December Twentieth- Almighty Hat's TS2 gifts I humbly submit for your approval this my holiday gift to Garden of Shadows.
Quick and dirty policy: NON-PROFIT USE ONLY. I've got two sets of Pooklet's color actions and Pooklet says no paysites for her color actions, Alfred Askew is a darling lovely person who drew something for me so don't go using that graphic for profit, and the third thing... well, the third thing has its own set of rules. We'll get there.
I'd also like to apologize for my rather uninspired photos. They're clear, but they're nothing special, and that's kinda sad.
Part the first, the Sims 2 Store Castle Stuff set, Pooklet'd. Why? Because you can never ever have enough wood tones. Requires Apartment Life, Mansion and Garden, Best of Business, or the Sims 2 Store Edition, alas.
But also! On the two least-brown blacks and all the grays, you have the option to add heraldry designed just for Goslings!
Okay, pictures.
Now, I know people hate Shrapnel binned as brown, but seriously, Shrapnel makes such a great wood tone. I believe the bedding only works for this bed, for I am not good at bedding. The tapestry is part of the bedframe subset, is the same on every color that doesn't include heraldry, and was cobbled together from a photo of a bell-pull style tapestry. It was the most neutral thing I could come up with that wasn't just plain off-white linen brocade.
All of the dining tables are available with the off-white linen brocade runner (hey, for a dining table, it works), but only Time Bomb, Smoke Bomb, Mail Bomb, Pipe Bomb, Flash Powder, and Dynamite have blue. (I'll show you blue in a minute.) Chairs come with both a GoS blue cushion option and an off-white option-- but they're subsets anyway, so mixing and matching is MUCH easier.
The loveseat and chair, likewise, have blue and off-white cushions as well as all the color options.
Hey, let's look at the color options! On the coffee table, that seems like a good choice:
Left to right from top, we have:
Dynamite with heraldry, Dynamite, Depth Charge, Incendiary, Explosive, Pipe Bomb, Pipe Bomb with heraldry...
Shrapnel, Safety Fuse, Volatile, Pyrotechnic, Smoke Bomb, Smoke Bomb with heraldry...
Land Mine, Fission, Grenade, Comburent, Mail Bomb, Mail Bomb with heraldry,
Flash Powder with heraldry, Flash Powder, Brisance, Primer, Molotov, Time Bomb, and Time Bomb with heraldry.
Smoke Bomb is my own home-brewed gray, because
there have to be four grays. I get a little twitchy if each family of hair doesn't have a unique gray-- but I'm a weirdo, I admit it. It's nothing fancy, just a layer of Time Bomb set to Multiply over a layer of Mail Bomb.
God, that was a lot of words. More pictures!
Everything you can possibly put heraldry on-- banner, shield, runner, coffee table, end table, bed, rug, and kinda sorta the dining table.
The skull and spiderweb are done to match (but not directly taken from) our board graphics, the blue matches our header-- which is also full of tiny bats-- and the gosling is... well. For GoS. The gosling is ALSO drawn by our very own Alfred Askew, who saved my bacon when Google Image Search refused to return any simple line drawings of baby geese.
I even tried to work skulls into the hilt of the sword. ... Mostly because originally it had flowers and THAT didn't coordinate.
I was going to do awesome tapestries and base-game compatible shields and flags and such with the heraldic device and scrolls and Latin and stuff, but I completely ran out of creative juices about halfway through November. So, with due credit and much love to Alfred Askew, I'm making my PSD and some high-quality PNGs of the heraldry available for Sims 2 free content use (and credit Alfred for her goose, please!). The motto I was planning to use was "So Goth, We Shit Geese," which is very, very roughly "Nos Adeo Gothic Nostra Stercus Anseres" in Latin. (Someone who is particularly goth could be said to be so goth, they shit bats. As well as the necessary GoS/Gosling/Goose pun, Garden of Shadows only LOOKS gothic to the casual observer.)
Part the second, most of the University Medieval furniture set (well, except for lights), Pooklet'd. Now, Eva already did the double bed, which you can find
here, so I didn't reinvent the wheel there-- I just did everything else to go with it. This set does require University, but you can find add-on slaved pieces by HugeLunatic and Ailias
here and
here and
here, which should be base-game compatible. Also highly recommended is Huge Lunatic's mod that slaves the bed curtains to the bedding you select, right
here.Behold the loveseat, arm chair, dining table, sofa, and dining chair, all in Molotov, which is actually a more contemporary cherry color-- Explosive makes a better traditional cherry/mahogany, I think.
I managed to do this one exactly upside-down from the other one, but you can see Explosive front and center at the bottom.
I've also included recolors of CTNutmegger's curtained single bed, which you can find
right here. The mesh for the bed is included, but not for the separate curtains since those are slaved to the bedding-- if you want 'em, go nab 'em from MTS. This bed is base-game compatible. (The dark spots on CTNutmegger's bed's posts are shadows where the canopy ties on. I left the canopy off so you could see the wood.) ... You know, the more I look at the Maturely Medieval single bed, the non-four-poster bed, the more I think I forgot to recolor it and left it with the original Maxis cherry finish. Ah well, it shows the difference nicely, since the headboards are shaded the same.
I forgot to save an uncompressorized version. I was gonna be all good with making my presents accessible to people who have problems with compressed goodies, but... well. I failed.
Part the third also has many parts-- do you haunt the What Maxis Content could YOU Do Without thread? Is Maxis's taste so emphatically not your own that the only stuff you ever use of theirs is, like, the smoke alarm? Do you play a period game and get a bit frustrated that the stuff you can't weed out of your catalog is uselessly anachronistic? Sick and tired of scrolling endlessly through your Sculpture, Wallhanging, and Deco Misc sections looking for the good stuff you downloaded?
Then this present is for you.
Besides a peek into my catalog, you might notice that while each one of those sections is one short page, every single item ON those pages has a custom content star. So what gives?
Welcome to Project Hide Everything! This highly customizable mod consists of a whole slew of teeny tiny files you can use to hide whatever Maxis Buy Mode content you're sick of, while leaving alone the stuff you actually like. All it does is simply and safely and reversibly hide stuff from the catalog. That's it. You don't have to waste valuable loading time on the Maxis-made crud you don't really want to see ever again.
These are
not sorted by expansion but by section, and each individual item has its very own file. Want to hide the sports car but leave the minivan? You can do that. Want to hide all the stereos but leave the community lot speakers? You can do that. Want to just hide the community lot speakers tied to radio stations you can't stand? You can do that too! Never be forced to look at Maxis fug again!
Each file is labeled with my name, HIDER in all caps, and the
catalog title of the object. I've omitted a word here and there, I admit it, but I also added things like 'TV' or 'RC Car' to the end, if the title wasn't descriptive enough. In Deco Wallhangings, paintings, posters, drawings, and photograps are labeled as such-- just in case you want to keep the framed paintings but ditch the taped-up posters. Or vice-versa. Beds are labeled as double, single, or coffin. If you don't actually want to hide absolutely everything in a specific category, you'll have to know the name of what you want to hide or keep.
Technically speaking, these are default replacements-- if you have a default replacement or re-categorizer for a Maxis object, you're going to have to choose between defaulting it out or just plain hiding it. I mean, honestly, you could do both... but I can't think why you'd bother.
Yes, this is just for Buy Mode right now. Yes, you can in fact hide important things, like all the phones, including the community lot phone, or the Open for Business open/closed sign. To get the item back, just close your game and delete that hider from your catalog. No, having the hiders will not affect what you already have placed in your game, and you can still use the recolor tool on already-placed objects (you can't use the eyedropper on them, but you can pick things up and hold shift to get more). No, having hiders in your game for expansion or stuff packs you don't own won't hurt anything but your loading time.
INTEENIMATOR USERS: You may NOT want to hide ALL the Maxis double beds unless you also use ACR. InTeen generally requires Maxis beds to, you know, result in teen pregnancy. ACR somehow fixes that little hiccup, so if you use InTeen without ACR and still want the possibility of teen pregnancy... don't hide all the stuff Sims can use to get pregnant. (Although I didn't hide the elvators, so there's that.)
And that special policy I promised... So long as you don't take my name off the filenames? Feel free to do anything you like with these suckers, barring profiting from them. Want to sort them by expansion and share those? Go ahead! Got your game all tweaked for your period and think other Ancient Egyptian/Greco-Roman/Medieval European/Italian Renaissance/English Restoration/French Revolution/American Revolution/Regency/American Civil War/Late Victorian/Belle Epoque/Roaring Twenties/Depression Era/WWII/Mid-Century/Seventies/Eighties/Post-Apocalyptic players might get some use out of your sort? Go on and share it! As long as I still get credit and nobody's making a profit off of these, feel totally free to share any combination you please. In fact, once you hit on a sort you like, you may want to extract the innards of each file and add them all into one big file-- one big package instead of 1,600 (I shit you not) little packages will decrease your loading time.
None of these are compressorized; individually they're tiny files anyway.
Download:
FULL SET(27 MB, over 1,600 tiny files, don't say I didn't warn you)
If you don't want everything or have a slower connection, I also uploaded all fifty-one catalog categories separately-- just in case all you want to hide is all the dining chairs or something.
Appliances, Cooking (stoves, barbeques)
Appliances, Large (dishwashers, trash compactors, grocery store fridges)
Appliances, Refrigerators (exactly what it says on the tin)
Appliances, Small (microwaves, coffee makers)
Appliances, Miscellaney (community lot espresso stall)
Electronics, Audio (stereos, jukeboxes, Neukum speakers)
Electronics, Entertainment (Pinball, arcade games, game consoles)
Electronics, Small (phones, clocks, alarms)
Electronics, TV and Computer (exactly what it says on the tin)
Electronics, Misc (vending kiosks, cash registers)
General, Cars (cars and helicopter)
General, Kids (lemonade stand, potty chairs, cribs, toyboxes...)
General, Dresser (dressers and armoires and closets oh my!)
General, Miscellaney (trash cans, fire sprinklers, assorted business fixtures)
General, Party (bars, cakes, balloons, wedding arches)
General, Pets (litter boxes, food dishes, dog houses)
Hobbies, Creative (Musical instruments, easel)
Hobbies, Exercising (Workout equipment, ballet barre)
Hobbies, Knowledge (mostly bookshelves, also telescopes)
Hobbies, Miscellaney (mostly crafting benches)
Hobbies, Recreation (games and sports)
Plumbing, Showers and Tubs (exactly what it says on the tin)
Plumbing, Sinks (just sinks)
Plumbing, Toilets (also includes restroom stalls)
Plumbing, Hot Tubs (plumbing is a very obvious category)
Decorative, Curtains (curtains and blinds)
Decorative, Mirrors (On the wall or on the floor)
Decorative, Miscellaney (The stuff in this category is in here with no rhyme or reason-- the OFB open/closed sign is in here. Also, there are two rocks that refused to hide at all.)
Decorative, Plants (potted plants and bouquets)
Decorative, Rugs (exactly what it says on the tin)
Decorative, Sculpture (usually art, sometimes clutter)
Decorative, Wallhangings (paintings, tapestries, posters)
Lighting, Ceiling Lamps (all things that hang from the ceiling and cast a glow)
Lighting, Floor Lamps (lighting is going to be pretty easy to describe)
Lighting, Miscellaney (mostly streetlights)
Lighting, Outdoor (garden lights)
Lighting, Table Lamps (if you can't set it on the floor or stick it to your wall or ceiling, it's in here)
Lighting, Wall Lamps (requires a vertical surface)
Seating, Beds (exactly what it says on the tin. Also coffins)
Seating, Dining Chairs (they scoot up!)
Seating, Living Chairs (armchairs, mostly)
Seating, Miscellaney (Park benches, barstools, hammocks...)
Seating, Lounge Chairs (recliners and chaises)
Seating, Sofas (sofas and loveseats and sectionals oh my)
Surfaces, Coffee Tables (you know you're just going to clutter them up with mail and newspapers)
Surfaces, Counter (counters and islands)
Surfaces, Desks (exactly what it says on the tin)
Surfaces, End Tables (yup, end tables)
Surfaces, Miscellaney (vanities, food judging table, BV tea table...)
Surfaces, Shelves (for all your displaying needs. Includes Decra-Chill)
Surfaces, Tables (for dining!)
Happy Holidays, you beautiful people! Please let me know if any of my links lead to the same place or the wrong file.