Semper iuvenes

Still hard at working building the first beginnings of my world and sims so I can start the new gameplay / story I’ve got planned. Progress is slow because I can’t resist temptations like these: aging up a character because I won’t get to see what she looks like all grown up for quite a while. To speed up my own slowness I’ve completely removed all CC. Only ReShade remains.

What?! Content on this blog... No way!!

More to come soon™.

Been a while, but I am back for real now!

In a nutshell: I graduated from uni, went on a long holiday, started looking for a job, found one, and have been at it for almost a months now. It has been quite an exhausting period for me, but things are finally starting to fall into a rhythm again.

Which means I get some time for simming again now and then! I installed @pictureamoebe’s Cool Summer preset for Reshade 3. It is a remake of my favourite Clear Summer preset but, because it is Reshade 3, I can finally have DoF. Yay! The above screenshot is completely uneditted, just resized. I already love this preset, even though it is a little cooler than the original. I might end up tweaking it at some point to see if I like it better with some more saturation.

For my first day back in the game, I started to remake Inverness today (because, sadly, I somehow lost it). The exterior and landscaping is all done, next up is the interior. Because I do not want to spent my days looking for suitable CC, I decided to go without it as long as it is not resulting in lackluster builds. So far so good, I did like the CC thatched roof texture better than the Maxis one, but oh well. I still quite love this build because it is an old bathhouse refurbished twice, to allow for a residential function. The three different extension to the bathhouse allow me to play with the exterior styles, which I love doing. 

Now, if everything goes well with my job and I don’t return to the zombie I used to be when I came home, I might finally be able to make some headway towards building my world and starting my new story over the coming weeks.

Houston, we have a winner! 

@brntwaffles’ NoBlue lighting mod & @pictureamoebae’s Clear Summer preset.

>> Comparison Picture << You can see the difference most clearly if you look at the paving; HoS turns the floor stones into a saturated ochre while CS leaves them a nice sandy colour. And I actually like the additional removal of blue, look at that sky! A perfect baby blue, whereas the HoS sky was a much more dominant blue. 

There is a little lag when I turn the SSAO setting on but, thankfully, it is not required for gameplay. The game’s innate SSAO + Clear Summer is pretty enough for that. The additional ReShade SSAO is just to add that little extra depth and “oomph” to screenshots.

Marnie sure is happy with this setup, too!

After a very long hiatus I am getting back into TS4 again.

Currently testing the lighting mod / ReShade presets I want to use with Marnie’s help. This is @brntwaffles’ NoBlue lighting mod with @pictureamoebae’s Height of Summer ReShade preset.

The jury is still out on the evaluation. It might just be a tad too colourful and bright and cheery for my tastes. I will probably try to go back to the Clear Summer preset and see what that looks like now; I used to love the clear pale lighting it has. Sadly there is a chance it won’t be viable anymore. Not only did it used to correct the blue EA shadows (which is no longer needed), but it also lagged my game when I turned the SSAO setting on (I have a beast of a machine but the 4k screen attached to it really destroys it with heavy ReShade computations).

But only one way to find out for sure... If it doesn’t work I can always try removing the NoBlue lighting mod or tweaking the HoF settings so the colours pop a little less.

Moved Marnie’s ranch to the 64x64 lot in upper Windenburg Stardew Valley. After building the silo I had to conclude the ranch’s program was never going to fit on the original 40x30 lot. I actually like this lot better due to the surrounding landscape and the lake nearby (which even has a pier, just like the lake in front of Marnie’s ranch in the actual SDV).

I really enjoy this particular neighbourhood in Windenburg and it works well as a Stardew Valley substitute, but it has way too few lots to fit everything so I will probably use a few areas of Willow Creek as well. I’ll just pretend this is the hill-y area north of town, at the foot of the mountains, and Willow Creek the actual town in the valley.

WTB CAW for TS4, tyvm.

PS. I totally caved and downloaded a whole bunch of deco CC animals. Can’t have a farm without farm animals of course.

First building of Marnie’s Ranch is a fact (it will be a joint residence/farm/shop like in the original SDV). Not sure about those white shingles but other than that I gotta admit I kinda like it, even though it is still very bare without landscaping.

Additional shot of @vicarious-sims‘ Salome de Sang as Stacy Anderson in my game.

This time without make-up to show how gorgeous she is! Thanks for sharing Vic!

A while ago @vicarious-sims shared her lovely Salome de Sang with us. I planned to use her in the world I was creating / populating back then but, well, it never came to that.

Now I am back in the game I still wanted to use her, however, so I decided she would become a part of the extended Stardew valley universe (characters that will be in my game but are not in the original Stardew Valley). Meet Stacy Anderson, Shane’s younger sister who lives in the city (i.e. my version of San Myshuno once it releases in the EU). I tweaked her slightly so she would fit in with the style of sims I have going (mainly proportions of her face) but other than that she is exactly as @vicarious-sims envisioned her.

Remade Shane after my game crashed yesterday. Shane is trouble... one of those tortured souls (which is of course why I have a soft spot for him).

While I am still not 100% happy he is coming along nicely and definitely beats the version of him I created yesterday. This one is much more true to character (IMO).

PS. Went ahead and recoloured his hair anyway, took me all of 5 minutes so it wasn’t too bad and, you gotta admit, he is rocking that indigo.

More Marnie because I adore her.

I tweaked her features slightly because I felt she looked a little young. I also added a pretty nice nose overlay to my game that not only adds definition but also adds individualization between different sims.

The only thing missing is freckles, but it is on the same “slot” as her mouth wrinkles and, without those, she just looked a little too young. I wish there were more slots to add facial details!

This was where Shane was at before my game crashed.

Of course I forgot to save...

His “natural” hair colour is purple/indigo, but I am not sure if I want to carry over Stardew Valley’s weird normal hair colours. I have to remake him anyway so I have some time to think about it, there are hardly any such colours out there so I’d have to make one myself (and didn’t I just say no CC making?).

Long time no see!

It’s been a while since I was active on Tumblr. Between lots of RL work and my unhappiness with the direction TS4 was/is taking I needed a good long break from the game. To be honest, I was not sure if I was going to come back but, lo and behold, here I am.

When I haven’t been working, I’ve been playing a lot of Stardew Valley; a pretty amazing pixel art farm-life sim that is strangely addictive and in-depth. It was actually this game that prompted me to go back to the sims, because the entire universe and its characters are so vibrant and lively that my imagination started to run rampant and create additional stories for these characters. I started to miss storytelling and simply bringing a world to life, so here I am, back in TS4 so that I can recreate my own version of Stardew Valley, its surrounding universe, and its citizens. 

(As an aside, I briefly contemplated reinstalling TS3 and recreating SDV in CAW but I decided that such a project would be too high-maintenance and time consuming. In the end, I opted for TS4 because its limited framework is, in this case, a positive feature that will force me to make choices and, hopefully, keep me far, far, faaaaar away from any of the draining peripheral activities that usually crush my simming spirit in under a month. ((As an aside to this aside, I truely love creating CC but I do so much of the same activities during my workday that I can never get anything done for myself)). That... and I just really love how TS4 sims look. For this save I am going CC Free+, that means I will go CC Free as much as possible and only add things to the game that can not be replaced or missed... oh hai Marnie’s hair!)

This is my interpretation of Marnie, the game’s resident rancher and animal expert. She lives on a farm pretty close to the OC (your character) with her niece Jas and nephew Shane. While the relationship between the characters is a little muddled and never fully explained in the game, in my version, Jas will be Marnie’s late brother’s child (and thus her actual niece). Shane will be Jas’ cousin from her mother’s side, so while not technically related to Marnie he is related to Jas and she sees him as her nephew anyway. 

PS. For anyone familiar with Stardew Valley that wonders how I came up with her surname. I simply referred to a thread on the official forums (here) where someone came up with a few that I quite liked and will probably use myself.

Mae Lynn as a teen, around the time she met Tom Richardson and roughly a year before she had Vanessa, and the way she is now in her early 20s. I think her nose still needs some tweaking but I can not find out what it is so I am letting it rest for now.

It’s nice to be back inside the game.

PS. An official rating site showed EP3 to be something akin to city life. While not official until EA comes out with an announcement, it feels fairly legit. I was really looking forward to a generation EP and toddlers but if it had to be anything other than that or seasons, I suppose apartments and mixed residential/community lots would be pretty cool.