Hello there I'm just looking for new tips and tricks. Sorry for bad English!

By tips and tricks I also mean super basic things like creating a collection for all the items I use every time I build a new home, so I don't have to go through the buy/build menus. It saves so much time and I keep wondering why didn't I do this years ago.

Yesterday I learned a little about S3PE and managed to change the subfunction class of the great timeshifter mod from electronics mics to plumbing misc so I can find it super easily now. I'm still riding that high!

Give me all your tips. There are nothing too basic for me I can promise you this!!!

For building especially, I second the creaion & enthusiastic maintenance of collection folders. I have them for styles, for functions, for sets, for any category I can think of to make finding things easier. (I mean to change a lot of the collection icons in SimPE to make them easier to see, bu I haven't gotten around to it yet)

If I'm doing a difficult build, I sometimes save it to the library several times during th process so it's easier to go back to an earlier stage if necessary. Another time this is useful is when you're making a housing tract or a city, where several lots are going to be basically changes on a type. I don't play "pretty people in fancy mansions," I play ordinary people (well, given that some are aliens and some are imaginary friends, maybe not quite ordiary) in interesting low-to-moderate cost housing, so the "cookie cutter" approach is useful to me.

Lately I\ve been having more fun with the "place friezes on" cheat, which allows me to use platforms on top of buildgs to creaate kind of "poor man's Art Deco" profiles for community buildings such as shops and post offices.

I'm also trying to build up a collection of deco houses to give the landscape a more filled-in, urban appearance without the processor load of too many detailed lots on the map. The barriers to that so far are that I'm having trouble finding them in the right architectural style and also that buildings converted from other games are often bad quality because of the limitations of the original objects.

For just smoothly running the game I cannot praise anything more than the Nraas mods. The suite of mods s quite large so there's an initial investment of figuring out which ones are right for you, which also includes reading a lot of material about how the mods work, which ones are dependent on or work together with which other ones, and how the tuning parts work. If you haven't seen them yet here they are: https://www.nraas.net/community/home.

I totally agree with you especially these ones. It's really important to save lots every after big changes or at least every 30mins or so because sometimes the game freezes when I go to change the color and you can't go back or any buttons are greyed out. So save frequently.

When you're ready to start trying mods, consider installing NRAAS Relativity. This mod allows you to adjust the clock speed, so granting you more hours in the day.

If you start downloading CCs, it is better to organize them early. I didn't realize I had gotten around a thousand already and got overwhelmed when I started to organize them at that time.

I have heard about this cheat but I still don't understand what friezes are... Can you show me a picture? offtopic but whenever I google what a specific architectural term means I just get more confused... Like I just googled what friezes are and I got this "In classical architecture, the frieze is the wide central section of an entablature and may be plain in the Ionic or Doric order, or decorated with bas-reliefs" BROOOO WHAT PLS I BEG U

Yes I agree on the organizing CC early... I haven't and I have to get to it. In fact I would like to clean every single CC thing I have. I found the CC cleaning video on youtube and I really want to try but I don't understand enough how CC works yet. The most I have done with S3PE is to change where an object is shown in the buy menu.

Nraas is literally a life saver. I do not open the game without errortrap, overwatch, mastercontoller+cas and traveller. I also read their Tips for better performance and I check The Sims 3 tutorial hub's myths and gruesim's run smooth tips. I have carefully followed those instructions and I cannot remember the last time I had a crash or any issue with saving. The sims 3 actually works really well even with unorganized mess of merged CC

placefriezes is a cheat introduced first in Ambition (also applicable in base game as well). It's like placing some foundation at the top of the building, or in the middle like when you want to create L-shaped stairs. If you really want to know what it looks like, go to Twinbrook. Majority of the houses there as well as venues have friezes placed on top. This is the example:



you see there's noticeable low wall before the roofs are placed.

Friezes are used a lot in Twinbrook. This house is a remake of a Twinbrook one.
If you look above the columns at the front, there is a space of wall that's the standard size for a foundation. That's them It makes it looks like a story in a building has higher ceilings than usual for the Sims (which many of the houses in the Southern part of the US have).

Edit: looks like me and Legaciesoffailures were typing the same thing at the same time.

I love using the friezes cheat. And it is an excellent idea to make a collection of things I never can remember where they are in the items?

Thanks, legacyoffailures and Tacitala! So it's the foundation from the foundations tool but just not on the ground floor?

Yes, but first you have to open the cheat console and type "placefriezes on" (you can check whether I got this precisely correct by typing "help")

Welcome to the journey of customizing your game! It's addicting
Merging CC packages is a good habit to get into- if you don't know how to do it manually you can use CCMagic or Sims 3 Mod Organizer. The main benefit is shorter load times, but it's also nice to keep things tidy and organised.

On the topic of collections, my first contribution to this site was a tutorial on hiding CC in bulk and using collections to still have access to it: https://modthesims.info/t/676240
It has really changed the flow of using Buy Mode for me, so I always hope more people can get some use out of it. Best use is for CC clutter, but the tutorial covers a lot of different uses!