Clean templates in...the rebuild begins!

Because I can be a bit of a moron, it took me a few days to get my clean templates installed properly. Pro tip: it really helps if you follow all the instructions!

I really didn't discover anything especially exciting during this process but just in the interest of keeping you all up to date, I'll share what I did find out along the way, through my own fiddling around and with the help of some of the people at N99 and on Twitter. I'm not going to go through the instructions here as they're quite simple. Any advice I give below assumes you've already read the instructions and have at least a vague idea of what you're doing.



First of all, I'm using these clean templates. If you want a custom neighbourhood completely free of sims when you start it, you'll need to install the templates for each expansion you have. All the links you need are right there in that thread.

Tips:

• This is already stated in the thread I linked to but I'm going to repeat it here. Out of everything, this will save you the most heartache! Make sure you back up each original hood template in a safe place. That way, you won't have to worry about deleting the wrong thing or anything like that, because you can just go back to your backups.
• If you're making a custom hood, you can safely ignore the Strangetown and Veronaville templates. For the base game, you only need the Pleasantview templates. 
• I am pretty sure that it's the same deal for the Uni templates. Custom unis always use Sim State townies and NPCs. I wasn't 100% positive though, so I used all of them. My test hood did not add any townies or NPCs when I added the uni and the first professor generated was not a default one. So if you're also not positive, you can't go wrong doing the templates for all three. 
• The instructions for the BV template V001 state it is a complete replacement of the folder and that you don't need to delete the character files. It's not and you do. In the rar, you'll find the V001 neighborhood template, which you can copy over the one already in the folder but you'll need to delete the character files manually. So you do this one exactly like you do all the other hood templates. If you don't delete the character files, you'll get the Traveller family in your bin.
• Also, double check your steps along the way, just to make sure you've done everything correctly. I forgot to delete the characters from V001 and P001 (the Pets hood) and ended up with 134 characters in my Characters folder before I'd even created a sim or placed down a lot. 

Once I did all that, I created a test hood and I had absolutely no characters in the Characters folder! Everything seems to be spawning as it should so far. I've seen the paper girl go by, I've generated the professors (as I mentioned) and I even tested out the NPCs like the Therapist and the Social Bunny.

I'm doing a few things differently this time around. I'm not going to have a downtown. I'll still think of Exeter as a downtown area but technically, it will be a shopping district. This prevents the Grand Vampires from being generated. I already had hacks to stop them autonomously biting my sims but I'd rather not have them at all.

So far in this test hood, I don't have any Master Wolves or Grand High Witches. I didn't do anything special to ensure that, so that's interesting. I have been plagued by witches since I installed AL - none of the hacks I've tried work for me - so it'll be awesome if I don't have to worry about them in Sullivan 2.0.

Because of the clean templates, I'm going be cutting back on the amount of townies I have. I got lazy with Sullivan and ended up taking out the vacation templates and letting all those sims generate. Due to the same laziness about making dormies, I ended up with two universities full of dormies, way more than I needed for my purposes. No more. For one thing, Kendal, Lake and Gordon (and possibly others) are all former vacation townies, so I don't really want to see their clones walking around the hood. But also, I just want to keep the character files down a bit better than I managed with Sullivan.

One nice thing that I've discovered with this test hood - I can adopt pets again! I've always been able to buy pets from pet stores and using Monique's computer but I haven't been able to use the adoption service since before Sullivan. My game would crash every time I tried. So I'm looking forward to having another option available to me now.

Anyway, I think I'm now finished the preparation stage and am ready to start the actual rebuilding of Sullivan! When I get started, I'll put up at least one more post with some (hopefully) helpful tips about how I'm going about it all, as well as some links to hacks that I'm using to help me. 

Eeek! I'm actually a little nervous about beginning this rebuild finally, so wish me luck!