I read a lot of legacies and BACCs and suchlike, and I'm always amazed at how cohesive and developed people's neighbourhoods feel. I know in BACCs there's an advantage there, but even in the things I read where the author has no real rhyme or reason to their playing (beyond the challenge at hand), the neighbourhood always seems to feel so full.

So, here's my question: how do you start off a neighbourhood in the first place?

(I myself have never really managed to play a full neighbourhood, beyond my BACCs, which never last longer than a full rotation. I keep trying, though!)

It really depends on where the neighbourhood came from...if it was Maxis/downloaded, or if I'm making it myself from scratch. I'm guessing you're more interested in the "from scratch" sort? Well, even that still depends on a few factors, like if I'm doing something for a specific challenge. Aside from my two random test hoods, I currently have two hoods I started from scratch: my Frontier hood, and a hood I created specifically to test the aging mod I made with my husband...and then got bored and just decided to go "test" the mod in the game as a whole.

For any halfway serious hood, we always use empty templates so the same "Pleasantview" townies/npcs don't end up roaming about in every single hood ever. (I dunno who ever thought that was such a wonderful idea.)

The Frontier hood has two households, one my husband plays and one I play. We both started with a married sim couple and moved each into an empty lot. The hood also started with exactly 3 community lots, none of which have much, though one has a nice lake for fishing, and another has hot springs. The third is supposed to be a "lumber mill" eventually, but at present it's just a forest. We placed all three lots next to each other, so you can see from one to the next and placed some hood deco trees about to enhance the feeling of "wilderness." We also have probably the full set of "no-respawn" hacks, but to help our Frontier feel wild and a little dangerous, we moved a single sim into a lot, made her a werewolf with the batbox, and had her "summon wolves" a few times, then turned her into a townie. So now we have a lovely werewolf wandering the hood along with a pack of wolves (who don't show up nearly so often as she does!).

In my "ages" hood, I started off making a few different families, trying for a bit of variety. I made an elder couple with their two grown children (and their daughter's new husband), and when we moved them in, we had the daughter and husband move out and move into another lot. Ideally, I should have made more households to be inter-related like that, but I got lazy. The other households were rather boring, actually: two parents with two teens and a child; two parents with a teen and a child; two parents with a teen, a toddler, and a child. That hood has, I believe, exactly two community lots: a shopping mall where you can buy basically everything, and a park that features a pond, a sandbox, a basketball hoop, chess tables, and a little putting green. The sandbox is weirdly popular with adults.

I'm sure most people put far more stuff into their hoods, but I'm just so lazy... What do I need with 12 community lots when I can shove every possible needed thing into two?

Lots of people will come here and tell you all about the rulesets that make the game fun and full and varied for them; but for my part, if I did that, it'd kill the spontaneity, and I think a lot of people who come on here complaining that they want games of a certain type and trying to develop "the right" set of rules are simply trying too hard. For me, if it doesn't happen organically, it won't happen at all.

The prime thing, for me, is to start off with characters who engage me as people. They have a little bit of backstory and some existing relationships, which I feel it's perfectly acceptable to use cheats and editing tools to build if the game mechanics don't let you do it directly.I build them a residence, plop them down into it, and interpret their autonomous behavior and their wants in light of what I already "know" about them. Sometimes I micromanage them, sometimes I keep my hands away from the mouse. Sometimes I make a rule for a household or an individual - this family comes from another country and the adults can't help the kids with homework because they don't understand the written language, for example; but older kids can help younger kids because they're better at language acquisition. Or, this guy is dyslexic and can't read books for skill points. This family is patriarchal and it women stay home and mind children; this one is also patriarchal but the women earn the income and turn it all over to the patriarch, who makes all the important decisions and rules the younger men with an iron hand; this family is matriarchal and it privileges social connections over material wealth. And so on. Sometimes I adhere to these rules long-term; sometimes I phase them out; sometimes I adjust them to accommodate new developments.

I like to send them to community lots and let them interact with townies and other playables, and I pay attention, not just to the active sims, but to the stuff going on in the background. This may be the most essential element of making a neighborhood feel "full," letting the sims get out of their houses and interact as a community rather than as individual sims isolated into little nuclear families. Let them get out and about and random townies will become important. If you have empty templates and there are no random townies, the playables will build a complex web of personal connections among themselves without your input. Use features like the NL social groups (as distinct from the AL ones) to put together outings to simulate club memberships, business associations, high school cliques, kaffee klatsches, families and old friends keeping in touch by going shopping together, religious congregations, musical groups - whatever you like. Don't get food delivered, but go out and buy it.

Watch it all, and instead of yelling at sims for being stupid, look at what they're doing and ask yourself: Why are they doing this thing that looks stupid to me? A lot of the time it's a mechanical thing that you can fix by rearranging the lot or installing a mod; but a lot of the time it's something that you can read to illuminate a character. A first-trimester pregnant woman whose husband is not the father of her child goes out of her way to throw up as far from him as possible - mechanically, that may be a routing issue, but from a character standpoint you realize that she doesn't want him to figure out what's happened until she knows what she wants to do and has her story straight. A man loves his fiancee but keeps showing up in his sexy neighbor's apartment - is he Just That Friendly, or does he have a self-destructive streak? A single adult spontaneously makes friends with all his friend's children - does he want children of his own? Is he the Cool Uncle who relates to them on their own level? Is he a creep? Is he immature? Does he respect and understand them as developing persons? Maybe he should get into the education career and stop at the elementary school teacher level?

If you're the kind of player who does this, you'll find you don't have to organize things in spreadsheets to keep track of it all, any more than you need a spreadsheet to manage the different personalities inhabiting your personal universe. You know how your Uncle Frank, your boss, and your best friend from high school will react to certain stimuli - you Know it. You may find it fun to keep notes or write story, though. You don't have to be elaborate about it unless you find that kind of thing fun. I just use the game camera and the storytelling album.

The important thing is to play flexibly within the parameters of what you enjoy. Leave yourself open to Better Ideas. Don't get too married to your own intentions to roll with the curves the game throws at you and see what happens. Keep what's fun for you, discard the rest.

Well my most successful neighbourhood has been Coral Bay. I don't now play legacies or the BACC as such, I now play integrated. Integrated is something you might want to look into. For me the four main reasons for it's success are:

1. How it looks. While I have enjoyed starting from scratch none of my from scratch hoods lasted as I could never get the look that I wanted. So this time I started with a player made, empty neighbourhood. It was ready to add sims and decorate and looks beautiful. My decorating has only improved how it looks. So for me the look of the hood has been an important reason for it's success. It's a very small hood made by Plasticbox, on here called Elsewhere. I love how nearly every house has sea views. A new hood can never compair to how pretty this hood is, it draws me back.

2. I did not play to other peoples rule sets. While I have gained ideas and taken rules from here and there this time I did not play someone else's rule set. I have played it my own way the whole time. On occasion I have played a small change inside of it, but that's just because i felt like it. A whole rule set like the BACC simply made me want to quit a hood. It limited what I wanted to do.

3. I made sure to give myself things only a bit at a time. Meaning I did not set the whole thing up at once. When I was a kid the main fun I had with Lego was the building and setting up this is similar. So I started my town with just the minimum of sims, jobs and businesses. I have been playing it for maybe 3 years now and only just got a toy shop. Before that about 6 months back I finally added a pet shop and a veterinarian. Instead of just putting it all in these things in whenever it came in when the town was ready, when a sim had finally grown up to take on that position. Basically I left things to enjoy along the way.

4. I use mostly playables who all interact a lot on owned and unowned lots. I only have a handful of townies that I make myself as needed. Since you have played the BACC you would have also had lots of interaction on community lots. I however love OFB, it's my favourite thing to do. I guess if someone dislikes owning businesses this would not work, but I will assume as a BACC player that you do. I have them start small with a loan or loan shrubs. Most shops are small but look nice, not ugly square boxes tossed down like my old BACC business use to be. Again to me looks has been an intrical part of continuing this hood. I use to play BACC but it morphed some years back into the Integrated from reading The Isle Of Tyme and Apple Valley.

Not very often! When I do start a neighbourhood, I'm committing long-term to the Sims who live in it -- quite possibly until the Grim Reaper comes ---- for me!

I start my custom neighbourhoods very small -- with one or two households. These households vary according to what I envisage for the neighbourhood. They can be anything from single Sims to multi-generational families. I generally like a variety of types of family. I'll give then a shop where they can buy at least the basics. Often this will be the minimart from Mootilda's "Moo's Mews" range. (It sells everything that can be bought retail in base game in a 1x1 shop!) I'll also create a few townies, either by making them in CAS and then turning them into townies or else by using the Townie Tree. (In my game you have to go to Pleasantview to meet the Pleasantview townies!) Over the next few weeks and months I'll add more families, and, usually, more townies too. I'll ease off making new townies when there are 30 to 40. I'll also ease off making new families when the neighbourhood seems reasonably populated.

I tend to start a neighbourhood when I have a clear idea of what kind of neighbourhood I want it to be: a BaCC, a rural 19th century farming village, a modern city with high unemployment. A couple of nights ago I set up a megahood, because in principle I like the idea of Sims from several different Maxis hoods being able to interact with each other, but since I have no particular 'culture' in mind for it, it's quite possible that I'll never play it.

One thing I like to do with a new hood: I play the families in gradually, rather than starting them all at the same time. I know some people prefer to play so that if it's Monday in one household, it's Monday everywhere, but I do the opposite: I like my Sims to start at different times, so that I have more variety in the seasons as I go from house to house, and so that I don't have one rotation with many Sims aging up or going to university followed by several rotations in which nothing much happens. On the few occasions I've started everyone at once, I've lost interest halfway through the first generation. I play short rotations of just 24 Sim hours, usually exiting early in the morning (unless there's a screaming toddler or desperate pregnant Sim on the lot; I won't exit until they're taken care of), so even in my largest hood a rotation is fairly quick and I can usually keep track of who's doing what, which makes it easier to stay engaged in their stories.

pre-made neighborhoods; in past times started with the Prima Guide suggestions.

neighborhoods I made; have not gone far with most of them. though in one neighborhood did do a bit of gameplay; named it Death Raising.

temporary neighborhoods; most of the time would create 1 residential and 1 household then test a few things. afterward remove the neighborhood.

I've definitely changed how I do this over the years!

Here are some of my past and current methods.

- Download pre-made neighbourhoods here on MTS. There are some lovely ones, really well made and they look so beautiful. It's fun figuring out the stories for an occupied hood.

- Sims first. One of my favourite hoods was statistic based. I randomised 100 potential sims, then looked up stats for things like age, marital status, number of siblings/kids, and divided them up into rich, poor, and middle class. I did all of this in a spreadsheet and then I went through deciding who would be related to who and then I went in and made them all. Sent them to live in different parts of town and played. For this one, I planned out the hood in advance, but when I moved them all in, it still wasn't entirely built. I never finished that hood, and it might even be corrupted, but I might go back to it one day. What I liked about this is that everyone started with connections. I've done an apocalypse challenge this way too although I rolled for toddler/child/teen/adult/adult/elder, rather than numerical age.

- Role based. This is a variation on the last. I started with a single family and then from that family, I decided who else I would need in the hood. So there was a teenage girl and I decided she had a group of four friends, so I made them and their families. She had a little brother and I decided that the brother would play football at a local sport club, so I needed a coach and some other team members. The parents needed colleagues, so I made some colleagues. Every time I came up against thinking "This character ought to have a crush/colleague/friend/boss" then I'd look around the hood for someone suitable and if they didn't work into the story, I'd make them, complete with family. This was a really fun way to play and may be a nice organic way of growing a hood, too. It was like the hood expanded as I needed it to, as I explored the story.

- Challenges. There are some challenges which end up generating/involving a large number of sims. For example, I had one hood I started a legacy in. I added community lots with each generation, but all other sims in the hood were either legacy spares or their townie friends made playable (e.g. through uni.)

- Hood backstory. This is most often how I create hoods now. I'll either create from scratch or download one. Then I'll figure out where it is, what the climate is, how and when people settled here, what kind of people would want to live here and who wouldn't, and explore from there. I've paid far more attention to hood deco recently, rather than just plopping down lots wherever.

No rules, no spreadsheets, no challenges.

The Sims are the hood. I get to know them and they give the hood life. Sims are part of and take part in community activities in my game.

The hood is dynamic and changes over time, just like real towns or cities change over time. New businesses, new housing, new subhoods - all are built when needed, not before.

Community lots are important to me; and if I start a new hood, there will at least be a park with a pond

I'm warning you - most of my hoods are haphazardly put together and aren't usually done in one big chunk!

Like some of those who posted before me, the sims are at the forefront. I just can't get into a neighborhood if I don't have some backstories for the "founders" or, for the premade hoods, exisiting sims - I quickly lose interest when I'm not invested in them somehow. This goes for all of my hoods, be it supernatural, BACCs, and challenges - there has to be a reason why this sim is in a post-apocalyptic world and why she wants to make it out alive after all.

With empty hoods, I usually start with around 8 - 10 sims - enough for each one to have fleshed-out backstories (and unique faces because sometimes facial feature inspiration eludes me) and the number of townies and their qualities differ depending on the hood. I don't start new hoods that often for this reason; I like being connected to them and when there are too many sims at the same time, I can't devote my time to each one in the way I want to and sometimes I run out of ideas. I don't generally randomize sims' personalities and clothes because I like having certain ideas of them in my head. This also goes for the townies, and sometimes I don't even have townies because I end up wanting to play them all.

I don't usually make any CAS sims younger than adult because I like raising the next generations from babies to their last days, but sometimes I feel like playing a child or teen orphan and there are townie children and teens.

I'm not much of a builder, but since I tend to dive in sims-first and stay sim-centric, that helps me set up the neighborhood itself. Do these sims live in an eternal winter or perhaps an everlasting spring? Are these sims fairies who live in treetops or are they people of the sea? From there, ideas for the lots spurt forward, though sometimes I'm not in a building mood and I just continuously renovate, add, and delete the community lots as the hood evolves. It happens in real life too anyway - some buildings are improved and given different functions over time. It can have funny results - like, oh, hey, I want this castle here now, so I'll just move this market here, but no, there's a park in the way, better move it too, and the whole neighborhood suddenly goes through a major layout change.

Because I appropriately warned you at the start, my houses often don't mesh well together in a hood - my neighborhood views might give you a headache! This is mainly because where I live, everyone has non-coordinating houses that have been renovated over the years to their personal styles. You'll have a modern house on one street, a woodsy cabin in another, and a mini medieval tavern style one in the next. I know it sounds chaotic to some, but I've always liked it this way; I can walk down the road and remember the residents' quirks and habits. It gives a certain personal touch to these houses, and hey, if a neighborhood consists of its people, then I'll have the neighborhood reflect it.

Challenge hoods are also set-up almost the same way and sometimes I even combine them in one neighborhood if it fits anyway, like an Apocalypse challenge with an "asylum" of survivors nearby. The main difference is that they're generally more themed in terms of buildings - it'd be too strange to have a bright red house when the rest of the neighborhood consists of broken-down shacks. I rarely play premade neighborhoods and when I do, I tend to edit their storylines so much that they're almost completely different.

How community lots are used is dependent on the neighborhood - sometimes they're the only places where sims can skill and socialize with the townies and others are to be avoided due to the risk of zombie attacks.

I do have notes and spreadsheets. Sometimes I'm currently out of ideas for a sim or I forget details - Sim A wants to get engaged to 2 others - who does he choose? If I have free time but can't play the game, I look at these guides and try to think about what the sim might do considering their personality and history. These guides become vital when unexpected corruption hits and I want to recreate the sim or the neighborhood.

I've never tried making hoods that resemble real-life ones, so what I have are purely results of my imagination. You can imagine the chaos.

For the longest time, I played my game as EA made it. Vanilla lot, vanilla houses, vanilla Sims, vanilla subhoods.

Last December, I decided to try an empty game with one Sim and townies. No structures, no businesses. My Sim started with a bed, fridge, 1 wall and a toilet. After he got a job, he added another wall and a shower, then he had four walls and I gave him a Downtown. That's where he met his townie wife. After they started a family, I added a new neighbor here and a new neighbor there. I had five generations, but never got a chance to really build up the town. I had to reinstall Windows and after reinstalling my discs, sans the useless "store edition" my saved game would not load. That actually turned out to be a blessing.

My current game started with an empty map, mods to keep away the townies and as many NPCs as possible. I began with 20 Sims of various ages, later I added another 25. It is a small neighborhood with lots of room to grow. This time around, I'm using an aging mod that allows Sims to live about five times longer and I've implemented a couple rules just to keep up my interest. They are very simple rules, plus a couple more waiting to be added in the near future. My goal is to eventually build up the neighborhood, add a university and a sub-neighborhood or two. But I'm in no hurry to do these things.

I'm like Sketching in that my neighborhoods are a mishmash of styles. And since I'm not a builder, most would say my neighborhoods are downright ugly. One of these days I'll learn to build better. I might even jump in with both feet and build an entire new neighborhood with a cohesive design. I'm thinking pastel Victorians in a farming community or maybe various shades of bright colors in a seaside village.

As for spreadsheets and stuff ... I'm a KISS (Keep It Simple Stupid) note keeper. I use ihatemandatoryregistration's spreadsheet (I could NEVER have this on my own): http://www.simfileshare.net/download/294670/
My "rules" (such as they are) are typed into a Word document, as are my list of random occurrences.

Most real towns are a mishmash of styles. People are free to build houses the way they like to (and of course, according to what they need and can afford) - so it seems pretty normal to me to have a mishmash of styles (my town is a mishmash of styles in real live) and I am going to look for excuses to say "mishmash" a lot from now on

That depends on the country and area, sometimes there are reason for a certain style of house. For example in our area, Australian country, most houses are up on short stumps due to the soil and weather. Because it moves a lot houses here are on low stumps and made of wood because they are more able to flex in the drought and wet making it less likely that windows and walls will crack. We are also became known for the housing style 'The Queenslander' which also had very high ceilings, lots of large opening doors and windows and wide wrap around verandahs to try and keep the inside cool during the blistering hot summers. Of course these days most of us have air conditioning but the style lives on because it's well liked.

In Coral Bay most of the houses are wooden and colourful to reflect the beach side theme.

Those houses are beautiful - and, yes, some areas do need certain styles for practical reasons, I agree with that. And you also do get towns where all houses are built in the same style - we have some of them too, but there are not many. In the Karoo you have towns where they have to have Cape Dutch gables and they have to be white.

Wooden houses are not allowed here - there are some areas where you find them, though, and you see them, on stumps and very pretty, quite often in vacation hoods close to rivers, but generally, not allowed by building regulations.

Here where I live, you find a modern house next to a huge old fashioned mansion, next to a small "starter" in almost every street. There are also old houses that have been restored to their original beauty and other old houses that are falling apart. The town is, however, rather pretty, because it seems as if anything you stick into the ground, just grows by itself, so there are pretty gardens and lots of trees lining the streets, with the mountain in the background - it rains a lot here. But as long as you have the kitchen back door and the windows in every room and the right light bulbs and the foundation has to be right - you can pretty much build what you like.

I always start with a farmer guy dressed in cowboy gear, his background is he comes from the mountains in Bon Voyage and he hopes to make a good life in a blank or nearly blank neighbourhood. He buys the bIggest empty lot and starts to farm from scratch. He'll eventually run a ton of farmers shops providing food for everyone. Next is the mayor, always a woman in a business suit. Her job will be to collect taxes, create laws, and organize institutions like prisons and schools. She lives in the main neighbourhood in the nicest house I can download.

After that, sims move in from CAS. Who they are and what they do is negotiated when creating them. I usually dress them in clothes they like the best, they do that funny dance when happy. We don't always agree. That's how come my gypsy artist girl, became a mechanic dressed up in goth wear. The artist role was taken by the red haired twin brother who wanted to escape the family horse farm. Out of CAS the Sims continue to develop and amend my original script. Antonio, the Italian guy who was escaping from his crime family, was forced back into a life of crime when that was the only suitable job in the newspaper. Pity that the only thing he ever wanted was to be in law enforcement. His wife the mayor bought him a flower shop because she knew he was into nature.

Once Antonio entered the crime world, he needed a proper crew, so Hawke the cheerful assassin got created. I moved him in to an apartment with the newly created bank manager. With crime the town will need law and order, so I had the other twin redhead brother set up a private investigation office. (He was supposed to investigate the missing town funds) My hood builds from there, as a need comes up or an idea for a sim, I create them and build a location. I'm strict about neighbourhood appearance, downtown is grungy and has more apartments, whilst the main hood is more affluent and follows a more country look.

Huh. The near-exact thing happened to one of my Sims. From the What's Happening in Your Game thread:

My way is pretty random tbh. If I start a new hood lately it's usually centered around one family that I end up liking the most then I add on other sims so they'll have friends, and then I end up getting attached to /those/ sims and before I know it, I have a bustling town full of aliens, lesbians, alien lesbians, and sims that I really get attached to. Then I end up forgetting the rotation and stop playing them because I'm not sure where I'm at with them. I've been taking notes in the hood description to combat that and it's working so far though. I do rotations by season and the first generation of Exhaustion Valley is just now reaching elderhood after like two years.

From scratch with empty templates and a random number of sims (10 in my current hood).
I let the hood grows from there.

With my current hood, I had an idea to construct a neighborhood like SimCity. I planned almost all the lots- low income, middle income, high income. Different densities based on subhood. Commercial lots at intersections. Start all the families on the bottom and work there way up. I started with 12 families because that seemed like enough to populate a hood without ending up 3 generations in and realizing everyone is first cousins.

The same idea has continued in the subhoods- I use the default downtown and Bluewater Village, but all of them have the same idea- different neighborhoods with varying price points, corner stores as well as commercial districts.

This is a pic of my hood I took before I had created any sim, and a recent pic. Never put so much planning into a hood before, but so far so good.

I make a hood for a particular reason; like my Apoxolips, to test sky & background mods (cool!), and building a bunker (underground with no walls). I have a few (like Pleasantview) I only play when I want "nice", or to build pretty houses. I've played all of the inhabited hoods by "Hood building group", and by PennyGriffin - love those faces! Most hoods start to feel the same, babies all over, micromanaging everybody. I delete and start over a lot.

I start horribly.

"horribly"? How?

I start off with a family and might make new families as needed, so lots of townie or Maxi sim interactions to start with but not for long. I've never started from scratch in a non-Maxi neighbourhood. The existing ones are more than enough to keep me going and these days I have little time to play. (I haven't even been on the Xbox for about a year.)

I kinda like starting with one plot and then having the sim get married and have kids, and I plan on having the descendants populate the town for awhile until the college gets set up. Or even a few subhoods. I mean, I might put in a few new sims to mix things up, but it's nice to have just one simple little hood with no subhoods, and just play one family for awhile without having to deal with college until later when it seems more logical to have a university.

I also roll creature stats and such for CAS and moved-in townies.

could you elaborate?