman was about five (including the women who did not have children at all) because live expectancy still was quite low (35 years for men and 38 years for women) and until the first pension scheme was introduced in 1889, having children was the only reliable retirement provision that people could have. Children, especially the daughters, would live at home until they married and some even after marrying. A wealthier family also could have some live-in personnel (mostly in urban areas or areas where farms had sole heirs). By the time the house was built, people had that in mind and wanted it to be able to accommodate everyone. But the real number of inhabitants sometimes was higher and sometimes was lower. As people here in Germany do not move house that often, they usually even stay in a house that is much too big for them. Thus, you do not have to worry about finding a purpose for every room. Maybe in one or two generations, a bigger family will live in that house and be happy to have so many rooms.

Frontside: You do not necessarily have to choose stone for the ground floor. You also can have stucco in different colors.
Regarding the fence: What do you plan to place on the left and right side of the lot? Usually you have a fence or some bushes there as well although it does not have to be the same type of fence as at the front and back. If the fence/bushes is/are not directly on the lot boarder, you also might add a boundary stone somewhere. They usually are at ground level or only a few centimeters above, but sometimes you can see them.

Backside: If you want to build a small garden shed as a storage for tools etc. you also can google "Geräteschuppen". If you want to build a bigger one where your sims can spend some leisure time, you might want to look for "Gartenhaus" or "Gartenhäuschen" (diminuitive form of Gartenhaus) instead.
Trees and shrubs: I cannot tell you. I am not an expert regarding plants and even in the region that you mention, there are some temperature differences (e.g. minimum temperatures during winter) and there are different types of earth in different places (due to tectonic shifts in the past) so that even within the region that you mention, not every plant will like every place. You could google "Stadtpark" and the name of a city or town to see some examples and then choose what you like best. I do not think that I heard about any bigger renovation or modification of parks so that they still should look like 15-20 years ago. And for private gardens, it really depends on the preferences of the inhabitants.



The text above was written before I saw simsfreq's posting. That is why we partially wrote the same.

Regarding storing clothing: I guess that was rather a question for one of the other rooms. Dressers and cabinets in guest bedrooms might not always be completely empty, but you would not store anything too private there. However, some people really have additional dressers in the attic or cellar where they have their winter clothes during sommer and vice versa. Such a room usually just is used as storage. Thus, you usually would not have a bed for a guest there and the dresser might be an old one that does not have to match the other furniture. Some people also use packing cases instead of an additional dresser.

@ralna @simsfreq: Also, I've let the Sims move in, decorated the rooms and made a start with the garden . Pics are in the spoiler tag



Some more questions:

• Which wood colors were common in German interior during the 00s, whether the furnutire was old or not? Was it common to match the wood colors with each other, or not really?

• I've downloaded some sheer curtains, but they clip with or sit on top of the Automatic Drapes. If I can't find any flat layerable sheer curtains, what are some common alternatives? Are Persion or vertical blinds also common?

• What German keywords can I use if I want to google for images of a top view/floor plan of a playground (for community lots)? I've tried 'Spielplatz aufsicht', but I could not find the results I wanted.

My son is in the 6th grade and he has a high sleeper bed with desk, computer and bookcase as well as his clothing storage. He also takes the Nintendo Switch console in there at all times. I would say a TV/console isn't unusual, maybe one generation behind, e.g. PS4 or even PS3, rather than PS5. The reason he has a computer is because of distance learning due to the pandemic - he didn't have one before then, but we had an old one we moved in there for him. Probably a stereo would be normal for early 00s. Older kids might have had a desktop computer back then, although remember it was also common to have one family one that everyone shared. These days, older kids have laptops although not at age 12/13 - more like when they get into the "Oberstufe" (Grade 10 onwards). These days he listens to music on his phone using bluetooth headphones. I would say his friends' bedrooms are similar. Animé stuff everywhere and magazines/comics. Sofa-bed or futon for friends to sleep over, beanbag chairs. Some of them have a musical instrument or sports equipment lying around. Skateboards and rollerblades are popular. He has some lego and board games although he doesn't really play with these any more.

I think your floors look too light. I have medium wood floors in my apartment, although it's 1960s so not really the same period. Parquet in the main living room, laminate everywhere else - this is likely not original, I think the parquet is, it matches the doors and skirting boards. Bathroom has tile and kitchen has a kind of rubbery floor. Carpet is uncommon (it's considered unhygienic). Most of my friends' places have either wood (or fake wood - laminate/vinyl) or tile floors. Medium or dark wood feels the most natural to me. Underfloor heating is also really common although I think that's more modern than early 00s. But anyone I know who renovated a house here in the last few years has it. Your heaters under the windows look fine, it's common to find this style of heater. In the dark brown colour or white.

I would just use google maps to look at Spielplatzen. You'll find then anywhere in residential areas, just pick any random area of Germany and zoom in. Normally no street view, but the aerial photos are there. Or just go to google.de and look for "Spielplatz". Or Flickr is really good for that kind of thing, at least it used to be - you can search by keyword and location, and likely year as well. Flickr was really popular in the 00s so it might be a good place to start. I'll see what I can find

I can't really get my head around how curtains work here so I'm not a good person to ask. Rolladen (metal shutters) are the most common, we actually don't have curtains up in most of the rooms because these work so well. I was actually thinking about how to create these in game - I think if the automatic blinds could be edited so that the mesh was just inside the wall, and the texture changed to a metal one, that would be the best approximation. I am not about to go messing with meshes, though. I probably could, but the last time I did was a long time ago and I don't want to look for all the tools and tutorials again.

Edit: Here, Flickr seems to be helpful in this instance:

https://www.flickr.com/search/?text=spielplatz

Also, have a look on youtube for "Weird things about German homes" Just because it's always fun! They are generally comparing against American or British houses depending on the nationality of the youtuber.

(Sorry I sent before I realised I had left the earlier paragraphs unfinished!)

Do you mean a TV and/or console as well?

Edit: thanks for the edit :p

I just submitted the post before I finished it, sorry about that. I've edited to include the info I forgot before. Sometimes I swap between paragraphs while writing if my thought tracks go back and forth; occasionally I forget that I've done that, and leave an earlier paragraph incomplete by mistake.

I will add that I've only lived in Germany since 2013, so my knowledge of your time period is not going to be accurate. I can only tell you what homes are like here today.

Ground floor:
I think that it is quite unusual to have the eating table directly next to a wall when you have a separate dining room. That is more common when you have an eating table in the kitchen.
The heaters like this and placed beneath windows are quite typical for newer houses with central heating. For an old house without central heating, I would rather go for more boxy heaters. Google "Nachtspeicherofen" for some images. And there is no need to place any heating in the entrance area. It is okay if it is a bit colder there because you do not spend a lot of time there and most of the time that you do spend there, it is to put on a warm jacket and warm shoes.
Curtain rods usually are placed a few centimeters above the window. You can lower them with a key. I do not know which key it is because our keyboards are different.

Kitchen:
Yes, clutter definitely will help. Look which counter your sims prefer for preparing meals and place plenty of shakers and glasses with spices and dried herbs there. If your sims like cooking, you also could have some small pots with fresh herbs (like parsley and chive). You also could place one or two additional lights beneath the wall cupboards. They are really common because the ceiling light will cause a shadow whereever you do something. Just watch where your sims spend most time in the kitchen and try placing the additional lights there or close to this location.

Parents' bedroom:
Dressers usually are wider than just two tiles. Google "Kleiderschrank" to see some pictures. You also could place a shoe cabinet there. If the dresser does not have a mirror included, a high or half-high mirror also is quite common.
I think that the stove pipe is also strange. Usually, the chimney goes from the ground floor up to the roof and any fireplaces just would have a short stove pipe leading to the chimney. Chimneys were wider because back then children had to climb inside to clean it. Thus, I would create a 1x1 box around the pipe to pretend that it is a chimney.

Bathroom:
I would not place the washing machine directly next to the sink and cabinet. On spin cycle it usually moves a bit. As the washing machine is just decorative, it will be sufficient to add a gap of a few centimeters with snap to grid disabled.

Kids' bedrooms:
Most children and teenager that I know had big desks in their rooms and dressers that would equal to two or three tiles ingame. Most children and teenagers had one or several additional cabinets in their rooms to
store all kinds of stuff.
I assume that children in Germany mature at the same rate as children in other countries. And each state has its own school system so that at least two states have six years of primary school while the other states have four years. The change from primary to secondary school is quite important because most states have some kind of split school system where you have two or three types of secondary schools in parallel and only one of these school types qualifies the pupils for university directly.
I think that TV, computer and console is a lot for a child's room in the early 2000s. A few teenager really had all three items, but most had just one or two of them or none. Some parents also were against electronics in a bedroom so that these families had just one TV in the living room and one or more computers in a room accessible to everyone. Some families even did not have any computers at all which sometimes was a problem when the children had to do some print-outs for school.
As additional electronics, a small stereo is possible (and was much more frequent back then than computer etc). MP3 players gradually replaced portable CD players.
Back at that time, printed magazins still were popular. Boys usually favoured scoccer or anime, some girls still bought horse magazins, others started buying fashion magazins. Board games also still were popular back then and there were some games especially for that age. When the kid has a stereo or computer, there should be some CDs, either just lying around or in a special shelf. Most children and teenagers also had small book shelfs in their rooms. I do not know whether everyone really read the books or whether it was more decorative for some pupils. A 5th grader also already could have some posters on the walls although the posters might change and additional ones might be added during the next couple of years. Most kinds of hobby equipment also would be placed in a kid's room, e.g. sports equipment, musical instruments. Depending on how mature you think that the child is, you still could add some dolls or you already could add some make-up clutter. Most children and young teenagers also collected something. In my region, in the early 2000s, Diddl objects (like writing paper and pads of notepaper) were popular for girls and Pokemon collectors cards for boys. In addition to that, in some families, I would place lots of clutter to make the rooms look more or less chaotic.

2nd floor:
You definitely should add some fence or half-walls around the hole caused by the stairs. It looks quite dangerous and might not be legal in many places.

Cellar:
I think that this kind of cellar is more typical for newer houses when it was easier to dig big holes in the ground. It is not a real problem when one Fachwerkhaus has a big cellar, but most of them would have a smaller vaulted cellar (e.g. just one or two rooms as storage) or some even no cellar at all.

Partykeller:
I know a few people that have one. Some people really spent a lot of energy into turning it into a room where you like to spend time and that is centered around a certain topic (e.g. what scoccer games on TV while having a few drinks with friends), but sometimes, it is just an example of bad taste. People might have bought one or two new items for the room, but the rest is furniture that they did not want to have in the "regular" rooms of the house anymore and the furniture does not always match. Floor and walls also sometimes were not changed for many years (thus before the room was turned into a Partykeller).

Gartenhaus:
If you make the roof a bit bigger, you could have a table with four to six chairs instead of the two chairs that you currently have. Such a Gartenhaus is a place where you could sit with some friends in the evening to talk, maybe have a few drinks or enjoy a barbecue. The position of the Gartenhaus looks okay to me, although the pathway really is a bit strange.

Garden shower:
Maybe I know the wrong people, but I do not know anybody who has one in their garden.

Shrubs:
If you want to use just one type of shrub, you could look for thuja. I know several people who have planted them in a row although I am not sure whether it is suitable for all regions. And you will have to replace them at a certain point because the lower part will become wood-like and there will be no more green so that it does not look good anymore and people might be able to peek through.

Driveways:
As far as I know, animations will not work when the driveways are placed like that. Nevertheless, your sims will be able to use the cars.

Street lights:
There are definitely too many of them. Depending on the intensity of the light, they usually are placed about 25 to 50 meters apart from each other and when the street just has two lanes, street lights on one side of the street are sufficient. Thus, I think that one street light per lot should be sufficient. If you choose the same side of the street for each lot, it should look coherant from neighborhood view. The cars also look dangerously close to the street lights and I wonder how the driver of the second car left the car.

Wood colors:
If the age of the furniture does not matter, you can use every kind of wooden color. Most German houses and apartments do not look likea design suggestion from a catalog. As long as the old furniture still is in good order, many people are reluctant or too lazy to change it so that they often keep furniture for decades.
Yes, most people try to match the colors. Furniture stores usually have furniture sets for different rooms and they usually have different versions for each type of furniture, but all matching each other and you can pick which items you want. Different rooms of course can have different styles and it is no problem to have a piece of furniture that does not match the others as eyecatcher (e.g. an antique heirloom). Creative people, poorer people or people with an interest in DIY could have rooms that do not match at all. The most common example should be students who share an apartment. Usually they cannot afford to buy new furniture for the whole apartment so that each inhabitant of the aparment brings along whatever their parents could spare or what they bought themselves. And when some of the students move out, they might not take all their furniture with them so that the furniture becomes more and more mixed the longer the apartment is shared.
For a kid's bedroom, it is common to buy a set of furniture when the child is born. The set contains both a crib and a regular single bed and all the other furniture that you usually have in a nursery and kid's bedroom. When the child does not need the crib and the changing table anymore, these items are taken out of the room and the child can continue to use it. When the child is older or already a teenager, the family may decide to replace all the furniture in the room so that it is more suited for a teenager and in such an event, the child/teenager will be involved in choosing the new furniture. Thus, kids' bedrooms often are more modern than other rooms in a house.
If you want to, you also can have a look at https://www.xxxlutz.de, https://www.roller.de and https://www.poco.de. They are chains of furniture stores. XXXLutz is Austrian, but during the past approx. 15 years, they bought many other furniture stores in Germany that did not belong to a chain or just were a regional chain. When you click on some of the categories, you will find "Komplette ..." or "...serien" where they show furniture sets for a whole room. Roller and Poco are more that kind of stores where you have to assemble the furniture yourself like Ikea, maybe for people with an even tighter budget. On the Roller website, look for "...programme" "...-Sets" and "...konzepte". On the Poco website, look for "...programme". On all three websites, you should also really click on each room that you are interested in because some of the set pages do not show up in the main menu.


Curtains/blinds:
Vertical blinds are rather common in offices at work, but I know one family that uses them in one room of their home. Persian blinds are more common than vertical blinds, but less common than curtains. In all rooms except for the bedrooms, thin curtains might be sufficient as people want to be protected from peeking neighbors. Thicker curtains are just needed for bedrooms so that the room can be dark at night when there are no roller blinds (modern houses) or shutter blinds (older houses).
If the curtain rods match, you could place the thicker curtains next to the window (so that the daylight can come into the room) and just have the thin curtains directly in front of the window. You also could try to place the thicker curtains with snap objects to grid false so that you can place them a bit further away from the wall. This might look strange from some angles, however, as the curtain rod will not be attached to the wall.

Playground:
"Aufsicht" is a term for a person who supervises something or someone. You can use "Draufsicht" instead. You also could use "Grundriss" as this is the term that is used for a floor plan (usually of houses).


Simsfreq's postings:
Thanks a lot for also helping. Out general impressions might be similar, but as we live in different places, have different ages etc. Softlism will get a more complete picture.
Console: PS2 was launched in 2000 and competing consoles like xBox, Wii and GameCube were launched between 2002 and 2006. Thus, they were less common back then. Gameboys and other handhelds still were popular.
Carpet: I also had the same impression that it is really uncommon nowadays. For that reason I was quite surprised when I read on a website that it is supposed to have the second highest sales (measured in square meters sold per year). Maybe it still is ranked that high because people have to replace it so frequently? I also know some schools that had carpet floors around 2000-2010 (I do not know whether they still have). Maybe such big public buildings also are a reason for the high sales?
The plural of "Spielplatz" is "Spielplätze". (I just wanted to mention it because Google does not suggest the correct plural form when you search for "Spielplatzen".)
Curtains/blinds: Rollläden (singular Rollladen) are very common for modern houses, but not for old Fachwerkhäuser. It is common to lower them in the evening either when you want to turn on the lights (because then curtains will not protect you from peeping neighbors anymore) or before going to sleep. In the morning, after standing up, you lift them again. The thin curtains are for daytime when the Rollläden are lifted and do not offer any protection from peeping neighbors anymore.
Just for the record: In rural areas, it can happen that you have neighbors who track the times when you lift and lower the Rollläden and then they are gossiping about it. If you do not have any curtains, these kind of people might even walk to one of your windows to peep into the house. The same kind of people like to hide behind the curtains in their own house while looking on the street for hours hoping that somebody will pass by. I even know a few people who have lists with the car registration numbers of their neighbors' visitors. It is really ridiculous. (I moved to a city as soon as I graduated from school to avoid that kind of stuff.)

Thank you so much

I agree that computer AND TV AND console is probably a bit too much.

Additionally I was a teenager myself in the early 00s - if kids had a TV in their room back then it was generally a small "portable" TV - not a full sized one. There are none of these in the vanilla game - you'd have to include a CC one. And certainly not a flat screen, as those were very expensive at that time, although they very quickly dropped in price in the second half of the 00s.

@ralna @simsfreq

Interior:
I have to look for functional wall heaters anyway, because the Sims complain about the heater blocking an object. My parents also have a "Kleidershrank".
I'm aware that the chimney looks odd, but it was the only in-game fireplace that didn't take too much space. Thanks for the tip of building a wall around it!
Do the wood colors of the skirting board, doors and window frames usually match with other? And is the furniture wood color usually matching with the skirting board/doors/windows?
Regarding garden pathways ideas, I will try googling with "Garten draufsicht", but some examples are always welcome.
When I google for "shutter blinds" for old-house blind ideas, do you mean those thick blinds that are placed inside the house?

School system:
Can you recall in which states the secondary school started at 7th grade instead of 5th? I only know about Berlin. For the sake of the likelihood of mingling between teens from different school tiers in a village, I pretend that the public school is a Gesammtschule (I recently spoke to a German relative from Hesse who went to a Gesammtschule during the 00s), and that the teen of this Fachwerk household goes to a Realschule and the child to Gymnasium (if I pretend that her 5th grade is in secondary school). I picture that Juliet, Tybalt and Hermia attend a private Gymnasium but I have to find a mod that removes the school uniform for private school kids.

Village hood infrastructure:
What kinds of apartment buildings are the most common in small/rural villages? I want to build one apartment complex in a subhood that's going to be a nearby small village but with more facilities, like a supermarket, small shops and a church.
For this Weiler-like Veronaville, would a Jugendzentrum or a Dorfdisko be suited, or are a playground and a swimming lot already more than enough for such a small village? I want to build Partykellers in some of the households anyway (especially in less old houses) to give the young Sims party opportunities in their hood.
Is a community lot with a "Brunne" also suited?
Lol I can imagine that the adult Capps would be those kinds of Sims who will track their neighbors and gossip a lot, especially the households who are friendly with the Montys (except the Summerdreams).

Kids rooms and mid-00s teen culture:
I've added a stereo in both kid's rooms, and the teen carries an mp3 player as well. Since the teen has a sloppy personality and loves football, I placed lots of clothing clutter and some football posters in his room, but I have to look for soft-drink clutter as well. Due to limited tile space, I picked a one-tile dresser for the kids because otherwise they complain about blocked objects, but perhaps I could create a workaround with walk-through OMSPs.
I watch Türkisch Für Anfänger (subbed), where the 16 y/o Cem has both a console and a TV in his room, and probably also a PC. Lena and Yagmur had a TV and a computer in their room. The story of that show is set in 2006/2007. But if a story is set in 2004/2005, would a console + TV + computer be more realistic for a 9th-grade kid than really early in the 2000s?
Was watching anime also a thing amongst the "cool/popular football jocks" kind of boys in 9th grade, or more amongst the goth/emo/"alto" kids? I feel that in my country, anime was more associated with kiddie cartoons like Pokémon, Hamtaro and Digimon, and anime culture was probably more perceived as "dorky" in secondary school during the 00s. But could it be that anime was more cool/mainstream in Germany due to more availability of dubbed (shounen) shows than in my country?

Sorry if I made any spelling mistakes

Private schools are pretty rare here. Gymnasiums are so successful that the concept of richer parents paying more for a better education isn't really a thing. However you do tend to get a big class divide - kids go to the type of school their parents went to on the whole. So Gymnasium is pretty synonymous with how private schools or grammar schools work in the UK, maybe the US as well. Private schools actually tend to offer some kind of "alternative" education.

For sims purposes I would just assume that the child > teen transition denotes the transition from primary to secondary education, at whatever age that actually occurs.

I do get that impression about anime, but I really don't know if I'm right about it!

I don't know about apartment buildings in villages - I don't think you see them really. What you may see is a "mehrfamilienhaus" which is a bigger house converted into several apartments. Although there was this one which was next to a barn that caught fire and had to be evacuated, the part of the building to the left was the apartments.

https://www.pz-news.de/videogalerie...eoid,13065.html

Interior:
Skirting boards usually match the floor, e.g. when you have a wooden floor (or another material with a wood design), you try to choose the same or a similar wood color for the skirting boards. If the floor is tiled or made from stone, you might use the same tiles or stones to cover the lowest 5-10 cm of the walls. It is also common to have skirting boards beneath the ceiling, especially if you have a wooden ceiling. In this event, the upper skirting boards usually either have the same color as the lower ones or they match the ceiling color.
The skirting boards do not necessarily match windows and doors as you usually use the same types of windows and doors for the whole house (doors: or at least for the same floor) while it is common to have different types of skirting boards for different rooms. Balcony doors usually match the windows.
One more thing that you could take into consideration: German houses usually have thicker walls than the one ingame. That is why windows usually have window sills on the inside and outside. The window sills on the outside usually all have the same color and are made of some weatherproof material. The window sills on the inside can have the same color, but do not have to. As they are connected to the wall, you usually decide for one color when you build the house or renovate it and replace the windows, but apart from that, you do not change them. Thus, it would be normal that the window sills in a bathroom are covered with the same tiles as the wall, but you would have something neutral in the bedrooms and nothing that matches the style of each kid. Window sills on the inside frequently are used to place plants and decorations. You can google "Fensterbank" and "Fensterbrett" for some images.
"Shutter blinds": No, I mean the ones on the outside that are connected to the window. You can google "Fensterladen" to get some pictures.

School system:
Apart from Berlin, Brandenburg also has six years of primary school.
A village like your Veronaville most likely would not have an own primary school and definitely no secondary school. There are a bit more than 15 000 primary schools in Germany which equals approx. one primary school per 5500 inhabitants. For secondary schools, "Gymnasium" is the most frequent type with a bit more than 3000 Gymnasien which equals one Gymnasium per approx. 27 000 inhabitants. Gesamtschule is the second most type with about 2000 ones which equals one Gesamtschule per approx. 40 000 inhabitants.
I do not know the exact rules for each state, but usually pupils only get a free bus ticket if they live a few km away from the school (e.g. 3 km). All the other pupils are expected to walk to school or go by bike (and nowadays many parents use the car to bring their children to school). As in rural areas, there is almost no regular public transport, there are bus lines that pick up the children of one (or more) village and drop them off directly at school. Each village usually just has one bus stop for the school buses and children are expected to walk there.
Private schools are rather uncommon in Germany and most private schools are not really the type of school that the Capp kids would attend because these schools are more about ideologies and education concepts (e.g. Waldorf). There still are a few schools that are operated by nunneries and they used to be a popular choice for daughters of rich families, but that also has changed within recent years. I am not sure whether Tybalt would not enjoy going to a girls' school at all or whether he would enjoy it too much.

Infrastructure:
In rural villages, the most common buildings for rent should be single-family houses and houses with two apartments. An apartment complex definitely would be too big so that the subhood is a better place for it. I know a few houses that were built in recent years with the plan to immediately rent them to someone. These houses are smaller than your Fachwerkhaus with just 2-3 bedrooms. They were built as semi-detached houses so that each family has their own share of the garden. The other rental houses are houses that originally were inhibited by the owners, but they have moved out and now rent it to someone to make some extra money. If such a house has just 2-4 bedrooms, it could be rented in the whole. Houses with 4 or more bedrooms usually are divided into two or maybe three apartments. If possible, people prefer to have one apartment in each side of the house, but that might require adding more stairs and therefore spending a lot of money on renovations. If each family has one side of the house, the garden usually is also divided that way. If that is not possible, try separating the staircase from the hallways so that you can have apartments on different floors (ground floor and maybe a part of the cellar on a sloped lot as one apartment, first floor and, if existing, second floor as another apartment). Some houses already were built with some kind of granny flat so that you do not have to create separate apartments in such a house anymore. If the house is divided that way, the whole garden frequently is shared by all inhabitants.
As rents are lower in rural areas, I would not create studio apartments, even a single would have 1-2 bedrooms. (If you look at some websites for houses and apartments: In Germany you usually mention the number of rooms, not bedrooms. Thus, this number also includes living room, office etc., just kitchen, bathroom(s) and hallway(s) are excluded.)
If you plan to have a farm house in your neighborhood, you could place a barn somewhere close to it and that barn could be converted into living space.
If you go for a "Weiler", any kind of public building usually is too much. Even in villages with about 1000 inhabitants, day care, a voluntary fire department, a vicarage, a church and a sports club usually are the maximum that you can expect. Most grocery stores, bakeries, etc. closed before 2000 because people prefer to go to the next town or city because there they can choose from a bigger assortment and have to pay lower prices.
All the clubs and organization in a village would somehow share the above mentioned public buildings. Thus, the vicarage e.g. would be used by the rural women's association for a few hours on one day, by the music society on another day and if there is a youth group (that usually consists of preteens, not of teens), they might be lucky to also be allowed to use it for 2-3 hours on one day per week. As they share the same room with the other clubs and associations, that room usually is not decorated in a special way.
There are not enough potential guests to make a Dorfdisko profitable. That is why there usually is just one event per year where a club or association (like the fire brigade) hosts a party to raise money. Such a party could take place in the fire station or the sports club's gym and therefore also has very few or no decoration. Such an event then attracts people (teenager and young adults) from other villages and towns as well so that it is profitable. During summer, you can attend such events almost every week in another village and there is some kind of fixed schedule so that there are no events in parallel. Some more clubs and the parish usually also host events once per year, but these events are more interesting for middle-aged people and older because you usually just go there for lunch or for some coffee and cake in the afternoon and listen to a brass band. These kind of events mainly attract people from the village itself and just a few poeple from other villages so that there are much fewer guests in total.
A playground is okay for a Weiler, the swimming lot most likely would be located in the subhood. For a Weiler, a swimable lake would be more typical or maybe something that looks like a "Löschweiher" (an artificial pool with water that could be used to have more water for extinguishing fires, if needed).
Brunnen (singular and plural are the same): They are common on the "Dorfplatz", a central square next to which you can find some important buildings like the church. As "Dorfplatz" unfortunately does not provide you with good pictures of how such a well could look like, you might want to search for "Osterbrunnen". Google then will show you many wells from rural places that are decorated for Easter. That kind of decoration is typical for Franconia, thus not for the region that you are interested in, but I think that it loos amazing nevertheless.

Kids rooms:
Before 2000, there only was Playstation (PS1). Playstation 2 was launched in 2000, XBox and GameCube in 2002 and Wii in 2006. Thus, there were lots of changes during a few years and there was much more advertising for these products so that more and more people got interested.
For computers, there was a similar increase in the years after the launch of Win XP and it also became common to have internet access at home. Germany was and is one of the least developed countries in the EU with regards to internet and mobile net. There are still many villages where the internet speed has not really been increased during the past 20 years and there also still are places where it is not possible at all to make a call with a mobile.
The scoccer players in general were not interested in anime or did not talk about it. Nevertheless, at my school there was no real division into cool/popular and not popular/alternative kids. There were groups of kids who got along well with each other, but these groups co-existed without envy or anything like that. Maybe the groups also are less strictly separated than in other countries. Due to the school system with several types of schools, the kids that you meet at school usually are not the ones that you meet at the sports club or another hobby. Thus, the kids also have lots of friendships outside of school.
The Pokemon collectors cards were most popular for boys from 10 to 14. Maybe it just was a trend because a Pokemon trading card game was launched in Europe in 2000. However, I do not think that it is considered that dorky in Germany. I even know some adults who still watch serios like Dragon Ball and try to start conversations about it with everybody without knowing whether the other person is interested in it. When Pokemon Go was launched a few years ago, it became a trend again and many completely normal looking adults also used the app and many streets were blocked because so many people were outside while playing.
I do not know whether anime really is mainstream in Germany, but liking it is not enough to label you as a nerd or whatever. Maybe it is really related to the fact that most TV shows are dubbed in Germany - and also to availability: Some years ago, you could watch anime on relatively common TV stations for several hours per day. Nowadays, this apparently has changed because I just had a look at a TV guide and could not find any anime series on a common TV station.

Regarding simsfreq's posting:
In a city, you can decide which Gymnasium you want to attend, but in a rural area there frequently is just one Gymnasium. Of course, you can decide to go to a Gymnasium in a city nearby, but that usually means that you have to commute for 2-4 hours per day and very few people are willing to do this. I only know two types of people who attended a Gymnasium further away: Some went to another Gymnasium for the last two years of school (Kollegstufe) because they wanted to have a subject as one of their two main subjects (Leistungskurs) that was not offered at the school in their administrative district because not enough pupils are interested in e.g. arts or music as main subject. Others had been struggling with bad grades and might even already have repeated one grade so that they were at risk of having to drop out of Gymnasium. If you do not get along well with a specific teacher, it might be better to go to another school to get a "fresh start" there. In both events, the pupils are during their last few years at school (if you struggle at a younger age, dropping out and going to Realschule instead is more common) so that they already might have some kind of driving licence so that the way to school is more like 2 hours per day instead of 4.

Nowadays, there is a lot of pressure to go to a Gymnasium because it becomes more difficult to get a good-paid job without Abitur (even for many jobs with three years of professional training that do not officially require Abitur).
I could imagine that one or more members of the Capp family start a politics career so that they can get into the school council and try to influence school-related decisions in a way that kids from other families are more likely to drop out of Gymnasium.

@ralna

Village infrastructure:
The swimming lot I had in mind for Veronaville was something simple with only Dixie toilets, benches and a BBQ to let the Sims swim in the river/"Nebenfluss" and fulfill their basic needs. Regarding hobby clubs, I consider letting the Sims send to the pre-made secret lots for the sake of ease, even though they won't look like German buildings. I yet have to find some functional hobby fire station CCs.
If the Teens want to go on an outing or a date, I just let them hang out on the playground or at someone's place (if possible with a mod) until I've built the subhood. And I want to let some of them throw a party in the basement, barn, or in the backyard (during summer).

School:
Then I will pretend that the Capps attend a prestigious Gymnasium further away . Tybalt (16/17) has a moped and Juliet (15) and Hermia (14) are dropped and picked by their grandpa from school. I pretend the public school is the most nearby Gesammtschule.
Was it common during 2004-2006 that rural kids already drove by moped at 14/15 years even though they don't have a license yet, since I understood there's less police control in smaller villages? I understood that moped tuning was a big thing back then, so I can pretend that Puck (14 in my story) is a mechanic whizkid since he likes to tinker stuff.

And these are the school tiers I had in mind for the pre-game teens in the Gesammtschule.
Realschule: Romeo, Puck (both 9th grade). Puck is more technical/practical oriented than theoretical. Mercutio is in 10th grade but doesn't perform well.
Gymnasium: some Townies with a Knowledge aspiration and a serious personality.
I pretend that the oldest Child Sims attend 5th or 6th grade secondary school, either Real or Gym.
How likely would Miranda Capp have to attend a "prestigious" Gymnasium as well, or would her parents be fine with sending her to the most nearby Gesammtschule?

The 9th grade Sims (14/15) won't have a part-time job unless during summer break (I have a summer break mod) or when helping with the family business (e.g. the Monty teens).

Teen culture
Since Romeo has a hip-hop aesthetic while Mercutio has an alternative aesthetic but they get along with each other, I will let the subcultures mingle with each other. But the Teen Sim I've made who lives in the Fachwerkhaus is that kind of 9th-grade football lover who is popular amongst the girls due to his looks and outgoing character (so a bit based on the US football Jock stereotype).

For the sake of designing my characters' music taste and seeking custom music, how popular were Reggaeton and Happy Hardcore/Gabber in German areas during 2004/2005? Was "Deutschrap" already as popular as US rap back then? I assume that Euro Trance, Ballermann, and Schlager are popular choices for a cheesy/kitschy 2000s teen party playlist.

Infrastructure:
Just in case you do not mind the amount of work: It should be possible to modify the hobby subhood template somehow. And some time ago, somebody posted that it is possible to replace lot files in the neighborhood folder of already generated neighborhoods. That way it might be possible to start playing immediately and renovate the lots whenever you feel like it.
Regarding dates at home: That is more common in Germany than it is in the U.S. Even woohoo is legal from age 14 (with certain restrictions regarding the age etc. of the second person) so that parents usually care more about sex education than about trying to forbid something. Dates in a car on a remote parking, in contrast, are quite uncommon for German teenagers (maybe also due to the fact that you have to be 18 years to be allowed to drive a car without a supervising adult).

School:
I think that it would be rather unsual to have a Gesamtschule, a Gymnasium and a Realschule in the same area. It is more an "either ... or ..." thing and there are states that prefer Gesamtschulen (till grade 10 plus Gymnasium just for the last 3 years) and states that prefer the separated schooltypes. I do not think that it is necessary to have a Gesamtschule just to be able to imagine that all children and teenagers know each other. It is quite common that several schools are located really close to each other, sometimes even within the same big building. This is even more common in rural areas where you do not have a regular public transport. School buses usually are operated by private companies and communities and administrative districts have to pay them a lot of money for the annual bus ticket (for every pupil up to 10th grade, from 11th grade on, you have to pay yourself). That is why the communities and administrative districts prefer to have schools in one place because otherwise the costs would be higher. Thus, just imagine that Gymnasium, Realschule and Hauptschule are located in the same building and primary school in another building within walking distance.
Miranda Capp: I think the whole Capp family would expect all the Capp children to do Abitur because that is the only school-leaving qualification that directly qualifies for university. That is the only important thing. It does not matter at which school she obtains it. When you apply for university, only the average grade is important and not the school where you graduated. And as soon as you finish university, no one will care about your Abitur anymore anyway.

Vehicles:
From age 15 on, you can obtain something called "Betriebserlaubnis" so that you can drive a Moped legally. From age 16 on, you can obtain a driving licence for a motorbike, but at least until the age of 18, you only are allowed to drive motorbikes that are limited to 80 km/h.
If you really want Tybalt, Juliette and Hermia to go to another school, you should consider that the Capp family hires a driver for them. A Gymnasium in a neighboring administrative district might be an 1 hour drive by car away so that dropping them off and picking them up would take 4 hours (unless Consort works in exactly that city where the school is so that he does not have to drive home inbetween). A Moped also is only an option for a school in your own administrative district (and in a rural area usually there is just one school) because Mopeds are so slow and the way to another school would be too long.
I only know very few pupils who had a Moped (less than 10 %) because most of them preferred to wait one year longer and get a motorbike instead (rich kids might get driving licences and vehicles as presents by their parents, but many kids at least have to pay a part of the costs). I do not think that it is very common to drive a Moped at 14 years or younger because you have to get an insurance and a licence plate for it which could be difficult or even impossible at a younger age. Tuning should be quite common, but of course no one can provide you with exact numbers for this. Maybe Puck gets the Moped a bit before his 15th birthday and keeps it on their residential lot and spends time tuning it until he turns 15?
I do not think that there are fewer police controls in rural areas, but it also does not matter that much. Many teenagers who own a vehicle also want to use it for their schoolway. And there should be police controls close to schools relatively regularly. Thus, sooner or later most people get caught.

Part-time jobs:
From age 13-14, teenager may work up to two hours per day on up to five days per week for easy work like delivering newspapers. The working hours have to be before 18:00, except during vacations.
From age 15 on, teenager are allowed to work up to 40 hours per week on five days per week, but not on weekends (with a few exceptions). You may start at 6:00 and end at 20:00, from age 16 on also at 22:00. Teenagers who graduate from Hauptschule or Realschule usually start an "Ausbildung" that takes three years. For most jobs, this means that you go to a Berufsschule in one week where you learn some theoretical stuff about your job and have some "classical" school subjects like German and maths and the other week you spend in a company where you are working and are taught the pratical stuff.
But teenagers who do not attend school anymore and also have not started an Ausbildung may start a regular job like adults (with the above mentioned limitations).

Teen culture:
That is really an U.S. stereotype. In the U.S., schools have their own sports teams and being part of such a team increases your chance of getting a grant for a good college. In Germany, most sports are done outside of school in sports clubs and it will not help you at all for your education. Some girls and women even are less interested in dating a scoccer player because matches and other events usually take place on weekends so that there will be less time that the couple can spend together.
Reggaeton and Happy Hardcore/Gabber were not popular amongst German teenagers back then. Deutschrap already was popular back then although I cannot tell you whether it was as popular as U.S. rap. I think that pop was the most popular genre amongst teenagers back then. Music from the U.S. is always popular in Germany, but back then there also was a period where several German bands (Echt, Juli, Silbermond, Wir sind Helden etc.) were popular. I know some people who listend to trance back then, but it was not really mainstream - maybe on a similar level as rap, rock, metal and some other genres. Schlager is more popular amongst adults than teenagers. For Ballermann music, it is similar although it might be slightly more popular with teenagers than Schlager. I think that your teenage sim would not mind Ballermann music when he actually is there* once per year, but it might not be the music that he wants to listen to all year long.

If you really like clichees: Some scoccer clubs (although more the adult teams, not the youth teams) do trips to the Ballermann once per year to party there and drink a lot. Thus, you could create a Ballermann-like vacation subhood with lots of beaches, clubs and bars and send your sim there with some friends.

@ralna @simsfreq

School, work & hobby
Pretending that the school tiers are all in the same building or campus sounds like a great idea! Then I will let Miranda go to the same Gymnasium as the other Sims and Townies, while the main Capps attend a Gymnasium further away that Consorts prefer to them (I recall that he is retired, but I have to look it up).
During which times of the year were there periodic parent-teacher conferences where they discuss the grades of their kid(s)? I recall I read somewhere that usually before or after the Carnival weekend, there's an important school conference, where the child/teen will hear whether or not their current grades are good enough to pass the year and thus have a final chance to fix their grades the upcoming months. Is that correct? (I'm aware that it might differ regionally)

What were some common after-school or weekend jobs for 13-14 year olds besides babysitting, (weekend) newspaper delivery and "Nachhilfe"?
On which day are usually the youth football matches -- on Saturday or on Sunday mornings?

Dating & outings
I picture that the football-loving CAS teen boy just kisses around with girls at paties or hangs out with them after school or a football match (at the cost of doing his homework ). so I want to make him inta a kinda sorta young Don Lothario, yet a downplayed version of the US popular guy trope -- the CAS teen is just a good-looking social butterfly.

If a Teen rolls a want to go on a date or an outing with other Sims, I can consider sending them to the playground or the swimmeable river (if it's summer) to hang out with each other in the hood. For Adults and Elders, I was thinking to send them somewhere in the subhood, like to a forest lot, doing groceries or performing their common hobby in a public bulding like a vicarage. I already understood that eating out in a restaurant is less common in Germany than the US, so I only send them to a restaurant on special occassions like Christmas or a family/birthday party.

I wait with adding a Downtown until someone has created a 4t2 Windenburg hood terrain.

Youth football is usually on Sunday morning to early afternoon (lot of kids & adults can be seen at fastfood places afterwards. Avoid these places on Sunday afternoon and evening as much as you can).
Eating out is not that uncommon btw. I think a German restaurant and American restaurant are quite different category. The word Restaurant in German is basically always associated with fin(er) dining. But there are also some more casual places people just visit when they are in the mood for it.

Not sure if anyone already mentioned it but stores are closed on Sundays. So no shopping on Sunday unless it is a special "verkaufsoffener Sonntag" or a store inside an airport or a train station.

At the start of the game, Consort still is in the business career.

I think you might mix up parent-teacher conferences with the interim reports. At the middle of each school year, all pupils receive interim reports that show the grades for each subjects that they got until then. This used to be somewhen during February at my school, although the date could be different for each state because the school year starts at different dates (so that not everybody has holidays at the same time).
I do not know whether there is a fixed schedule for parent-teacher conferences. It might be up to each school. At my school, I think there was one per half-year.

For 13 and 14 year olds, babysitting, newspaper delivery and Nachhilfe are the most common jobs. Only soft jobs are allowed. Lawn mowing and going for walks with dogs might be additional options.

I do not think that there is a fix schedule for scoccer matches. The clubs usually have six youth teams (A to F depending on age), one or two regular teams and one or several teams for older men (Minimum age varies in some regions, but it can be as low as 30. They usually do not play league games, but tournaments and friendly games.) and on a regular weekend, about half of the teams have a home match. Not every team plays on the same play field, but I assume that the matches do not take place at the same time. In my home region, scoccer matches take place both on Saturdays and Sundays and in the morning and afternoon. Currently, there even are some matches in the late afternoon or early evening on other weekdays because many matches had to be rescheduled due to Corona.

Restaurants: I do not know how common it is compared to other countries, but it definitely is more common than just for the special ocasions that you mentioned. However, a restaurant in a small rural village often will struggle to be profitable. Thus, for Veronaville itself, one restaurant (usually with "gutbürgerlicher Küche") would be the maximum. Additional restaurants (like Italian, Asian, Greek) could be located in the subhood.

Many people have the option to have a warm meal at lunch at work or at school. That is why many of them prefer to have some cold meal like bread for dinner. Maybe that has an impact on how often Germans go to restaurants.

Christmas in Germany: The 24th is the most important day in Germany on which you usually go to church and exchange presents. Nevertheless, dinner usually is quite simple so that preparing it is not too time-consuming and you can spend more time with each other. Celebrations with the extended family usually take place on 25th and/or 26th and on these days, lunch or dinner might be more elaborate.

@ralna
School: Yes I meant interim reports. If a pupil receives a bad report in February with the risk of being held back a year, do they still have a chance to fix their grades during the remaining months to pass their year? Do grades of certain subjects weigh more for passing the year? (Asking this for my written story about the CAS Sims)

School: then I will let Antonio Monty run the Italian restaurant in the subhood . Perhaps a Townie family can run the German restaurant instead (the Capps don't run a restaurant, right?).

Landscaping: Would History Lover's Simblr landscaping tutorial examples be a good example for a playground, or does it have too many bells and whistles for a rural town? I am going to google ideas on "Spielplatz grundriss" anyhow.

Events: What other yearly events do small/rural towns (<5000) usually host, besides Schützenfest, Maytree, a party host by the firefighters, and Carnival? Does every small town organize a Kirmes week/weekend, even though it's a tiny one? In the neighboring country where I live, certain towns have enough space/permit in their town centrum to host a large Kirmes with plenty of attractions, but the Kirmes in a small town/village usually consist of bumper cars and the kids' attractions and event revolves more around booze than in larger Kirmes (from my own understanding).
So how was the German Kirmes culture like in small rural towns?
Note: I'm not sure what's the correct German translation is for a "traveling funfair"; Kirmes or Vergnügungspark?


Have you played a lot with the Veronaville pre-made characters, or not that much?

School:
Of course they still have a chance. During the second half of the school year they will receive more grades and the final grade will be an average of all individual grades. Thus, it is not possible to get the best grade anymore, but an average grade or a bad, but passing grade still is possible.
As mentioned before, each state has its own school system. Thus, the following information might not apply for every state.
The German grades range from 1 to 6 with 1 as the best grade. With grades 1-4 you will pass the year without a problem. With 1x 6 or 2x 5, you will have to repeat the year. Good grades (1 and 2) in some subjects can be used to "compensate" bad grades in other subjects to avoid repeating the year. Bad grades in main subjects can only be compensated with good grades in other main subjects. There are more rules and limitations for this, but I do not want to bore you with the details. Sports/physical education usually is not relevant for passing a year so that you can have a 6 without having to repeat the year. All the other subjects are relevant and I even know somebody who had to repeat a year because of religious education.
Main subjects are German, any foreign language, maths, physics and chemistry. All the other subjects are minor subjects. For minor subjects, you can receive grades for general participation (e.g. answering questions), for written exams (not previously announced and only about the content of the previous lesson), for being questioned about the content of the previous lesson (teacher frequently do that with pupils who do not participate that much voluntarily), for presentations etc. The final grade for these subjects simply is an average of all the individual grades. For the main subjects, there are additional written exams that are announced at least one week in advance and that cover the content of several weeks. The average grade of these written exams will account for 2/3 of the final grade and the average of all the other individual grades will account for 1/3 of the final grade.
Grades in minor subjects usually are snapshots of your performance on a certain day. Thus, when you are lazy, you will get bad grades relatively soon. However, it will also be relatively easy to get some good grades if you invest a bit of time. If you want to improve your grades, it will be sufficient to pay more attention to the classes in future. Sometimes, teacher even will offer pupils to give presentations at the end of the school year to improve their grades, if needed. Thus, while it is possible to have to repeat a school year due to bad grades in a minor subject, it is rather the exception.
Grades in main subjects depend less on your daily form. If you become lazy, your grades will drop much more slowly (at least within a school year - at the beginning of the next school year, everybody will start with a clean sheet again). When your grades have dropped, however, it also will be more difficult to get better grades again. A good presentation will not change the grade a lot because of the way how the grades are calculated. And for the written exams you do not only have to know all the content from the past few weeks, but also all the "basics" that you learned in the past. Thus, it will be very time-consuming to catch up on all the content that you missed. This is the situation when you might start having private lessons. And if you cannot improve the grades until the end of the school year, you either have to repeat the school year or change school (e.g. from Gymnasium to Realschule).

Restaurant:
I do not think that the Capps would run a restaurant. Maybe they own the buiding and rent it to somebody who wants to run a restaurant. That way they can earn money without actually having to work for it.
However, I do not know whether there is a mod that could enable this ingame.

Playground:
Definitely too many bells and whistles. The lot looks more like a park with a small playground area. Playgrounds are exclusively for children under 14 (plus supervising adults). Thus, you usually only find items and equipment that are appealing to children, but nothing that would encourage an older person to spend some time there. Apart from items like swings and slides, there might be a few benches facing towards these items (so that parents can watch their children) and maybe also a waste bin. Usually there are no lights because children are supposed to be at home when it is dark. Of course, teenagers sometimes still will meet at the playground, but usually due to a lack of alternatives and not because the lot is so appealing to them.
As I assume that your are not happy with this answer: I think you should not add anything to the playground. However, if you really want that lot to be a meeting place for people of all ages, you rather should create a small park and then fence a smaller area of that lot as playground so that it is separated. Then you can have seating areas, barbecue, lights and other items in the park part of the lot while still having a traditional playground in the other part of the lot. Villages usually have no parks (as there is enough green around the village), but it is the better compromise. You might also place some lots outside of the village with a woodland playground, some benches at a landmark (e.g. on top of a hill) or the ruins of an old castle.

Events:
Schützenfeste are not that common, thus a village most likely will not have one and only few towns (<5000) will have one. Many Germans are against weapons and laws are rather strict compared with other countries. For Carnival, the options also are limited when you only have few inhabitants. A village might host a Carnival event for children in the gym of the sports club, but bigger events like a parade or a show with carnival speechs, music and "Gardetanz" usually take place in towns bigger than that (and even then it frequently is a collaboration by several towns) or cities.
You could have an Easter fire (in my home village it was made by teenagers and young adults on a hill outside of the village and they spent the whole night together on that hill). There also could be an event to burn the Christmas trees after 6th January. Pretty much every single club (marching band, singing club, country women's association, a club for making the village more beautiful, the sports club, the kindergarten etc.) of the village has its own party although these events usually mainly attract inhabitants of the village. The events usually start at lunch time and include a barbecue (Bratwürste and steaks), cakes and coffee, all kinds of drinks and usually the marching band makes music annd the event ends somewhen in the evening. It might not be too attractive for teenagers, but most families who live in the village for a longer period of time will show up at least to pick up some food. The fire brigade usually has another event in addition to the party for teenagers and young adults. On the other event, the members of the fire brigade do some kind of practical exam while the whole village can watch. Afterwards they also serve food and drinks and offer some entertainment for the children like taking them on a ride with the fire truck or letting them use fire hoses to "shoot" at pyramids of empty cans until they all fall down. Once per year, there also could be a celebration of the elderly of the village. They are served some cake and coffee while some teenagers (although probably not your teen sim) and young adults of the village put on a show to entertain them. Before Christmas, you also could have a "Weihnachtsmarkt" although that would better fit into the subhood than into Veronaville itself. There will be many sales booths with food, drinks, but also all kinds of Christmas decorations and things that you might to give to someone as a gift on Christmas. There usually is music and there might be some fairground rides for children. In the evening, many people like to drink Glühwein there with some friends. As Veronaville has a river, there could be a fishing club as well and that club would have a party once per year where they sell a lot of fish dishes amongst other things.
For villages and towns in areas with vineyards, there also might be a bigger event (called "Weinfest", usually instead of the big party by the fire brigade or whichever club hosts such an event) where the vineyard owners sell their wine amongst others. These kind of events usually last a whole weekend and frequently there are several stages so that there is music for all ages and preferences. Frequently, 10 000 to 15 000 visitors squeeze themselves into the center of a town of 2000-3000 inhabitants.
If you like traditional stuff, there could be a parade and event for traditional clothing (Trachtenumzug/Trachtenfest), or a parade in remembrance of a vigilance group (frequently replacing real weapons with walking sticks or the like; If you google for "Bürgerwehr", please be aware that there will also be unwanted search results for right-wing groups that do not have anything in common with the historical stuff). Every couple of years, ther also could be a long walk (lasts several hours) along the borders of the community which in the past was to check whether all boundary stones still were in the correct place. Many villages also have some sort of pilgrimage once per year where they walk to a certain pilgrimage church. Frequently, this will include one or more overnight stays and people also might party during these nights. Some people in your Veronaville also could do some research to find out how old Veronaville is and whenever the age is a multiple of 25 (e.g. 700, 725, 750, 775 years), many villages like to also host a bigger party/event for a whole weekend. These events frequently include all the activities of all the other parties and events so that they are interesting for all ages. And when you just had such an event, you do not necessarily have to wait 25 years before you host the next one - just do a bit more research and you might find a document that proves that your Village is even older and the next celebration might take place again after a few years.
There is also something called "Tag der offenen Tür". This event usually takes place once per year and different buildings (historical ones, but also factories and other kind of buildings) may be visited for free while not being open to the public for the rest of the year. Frequently, you just can visit the building, but sometimes communities or companies organize an accompanying event.
Kirmes is a regional term for Kirchweih. Kirchweih is a celebration on the name day of the saint to whom the church of the village is dedicated. Thus, every village with a church has a Kirchweih. However, frequently, in small villages it is just an event like described above with some food, drinks and music. If you want to have fairground rides, you usually have to go to towns with at least a few thousand inhabitants.
You could try "Jahrmarkt" as search term. That term can be applied for any kind of annual fair that includes some fairground rides. Kirmes/Kirchweih (and there should be dozens more regional terms) is linked to the religious event and does not necessarily include fairground rides. A Vergnügungspark may have the same kind of rides, but it has a permanent location (e.g. Disneyland in Paris).

I have played Veronaville a few times, but I spent much more time with Strangetown and Pleasantville. I know all the playables, but I do not know all the townies and NPCs.


If you can watch German TV: Maybe have a look at "Schnäppchenhäuser" on RTL2. In this show, they film people who buy very cheap houses (usually very run-down as well) and renovate them (frequently with a very tight budget). That way you could see many different houses to get some impressions of size, house plans, ideas for renovations etc. You also could watch some of the episodes on tvnow.de althouh you might have to fake a German IP for that. As they show so many episodes, you might want to have a look at the descriptions first so that you can skip the ones that are not relevant for you. Nevertheless, houses in former East Germany will be overrepresented because in some regions there are lots of uninhabited houses that you can buy for very little money. As the show is about cheap houses, many houses are completely outdated regarding heating, sewage water etc.

@ralna

Monty Ranch renovation
How would you renovate the Monty Ranch into a German-based "Villa Rustica"? I definitely want to rearrange the rooms, add a 1st floor and a cellar and replace the windows and convert the hipped roof into pieces of gabled roofs. What's a more realistic tile ratio for a Villa Rustica building? How many tiles does the entrance usually have? More than 2 - 3 tiles in this case? (on the English Wiki, I've found a list of Roman villas in Germany)
Regarding living with multiple generations, would it make sense that Romeo and Mercutio always have lived with their grandparents even before their parents have died, while the other adult Montys (Antonio and Bianca) have chosen to move out of the Villa?
The mansion was revamped by the creator of the clean hood, so it doesn't resemble much the pre-game lot.

Creating Sim families
I want to create a "Tussi" kind of single mom Sim. What were some good examples of German Tussi TV personalities from the mid-00s? When googling, I mainly get the 2010s "Eine Tussi wird Mama" book as result, or NSFW stuff.

School and culture
Is it correct that children and teens bring home their test results and have to let their parents sign the grade? How did school notebooks/folders usually look like during the 2000s (before digitalization of schoolwork was common)? What kinds of folders or notebooks were common to write the homework assignments in? Did they bundle spare A4 papers in e.g. one 23-rings folder, or did they use a separate A5 or A4 notebook for each subject? Was there some kind of color-coding of the notebooks/folders?
Pictures are appreciated since I don't know the English or German terms for every type of folder. Asking this so I can select specific office supply clutter for my Sims.

Was using a webcam during chatting common amongst mid-00s teens? I understood that ICQ was the most popular chatting platform throughout the country (though in some regions AOL or MSN was also used).

What are the main differences between Catholic and Protestant Carnival parties?

Tile ratio:
I cannot give you any advice on the tile ratio. I have seen less than ten Villae Rusticae in my life and did not pay too much attention to the measurements back then. Here is another link to a list of Villae Rusticae that might help you: https://www.wikiwand.com/de/Liste_v...ae#/Deutschland
Some of the pictures show the layout with a scale so that you can do the calculations yourself.

Entrance:
A Villa Rustica is a type of farm and therefore would have some kind of gate or arch for a carriage leading to an atrium, a barn or the like. For the main building, I guess that the door would not be too wide. Winters can be cold and any opening for a door or window means that heating becomes less efficient and more expensive. For this reason, I do not think that arches on the outside of a residential building are a good choice for Germany. Maybe have the regular front door (or more than one) on the outer wall and the arches where you currently have the regular front door.

Monty family:
If Patrizio planned to have Claudio as heir of the estate, it definitely would make sense that Claudio and his family also lived there. I guess as long as you have a second bedroom big enough for a double bed, it is plausible.
It also sounds plausible that Antonio moved out when he married. As the Montys are rich, I assume that they would own more than just one lot so that Antonio would receive one of the other lots upon marriage. I usually substract some of the cash from the main Monty and Capp households to give it to the respective bin households so that they can afford some of the bigger and nicer houses in Veronaville and so that the Montys can stay on their side of the river (I also use the mortgage bushes in addition to this).
Due to the somewhat historic setting (based on plays by Shakespeare) and the fact that the Montys are portrayed as a patriarchal family, it would make more sense if Biance lives with her parents until her wedding.
Therefore, I would have four bedrooms in the house: one for Patrizio and Isabella, one shared by Claudio and Antonio until Claudio married, one for Bianca and one that was used by Antonio after Claudio got married and now is shared by Mercutio and Romeo.
(Sorry if any of the names are wrong. I play with the German names and sometimes I mix them up.)

Tussi:
If you really want the clichee, search for Daniela Katzenberger. However, her appearences on TV only started around 2008 or 2009.
For the mid-00s, it is a bit more complicated as there was less reality TV and no social media back then. Therefore, there is no woman where "Tussi" is the first word that comes into my mind. Thus, the following persons might not really fulfill your expectations: Jenny Elvers, Kader Loth, Verona Pooth, Djamila Rowe, Tatjana Gsell. In 2008, there was a German copy of "The Simple Life" with Gülcan Kamps and Collien Ulmen-Fernandes.

School:
I do not remember that my parents had to sign my test results. Thus, it definitely is not obligatory for everyone. But I can imagine that teachers do that for pupils with bad grades to ensure that the parents are aware of it.
Digitalization of schoolwork? I am not sure whether this already has happened in Germany. Due to Corona, it was a big topic last year and this year and German schools apparently are not really up-to-date. Notebooks usually looked (and still might look) like this: https://www.mueller.de/schreibwaren...arf/schulhefte/
You have one notebook per subject and once it is full you start the next one. In primary school, A5 was the more common size, in secondary school, A4 was more common, except for vocabulary books that always were A5. You also could buy covers (google "Schulheft" and "Umschlag") for the notebooks. In primary school, usually all pupils had covers with the same color for a subject. In secondary school, you usually can choose the colors yourself and the covers are just for protecting the notebooks and many pupils stop using covers at all at a certain point.
During the last few years of Gymnasium (approx. grade 10 to 13) many pupils switched to spiral note pads ("Collegeblock") and ring binders ("Ordner").
For additional clutter, you also can google words like "Wasserfarbkasten" and "Schulmäppchen" (the more organized ones usually are for younger pupils, the less organized ones for older pupils - for the latter you also could try "Schlampermäppchen").

Internet:
Webcams were not that common back then. Yes, ICQ might have been the most common chat software back then. I also know many people who used IRC for group chats. I do not think that AOL was common for chatting. They did a lot of advertising on TV for their service as internet provider, but they somehow also had a bad reputation. MSN and Hotmail mainly were common amongst teenagers who had friends abroad because ICQ might have been less common there.
However, chatting in general was not that common back then and only the teenager with a bigger interest in computers used it. Thus, I do not think that your teenage sim would have used it. SMS still were incredibly common back then and a sim like your teenage sim always would ensure having a modern mobile (modern back then) and a contract that includes many free SMS per month.

Carnival:
Carnival does not really have a religious background. Carnival has some pagan influences (frightening away the cold, darkness and bad spirits) and during the middle ages, there also were some jester parties where people made fun of clergy and nobility. Church and governments tried to stop these parties.
In many mainly Catholic areas, these parties have continued after the reformation. I assume that it was a good opportunity to have some fun before the fasting period before Easter starts. In mainly Protestant areas, the parties usually have disappeared. Maybe parties are less necessary if there is no fasting period afterwards. Nevertheless, today's Carnical parties always are non-denominational and not related to any church (except for making fun of it, of course).

Digitalization: I guess there is/was a significant gap in digital development between Germany and their neighboring countries. At least back in 2005, chatting through MSN was very common where I live -- I guess even amongst people with low to average computer skills. And owning a webcam was also common here so far I know. In this case, I pretend Puck is the one who taught his peers some basic computer skills in the hood since he's a tinkerer . How common was Windows XP in 2005? Because I've found here some Windows 98 computers if I want to give some Sims a dated OS for that time.

Clutter: sounds like the colored Maxis homework books don't look too off. Was watercolor painting that common amongst kids? Also, any suggestions on what clutter could be placed underneath the bed? (I didn't have space underneath the bed back then)

Community lots in a Weiler: What are your thoughts about the playgrounds? What kind of fence would suit around this lot?
From what age is it common for village kids to go to the playground without parental supervision? I understood that European parents are/used to be less protective than American parents. If the extra teen/YA playground is a bit too much on the adjacent turnaround, what would suit better on that ground instead?


CAS family home: Any suggestions to add/modify on the garden of the CAS family? I used hood deco for placing a row of hedges for the sake of ease. And I also placed an invisible soccer field.

Digitalization:
I think that (almost) every teenager knew how to chat, many just were not interested. Most teenagers had contracts for their mobiles that included one or several hundred free SMS per month and you can send SMS from wherever you are. For chatting, you have to be at home and many families only had tower computers, sometimes shared with the whole family. Thus, SMS were more convenient. Webcams became more common a few years later when notebooks (frequently with built-in cameras) became more popular.
Win XP should have been far more common. Many people bought their first computers after Win XP was launched. And the ones who already had computers before usually were willing to spend money on a newer OS or even a newer computer. After 2000, it also became more and more popular to use the computer to prepare presentations and hand-outs for school (at least at my school).

Clutter:
Watercolor painting was done frequently during art classes. Therefore, it was obligatory to own a set of watercolors.
You also could get some maths stuff line ruler, triangular ruler for geometry, compass etc.
Many beds have boxes built-in beneath the mattress so that you have additional storage. For beds that do not have such a box, you could buy a big bag made from cloth and/or plastic that also serves as storage. If you do not want to do anything like this, you could put shoes, sports equipment like a deflated football and other bulky stuff there for children and teenagers. For a teenager, you might also put some bottles of alcohol there. Buying beer and wine is legal from age 16.

Community lots:
For a Weiler, pretty much any community lot is too much. There simply are too few adults that pay taxes to maintain all that stuff.
For the football and basketball equipment I would do an extra lot (rather in a subhood than the main hood) with a sports club as a building.
And as I said before, I would have a playground with just playground equipment on it (and also on a much smaller lot). In a small village, it would take maybe a 5 minute walk to go home to go to toilet, if needed, so that after 10-15 minutes the child could be back at the playground to continue playing.
Regarding the age: That is difficult to say. When I started school, it was common that one of your parents walks to the bus station with you in the morning for the first few weeks and afterwards, you were allowed to go alone. I assume that for most parents this also was the age to go to the playground without supervision. However, in my village the playground was completely run-down and all the items except for the sandbox had been removed (lack of funding - and my home village definitely was bigger than a Weiler) so that we were not interested in going there. I do remember that I was allowed to walk to my grandparents' house by myself about from the age of 4 or 5 (a few hundred meters distance similar to the distance to the playground) and on a few ocasions also to the sports club (more than one km distance) at age 5 together with my younger cousin.
However, a few years later (= at the time relevant for your Veronaville), there usually were two or three women at the bus stop in the morning "supervising" the children (i.e. gossiping with each other and smoking cigarets). I am not sure whether they just wanted to socialize or whether they really thought that it was necessary to watch their children. Thus, I assume that some people want to have a closer eye on their children than in the past, but they definitely still are more relaxed than parents e.g. in the U.S.
Btw: School hours in Germany are different than in the game. For primary school, four or five lessons (= 45 minutes) per day were common (= end of school at 11:15 or 12:15, including breaks), in secondary school, six lessons (= end of school at 13:00) were usual during the first years and during the later years, it was common to have one or two days with lessons until 15:30 or even 17:00, but 13:00 for all the other days.
In rural areas, there still was a relatively high percentage of housewives back then because day-care offers for toddlers were so bad (e.g. closed for 1 or 2 hours at lunch time so that you had to pick up your children and bring them back after the lunch break) and it was difficult to find a job with sufficient flexibility and close enough to the village. If both parents were working, it was common that school-aged children were at home unattended and the children even were allowed to use the stove to warm up food that their parents had prepared for them.
Nowadays, the situation has improved and day-care usually is available for more hours so that many women resume work when the child is 1-3 years old (due to paid parental leave and dismissal protection, one parent usually takes more time off than in many other countries). Many schools also offer after-school supervision today so that the children can stay at school and do their homework until their parents return from work.

CAS family home:
Your sim girl might like a swing in the garden.
The bushes and trees along the lot border and the chairs in front of the Gartenhaus look realistic. Maybe you can find a matching table, e.g. a folding table or any other table that can be moved into the Gartenhaus easily when the weather is bad.

Front yard:
Have you tried how it looks like when you replace the metal fence with the stone wall? It seems strange for me to have another type of fencing for just four tiles.
I like that the wheelie bins rotate after use. It would be unrealistic if they all were perfectly lined up.

@ralna

Infrastructure: I used a 3x3 lot for the playgrounds to entirely fill those roundabout kind of streets. Maybe you've already mentioned, but what kind of lot or hood deco would suit better in those spaces instead?
Were in the hood is the most plausible spot to place a bus stop hood deco? (I have a mod where Sim kids can choose to walk to school)
I've also created a family where I want to let the father work as an agricultural farmer. In the case of a Weilier or Haufendorf, is the farmer's crop field usually right next to their lot, or rather somewhere else at the outskirts of the village? When taking a look at the ground plans of the village types, I nothes that the residential lots are bordered by fields on the back, but I'm not sure if it differs between livestock fields, meadow fields and crop fields.

CAS family: Would it make sense that the teen Sim's bedroom is on the second floor instead. so the child sister's bedroom space can be doubled? Both children are fairly active unlike their parents, so the teen Sim wouldn't mind walking more (and I guess he would have more rest on the top floor). Thanks for the garden feedback and clutter tips! However, I yet have to find or request a mod where Sims can chat with others through texting on their mobile.

Storytelling questions (want to write stories about them as well): Do school kids usually the the bus at fixed times? (I understood the bus schedules are very limited in rural areas, i.e. driving once every hour) Are primary-school and sec-school kids mixed in one bus if both schools are at the same location?
If school is already finished at lunchtime, do the Nachhilfe sessions usually take place at school or at the teen's home that needs help?
Before covid, on what days do soccer training sessions usually take place, and are they hold before or after dinnertime? And do amateur sport coaches get a small amount of money, or is it solely volunteer work with compensations? (in my country, coaches are volunteers)

Sorry for all those questions, but I'm just eager to learn more about those small cultural details in a different country

I'm not sure about the other questions, but as for Nachhilfe this is typically done by other students looking for extra cash, so either college graduates or 10th-12 graders (those doing Abitur). Where it is done depends, but in smaller towns it is AFAIK quite typical for the Nachhilfe-giver to just go to the kids home. I can't exactly speak about small towns because I'm from a big city, but in general Germans are quite strict with their regulations, and having people on school property after hours is not covered by insurance if an accident happens. If the Nachhilfe is given by a teacher, however, that is probably a different issue and would likely be allowed.

Re: football (if you are aiming to create a German town then I must insist you stop calling it Soccer. It's Fußball ), the training would likely depend on the organisers but with us, it was always after school but before dinner. So around 16:00/17:00. Dinner in Germany (like many cultures) is an important meal for families because it is the one meal a day where most families sit together at the table.

Infrastructure:
You could place the day care center for children there or the sports club and/or a football pitch (if you choose to have two different lots, they should be relatively close to each other), the church, rectory, fire station or if you want to have a restaurant in main hood Veronaville the restaurant plus terrace/garden.
If you do not like these ideas, you also could split up the area into several smaller lots (e.g. 2x2, 3x1 and 2x1).
The bus stop should be in a central location so that children from the outskirts of the village still can walk to it. If you plan to have a central square (that is surrounded by many of the important buildings like the church), the bus stop could be included in that square.
Farmers: Fields usually are outside of the village although in small villages with few streets it can look like they are adjacent to the lots. But even when a field is close to a lot, it does not mean that the field and lot belong to the same person. As the land was distributed amongst the heirs every generation, the fields of a farmer would be scattered in several different places.
On the lot itself, farmers frequently have a big garden where they grow vegetables and fruit that they eat themselves. Livestock might be in a stable on the lot, too.

CAS family:
If the teen prefers a room on the second floor, of course he could have a room there. However, I would not make the child's room bigger because it would be too big.
I guess for game purposes, it is okay to ignore texting and use chatting instead.

School/Nachhilfe:
Buses once per hour? That would have been luxury. In the morning, there were two buses - one for primary school and one for secondary school. The primary school was just a few hundred meters away from the secondary schools. Primary school pupils usually only used their own bus and most secondary school pupils also used their own bus, but it was possible to use the primary school bus as well. I often did this because the Gymnasium had an additional building that was closer to the primary school and the public library also was in that building.
After-school supervision and Nachhilfe are not the same. After-school supervision just means that an adult with a pedagogic background is around while children from different grades do their regular homework and spend time with each other afterwards until their parents return from work. The room usually is provided by the school itself or the community that also pays for the school so that this can take place in the same buildings.
For Nachhilfe, I agree with Morrwindnostalgia that it is usually done by older pupils and takes place at the home of either the Nachhilfe giver or receiver. I usually had the Nachhilfe receivers come to my house because they were from other villages or towns so that their parents had to bring them by car.
Germany does not have colleges so that there are no college students or graduates who offer Nachhilfe. University students usually move to bigger cities to be close to their universities (and might offer their services there, but not in a rural village) and university graduates try to take up a regular fulltime job and usually are not interested in offering Nachhilfe. In bigger towns and cities, there also are companies that offer Nachhilfe. These companies usually hire teachers that did not get a job at one of the public schools and these teachers then work fulltime for the company. Teachers who work at public schools usually are not interested in offering Nachhilfe either.

Fußball:
It was me who started using the word "soccer" instead of "football". Thus, I should be the one to be blamed. I think that "Football" might be ambiguous depending on the home country of some readers. And both "football" and "soccer" are just translations for "Fußball", but it would be strange for me to use the German word in an English text when there are no national differences that would justify using the German word.
For a teenager, I also would assume that the training takes place in the late afternoon for most clubs. However, there might be exceptions. Even small clubs have seven youth teams (A to G youth; A to F each include teenager/children from two years, G includes all children aged 6 or younger) and one or two adult teams that train at least once or twice per week (depending on the league maybe more often). If there are not enough children/teenager for a youth team, two villages might form a joined team for that age group. Nevertheless, all clubs have to find time slots for the training of all teams.
Coaches usually receve a small amount of money, but it is more a recompensation and not an incentive to do the job. If the adult team does not play in the lowest league, the club even might offer a small amount of money to some talented players from other villages to play for this club instead of the one of their home village.

@ralna @morrowindnostalgia: yeah, I was also switched to "soccer" to avoid confusion for American readers. And Fußball can be confused with Foosball tables.

Thanks for the suggestions! Then I'm thinking of building a restaurant+terrace with the Antonio family living upstairs (so an OFB lot) anyhow, and on the other plot either a football pitch, church, or the football clubhouse (depending on what suits best close to a restaurant lot). I consider placing the bus stop somewhere near the bridge.

Do you know where I can find a list of Weilers in Germany? I'm not sure if it can find it on the (German) wiki.

In the meantime, I'm going to look for renovated Villa Rustica inspiration. So far I've found Mehring, Roma Villa Borg, and Villa Otrang.

3x3 lots:
Many sports clubs have a restaurant included in the building. However, these restaurants in sports clubs frequently do not have the best reputation beause many people have prejudices that the food in such restaurants has rather bad quality and is unhealthy. Thus, many of these restaurants are not under lease anymore and only used by the sports club for events related to the club.
Regular restaurants in small villages also have problems to generate enough profit for the owners. Many of these restaurants therefore just are opened on weekends (and even then they often have to have themed events or some special food to attract a few guests) or for groups (weddings, funerals etc) while the owners do another job on weekdays.
Most restaurants in rural areas have regulars' tables. On Sundays after the church service, some men go there to have "Frühschoppen" while their wives prepare lunch. I assume that this habit will die out sooner or later because the younger and middle-aged generations go to church less often than the elderly people and more and more women of these generations also do not accept that they have to do the chores while their husbands have fun drink alcohol at such an early time.

Weiler:
I could not find any lists for Weiler or Dörfer either. Most likely this is because they usually do not have an administration of their own.
I did find a list with the 100 smallest municipalities: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liste...h_Einwohnerzahl
You will have to look up the background of these municipalities to find out whether they are a small Dorf or Weiler or whether it has a different background like a secularized monastery or a hotel for tourists with inhabitants/staff living there.
These municipalities most likely will have more public buildings than villages that do not form a municipality of their own. Municipalities have to offer certain facilities like a primary school although these very small municipalities usually form a union with one or more neighboring municipalities to fulfill these requirements.

Sorry to chime in so late.
I suggest to pick a few small places from Google maps. Plug them into google or your search engine of your choice and have a look at the images that pop up. That might give you an idea. To be honest, what I'm seeing in Veronaville is not something I expect to see where I'm from. Small town (about 5000 people) surrounded by smaller villages in the Western parts of Bavaria.
But maybe further South towards the Alps?
Houses are not built with wood in Germany, they haven't been for a long time and wooden panelling on the outside wall is not soemthing you'd see on a house except for accentuating.
And in the smaller towns in the South, you will find almost always a church or at least a chapel. If you are going for a Southern type village.

@310175: thanks for the suggestions! The original VV houses have half-timbered plastered with brick walls on the ground floor, but I was planning to give them a Fachwerk makeover anyhow.
Atm I'm thinking to make it set somewhere in Rhineland-Palastinate due to Italian influences (like the Eifel area).

Ah, I have no intuitions or memories about Rhineland-Palatinate. Probably add castle to church. More hills and forests. More gorges and bridges and narrow rivers. Less open space. Not sure about the Fachwerk but I would gess that again, they're not that common anymore unless the place could avoid damage in WWII. To me, Fachwerk goes with Alps, Switzerland, Austria, and the occasional one or two in small places. Rarely residential single family homes. I never quite understood what Maxis was going for with Veronaville.

@310175: I want to build more houses and place closer together, but I was also thinking of creating it into a Weiler type of village, so more clumps of houses between open spaces.
Freudenberg in NRW has many Fachwerkhäuser, probably most of them detached.

Maxis' Veronaville was based on UK and Italy due to Shakespeare inspiration, but when I played it for the first time, I associated timbered houses only with Fachwerk and back then I didn't know that UK also has those kinds of timbered houses (Tudor), so that's why I've wanted to create a German alt Veronaville and retain that idea for nostalgic reasons.

310175:
Fachwerkhäuser were quite common in several regions within Germany and in these regions, you still can find a lot Fachwerkhäuser. Small towns and villages were not that popular targets during the war so that not that many Fachwerkhäuser got destroyed. In posting 11 in this thread, I linked some pictures of towns and villages in Rhineland-Palatinate, North Rhine-Westphalia, Baden-Württemberg and Hessen that have many Fachwerkhäuser.

Softlism knows that lots with big gardens are extremely uncommon for Fachwerkhäuser, but decided to have such lots nevertheless. I think that especially for the center of a village, lots with a width of 10 would be the most common size. Nevertheless, Softlism decided to use bigger lots and avoid the lot adjuster. Therefore, I looked up some typical village layouts and Weiler was the only one where some open space between houses was common. However, Weiler usually are too small to have a church of their own. I assume that you have to make some concessions when you try to built a neighborhood in Sims 2.


Softlism:
Freudenberg is an exception in that respect. As you can see on the other pictures that I had linked, the more common option is that the houses are built directly next to each other or with a narrow gap inbetween where only a single person can walk through. I assume that detached Fachwerkhäuser like in Freudenberg were even less common in the past, but these houses had a lower risk of getting destroyed by fire because fire cannot spread as easily when there is a bigger distance between the houses.

@ralna: I'm still open to narrowing down the lots with Lotadjuster, but I wanted to be settled with the architecture first. The CAS Sim family's home is 12 tiles wide, but I can consider narrowing down the extra tiles if that's safe to do with inhabited lots.

Anyways, I've played around with attic roofing and ceiling beams, and recently found out ceilings could also be recolored, so here are some pics within the spoiler tags! Feedback and suggestions are welcome

Lot adjuster:
If you want to use lot adjuster, 8 tiles is the maximum size for a house on a lot that is 10 tile wide. It is possible to place walls in a 90° angle to the lot boarder so that from neighborhood view the houses look like row houses, but the adjoining walls have to be at least one tile away from the lot boarder.
Here is a tutorial by plasticbox on how to built fake row houses: https://modthesims.info/t/286909
According to this tutorial, it is safe to adjust inhabited lots as long as the sims are not placed within the area that you want to delete.

Living room:
I like the ceiling beams. Sure, they do not look like they are more than a hundred years old, but they do create the right atmosphere.
The curtains should be placed further below slightly above the window frame. That way you also avoid the problems with the ceiling beams. The windows definitely lack window sills (which also would save the problem with heaters and curtains being too close to each other).
The current placement of the sofas looks strange. You could replace the loveseat with a living room chair. You also could keep the loveseat and try to shift the sofa one tile backwards.
For the game console, I assume that most people would place it in the TV cabinet. Would it still be usable if you place it there with an OMSP? A small stereo frequently also would be placed in the TV cabinet or in a shelf. However, there is not enough space in the TV cabinet. Therefore, I would keep the stereo on the floor. If you add an end table, the stereo would be at a strange height in relation to the window.
I do not mind the American football. Maybe it is a souvenir from a past vacation trip. Or maybe the teen tried playing American football and when he stopped playing, they put the football there.
Most people that I know do not have that much more stuff in their livingrooms. Some photos on the walls and/or in a shelf (e.g. in the TV cabinet) are common. Some pictures of relatives who do not live in this house, but also pictures from important events like the parents' wedding, but also any kind of nice memory like when the children were younger or from a vacation, for another family maybe pictures with their pets etc.
Plants also are common. Bigger ones can be placed on the floor, for smaller ones, the window sills are the most common place. Depending on the preferences of your sims, you also can add newspapers, magazines, cut flowers, candles or a wall clock. Some people also like dust traps. The coffee table should not be empty like this. You could add some glasses, bottles, juice bags, bags with potato crisps/chips or other snacks/nibbles/munchies, maybe a bowl that can be filled with the snacks. For healthier families you could have a fruit bowl.

In addition to this, many people also have seasonal decoration, mainly for Christmas, but also for other seasons and holidays. For Christmas, an Advent wreath is quite common from the end of November on and the children would have Advent calendars (anything goes - from cheap chocolate ones to elaborate ones that you fill with presents yourself). Star-shaped lamps on the window sills are common (so that the light is visible from outside) and for the whole house anything related to stars, angels, Nikolaus (like Sinterklaas, not like Santa Claus), snow, fir branches etc. If you want some additional inspiration, google "Erzgebirge" and "Weihnachten" for many hand-made decorations like Christmas pyramids - although it might be difficult to find that kind of stuff as CC. Many people buy the Christmas tree only a few days before Christmas because the Christmas tree has to last until 6 January (at least in Catholic regions). Some middle-aged and older people also might have a wreath with seasonal decoration on the outside of the front-door year-round.

Heaters:
I tried to explain two different types of heating.
The first one is central heating where the main part of the heating system is in a separate room (most frequently in the cellar). This heating system heats water and transports the hot water to all the other rooms of the house. There you have heaters like the standard EA ones (or other not bulky ones) that frequently are mounted to a outer wall beneath a window. The heaters are connected to a tube (for the hot water), but do not need any electricity. For newer houses, you also might have underfloor heating and no visible heaters. In this case, you have a small box (Raumthermostat) somewhere on the wall of each room with which you can adjust the temperature.
The other type of heating is for houses without central heating. In these houses, heating with electricity is common, e.g. with night-storage heaters. These heaters have to produce the heat themselves which is why they are bulkier than the other ones. These heaters usually are not attached to the wall, but placed on the ground and usually (at least all ones that I have seen so far) also not placed directly next to a wall, but with at least 20-30 cm distance. They also are not necessarily placed close to an outer wall. In houses without central heating, you also have water boilers in kitchen and full bathrooms because otherwise you will just have cold water.

Hallway:
I would place a longer ceiling beam. These beams are the supporting structure of a Fachwerkhaus so that they go through the whole house and do not simply end somewhere in the middle of a room.

Guest toilet:
A wall lamp usually is placed close to the mirror (above the mirror or next to it) so that you can see sufficiently when you look into the mirror. If you want more lamps, ceiling lamps should be more common.
Hanging sinks are much more common than standing ones (I do not think that I ever saw one in real life). And a tooth brush in a guest toilet is rather uncommon as well. For the full bath, it is common that everybody has glasses or cups of their own where they place their toothbrushs.
The ceiling beam should be dark even though it does not match the color scheme of the room. Old beams have a rough surface, cracks etc. Therefore, it would be extremely difficult to paint them perfectly in another color.
The lace curtains are placed a bit too high (in a bathroom, you do not want to have such a gap between the curtain and the lower end of the window) and apparently also a bit too much on the left side.
As the room is very small, it might not be necessary to place a heater there. The rooms next to it should be sufficient to keep the temperature at a comfortable level.

1st floor:
For the bathroom, you could look for a "Handtuchheizung", if you do not mind looking for more CC. These heaters have more gaps inbetween so that you can put some towels there so that the towels are warm when you use them. Although they might be more fitting for a modern house with central heating.
Hand towels are placed close to the sink, bathing towels close to shower and/or bath tub. Having them so close to the toilet seems unhygienic for me.
The curtains in the other rooms are too high and in the girls room, it looks like they are clipping. It might be better to have just one window in the middle of the outer wall instead.
The furniture of the girls room looks like it does not match at all. Bed, desk, chair, shelves, toy box and the thing in the lower right corner (dresser?) have so many different colors. Such a mix would be more common for e.g. students who share an apartment. Of course, the furniture items do not have to be from the same set, but it would be good to have only like two main colors for the furniture.

2nd floor:
The chaos looks realistic for a teen. As there is so much to see in these pictures, I most likely will miss many details.
Again, I think that the furniture (plus the wooden beams and the door) has too many different main colors. I like the ceiling light. Most families have lamps in rather neutral colors because then you do not have to change them whenever you are redecorating a room.
One of the wall pieces has a different color. The jeans on the TV should be moved a few cm. The teen might have a small stereo instead of the radio with tape deck. The posters seem to be quite mixed. Maybe it might be better to focus on one or two topics for the posters. Does the teen only play scoccer himself or does he also like to watch scoccer? If he also likes to watch it, he could have posters of famous players, jerseys from his favorite club and/or the national team and other decoration.
The glass bottle on the shelf looks dangereous and I am not sure whether the teen would place it so openly. You might put it between desk and dresser instead. The backpack behind the fan fascinates me because it looks like it was carefully placed in that corner. If this is the backpack that he uses for school every day, I would place either the fan or the backpack a bit differently so that you can assume that the teen just threw the backpack into the corner when he returned from school.
Would it work to create a high pile of notebooks, books and other school stuff on the desk?
I like the Mezzo Mix bottle because it is not available in every country. It might be a bit too much that you have bottles, cans and paper cups for softdrinks in one room. The family most likely would buy either bottles (far more common) or cans and a small village usually does not have any fastfood restaurant or other place where he could have gotten the paper cup. If he got it somewhere else, I think he would have emptied it there and simply thrown on the ground. Btw: In 2003, Germany extended its bottle deposit to single-use bottles and cans (The deposit now pretty much applies to all drinks except for juice, wine and Schnaps). After this date, the number of sold cans dropped drastically.
I assume that even a sloppy teen would want to use the sofabed as sofa as long as no friend of him is staying overnight.
Walls: I would assume that the room was renovated before the teen moved into this room. Thus, I would keep the style consistend with the rest of the house. Maybe you can find more horizontal beams that you could place maybe on eye level. Then your teen would have another place where he could have place some used clothes that would partially block the view. If he becomes a bit less sloppy one day, you also could have beams beneath the ceiling and attach some kind of curtain to that beam. I am not sure whether he is the type for a folding screen.
Did you place the diagonal beams in different ways on purpose?

@ralna: thanks again for the feedback!

Furniture colors:
I colored the door white to match the white windows. Would it make more sense to match the other furniture with the beams instead, i.e. recoloring the furniture into similar dark wood shades as the beams? Regarding the walls in the Teen's room, I have to find a recolor with dark wood skirting boards.

First floor:
Any suggestions on what to place in the empty room next to the girl's bedroom?

Deco:
It's a pity I cannot adjust the height of curtains
I've found some clutter through German Sim sites as well, which was great. The Teen also likes to watch football (sports is his OTH based on his personality), but I couldn't find more "soccer" posters . I can play around with OMSP to stack books and notebooks on his desk. I had placed the diagonal beams asymmetrically because there was a gap between the wall, but I fixed it by placing ceiling beams as well and thus I've made them symmetrical again. Wall deco clips with the horizontal beams if I use the quarter-tile cheat, but I can try placing more surface deco with OMSPs.
Can you show me pictures of electric night-storage heaters that aren't attached to the wall?
What kind of deco is common in German guest's toilets besides a toilet brush, a small towel, magazines and a toilet refresher? In my country, it's common to place a birthday calendar in the guest's toilet.
And what kind of wall deco is common to place in the dining room?

Lot sizes:
Are Fachwerk farmhouses also common in the (south)west? Because during my google search on Fachwerkhäuser (either general or a specific state), I observed that Fachwerk-Bauernhäuser are usually detached with more garden space. Or are bigger lot sizes amongst old houses more common in northern regions and Bavaria than in BaWü and Rhineland-Palastinate?

EDIT: Around 2004/2005, did 8th and 9th-grade boys and girls usually carry backpacks or rather messenger bags? What brands were popular besides Eastpack, and what colors and patterns were common?

Furniture:
The furniture does not have to match the beams. The main problem was that the girl's room has about eight pieces of furniture in eight different colors. It would be better, if at least groups of three or four furniture pieces have matching colors. The furniture for a child's room usually is bought as a set with maybe a few add-ons that are not part of the set. I think that even charity shops try to offer matching sets.
Extremely mismatched furniture should be most common for students who share an apartment or similar households. Many students prefer to live in the city center and therefore rent an apartment with a few other students. These apartments usually are empty except for bathroom fixtures. Even a kitchen might not be included. When the students move into such an apartment, they frequently bring along some old furniture pieces that they got from their parents, grandparents and other people, sometimes furniture from bulky waste and when universities get net furniture, they might allow students to take some of the old furniture for free. And of course, not all studens stay in the apartment for the same amount of time so that one student might move out first and leave some of their furniture behind and a new student moves in and brings along more new, mismatched stuff.

First floor:
Just leave the room empty for the moment. I am sure your sims will develop interests, hobbies and friendships while you play them and you will realize what THEY want to have in that spare room.

Decoration:
Is that a general problem or just problem with these curtains?
Night-storage heaters: You will find a lot examples when you google for "Nachtspeicherofen". These results also will give you an impression how many of these heaters are placed on the floor and how many on the wall. In pretty much all the pictures shown, the night-storage heaters are placed directly next to the wall while the ones that I have seen in real life all had some distance to the wall.

Guest toilet:
Magazins and a toilet refresher are an option, but not a must-have. I have never seen a birthday calendar. Most bathrooms that I know do not have that much decoration. Usually, you have an item in which additional toilet paper can be stored ("Toilettenpapierbehälter" offers some good pictures as results) and you might also have a small shelf cabinet (one tile wide, but it can be high) for additional towels. If the full bathroom does not have enough storage, you also might put other stuff like shampoo and shower gel into the shelf or cabinet. I know several families that have the medicine chest (with a mirror so that you can place it above the sink) in the guest bathroom and not the full bathroom. In the guest bathroom, they key usually is in the door lock so that guests can lock the door if they want to (common when there are many people in the house at the same time, less common when only few people are present because then everybody knows that the toilet is occupied).
If you have an older sim lady who likes needlework, you might want to look for "Klopapierhut" instead of the "Toilettenpapierbehälter" (Warning: The search results show things that are considered very bad taste by the majority of people ).
The old lady/older couples also might have plush rugs in front of the toilet and matching covers for the toilet lid. Google "Toilettenteppich" for some examples (although most search results look too modern). The vast majority of people does not have these kind of rugs anymore because they are extremely unhygienic.
In recent years, more and more restaurants, companies and other semi-public toilets have some necessities lying around in the restroom: Hair brush, comb, hand cream, deodorant, sanitary products etc. So far, I have seen this in two or three private households as well. The items usually all are placed in a small basket or bowl that is placed somewhere where people can see it easily. But that trend might be too recent for your Veronaville.
There is something else that is relatively common for bathrooms in Germany although I do not think that it can be included in the Sims. The water connection for toilet and sink might not be inside the wall, but in front of the wall and covered. The top of this cover can serve as a shelf and frequently is cluttered. Google "Vorwand" and "Waschbecken" or "Toilette" if you want to see some pictures. (It was really difficult to find appropriate search terms for this because I did not know how this officially is called. I wanted to try the German word for "sill" because of the shelf-aspect, but the German word for this is "Sims" and I got tons of results related to the game, but not to real life architecture. )

Dining room:
You could place pictures on the wall. I think wall tattoos with some kinds of sayings also were more popular 15-20 years ago than they are now. You also could place a sideboard in the dining room. Especially when your sims like to cook themselves, they might need a bit more place to store kitchen equiment. And on top of the sideboard, you can place alcoholic and/or non-alcoholic drinks. Above the sideboard, you can place a wall cupboard with glass doors and have different kinds of glasses (for different kinds of drinks) and dessert bowls in there. I also know many people who have some paper and pens/pencils lying around somewhere, but that stuff usually is placed so that you do not immediately see it (e.g. on a window sill behind the curtain). And of course, like in every room, you can have smaller plants or some clutter on the window sills.

Lot sizes:
In general, lots and houses are a bit bigger in regions where just one child inherited than in regions where all children/all sons inherited, but even there you will hardly find any villages with a significant number of detached houses with garden on both sides of the houses in the village center.
Thus, it is more about the location of the lot within the village. There you usually have houses with either no gap to neighboring houses at all or just a narrow gap where a single person can walk through. Some of these houses have a garden behind the house. Just the space in front of the house and on the sides is very limited. Farms usually are not located at the central place of a village, but may be located along the main street because most villages just consisted of one street (Straßendorf) when they were founded and additional streets only were added at a later point. Such farms usually have a paved yard (nowadays maybe also tarred or concreted) and all buildings are accessible from that yard (so that you can reach them easily with a vehicle). A U-shaped form should be most frequent (with the opening to the street), but there also are farms with just two rows of buildings on each side boarder of the lot or rectangular shaped forms with a big arch in the front.
Farms like you imagine them do exist, but they are much less common than the other types of farm (at least in your preferred region) and they would be located at the very edge of the village. I do not think that the village will have a realistic flair, if you just built detached houses.
(As mentioned in one of my previous postings, there are some isolated farms, Aussiedlerhöfe, like one or two kilometers away from the next village. These farms were built after the Second World War due to the lack of available space within the villages or even after the Flurbereiniging about 50 years ago. These farms frequently look like the farms you would like to build, but the Veronaville map imho is too small to have something like that.)

Maybe go to this website: https://www.geoportal.rlp.de/search/, open the "Liegenschaften RP" map, zoom in and scroll around a bit. The map amongst others contain footprints of all the buildings in Rhineland Palatinate like they were officially registered. That way you get a good impression of the more densely built village and town centers and where and how many detached houses are realistic.

@ralna

Furniture:
Thanks for clarifying! If needed, I can look for recolors to match the furniture better with each other.

Deco:
I have this no-shifting issue with every curtain (either Maxis or CC), except one sheer curtain CC, but if I shift it down, the curtain mesh turns black. Since I'm not so handy with SimPE, I have to post requests somewhere else.
For the hallway, are coat racks and shoes usually open or stored in a closet/cabinet? Are coat racks usually one or two tiles long?
Regarding window sill deco, aren't German windows usually turned inwards, whether or not they have a tilt-and-turn system? In that case, it would look unpractical to me to place plants on the window sill, but it must be said that I don't have much experience with TNT windows.
What are some common ceiling lamp fixtures in German households? (before I pick something too American from the Maxis stuff)

Mansions:
What kind of mansion building styles would suit best for the houses of the Capps and the Summerdreams? A Landhaus or a Herrenhaus? For the Summerdream mansion, I want to preserve the timbered walls, but for the Capp mansion, I'm open to recoloring it with a different wall type.

Hallway:
All versions exist. I guess it depends on the inhabitants. Sloppy sims would have their shoes lie around while neat sims would store them in a rack or cabinet. For shoes, we also have cabinets like this that seem to be uncommon in some other countries: https://i.weltbild.de/p/schuhschran...jpg?v=3&wp=_max
For clothing, you can have anything from a few coat hooks to some kind of big cabinet with mirror etc. You can google for "Garderobe" to have a look at some pictures. For bigger households and single sims who care a lot about clothing and fashion, I definitely would choose a two-tile version while for singles and couples who do not care that much about clothing, a one-tile version should be sufficient.

Windows:
Yes, when you open the windows completely, they turn inwards. As long as you just have one or two plants on the window sill, it just takes one second to move them out of the way. And when it is windy outside, it might even be good to sandwich the window between two plants so that the window does not slam due to the wind.
When you tilt the windows, they also turn inwards, but this mainly affects the upper part of the window so that it is no problem and you do not have to move any items. At least for the period of the year when you have to heat to have a comfortable temperature, however, it is not recommended to tilt the windows because it takes a very long time to exchange the air and the energy from the heating literally goes out of the window. The recommended version therefore is, to open several windows completely for a few minutes (usually in the morning). For this, you open at least one window per room (which means that you can have more decoration on the sills of the windows that you do not open) and also open all doors so that the exchange of air happens really quickly.

Ceiling lamps:
Many households have rather neutral lamps like you can find here (assortment of a German DIY chain).
For those households that are supposed to have more fancy lamps, you can have a look at the lamp sections of the furniture stores that I linked in one of my previous postings and IKEA stuff is also quite common, especially with younger people. Look for words like Beleuchtung, Lampen, Leuchten, Licht and Elektro on the pages. That way you will find the right categories quickly.

Mansion:
Due to the size of the house, you could go for a Herrenhaus, but I think the transition between Landhaus and Herrenhaus is fluid.
I guess you should choose a year when the house was built (according to your imagination) and then look up, what architectural style was popular at that time. You can look up that period in your language version of Wikipedia and then just click on the button for the German version. That way you get the German name for this period so that Google will show you search results from German-speaking countries and Wikipedia itself most likely also will have some good pictures in the article about said architectural style.

Regarding your search request:
Plastic bags in supermarkets and other stores cost some money (to encourage people to bring their own, reusable bags instead). In supermarkets, they started charging money many, many years ago. In some clothing stores, you still could get some free plastic bags until about 2015 (there is no exact date because many shops stopped offering plastic bags voluntarily to protect the environment). From 2022 on, the classical single-use plastic bags even will be completely forbidden.
I can imagine that your sloppy teen might have some plastic bags lying around, but for most other sims that type of clutter might be out of character.
Back then, some people already used the big IKEA bags so that you maybe also want one of these as clutter. Today, reusable bags like this can be bought in almost every shop (usually with the shops branding on it): https://www.highflyers.de/images/35..._RPET_weiss.jpg

Deco:
The mother is slightly neat, but the father is sloppy, so I will aim for a mix of organized and messy for the rest of the house. When I was googling for teen room clutter inspiration, I stumbled upon pictures from the 2000s with plastic bags lying around, so that's were I got that clutter idea from. In my country, money is also charged for plastic bags for all shops since a few years, but before it was only applied to supermarket bags.

I've added it later while editing in reply no.70, but I wonder what the schoolbag trends were amongst 8th/9th graders in the 00s. Did the "cool" boys from that age mainly wear shoulder bags, or was it variable? What colors and patterns were common for boys backpacks? Bold or rather dark? Colorful or neutrals? I assume that certain decorations/drawings were a thing back then, but that's probably impossible to find as CC and I'm not good at recoloring, so I will omit that detail in the game.

Storytelling questions
Do the Nachhilfe sessions usually take place in the pupil's bedroom, or rather in a common room?

I've designed the outgoing yet grouchy 9th grade Teen boy as a chick magnet, but he is a player with short lasting relationships (usually meets/kisses girls at parties involving booze). He has a Popularity/Romance aspiration with the Irresistible trait mod. Besides his looks, what traits would make him attract girls and make him having many friends, despite his moments of a**hole/cocky behavior?
He's friends with e.g. Romeo (no outstanding personality traits, artsy), Puck (neat, shy, serious, nice) and the NPC Renee Andrews (outgoing, grouchy, tomboy, footballer). He doesn't like Tybalt (outgoing, grouchy, footballer), so he gravitates towards the Monty camp but he's probably ok with the Capp girls (but I have to see how their interactions will turn out).
Asking this because I assume that social dynamics amongst teens work differently in Europe than in the USA, so I try to limit/downplay the American-only teen character stereotypes. I can't watch many German produced teen shows due to limited amount of subbed shows/movies and my German skills are too limited to follow shows without subs. But How To Sell Drugs Fast is on my watchlist for sure .

Hallway:
What about a two-tile clothing rack and the teen and the father have their shoes somewhere next to the cabinet (lying around, not neatly placed)? And if you find a jacket that is bent like the jeans on the TV in the teen's room, you could place it on a surface of clothing rack (e.g. a clothing rack that has a clothing rail for jackets in the upper part and a shoe cabinet with doors in the lower part. That way it would look like somebody quickly threw the jacket there instead of placing it properly with a coat hanger on the clothing rail.

Plastic bags:
As I said, I think it would be good clutter for the teen, but not for everybody.

Schoolbag:
At my school, the vast majority had backbags. Eastpak as a brand was extremely common (like 80 % of all backbags). There also was a short period when backbags with just one diagonal shoulder strip were popular although they rather were used during leisure time and not for the heavy school books. The Germans used to call this type of backbag "Bodybag" which is another example that Germans overestimate their English skills. If you want to do a Google search, it might be helpful to add "site:de" so that the search results show backbags and not bodybags.
This U.S. highschool clichee distinction in "cool" and "not cool" did not exist at my school and at hardly any school of my friends.
Shoulder bags only were a thing for the last two or three years of Gymnasium and even there many pupils still used backbags.
The majority of backbags hat just one color without a pattern and especially for boys, darker colors were more frequent than bright colors. But there also were exceptions and nobody cared about it. Thus, just choose the color and pattern that your teen likes. You can have a look at the Eastpak website, to get some inspiration.
For decoration, key fobs were the most common thing and were added to the zip fastener of the small bag of the backbag. Small stuffed animals (approx. 5 cm or less - frequently not the type of toy for children) were the most common key fobs although mainly for girls. Depending on the interests of a person, key fobs also could be related to a soccer club, music band, anime or even be a bottle opener.
Drawings on the backbag were not really common and there also was just one pupil who covered his whole backbag and coat with buttons of punk bands.

Nachhilfe:
Both is possible. Sometimes, I had my own school stuff placed all over the desk in a certain order to prepare for an exam or work on a project. On these days, I preferred using the living room, but I had to make sure that other family members would not disturb us there. When my school stuff was not arranged in a special way and I could remove it in 1-2 minutes, I used my own room so that I would not have to ask the other family members to stay out of the living room.
For your teen, if the Nachhilfe giver comes to his house, I would suggest a common room. The teen of course would not mind having someone in his bedroom, but his mother might not be too happy if others see this chaos and the Nachhilfe giver also might prefer a table with an empty surface like the dining table.

Chick magnet:
I am sorry, but I cannot answer this question. At my school and amongst my friends, even just two or three short relationships in a short period of time would cause a too bad reputation to attract anybody. No positive trait could make up for this.
You might have him try to have the relationships in different environments, e.g. with somebody from his school who is not from Veronaville and with somebody from Veronaville who is not from the same school and maybe he also gets to know some girls because of a hobby (apart from soccer) that are neither from his school nor from Veronaville. That way it might take a bit longer until the gossip spreads and he gets a bad reputation.
At the age of 14/15 and in such a rural area, the chances for having big parties with booze are rather limited. As mentioned in one of my previous postings, there might be one or at maximum two events per year in the village itself and there the people who sell the alcohol will at least roughly know the age of the guests from the village. For events in other villages, the teen would depend on his parents to bring him there and pick him up later on. He might have one or a few drinks without problems, but if he is visibly tipsy or drunken, his parents will refuse to help him in future.
Teenager younger than 16 also only are allowed to go out until 10 p.m. This can be extended when the teen has a form that his parents have signed and when another, older person accompanies him. A teen of 16 or 17 years as accompanying person would be realistic and delay the curfew until midnight. If the teen got drunken in the past, the parents might refuse to sign and your teen definitely would not be perceived as cool if he has to go home at 10 p.m.
Thus, the most probable occasion for drinking alcohol would be when the teen meets his Veronaville friends and at least one of them is 16 or older so that this friend can buy beer and wine legally. However, these meetings are not the kind of occasions where the teen could meet new girls.

Teens and TV:
I have to admit that I pretty much watch no such series and movies and therefore even know less about how teens are represented there.
If you also are interested in non-fictional TV that was popular amongst teens: From 1999 on, there was a show called "TV total" that was quite popular amongst teenagers and sometimes also a topic for conversations with friends. Most of the episodes of this show are available legally on a website called myspass.de. You can find the exact link at the bottom of the Wikipedia article (both DE and EN). Unfortunately, the episodes do not have captions and I am not sure whether you can watch the episodes with non-German IP.

In my environment, I felt a distinction between "cool" and "not cool" back then, but probably not as extreme as in US high school shows, and it also depends on the school tier one attended.

Teen dating culture:
Yeah that's why I was wondering how a "chick magnet" would be perceived in a different environment than the US high school setting or in a mid-sized town. In that case, I will also consider downplaying the playboy behavior of Romeo (Romance aspiration, commitment issues) during the time before he goes steady with Juliette. In that case, I just picture him being overly nice and appearing flirty towards girls. Good idea about the secret "a girl in every port" alternative for the CAS Sim!

Rural teen nightlife:
I thought that underage drinking was more common in rural areas, like when hanging out at small Kellerpartys at their friends' home? Or is that more common behavior amongst teens in mid-sized towns?
Does "not going out after 10 PM" also include just visiting friends? If yes, then that sneaking-out curfew thing from the game would be realistic for kids below 16. But I can also pretend that teens drink alcohol illegally while "sneaking out" . In my story, Mercutio is the one who is 16+, so he can introduce his younger brother and other underage friends to booze.

Cool/not cool:
Maybe, I was lucky that it was not this way at my school, but I assume that it is also partially related to the type of school. There is a period (maybe 6th to 9th grade) when pupils who participate too much in classes (like raising your hand whenever the teacher asks a question) are at risk of being considered Streber (a too ambitious person - as a rough definition). A few pupils thought that it would be cool to do the exact opposite and tried not to participate in classes at all and look bored or even did other stuff. Some of these pupils changed their behaviours again after receiving some bad grades, but many either had to repeat a year or had to change from Gymnasium to Realschule which definitely is not cool at all. Therefore, most pupils tried not to stand out at all (neither positively nor negatively) so that they behaved very similar during the lessons. And when you only have school from 8 a.m. to 1 p.m. you just have two 15 minute breaks so that there is not enough time for lots of self-portrayal.

Teen nightlife:
Parties with friends are the most common occasion for drinking alcohol. But your teen sim will not meet any new girls at these parties. Although we usually did not use any Partykeller for meeting our friends. The Partykeller that I know usually were rooms that were blandly furnished by the parent generation and not exactly the place where we wanted to spend our time.
As long as the teens are not too visibly drunken, they can meet in the teen's room (for smaller groups) or for a few special occasions (birthday parties etc.) with more guests the parents might allow them to use one of the common rooms. During summer, they also might simply meet in the garden and also have a barbecue (Bratwürste and steaks would be most common). For smaller groups, you can use the furniture next to the Gartenhaus. For bigger groups, most families own one or two "Bierzeltgarnitur" that you could use. If the inside of the Gartenhaus is for leisure activities and not a storage for garden equipment, the teens might also meet in there.
When your teen wants to drink a lot, I cannot really imagine him doing that directly in his parents' house or in the house of the Monty teens. In my home village, there was a vaulted celler beneath an unused barn relatively central in the village that was used for these kind of meetings. It was furnished with sofas, chairs and a table from bulky waste*, someone had somehow organized electricity for some lamps and the stereo, everybody brought some alcohol and snacks and smoking also was quite common there.
Do you have any plans for the silo lot? If not, you maybe could imagine that it belongs the Monty family. You could turn it into a community lot so that your teen and his friends can go there and you could ban all other people with the visitor controller. It might be helpful to also get the community time mod because it could ruin the imagination if your sim parties until early morning and then returns home and it is just 7 or 8 p.m.

*At that time, there were fix appointments once or twice per year where all inhabitants of a village or town could put old bulky items next to the street and the waste collection would pick them up. People usually put the stuff outside one or several days before the appointment and people who needed some stuff could have a look at it and take whatever they wanted. Strictly speaking, taking some of the stuff is theft and therefore illegal, but people usually did not care because they wanted to get rid of the stuff, no matter how. However, sometimes people also took stuff that simply was placed outside of a house, but not supposed for bulky waste (like an old bike that still was used regularly) and people from Eastern Europe knew the dates for these waste collection for many places so that they cae with small transporters, searched the bulky waste systematically and sometimes left behind the unwanted items widely spread and sometimes even on the roads. That is why there pretty much are no fix appointments anymore in recent years. When people have bulky waste, they can get an individual appointment just for their lot.

After 10 PM:
The law just applies to clubs, bars, restaurants, public events etc. Meeting friends is not a problem when the teen got the permission from his parents to be outside that late. This also applies for the way home afterwards although the police might decide to check your teen when they see him to find out whether he has the permission to be there. If they notice that your teen is drunken, they will bring him home regardless of whether he has his parents' permission and they also have to inform the youth welfare service about the incident.

Thanks for clarifying again!

School tiers:
I pretend that the CAS teen, Romeo and Puck attend Realschule, but that's based on my reference frame in my country where there's a roughly equal percentage between Real and Gym pupils. Also, where I live, village/countryside kids are more likely to attend the Hauptschule equivalent due to more availability of Hauptschüle buildings nearby the countryside and Real/Gymnasium buildings being too far away. So in my case, the smaller and more remote the village, the lower the average education tier over there. However, I'm not sure if that education-tier trend also applies to rural western Germany. So I wonder, to what extend were rural kids pressured to attend Gymnasium back then in the early 2000s?
I have pictured that the CAS teen has a phase in 9th grade that he neglects schoolwork due to the combination of social life, football and dating, resulting in bad grades (I originally based his character on the Dumb Jock stereotype, but now I'm going to water down that cliche). He has to fix his grades throughout spring because he doesn't want to repeat a year. Also, his (ironically sloppy) father is a chemistry teacher at his school but does not teach his class, so the teen has extra pressure to catch up with his grades.

Teen nightlife:
Thanks for the silo suggestion! No, I haven't done anything with that lot yet. I've already installed the Visitor Controller and Community time mods.
Now I picture that when teens get caught by the police when sneaking out, is because they got too drunk and did silly things like kicking trash cans or making too much noise during Nachtruhe . Btw, does the Nachtruhe also apply on Friday and Saturday night?
Regarding dating, I will consider letting the little "Don Lotharios" date with schoolmates that live in a subhood instead where there's a less strong gossip culture .
How common was underage smoking (<16) back then in the mid-00s? Did they also have to do that as secretly as drinking alcohol?
And since there's a lot of social control, how would Romeo and Juliet meet with each other if they don't attend the same school? Would the silo hangout also be a good option for them?

Is there a German saying for the small village mentality, i.e. "like knows like"?

Infrastructure
I'm going to download this road replacement because this is the best I could find. Is this color realistic, or actually too dark?

Schools:
In the generation of your teen's parents, children in rural areas definitely were more likely to attend Hauptschule or Realschule than Gymnasium. This has changed a lot because today pretty much everybody who can and may attend a Gymnasium does attend one. The change took place slowly, but I think that the situation between 2000 and 2005 was more likely to the one today.
Employees with a university degree in average earn about 50 % more than employees with an "Ausbildung". That is why there is a lot of pressure to have Abitur and go to university.

I was able to find some numbers for pupils attending the different schools in two states:
The percentages of 5th graders in Baden-Württemberg 2020/2021:
Gymnasium 42,6 %
Realschule 35,6 %
Hauptschule 6,2 %
Gesamtschule 15,7 %
The percentages of pupils enrolled in each school type in Rhineland-Palatinate in 2015/2016:
Gymnasium 50 %
Realschule 34 %
Hauptschule <1 %
Gesamtschule 16 %
Hauptschule has a rather bad reputation today so that pupils usually will prefer to attend a Gesamtschule, even if they obtain the same school graduation certificate in the end.
Please be aware that the numbers for RLP refer to the total number of pupils enrolled in secondary schools. Gymnasium has 8 or 9 grades while the other school types only have 5 or 6 grades. If you just had a look at 5th graders (unfortunately, I could not find data for that), the percentage for Gymnasium therefore would be lower.

The distance to school might have mattered in the past, but does not matter anymore. Between 1967 and 1978 many small communities were merged to bigger communities. Thus, a small village like Veronaville might have had a primary school and Hauptschule until then (frequently with just one class room for grades 1-4 and a second class room for grades 5-9 and one teacher had to teach several grades at the same time), but after that period, pupils had to take a bus to a nearby town anyway. The bus ticket is also paid by the community and/or administrative district until 10th grade (and families with a tight budget also can get help for grades 11-13) so that there are no financial reasons for attending a certain school type.
The funding might be different for each state, but as far as I know, communities fund primary schools and Hauptschule while administrative districts fund Realschule and Gymnasium. Thus, a Realschule does not necessarily have to be closer to Veronaville than the Gymnasium. Due to the school buses, it is convenient for communities and administrative districts that all schools are located in the same place.

Long story short:
There definitely already was quite some pressure to attend Gymnasium back then. However, I could imagine that your teen sim attended Gymnasium (especially as his father is a teacher) in the beginning, but then had to change to Realschule due to his grades. For the Monty's, Realschule or even Hauptschule also seems okay because they all work in gastronomy and graduating from Hauptschule is sufficient to start an Ausbildung in that business. And the Summerdreams are supernatural creatures so that I doubt that Oberon and Titania would care about something as mundane and trivial as school.

Nightlife:
Noise disturbances are not only a problem at night. You can get into trouble for causing too much noise during daytime as well. At night, people are just expected to be even quieter than during daytime. There is also a period at midday (usually 1-3 p.m.) so that people could take a nap if they want to. You can find signs at bottle banks that tell you that it is forbidden to throw bottles in there during these hours. The weekday is irrelevant for the noise and sometimes even bars and clubs get into trouble because of this. The police might make exceptions for annual events, but that also just would apply to the party area, but not to drunken people walking through the village.

Smoking:
Smoking definitely was done secretly, but many children or teens tried it and some got addicted. There still were cigaret vending machines (and also gumball vending machines - if you need some more inspiration for decoration) on the outsides of some buildings and you could buy cigarettes by throwing in some coins. There was no age check at all. Thus, it was even easier to get cigarets than alcohol. At that time, it also was common that people (older than 16) smoke at restaurants. Smoking bans only were introduced in 2007 or later and every state may decide itself so that you still might find some restanrants where smoking still is allowed.

Romeo and Juliet:
I do not think that Juliet would like to spend time at the silo due to the alcohol, cigarets and maybe Mercutio and Puck watching them.
And the way to the silo also would be a problem because many bored elders spend their days looking out the window and watch anybody who passes by. Therefore, people would quickly know that Juliet goes to the Monty side of Veronaville. I do not think that Consort really matters WHAT she does there. The fact THAT she is there is already enought to get her into trouble.
If the village has a neutral area with some hidden corners, they might meet there. Otherwise, they might meet somewhere outside of the village in the nature. I do not think that they can meet in the subhood because each of them would need a relative who takes them there by car.

Saying:
Do you mean "Jeder kennt jeden"?
I do not think that you can describe the whole mentality with one saying.
Here are two proverbs for you (just for entertainment, they are not relevant anymore today):
Schönheit vergeht, Hektar besteht. (Beauty fades, hectares remain.)
Heirate über den Mist, dann weißt du wen du kriegst. (Marry [someone from] accross the dung heap so that you know whom you will have.)
And my own opinion about living in a small village:
Da möchte ich nicht tot über den Zaun hängen (There, I would not [even] want to hang over a fence [when I am] dead.)

Infrastructure:
The color would be okay. I know some recently tarred roads that are similarily dark. The stones are a problem, however. They would cause a lot of noise whenever a car passes by and in villages cars tend to be faster than in towns and cities because many drivers think that the village is too small and not worth slowing down.
The vast majority of roads is tarred. Stones mostly are used in special places like in pedestrian areas or traffic-calmed areas close to squares.

Education of the Sims
The CAS Teen is a Leo, so his birthday is during summer break. I pictured him as an "early pupil" i.e. attending 9th grade when he just turned 14. However, I understood it's less common in Germany than my country to let kids attend primary school when their birthday is after June 30th, so I pretend he was ahead with educational development in his younger years but started having a hard time with school since 8th grade. When he switched to Realschule, he is in the same class as Romeo and Puck (he already knows Romeo from his football team). But once his grades are getting better throughout 10th grade, I guess he can proceed with Gymnasium after Abschluss.
So now my rule of thumb is: Sims with Knowledge parent(s) or having a Knowledge aspiration themselves are more likely to attend Gymnasium.

Romeo and Juliet relationship
I pretend that the subhood can be reached by bicycle, but that only active Teens are willing to cycle 30+ minutes. Puck is on the neutral camp, so I assumed he doesn't care that Juliet would hang out with Romeo. The Summerdream mansion is a neutral place, but a party or a friend group hangout would be safer for them to meet so it's less obvious that it's just the two of them. But maybe I should move their mansion away from the Capps mansion to emphasize their neutrality and reducing the likelihood of gossiping by the Capp relatives.
However, the relationship between Romeo and Juliet won't last too long because they have zero lightning bolts with each other (neutral chemistry), yet Juliet has one or two lightning bolts towards other boys (I installed some mods that alter the chemistry). I have to watch the anime Nikesoi to seek more inspiration about teen relationships within family feuds
My CAS family has more connections with Monty because the mother used to work in gastronomy (her OTH is cuisine) until she became a stay-at-home-mom. But now the kids are both in secondary school, she can consider going back to work part-time. Also, the CAS Teen is befriended with Romeo and the 16+ party-animal Mercutio. But I have to check how the father will interact with the Capps and the daughter with the Capp kids.

I will post photos very soon about my lot updates, including the silo! My next building project is renovating the Monty ranch into a renovated Villa Rustica using German-based villas as inspiration.

@aspersim:
Glad you liked it! I want to share with you some resources I use for German names:
On https://www.beliebte-vornamen.de, you can find the popularity of first names for each birth year/generation.
And here you can find the occurrence of German surnames spread throughout the states: https://www.kartezumnamen.eu/en/
I manually create Townies into playable Sim families since I use the townie-free clean Veronaville from @redandvidya as a base, so what I do, is looking up their names on the Fandom Wiki and check what their names are in the German/Dutch/Scandinavian version.

Have you already thought about which German state you want to base your hood on?

I also want to build a German-style Downtown, but want to base it on Windenburg from TS4. Unfortunately, there is no 4t2 Windenburg terrain at this moment, but I can consider creating my own after I managed to install SC4, so I can implement Ralna's notes about German road infrastructure.

Since I see you also own TS3, have you already checked Neustadt an der Sim?: https://gemeinsamesims3nachbarschaf...t-an-der-sim-3/
I'd love to see something like that for TS2 as well because I want to pretend that this town has the most nearby schools for the Veronaville kids (but still too far away to reach by bicycle, so they have to take the bus).

@Aspersim:
Thanks for posting here! I saw that more people rate our postings and was curious to know who else is interested in the topic.

For German family names, I can suggest these websites:
http://wiki-de.genealogy.net/Die_10..._in_Deutschland
On the bottom of the page, you can find links to places 1001-2000 and 2001-3000. The list is based on phone book entries in the year 2002.
https://de.wiktionary.org/wiki/Verz...en_Deutschlands
This list includes more than 3400 family names. It is based on phone book entries in the year 2005. If also shows the number of entries for each name (the number of people with each name, of course, is higher).

For given names, Softlism already has posted the best link where you can look up which names were popular in which year or decade. The lists are based on the rankings created by one man who collects data of about 1/4 of all births per year. The lists just are based on the first given names. If you also are curious what additional given names are popular, you can have a look at this list from 2005: https://www.beliebte-vornamen.de/31...-zweitnamen.htm

Your question regarding the buildings in urban areas is quite general. Maybe list some types of buildings so that it is easier to answer. And how do you define "urban"? Any place with a certain number of inhabitants? City vs. town vs. village etc.?

Neideffer: I have never heard that family name and search results for that name mainly were for the U.S. Therefore, I assume that the spelling somehow was modified when your ancestors immigrated to the U.S.
For the meaning of the name, it would be important to know whether the "d" used to belong to the first or second syllable. When I did the search, "Neidhöfer" appeared amongst the search results as suggestion. If your name is derived from this name, the farmer part could be true as "Hof" is one of the German words for farm and "Höfer" refers to a person living on a "Hof". "Neid" means "envy" although it is possible that the first syllable originally had another meaning because spelling and pronunciation can change a lot over time.
If the "d" belongs to the second syllable, the first syllable should be derived from "neu" (= new) and "deff" could be "Dorf" (= village) so that the whole name with the "-er" refers to a person living in a relatively new village.
Here is a map that shows you where in Germany the name Neidhöfer is most common: http://genwiki.genealogy.net/Neidh%...r_(Familienname)
For names derived from "Neudorf", it makes no sense trying to look it up on a map because that term was used for many villages that are just a few centuries old. Frequently, the official name is something else, but if a village was the newest village in the area, that term could stick to it forever.

Btw: In Germany, family names only were fixed in 1875 when civil registries were founded. Before that date, it was possible to change the spelling, the whole name or even to live without a family name. Thus, it can be really difficult to trace back names and persons before that date because each priest had his own preference regarding the spelling and some even translated names into Latin. The same persons name could be spelled in a dozen of different ways for different events in life (baptism, wedding, birth of children, death).

Uploaded lot: I could not find it in the downloads section. Thus, I cannot give feedback unfortunately.


@Softlism
Education: I have two nice German terms for you: Muss-Kind and Kann-Kind. Each state has a certain fixed date and all children that are at least 6 years old on that date have to be enrolled in school (Muss-Kind). Children that are younger than 6 years on that date can be enrolled in school, but do not have to (Kann-Kind). This usually refers to children who are 1-2 months younger, but in my grade there was a girl with British mother who was born half a year after the required date and she still was allowed to start school.
Switching from Gymnasium to Realschule is possible without problems, but the other way round usually is really difficult. The level of difficulty in subjects like math, physics, chemistry and foreign languages is completely different. I only know one person who managed to do this and that girl had extremely good grades and even she had to move to a city to attend some special classes there before starting Gymnasium so that she had a sufficient level of knowledge for all subjects and she even had to learn a new foreign language during that year. Therefore, pupils who graduated from Realschule usually start an Ausbildung or, if they really want to study, they attend a Fachoberschule afterwards. When they graduate from Fachoberschule after two or three years, they can study at a Fachhochschule. Fachhochschulen usually are less theoretical and more practical than universities. Moreoever, Fachhochschulen are more similar to schools while at university, you have more freedom to choose which classes you want to attend - or sometimes even whether you want to attend them at all or just prepare yourself for the exams another way instead. For students with insufficient self-discipline that could be a problem because they enjoy the free time too much and are too lazy and then will fail at the exams. Such students might do better at a Fachhochschule. To me, this seems to be the more likely way to go for your CAS teen.

In addition to knowledge aspiration, you also could have a look at the parents' jobs and personalities. If they have jobs that require a university degree, the children usually at least will start Gymnasium (it will depend on the children/teens whether they will graduate). Rather strict parents would insist that the children do homework every day so that these children also would be good enough for Gymnasium. I also think that parents with fortune aspiration would make sure that their children attend Gymnasium. And maybe all children with C- or worse will have to drop out of their current school and switch to another school type (Gymnasium -> Realschule -> Haupt-/Gesamtschule).

Romeo and Juliet:
Going by bike definitely is an option.
It is not important whether Puck cares. In a small village, there is no way that Juliet can walk to the Monty side without being seen by several other sims on the way there.
I would not move too many lots around, if you can avoid it. Some parts of Veronaville are only slightly above water level and parts of your lot might be beneath water level after moving the lot.
Are Romeo and Juliet already in love (instead of just having a crush)? Because as soon as two sims are in love, they receive some kind of attraction bonus so that they usually at least should have one attraction bolt.
I assume that the CAS father as a teacher either would get along better with the Capps or would prefer staying neutral and I do not think that the family as a whole really would want to be on one side and be dragged into the feud.

Do you recreate the original townies or why do you look up the names? If yes, there is an easier way: Create a copy of the Veronaville template and rename all the files to N001. Temporarily move out the folder with the Pleasantview template from the base game folder and move the renamed Veronaville folder there instead. The next time when you create a neighborhood, the game will copy the Veronaville townies and NPCs into the new neighborhood instead of the usual Pleasantview ones. After you are done, remove the renamed Veronaville folder and put back the original Pleasantview one (or whatever you prefer). However, as you already have started creating townies, it might be too late to use this method.

SC4:
If you have problems to install the game, you might want to contact the support. When I did this, they gave me the Origin version of SC4 that could be installed without problems.

@ralna
Townies
I've already started recreating Townies as CAS, and I've adjusted the faces and skintones significantly for most of the Townies. I also have chosen to manually rename them (I've created a table with an overview of all the Townies and their face templates).

Storytelling
When I started playing Romeo and Juliet, they were merely crushes. Good to know that falling in love automatically means one bolt! I will pay attention to it when playing.

Were teens from very small villages usually more privy about their relationships at the beginning than kids from less small villages, due to being cautious about their reputation amongst fellow pupils that are from the same village? (E.g. no PDA in the bus or at school, rather visiting their lover at their town instead of bringing them home, no love status messages on their ICQ, only mentioning to close friends that they're in a relationship). Also, after how many weeks do they usually tell their parents they're in a relationship with someone if their lover hasn't come over yet since their relationship?
I understood that German kids get "WooHoo" education from an early age and that many parents don't let teens avoid WooHoo and even support them with proper birth control (unlike what you may have read about some American parents and puritanism), but I'm not sure if that's only a city thing or that this mentality also applies to really small villages, and to what extent it matters whether the teen is a boy or a girl. Is it correct that rural RLP is not as conservative as rural Bavaria?

Education
During which years are pupils usually downgraded in level instead of being held back a year? How bad is it for someone's reputation amongst peers if they downgraded from Gymnasium to Realschule, especially if one of their parents is a teacher at the same school? Would they still be attractive for dating amongst non-Knowledge Gymnasium Sims (they have gained more free time for that), or only amongst non-Knowledge Sims from the Realschule?
The chemistry-teacher father has Knowledge aspiration, but he is fairly nice and has Music as OTH (I made him rolling a Science career a long time before I had FreeTime). The mother has Family aspiration and used to work at gastronomy.
In RLP, is it correct that the cut-off date for Musskinder has always been Aug 31st, or did it used to be June 30th until the law changed at a certain year?

Relationships:
I do not think that there is a difference, but there simply is not much to do in a village. Therefore, meeting in a town is more appealing as there could be a cinema, public pool, ice-cream parlour etc. Going there does not mean that you are hiding - it is still quite probable that sooner or later you will meet someone you know because everybody in the village has limited options for leisure activities.
PDA in the bus is uncommon because buses usually just connect one village with the school and the bus then drops off all pupils and drives to the next village. Therefore, only when both teens are from the same village they could have PDA in the bus. And that happens very rarely because there are so few options in a small village.
And even if the relationship does not work out, you do not immediately get a bad reputation. Usually, you do not immediately have a new love interest so that some time will pass before you have another relationship. And if someone has a bad reputation, that will only affect changes for future flirts/dates/relationships, but not friendships.
Telling the parents: That really depends on the teenager's personality, the parents' personalities, how well teen and parents get along, how serious and stable the relationship is, whether the parents already knew the significant other before the relationship started etc. Some might talk to a parent even before the relationship begins, some might wait months.
At my school, we had Woohoo education in 6th grade and in 9th grade. In 6th grade, the emphasis was more on the biological process of procreation. In 9th grade, the emphasis was on birth control and the like. The public library that also was located in one of the school buildings had many books about Woohoo education, some of them even picture books for pre-school children.
I guess parents in Germany are just more realistic. Teens will do it anyway.
I do not think that there is a general rule for rural vs. urban areas, girls vs. boys or RLP vs. Bavaria. It mostly will depend on the parents. It will also depend on the environment. At my school, there was a quite open atmosphere so that several gays outed themselves. Telling the parents usually also was not a problem. They did not actively tell everybody in their homevillages, but they were not hiding either.

People who attended Realschule or Hauptschule and made an Ausbildung afterwards were (and maybe still are - I do not have any numbers from recent years) more likely to get married as very young adults and have children than people who attended Gymnasium. They can finish the Ausbildung at age 18 or 19 and when they then find a job they are financially independent while students usually still depend on their parents until they are in their mid-twenties or even longer. The vast majority of such marriages that I know about did not last very long, however.

Education:
There is no rule for this. The school simply tells you that you are not allowed to attend the next grade and then the parents and the child/teenager have to decide which option they prefer. Repeating a year is very successful when you have problems with minor subjects or if you only lack knowledge from the last school year. Otherwise, it will require lots of hard work by the pupil to also catch up on the missing knowledge from previous years so that the pupil will not fail again. Switching to another school type can be helpful if the pupil has problems in several subjects including the main subjects because the level of difficulty at the new school is lower so that the grades automatically will be better. Gymnasium also has more different subjects (e.g. additional foreign languages) than Realschule and Realschule has more than Hauptschule. Thus, if a pupil has problems with some of these additional subjects, they might be able to completely get rid of such a subject by switching school. Somebody who is annoyed by school might not want to spend an additional year there while somebody with a certain career wish might need Abitur so that repeating the year is the lesser evil for them. There also are some limitations for repeating a year: it usually only is possible twice and some time has to pass between the two times. And the possibilities for switching school types also are limited because once you attend Hauptschule there is no more school type to which you could switch to avoid repeating a year.

Repeating a year or switching to another school type does not really harm the reputation. Especially at Gymnasium it is quite common. At my school, we were about 160 children in 5th grade and by the time of graduation 9 years later only 100 were left which means that 60 switched to another school or left school after 10th grade (which is equal to graduating from Realschule). I do not know how many had to repeat years because you lose some pupils that way, but also get some new pupils from the grade above.
As your teenager is just lazy and not stupid, I do not think that it will have an effect on his dating chances. Many pupils from my grade had relationships with teenagers from other schools or who already had graduated from school. It is more the generations of the parents that worries about career chances and future salaries. Teenagers usually ignore that and listen to their feelings. Thus, your teen still can date sims from Gymnasium and if they have sufficient attraction, I would not even exclude knowledge sims (although attraction will not be too high due to the aspirations). I think the CAS father might be the one who feels worst about his son's school performance.

RLP has 30th June as reference date. Therefore, it would be rather uncommon.


(I am on vacation right now. Therefore, my answers might take a bit longer.)

Relationships & parties I thought that rural parties/gatherings hold by friends were more "wild" than in mid-sized towns and cities, or do they do it more secretly? Because I understood that Dorfkinder usually start drinking at an earlier age than Stadtkinder.
Are sleepovers also common amongst Dorfkinder when they're an official couple, or is that too awkward in this case because of the risks of spreading rumors about Woohoo if someone from the hood sees that a teen has slept over?

Education & culture
I pretend that the CAS father is a Realschule chemistry teacher and that he just started with his teaching career since the schoolyear that his son entered 9th grade and his daughter the 5th. However, he promoted to a teacher by Sims logic, so he didn't have a proper teacher apprenticeship and just rolled in there with his MSc Chemistry degree after previous job experiences in the chemistry field . I'm aware that becoming a teacher won't go that easy irl, but sometimes I choose to retain Sims logic in my story to add absurd humor.

Despite cultural differences, what high-school anime tropes and archetypes would make somewhat sense in a my romcom story, featuring Sim logic? Like cycling/running to the bus stop with bread in their mouth, shouting crazy names when doing football tricks, transfer students, Carnaval cosplay (instead of cafes), and swapping school and Japanese festivals for village parties?

Speaking of vacation, during what time of the year do teens talk with each other about the vacation plans they will have during summer break? Do they often have two vacation trips, of which one with family (abroad or domestic) and one with friends (e.g. domestic youth camps)?

Hope you have a pleasant and safe vacation

Parties:
I do not think that partying in villages is wilder than in towns. It is legal from age 16 (for beer and wine, "hard" alcohol from age 18) and in every place you have some parents who do not care whether their children start drinking at an earlier age. Most parents, however, do care and if the police becomes involved or a hospital stay is necessary due to alcohol intoxication, pretty much all parents will care.
And just because you live in a village, it does not mean that you have to stay there for all gatherings. From the age of 16 on, we usually went to some bigger towns or even a city (1 hour drive by car) when we wanted to go to clubs or bars. Someone aged 18 offered to take along the others and had to stay sober for the evening and night. The others could drink alcohol, but we all drank moderate amounts, not excessive amounts. In our own administrative district, there only was one club that had a recurring event every two weeks with music that we liked and one bar where we met on Wednesdays (due to the Happy Hour).

Relationships:
Sleepovers definitely exist and are quite normal for official couples. There will be gossip, but mainly amongst the elderly people of the village and hardly amongst the other teens.

Education:
Becoming a teacher that way is not that unrealistic. Of course, the majority of teachers has a teaching degree, but at my school there always were a few teachers with non-teaching degrees who got hired at a time when there were not enough graduates with teaching degrees for a certain school subject.
Teachers usually have at least two subjects that they can teach, in recent years some teachers even have degrees for three subjects (especially if physical education is one of the subjects). Only arts and music teachers have just one subject. Thus, it would be more realistic if your chemistry teacher had a second subject as well. I think that biology would be the most common choice.
Moreover, he would "only" be an employee of the school, not a state official. As teachers become state officials for lifetime, there is an age limit. If you are older than the age limit without being a state official, there is no chance of becoming a state official anymore. (For universities, this is different, because there you can be appointed a state official for a certain amount of years). Many non-state-official teachers have the problems that the schools end the contracts before the summer vacations and rehire teachers for the start of the new school years so that the teachers are unemployed for six weeks every single year. And they might not be rehired by the same school so that they might have to move to another town/city very spontaneously.
It does not sound too logically to me, however, that someone who already had a regular job starts to work as teacher. A chemist with some years of professional experience in the chemical industry has a much higher salary than what schools can pay for a teacher without previous teaching experience. How many people would be willing to accept a salary loss of at least 20 000 per year? And if the CAS fasther was really good in his previous job, the salary loss might be much higher than that.
At my school, career changers as teachers were young because for beginners the salary gap between public sector and industry is smaller and both sectors have salary agreements with salary raises after several years within the same sector so that it becomes more and more attractive to stay in the same sector. And due to their young ages they still had a chance to become a state official. The only exception was a middle-aged biology and geography teacher who had spent 15-20 years in South America and therefore had no professional experience at all before working as a teacher.

Culture and tropes:
Pupils who take the bus usually do no take a bike to go to the bus stop. For a small village like Veronaville, hardly anybody will have a longer distance than maybe 500 m to the bus stop so that it is not worth the time to get your bike from wherever it is placed on your lot and lock it somewhere close to the bus stop.
Running is common for pupils who are notoriously late. My way to the bus stop was the same way that the bus had to take. Therefore, most bus drivers were nice enough to do a short stop inbetween to pick me up whenever I was late. Sometimes, when they arrived a bit earlier than usual, they even stopped in front of my house and waited for me. However, not every bus driver is that nice.
As I am not interested in football, I cannot answer that question.
Transfer students do exist. However, teachers usually are hired at the start of a new school year or in the middle of a school year (at a certain date shortly after the pupils receive their intermediate report cards). It would be extremely unlikely that your CAS father was offered a contract to start at any other date than that.
If your CAS family previously has lived in another state, there could be problems even if the move took place during the summer vacation. As each state has its own dates for the summer vacation, the children could have had an extra long summer vacation or no summer vacation at all. And the level of difficulty of the classes varies between states. Thus, if your CAS family e.g. moved from NRW to RLP, the pupils had two additional weeks of summer vacation, but classes in RLP are more difficult than the ones in NRW and some of the bad grades of your teen sim also could be attributed to this. If the move was the only reason for bad grades, repeating a school year is the more common option. Therefore, you still should imagine him as being lazy to justify switching to Realschule. The CAS girl would be less affected because there is a big cut between 4th and 5th grade anyway and many subjects will be new for everybody so that all pupils from her grade will start at zero.
Carnival: In the region where I grew up, every village had a small event for pre-school children and there also was a day or two where children could wear costumes at the day care. However, there was no equivalent in primary or secondary school. Teenagers who want to party, might do a day trip to a big city for some street carnival events (usually a procession with several decorated trucks) although the music that is played there is not the most popular genre amongst teens. A few people who are very passionate about Carnival might join a club to practice a certain type of dance (Gardetanz), make the kind of music that is popular for Carnival or prepare Carnival speeches. However, they usually cannot demonstrate their skills in their home village, but have to go to a city and participate in the Carnival procession there (music and dance) or be part of one of the Carnival shows that also take place in some towns (music, dance and speeches). Some of the bigger shows also are shown on TV every year so that you could be able to find some videos online, if you are interested. However, I cannot really imagine that your CAS teen is that much interested in Carnival that he is willing to invest a lot of time in such a club throughout the whole year. Attending a Carnival procession as a guest or completely ignoring Carnival seems to be more likely.
Switching to another school type is relatively common for pupils attending Gymnasium. In my grade, we were approx. 160 pupils in 5th grade and 100 pupils in 13th grade. Thus, approx. 60 pupils either switched to Realschule or dropped out of school after passing 10th grade because then they automatically have Mittlere Reife (the same school leaving certificate like after graduating from Realschule). There also was one girl who had to switch to Hauptschule (I think because of some age limit for Realschule as she already had repeated one or two grades in Gymnasium). She attended a branch of Hauptschule that has an optional 10th grade where the pupils also can obtain Mittlere Reife. However, when applying for an Ausbildung, pupils with 10th grade of Gymnasium have better chances than pupils who graduated from Realschule and both have better chances than pupils who graduated from 10th grade of Hauptschule.
I have never heard about Japanese festivals in a small village. Smaller towns and villages might have twinning agreements with towns and villages from other countries (just like bigger towns and cities). If such an agreement exist, there might be mutual visits with smaller events for the visitors. However, such agreements and visits usually are more interesting for middle-aged and older inhabitants and agreements are much more common with other European localities and the closer the partner town/village is, the more frequent mutual visits will take place.
Schools also might offer school exchanges with partner schools in other countries. Most partner schools are in the United Kingdom, France and Spain because these are the most common foreign languages taught at school (for some states in eastern Germany Russian still might be popular as well). However, many schools try to establish more partnerships with schools in other countries as well so that more pupils per grade have the chance to go abroad for 2-3 weeks. My school tried to establish new partnerships with schools in Skandinavian countries and Poland while a previously existing exchange with Israel was not continued after more and more parents became worried about their children's safety there.

Vacation:
There is no general rule for this. Some people like to book vacations several months in advance, some are more spontaneous. Some people spend their vacation at the same place every year, some people with migration background visit their home country (e.g. the Monty's might go to Italy) and family and some people who do not have sufficient money might not go on vacation at all. People with more money might go on several vacations per year. Skiing holidays during Christmas break or Easter break were quite popular amongst these families.
I do not know any teenager who went to a domestic youth camp. They usually were for pre-teens and either used by families who could not go on vacation together or when the parents needed someone to supervise the children while they were at work. In the latter case, the camp could be very close to the village so that sometimes the child/pre-teen just would spend the daytime there and sleep at home. Some villages also might offer youth camps themselves for the children and pre-teens of the village.
The soccer club of your CAS teen might offer a group trip somewhere once per year. The teen and his friends also could attend a music festival in the region and camp there for a long weekend. For bigger festivals further away, I would wait until they are 16 years old. If the CAS family used to live in another region of Germany before (= more than just a few km away), the teen also might visit an old friend for a week or a fried might visit him (so that you have some use for the guest room).

Due to the devestating floodings in NRW and RLP, you might be able to see pictures of more towns and villages from these regions in German media than usual. Although I am not sure whether the pictures will help you due to all the destruction.

Thanks a lot for your wishes!

CAS family
In the game, being a science teacher earns more money than his previous jobs, but good to know about the reality anyhow. He can promote to a better job eventually if his teacher contract at the nearby school doesn't last that long. I do wonder, are chemists with a Hochschule degree also eligible to teach at a Realschule if they're an employee of the school, or only from the Uni? Until what age can people become a state teacher, and do they always need a special teacher degree in that case?

Tropes & culture
I pretend that the CAS family already lives in the village for many years; the transfer/exchange student was just a general trope I wondered about. Regarding traditional events, I'm curious what Japanese festivals (e.g. New Year's temple visit, summer festivals, sports day) could be swapped for German events/traditions to give the same trope vibe as in anime/manga. For the "Beach Episode" cliche, the teens might visit a nearby lake or go together on holiday to Mallorca once they're 16 . And instead of bento boxes, kids and teens bring sandwiches to school. So what other anime cliches would suit/be translated better into a Germany story than in an American story, you think?

Yeah, I just discovered some small villages through the diseaster, but I find it painful to see the damage So I better throw in a date filter when googling.

Do newspaper deliverers wear a certain color of coat, like red? I managed to age them up while keeping them functional, but I want to look for fitting clothes for Adult deliverers.

Monty Ranch
In the meantime, I've started renovating the houses of the premades. Here are some pictures I've made

Some things I haven't made up my mind yet: how many bathrooms and kitchens would this mansion likely to contain for multiple families? Which of the teens would most likely have taken over the room of their deceased parents, or would they rather choose to keep on sharing a room since the loss of their parents is quite fresh? How many cars would the adults own? Three? (assuming that the cars of the deceased Sims are sold or crashed)

Silo
Based on a quick google search on Silo using *.de, I managed to revamp the silo into an old stone one.

I yet have to find some distressed object CCs to use them as bulky waste. I'm considering to add more bigger shrubs so feud-neutral Sims have a private spot to kiss each other .
Would it make sense to build a decayed barn next to it, or would merely a silo be enough so there's more room for old bulky waste?

I hope that you and your loved ones are safe!

CAS family:
The degrees from Universität and Hochschule officially are considered equivalent. The difference is mainly in the heads of some people. There also still might be some wage agreements that consider degrees from a Fachhochschule on the same level as a Bachelor from Universität.
Just for your information: It is not possible to obtain a doctor's degree at a (Fach-)Hochschule.
For RLP, the age limit for teachers becoming a state officials is 44. However, the CAS father cannot just start teaching as a Referendariat is obligatory for all teachers. The Referendariat consists of 18 or 24 months of training at schools. In the beginning, new teachers spend most of their time watching other teachers and only teach for very few hours per week. During the course of the Referendariat, this will change and they will watch less lessons and teach more and more lessons themselves. Some people will regularly attend the classes taught by the new teacher to rate their performances. Considering that Germen men in average are 34,7 years old (and people with Hochschul/Uni degree usually are even older) when they have their first child, it is rather unlikely that the CAS father still can become a state official when his first child is 15 years old.

Tropes & culture:
I do not know a lot about anime/manga. Therefore, I cannot help you. However, I do not know any village or small town that has any Japanese festivals so that it cannot be that common.
Beach Episode: Apart from lakes, the teenagers also might visit a public swimming pool. Sometimes even rather small towns (like your subhood) have rather nice ones with several pools, slides, diving platform, meadows, beach volleyball pitch, some table tennis tables, a place that sells unhealthy food popular with children and teenagers etc.
Food at school: Sandwiches usually are made with Graubrot and look different than the sandwiches that already are ingame.
Newspaper deliverers usually do not wear any special clothing at all. They simply wear their regular everyday clothing. Daily newspapers usually frequently are delivered by adults because (especially in rural regions) there are many people who expect to have the newspaper in the newspaper tube at 6 a.m. and teenagers usually are not allowed to work that early. Newspaper tubes (in addition to the mail box) are more common in rural areas than urban areas and more common for houses than for apartments. When teenagers work as newspaper deliverers, they usually do this for weekly newspapers on Wednesday and/or Saturday afternoons.

Monty ranch:
The rooms are too big. The house also lacks some kind of hallway so that your sims can easily access all rooms without going through several other rooms. Maybe the Wikipedia articles for "Römisches Haus", "Atriumhaus" and "Atrium (Architektur)" can help you with layouts and so on. I did not read through all the articles in their German and English versions, but upon first glance, the German versions seem to be more helpful for your purpose.
As the house is supposed to have some Roman influences, classical round columns might be a more fitting choice. Maybe also do some research to find out how many staircases were common for a house of that size. As the rooms on the first floor are not connected to each other, you would need three staircases which could be too much.
The greenhouse roof also looks very unusual. If the house is supposed to be a bit older, it most likely is protected by the monument conservation and it would be difficult to get a permission for such a roof. Maybe you could replace it with some invisible/transparent floor tiles?
I assume that stones and terracotta are more common floor types for a Roman-inspired house than wooden floors.
Kitchens: As the Monty's are Italian-inspired, I rather see them as one big family instead of several nuclear families. Therefore, there should be one big kitchen with a big dining table where the whole family can meet for dinner (Wohnküche), probably even an extendible table as Antonio and his children and Bianca might visit often. In some households, such a kitchen is the most important room. As the house is rather big, there could be a second kitchen. Some people with big houses have a second kitchen as back-up. Most of these people that I know have the second kitchen in the cellar, but the houses are rather modern ones with a big cellar which does not apply to the Monty house. If the Montys also do some catering (in your imagination), the second kitchen could be the one that they use for their work. German authorities would not allow them to use the private kitchen for that. For professional kitchens, stainless steel is the most common material (even for counters) for hygienic reasons. You can google Profiküche or Großküche for some pictures.
Bathrooms: As mentioned in one of my previous postings, German houses usually have less bathrooms for the same number of bedrooms than an American house. One bathroom per floor plus a half-bath on ground floor for guests are quite normal, some houses have even less than that.
Bedrooms: With the old layout of the house, I would assume that Claudio and Olivia did not live there anymore at the time of their deaths because there is no room big enough for a second double bed. Thus, the room shared by the two teens might be a bedroom that was shared by Antonio and Claudio when they were younger.
Without taking the layout into consideration (because you can and will modify it), the usual constellation is that all three children stay in their parent's house until they marry and if you consider Claudio as Patrizio's heir, he might even stay there after his marriage. If Claudio and Olivia still lived there after their marriage, there was a need for at least five bedrooms for a short period of time (Patrizio and Isabella, Claudio and Olivia, Antonio before he got married, Bianca and Mercutio and Romeo as soon as they were born). Thus, it should be possible that each of the teens has an own bedroom without any of them moving into their parents' bedroom (maybe one of them kept the room that they previously shared and the other one moves into the bedroom previously used by Antonio or Bianca). I assume that Patrizio and Isabella would keep Claudio and Olivia's room the way it is. It might be reused again when Mercutio or Romeo will marry one day.
Cars: How many people will live in the house? Just the four like in original Veronaville? Will Bianca and/or Antonio and his Children move in as well? I think that Patrizio definitely would have a car. Isabella might not have one because many elderly women did not have a driving licence around 2000-2005 - they relied on their husbands and then had serious problems when they became widows. The teens are too young and are not yet allowed to drive. Antonio would have a car. For Bianca, it will depend on whether you play them more German or Italian. A German woman with a job in a rural area most likely would have a car of her own even if she still lives with her parents. If she does not have a job and income of her own, she might use her parents' car instead. Patrizio as an Italian patriarch however might prefer that she always has to ask him so that he knows what she will do and whom she will meet to ensure that she has no contact to the Capps. If many people live in that house, Patrizio might have a second car or might have decided to keep Claudio's car so that he can lend a car to Bianca and/or the teens might be able to use it when they are old enough.

Silo:
I do not think that such ladders would be allowed in Germany for safety reasons. As the ladder is outside of the building and accessible to everyone, I assume that the ladder would have to have some fall protection. You can google "Leiter mit Rückenschutz" for some pictures. For the inside of the building, it is possible to use regular ladders in combination with ropes and other climbing equipment to protect people from falling. As the ladders are attached somewhere, they usually are placed vertically without any angle and directly on top of each other. However, I do not know if there is any suitable CC for this.
You should not place too much bulky waste on the lot. If there is so much waste that it could attract rats or other vermins, authorities might intervene - and Consort Capp definitely would ensure that the authorities know about such amounts of waste.
Nowadays, silos usually only are placed next to other silos or in environments that resemble more a factory than a farm. However, I found a few pictures of old silos with barns or other agricultural buildings nearby. Thus, I assume that it is up to you whether you build a barn on that lot. If you build a barn on the lot and if Patrizio tolerates that the teens spend their time on that lot, the hangout more likely would be in the barn because it can be accessed more easily.

We are safe. Thanks for your concern! Both my home region and the city where I currently live only had "normal" floodings without fatalities and with manageable damage. After helping in their home towns/villages, several voluntary firebridgades and THW members (for technical support) were able to travel to the regions that were hit worse by the floodings and will help there for several days.
In the regions that were hit worse, the situation seems to improve a bit. The breach of the dam in Ahrweiler could be prevented and the water level is low enough that hundreds of people are allowed to return to their houses. On the flooded federal street, all stranded vehicles have been checked with sonar and by divers and there are no bodies inside. Nevertheless, the level of destruction still seems surreal - even historic buildings from the 13th century collapsed which means that no similar flooding took place for many, many centuries. I really hope that most of the approx. 1000 missing people are okay and just unable to contact their families due to the outages of electricity, mobile network, landlines etc.

Monty family
Thanks for the feedback! I let Bianca move in with her parents, so they're a five-Sims household and Mercutio might take over the room of Antonio since he's the oldest of the teens. Antonio lives in a separate lot with his twin kids as long as he can afford it. I want to give Bianca an own car as well since she has a job and lives like a German woman, so three cars it is for the Monty Ranch (one saved for Mercutio omce he has a driver's license). However, if a household lives in an old mansion, is it also common to store their cars in the open air because it isn't allowed to build an extra garage mansion? How many months does it take for a 16-year old someone before getting their moped license? Then I can pretend in what time of the year Mercutio would use a moped to drive to school.

The elders don't have very outstanding personalities, but Patrizio is somewhat neat (7 points) and is slightly less nice (4 points) than Isabella (5 points). Since they live in a small village, I assume they had more societal pressure to integrate with the local customs than if they would live in a bigger city, but correct me if I'm wrong. I haven't made up my mind how tolerant they would be about their teens doing underage drinking/smoking because I don't know anything about mentalities within the Italo-German culture.
I consider building an unused old barn with cellar since that might fit better with an old silo, but the silo can always be utilized for doing more sneaky stuff . I haven't found 1-tile ladder yet, hence I had to make this workaround. But I can try looking for longer fences for added realism.

Glad to hear that you're safe! I hope this disaster will pass soon and that the missing people will be found.

Cars/garage:
I do not think that many people really request a permission for a garage when they live in a monument protected building. When the lot is rather small, there usually is not enough space for adding a garage and when the lot is rather big, there already should be some subsidiary buildings so that one or more of these could be modified so that cars can park inside. These subsidiary buildings usually are open to a yard on the lot and not directly open to the street and you also might need some alternative for the EA garage doors - or, if only cars are parked and nothing else is stored there, you simply might leave the building open on one side. And if you have a bit of patience, you also can wait until a small lot close to your own lot is available for sale and build a garage there.

Driving licence:
It should be possible to do all theoretical and practical lessons and the exams in one or two months. As it is allowed to do the lessons and exams before the birthday, Mercutio could pick up the driving licence in the district office on his 16th birthday. If he fails one of the exams, he will have to wait three weeks before he is allowed to try again and after two or three failed exams, people have to wait even longer before trying again.
I am not sure, however, whether Mercutio really would want a Moped driving licence. His age also is sufficient to get a driving licence for a small motorbike (Leichtkraftrad) with speed limit (80 km/h instead of the 45 km/h of the Moped). This driving licence also would entitle him to drive a Moped while the Moped driving licence would not entitle him to drive a small motorbike. The driving licence for small motorbikes is more expensive (about 1000 euros vs. about 500 euros for the Moped driving licence), but I could imagine that Patrizio does not mind to pay for this for a grandson. Around 2000 or shortly afterwards, several German Moped companies went bankrupt. I do not really remember whether this had any effects on people who wanted to buy Mopeds, but I could imagine that prices were higher for a while due to this so that the difference between prices for Mopeds and motorbikes was smaller during that time.

Italy and Germany:
In a small village, there is more pressure, but this does not mean that everybody participates in the village life, not even all the people who originate from that region.
I would assume that Patrizio was a migrant worker who started working in Germany somewhen between 1955 and 1973 (in 1973, hiring from abroad was stopped). Many of these immigrants were from economically underdeveloped, more traditional regions. Isabella and the older children might still have lived in Italy until some laws related to child benefits were changed in 1975. Due to the cheap manpower from abroad, many companies delayed the automation. Nevertheless, when the automation finally took place, many migrant workers lost their jobs. If Patrizio had managed to save a bit of money until then, this might have been the time when he and Isabella opened an Italian restaurant.
I would assume that Patrizio was rather strict with his own children (due to his own upbringing in a rather traditional region), but he might have mellowed with age. I also read that the descendants of migrant workers felt a lot of pressure to integrate themselves. I do not have any experiences of my own with that topic, however. I have a few ancestors from abroad, but they moved to Germany 200-300 years ago and married Germans.

Underage drinking/smoking:
I once heard that in Italy (and some other countries like Spain) it is relatively common that even children are served a small glass of wine along with dinner. And it seems to be legal to serve alcohol to teenagers who are at least 16 years in restaurants - although it is illegal to sell them alcohol in a shop. The minimum age for buying cigarets currently is 18, but the respective law was changed in 2012 so that I would assume that it was 16 until then. Smoking is more common amongst workers and at the time when Patrizio was young, it still was common to smoke at your workplace. Therefore, I can imagine that Patrizio also smokes/did smoke when he was younger.
I am not sure, however, if these thoughts really matter. At the beginning of the game Patrizio is very close to dying from old age. Therefore, I do not think that he walks to the silo to check what the teens do there. And as you wrote yourself: You still can use the silo for the more sneaky stuff. The barn also could have a hayloft. The teenagers might hide the alcohol up there because an old man like Patrizio would not climb up there anymore.
I already assumed that it would be difficult to find more realistic ladders. I just wanted to show them to you nevertheless so that you know what kind of ladders typically would be used.



There has been no new rain which is really good. I hope that the water levels will become lower soon in the affected regions. The Rhine has high water levels further upstream that will sooner or later reach the affected regions and hopefully will not worsen the situation there.
I hope that you also are safe. Several other countries also had severe floodings recently ...

Motor vehicles
I guess I started to confuse Moped with a Scooter/Motorroller. Is the minimum age for getting a license for a Scooter also 16? I've already downloaded some scooter CCs, but I can also look for something similar to a Leichtkraftrad (I see Mercutio as the type for driving on a motorcycle).

Infrastructure inspiration
I've been browsing around RLP (Eifel area in particular) on Google Maps and found some small villages (<1K) with a river crossing through, like Mürlenbach, Rech, Insul, Schuld, Kyllburg and Sankt Thomas. After searching for pictures, I wonder: does Sankt Thomas have characteristics of a Weiler? Though I noticed that it doesn't contain many old buildings. Kyllburg is another <1K village but there's less space between the buildings and not really Fachwerkhäuser (from what I've seen on Google).

Besides exploring Google Maps and Luftbilder, can I also get a good impression from certain Modell(bahn)/Miniatur Dörfer, or do those building usually have too much space between to capture the realism?

I'm safe (we barely had rain), but the most southern province (Limburg) has been affected by the heavy rainfall. However, that province has already experienced severe flooding in the 90s, so since then lots of investments were done on improving water protection. And the government took actions immediately.

Vehicles:
Mofas (max. 25 km/h) are allowed at the age of 15. To be allowed to drive a Mofa, you have to pass a simple test. The certificate for passing this test is not called driving licence, just "Prüfbescheinigung".
Mopeds (max. 45 km/h) and Leichtkrafträder (max. 80 km/h) both are allowed at the age of 16. They both require a driving licence although the driving licence for a Leichtkraftrad is a bit more expensive. The driving licence for a Leichtkraftrad includes the driving licence for a Moped and if Mercutio ever wants to have a driving licence that entitles him to drive all kinds of motorbikes, he will have to get the driving licence for a Leichtkraftrad anyway because it is the prerequisit for the other motorbike driving licences.

Infrastructure:
Sankt Thomas used to be a monastery and some people who used to work there might have built there houses nearby so that they had a short way to their workplaces.
It might have been a Weiler at some point in the past, but it is definitely not a Weiler anymore. A Weiler has a maximum of 15 houses (in some German regions and in Austria a maximum of just 9 houses) while Sankt Thomas has more than 60 houses. A Weiler also is so small that usually there are no street names. People just use the name of the Weiler and the house number and the house numbers might seem to be in a random order because they were defined chronologically (the oldest house has no. 1, the youngest house the highest number). This also used to be the case for villages and towns, but there at some point the numbers were changed because it became to difficult to find the right house.
Bruderholz slightly north of Sankt Thomas looks more like a Weiler although even Bruderholz has too many houses and a street name for the northern houses.
Even Jakobsknopp further north is called a "Dorf" on several websites and not a Weiler.
It might be an option to have three separate groups of houses on the Veronaville terrain (one group for each family) so that you can consider them as three Weiler instead of just one.
Until a few decades, most villages formed a community of their own and therefore have some central buildings like a church. These are the places where you still can find some old houses. Settlements with more space between buildings usually are rather new and always were part of a bigger community so that there are no central buildings or if there are some, they are less relevant.
Modelleisenbahnen: Companies offer whatever people are willing to buy. Therefore, you can find some realistic stuff and some less realistic stuff. The distances between buildings also depend on the personal preferences of the owner of each Modelleisenbahn as the items can be placed freely.


It is good to hear that your region was not really affected and I hope that the situation in the Limburg region will normalize soon.
One of the places in Germany that was hit worst by the floodings also had newly improved water protection. However, the amount of rain in some places was much higher than any predictions - up to a quarter or third of the yearly amount of rain within just a few hours. And a 2-3 decades ago, many cities, towns and villages decided that they no longer need sirens to alert fire brigades etc. and the sirens were dismounted. The opinion on this topic has changed again a few years ago, but many places still do not have a working siren again and only few people have the disaster alarm app on their mobiles. Fire brigades and other organizations were trying to help as many people as possible, but there were too many people who needed help at the same time ...

Vehicles
I've learned something new again! I don't have much knowledge about motor vehicles, but here the minimum age for both a Scooter or a Mofa is 16. There are more Mofas than Scooters in NL since the last decade because it's more convenient and no helmet is required until June 2022. Since recently, Mofas are banned from the cycling paths within Amsterdam and a helmet is required if they drive on the roadway.
I picture Miranda with a Scooter (Vespa?), and both Mercutio and Tybalt with a Leichtkraftrad.

Infrastructure/hood planning
Do you know which RLP villages as small as Bruderholz have retained some Fachwerkhäuser? For Veronaville, my plan is to build not-so-old houses with plain white plaster walls after I've finished the makeover of the premade mansions.
I notice it's pretty challenging to rebuild a German village because of the lack of 3D houses in Google Earth! And the aerial photos I've found aren't always helpful enough for precise hood planning. Also, it's a bit complicated for me to spontaneously visit Germany for a few days because of tightened travel restrictions again between NL and Germany and the recovery of the floods in the Eifel area.

I hope that the affected areas recover soon and that the victims get good mental help and that the German government will take better measurements in the future.

Vehicles:
In rural areas, many people prefer the option with higher speed because otherwise it can take you quite long to reach your destination. Mofas are allowed to use cycling paths only outside built-up area and helmets are obligatory everywhere. Germany in general has less cycling paths than the Netherlands which means that especially in rural regions you might have to use the regular street because there is no other option. And if you have to use the street, it is safer if your vehicle can and may drive at a speed which does not make you an obstacle for other people on the street.
A Vespa requires driving licence AM which is the one also required for Mopeds.

Hood planning:
To know such small villages, you really have to live in the region for a while. I spent a lot of time driving through RLP and also have been there for many day trips, but I have never lived there. Therefore, unfortunately, I do not know any such villages.
Did you have a look at the list of smallest communities in Germany that I linked in one of my previous postings? If I remember correctly, most of the communities in that list were from RLP and Schleswig-Holstein (because they had a different approach when communities were reorganzied a few decades ago).
When I was searching for pictures for previous postings, I frequently had browser tab with the map of a region and another browser tab to google pictures from any village/town that looked interesting on the map. Of course, you will not get the complete picture that way, but if there are any notable historic buildings, you will frequently find pictures of them because many villages/towns want to attract some tourists that way.
It also might be an option to search on Wikipedia. There are many lists with Baudenkmäler or Kulturdenkmäler. Of course, not every tiny village has a Wikipedia article, but usually the town or community to which the village belongs has an article and for the articles that I have checked, each village had its own list of Denkmäler within the article.
Here is a list for RLP: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kateg...Rheinland-Pfalz)
Here is a list with links to the lists of the other states:
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kateg..._in_Deutschland)
On the bottom of each page (at least the ones that I have checked), there are links to the lists of other towns/communities within the same administrative district. That way, if you find several small villages close to each other, you do not have to search the big list.

Wow, this project has to mean a lot to you that you even consider going on a trip to Germany because of it. It is true that nobody should not visit the flooded regions unless they want to help in some way (firebrigades for cleaning up, people who want to pick up relatives or friends from emergency accomodations etc). Currently, there are no big Corona-related restrictions for trips from the Netherlands to Germany - although that could change very soon due to the high incidence rate in the Netherlands. I am not sure whether there are any serious restrictions for returning to the Netherlands, but as the German incidence rate still is very low (although at the beginning of an exponential growth again) that also should not be a too big problem. As long as the incidence rate still is low, many activities are possible without a rapid test. If the incidence rate becomes higher again (it will!), you might need a proof that you are vaccinated or you might have to do rapid tests ever 48 hours.


It seems that the authorities have a good overview by now. The number of missing people has been lowered from more than 1000 to 175 while less than 20 bodies were found in the meantime (the total number is 170 so far). However, for the remaining 175 people there is not much hope.
The measurements definitely will be reviewed and improved (although most likely no politician/party will assume responsibility for the errors). However, I do not think that floodings like this can be completely prevented in future. The climate change causes higher temperatures and also has additional side effects like disturbing the jet stream. Due to the higher temperatures, air can become more humid and without the jet stream, clouds can stay in the same region for a very long time instead of moving in Eastern direction. Not all the floodings were near rivers or creeks. Some were in open country where the ground simply could not absorb any more water.

Thank you for the links!

Well, I haven't visited Germany for 15 years and it's much closer than let's say Scandinavia, Italy or Switzerland (I can go by car to Germany easily instead of booking a plane and it interests me more than Belgium or northern France), and I've liked the German subject when I was in sec school (but my German listening skills are very rusty). Also, googling for images helped me appreciating the lush hilly landscapes over there and old towns . But regarding holidays, I'm usually fine staying in NL during summer and save my travel days for going south in fall/winter (if still possible...)

Pictures of my progress of Capp & Monty mansion makeovers are coming soon! (I probably catch up building in TS2 again once it's getting rainy here upcoming weekend)

If you like these kind of landscapes and old towns, maybe the Bergstraße would be a good destination for you. It is in Hessen and nothern BaWü, but it is quite close to RLP and there are several towns along the Bergstraße that still have intact town centers, many of them with plenty of Fachwerkhäuser.
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bergstra%C3%9Fe
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bergstra%C3%9Fe_(route)
The articles contain many links to cities and towns along the Bergstraße and some of them contain quite helpful pictures with many Fachwerkhäuser (the German Bergstraße article especially highlights Heppenheim in that respect).

Thank you for the travel suggestion!

I just tried setting up a floorplan for the Capp & Monty mansions, using various pictures of Burger & German Villa Rusticae as inspiration.

The Capp Mansion
Herrenhaus board: https://nl.pinterest.com/Mediasimo/...-mansion-ideas/


The Monty Ranch
Villa Rustica board: https://nl.pinterest.com/Mediasimo/...ty-ranch-inspo/
The premade Monty Ranch: https://sims.fandom.com/wiki/Monty_Ranch

Short German lesson:
The plural of "Burg" is "Burgen". (Ham-)"Burger" is food just like in English. "Bürger" (singular and plural are identical) means citizen(s) and "Bürge(n)" means warrantor(s). The differences are just small, but it might have a big effect on search results.

Pinterest:
For Pinterest, I can only give you very little feedback because I do not have an account and they have a pretty annoying pop-up in the middle of the page.
The interior pictures seem to be from only partly furnished houses/apartments like from a website where people can offer/look for houses/apartments.
I found a website where people post pictures of their homes as inspiration for others: https://www.solebich.de/beliebt
Of course, not every house/apartment looks like this and I assume that elders are underrepresented on this website, but maybe it will help you nevertheless.

Capp mansion outside:
I think that not only the roof above the balcony is problematic, but also the roof next to it because of all the clipping.
I also think that such a balcony with separate roof is rather uncommon. The balconies that I know are either covered by parts of the regular roof or by upper floors or they do not have a roof at all. A separate roof is more common for a turret.
I would also try to reduce the number of wood colors used. Windows, door, columns, stair railing, wall cover of the house and wall cover of the balcony all have wooden colors, but none of these match. The wall covering of the balcony also seems a little "too much" compared with the rather clean and minimalistic timber frame of the rest of the house.
The front porch should have some fence or half-wall around it so that no one can fall down. And when you have some fence of half-wall, you usually would not have columns directly behind it. There are some fences that include columns or you can place the columns with SnapObjectsToGrid false. I would also reduce the number of columns as the two left and two right ones are directly next to supporting walls and therefore unnecessary.

Fireplace/stairs:
You also have to decide where you want to put the stairs. I guess that will have more effect on the layout than a bathroom and a fireplace.
I can imagine that the Capp's have a parlor where they receive visitors. The fireplace could be in that room. They also could have a library (either as separate room or combined with the parlor) to show people how much they care about education and knowledge. In addition to the rather formal parlor, they also should have a normal living room. You can google "Kaminzimmer" if you want to get some inspiration for the fireplace. There are many pictures that show rather old-fashioned parlors with fireplace.

Layout/hallway:
The layout looks fine for a first floor with bedrooms and the like. For the ground floor, I would start furnishing the rooms and to see if the room sizes are appropriate for your plans and adjust the layout if necessary.
I would shorten the hallway because the ends on both sides are wasted space. You could add 4x2 sized bathrooms or you could enlarge the two rooms next to it (at least for the right side of the ground floor and any upper floor). The hallway already has a source of daylight due to the windows in the middle. Thus, no additional windows are needed and you did not place any either. In real life, you also might have doors with some glass parts for certain rooms (like living room or office, not for bedrooms and bathrooms) so that there is more light in the hallway, but unfortunately lighting in Sims does not work this way.

Extra floors:
It might be useful to add this cheat to the userstartup.cheat file so that it is always active. I did not count how many floors you have used so far, but if you already have reached the limit, you might have to remove one floor again before the cheat will work.

Room arrangement:
Do you really want to move all children with families in again? If not: Miranda is just one day younger than Hermia. Thus, it seems realistic that Goneril and Albany got married around the time when Hermia was born and Goneril could have moved out around that time.
As the house has so many rooms available on the upper floors, I would not have a bedroom on the ground floor unless Consort already is very infirm. First floor definitely sounds more realistic than second floor.
Just for the record: I assume that you mean Hermia when you wrote Hermine. Nevertheless, it is a bit confusing for me because, in the German version, Hero Monty is called Hermine.

Monty ranch:
You do not have to connect the garage with the house. On a large lot like this, it is common and looks natural that there is no connection.
For the garage, I would use an invisible recolor of the driveway and use the same floor as in front of the house.
For the garage door, I also would look for some arch-shaped CC. You can google for "Garagentor Rundbogen" if you want some examples for what I mean.