I'm using Paladin's SimWallCat to reorder custom walls and floors, so I can put e.g. tiles together and stuccos together and so forth. But this program does not touch any of the Maxis content except (I think) the Deluxe walls, the Japanese themed ones. Is there any way of repricing or reordering the rest of the Maxis catalog so it isn't a disorganized mess that I need to have committed to memory to find anything?

The prices for the base game's wallpaper and floors are determined by what's in the Build.iff file, located in Maxis\The Sims\GameData. You can alter the prices of the wallpaper and floors and even the price of building a wall by editing that file with IFF Pencil 2. You can get that program at SimsDepot's Must-Have Programs page, here: https://www.thesimsdepot.com/sims-1...ams-for-sims-1/. Make sure you BACK UP Build.iff first, because mistakes are easy to make.

The wallpaper and flooring are ordered by price; within price, they're in alphabetical order. Unfortunately, changing the name of a Maxis item doesn't put it higher or lower in the default order; changing "Royal Blue Carpet" to "AA Royal Blue Carpet" didn't change its position at all. But changing the Mountain Fog wall price from §6 to §4 did move the wall to the §4 section and hence earlier in the catalog. So you can make all your favorites cost §3 to make them easy to find. :-)

This is only for the base game wallpaper and floors. The Maxis walls and floors for the expansion packs are located in each pack's .far file. You can't really edit those -- you should be able to, but FarOut wouldn't let me put stuff IN, only take stuff OUT. What you CAN do, though, is to extract whichever walls and floors you like from the .far files, using FarOut, edit each one, RENAME the file, then put it in your Maxis\The Sims\GameData\Walls or Maxis\The Sims\GameData\Floors folder as a custom-made wall or floor. Although you can override OBJECTS that are inside .far files, just by placing them into the expansion pack's folder, textures, walls, and floors don't seem to work the same way.

You can find FarOut on the Wayback Machine's version of the SimWardrobe site: https://web.archive.org/web/2016040...imwardrobe.com/. Click the Sims1 button on the left, then the Programs link on the right. FarOut is the seventh one down.

Ahhhh perfect, thank you!

You're welcome!

I've edited the part about walls and floors from expansion packs. It turns out that FarOut will let us take stuff OUT of the .far files, but even though it claims that it will let us put stuff IN, the added items won't save. But you can still have those wall and floor files earlier in the catalog; we just need to go about it differently.

What you CAN do is to extract whichever walls and floors you like from the .far files, using FarOut, edit each one, RENAME the file, then put it in your Maxis\The Sims\GameData\Walls or Maxis\The Sims\GameData\Floors folder as a custom-made wall or floor.

Dang, ok, thanks for clarifying.

I'm sure Maxis had their reasons for doing it this way technically, but it sure is mystifying why they thought the arrangement of the walls and floors in-game was satisfactory. Actually, maybe this explains why the Maxis-built houses have bathroom tiles in the garden and stuff.

Well, when The Sims was first released, no one expected it to become the best-selling game of all time (at that time). It was just a little house-building program that Will Wright had made up after his house burned down, and after he decided to release it as a game, the little people were added almost as an afterthought.

So I'm guessing they never expected to be making expansion packs for it, so they didn't plan on having the catalog be reorderable or anything. I'm sure they would have done things differently if they'd expected The Sims to be a raging success and to have seven expansion packs, but that kind of wild success is a once-in-a-decade lightning strike, not really predictable. :-)

Years ago, in one of the forums, someone made a little program for a person who requested to re-price some walls to 0. I don't know if it would help in the above quest or not (or if it could be tweaked). However, I can't remember which forum and haven't been able to find it in a search (can't remember what it was named) or in perusing my files from forums. Should I find it, I will post it here ... just in case. Maybe someone here will remember it also and be able to locate it in their files.

Are you sure this was for the MAXIS walls? SimWardrobe's SimWallCat does this for custom walls but not for Maxis ones.

I think so, yes. For Maxis, although I cannot be absolutely certain.

It would only change the price to zero (0), not any price you wanted.

I believe what they wanted was to move the more expensive Maxis(?) walls to the front so they could get to them easier and quicker.

Edit: I'm thinking it may have been at Simblesse Oblige or Terra Luna, as they would sometimes take requests. It's possible that I may have accidentally deleted that file when I deleted duplicates but still cannot remember exactly which forum it was at.