Not a chapter: Site list of content
A couple of people have asked where to find the custom content I use (there is particular interest in David Villa :P), so I’m putting the master custom content list here, and will update it piecemeal when I have the time.
It’s basically an explanation of where you can download the things I use in the game. Of no interest to non-Simmers, unless you want to laugh, for example, at the fact that Zlatan uses Britney Spears’s lips.
First I will give a general description of the sites and creators I use, and then a list of content for each individual Sim.
I will try to keep all the web addresses up to date, but it’ll be a bit of a gargantuan (and boring!) task, so please have patience if some of the links break.
GENERAL RECOMMENDATIONS
Messageboards
Mod The Sims 2 - start here. Game help, masses of downloads, and modding tips so you can make your own stuff. The best site there is, IMHO.
InSIMenator - smaller than MTS2 and with fewer downloads, but still useful. UNfortunately, recently sold up to someone who doesn’t know or care about Sims 2, so we might have to download everything quick before it implodes... Watch this space.
Places NOT to use
The Exchange - so poorly regulated it’s impossible to use, and an ongoing nightmare for people who don’t like having their work stolen. I’m not going to link to it.
Skins
All the skins I use are by Enayla - it helps keep things reasonably simple for me. All her skin have a gargantuan file size (generally at least 5MB, or up to 30MB as a default replacement), but the difference they make to the quality of your Sims is incalculable.
The skins I use are these:
Pixie Glow (as an optional skin and as a default): my second-palest skin, and probably the commonest one I use.
Summertime (as an optional skin and as a default): for Mediterranean-coloured persons.
Pixie Light: even paler than Pixie Glow. For really pasty types.
Pixie Gold: this is actually an East Asian skin, but I use it with eyeshadow over the top for my sallower white folks.
Pixie Rust (as an optional skin, as a default and as yet another default): a lightish black skin. Currently sported by Alessandro Mancini and Sebastian Giovinco.
Eyes
I only use four sets of eyes.
1. LiSims eyes (top of the “Genetica” page), recoloured by me because they looked rather bloodshot;
2. Realistic Sim-Eyes (here and here) by Lienertje;
3. Leon’s Eyes, by Jamelia;
4. 1/30 eyes, by Helaene.
Helaene needs to be introduced separately here, because getting hold of her work presents a problem. There are three locations for most of her stuff: her MTS2 account, her website, and the “graveyard” of her old work. With all these sites to choose from, you would think that getting hold of the download you wanted would be easy; unfortunately, it isn’t, because a lot of the stuff I like best isn’t there any more. However, I might be able to upload it later along with my Sims, if I find the time to do so...
Hairstyles
Hair for male Sims is rather scarce. Almost all creators seem much more interested in Sim women than men. As a result, many of my poor footballers are wearing the horrible barnets provided by Maxis. The rest have wildly varying topknots, as I scoured the Internet desperately searching for anything that looked vaguely acceptable. It, erm, didn’t always work (sorry about that, Monty).
An additional problem is that many of the fanciest hairstyles are pay.
Question: What is your policy on pay sites?
I haven’t really got one - I know they’re illegal as defined by Maxis, by I keep using them anyway... silly of me, I suppose, but there we are.
For those who don’t know what pay sites are, I feel it is important to sum up the basics:
1. Some sites will charge you money (usually by Paypal) to download their custom content.
2. This practice is legally ambiguous and Maxis, the creators of The Sims, have stated clearly that they do NOT authorise it.
3. ...But it seems very unlikely that any pay creator will ever be actually prosecuted.
4. Many sites (such as MTS2) have a free-content-only policy and will not allow you, for example, to offer recolours of pay content, or to use it in your screenshots.
5. There are “pirates” who offer pay items for free, against the wishes of their creators.
6. Some of the creators hit back at the pirates by illegally sharing their Paypal details...
...and the whole thing goes on and on at sim_wank, and occasionally at Fandom_Wank as well, but the only things you really need to know are:
(a) Pay items exist;
(b) If you don’t want to pay for them, you can get them off pirates.
So, here’s the list of hair sites:
XM Sims: Lots and lots of free hair in an extremely large selection of colours (possibly too large; I don’t really need baby pink or dark green that much). Unfortunately, there isn’t very much in the men’s section, and a lot of what’s there is ancient Chinese headdresses - very impressive, but not much use to me, sadly. All the same, an excellent, reliable resource. Ad blockers come in handy again here, though.
HelgaSims used to make a wide variety of very good free hair, but the site is down, possibly permanently; fingers crossed it goes live again.
Nouk (website; MTS2 profile): extremely principled creator who made almost all the half-decent hairs for black women. Not much of her stuff actually seems to be available at her site at the moment, so it might be better to use her MTS2 account. Some of her hair is rather awful, some is amazing.
Dedital Sheep (don’t ask): all free. Not of the best quality, but certainly useful. They also do an excellent line in strange ear accessories. They moved the server recently, and the address changed; will try to keep on top of that if it happens again.
Peggy and Raon: Pay. Peggy’s site is huge, and sometimes very difficult to navigate; Raon’s is more manageable. Both suffer from the Curse of Manga, i.e. some of the hairs look good on chibis but not on anyone else. An ad blocker is recommended if you’re spending much time at Peggy’s... and since this has all been rather negative so far, I’d better admit that Peggy’s textures are amazing, and some of her work is unparalleled.
Rose: Pay. Same as above: some beautiful pay hair, some good free stuff, and some unusable manga weirdness. In fairness, the quality of the pay hair is very high.
Clothes
All About Style is a good place to start, though a few of the clothes are unbearably runway. As usual, there are far more women’s clothes than men’s, but their selection is still useful.
SimGuys suffers from the triplicate curses of (a) a Flash menu, (b) frequent downtime and (c) incredibly skinny jeans, but I’d never be without it. Cesc’s pyjamas alone are worth a lifetime of worship.
Modish Kitten has her own Flash site and occasionally uploads things to MTS2. I have edited a lot of her clothes because the necklines scare me - they look too tight; I was worried my Sims were going to be strangled...
Make-up
Bruno makes astonishingly good lips, although many of them are female-only and have to be converted for use on men. (This is something you can do easily yourself in Bodyshop.) I have also found her aSimmetry eyeshadow to be invaluable.
Simenroute makes a number of make-up items that we Simmers class as “facial character”: under-eye bags, moles, and the like.
Navetsea (MTS2 profile; InSIMenator profile) makes the same kind of things, but confusingly, some are available at MTS2 and others only at InSIMenator, so make sure you check both boards.
RenSim produces various different types of content - eyes, brows, lips, beauty marks and so on. Many of them aren’t my style, but there are several bits and bobs that I find it infuriatingly difficult to manage without when I accidentally delete them. (Oops...)
Alkaloid is a one-stop shop if you’re a ginger. Made some lovely freckles and very useful teeth.
Miscellaneous and varied stuff
Sirona Sims/Corvidophile: Corvidophile used to have an MTS2 account under that name, but left start her (his? Her?) own site. There’s a wide range of stuff there, including some really nice houses.
Inspiration
I am vastly indebted to cloudlessnights's Harry Potter Sims journal. As far as I'm concerned, this is the original and the best.
MASTER LIST OF SIMS
Fernando Torres
Skin: Pixie Glow by Enayla
Eyes: Leon’s Eyes in brown by Jamelia
Hair: Male hair 4 in blond by Dedital Sheep
Eyebrows: Madness brows in brown by Rensim
Stubble: Light Portuguese Stubble by me
“Blush”: F-INevo4 Freckles by Navetsea; Layerable Natural Teeth by Alkaloid; Birthmark 25 by Simenroute; “Shy” Blush in an orangey sort of shade by Corvidophile; Circonflex Anti-Shine Blush by RenSim; Layerable Nose Freckles 2 by Alkaloid; Freckles Variety 2 and Freckles Variety 3 (beginning to sense a theme yet?) by Durka
Eyeshadow: Torres’s Eyes Mk II, by me (will upload one day, when I upload the Sim)
Lips: 901 Lips in Moonstruck, by Helaene (not currently available; again, I’ll upload them with the Sim)
Costume Make-Up: Freckles 2 and Freckles Color 3 by Corvidophile
Outfit: Black top with gold pattern by Frizelbliz; Baggy Ripped jeans by Exportdry.
David Villa
Skin: Summertime by Enayla
Eyes: Leon’s Eyes in brown by Jamelia
Hair: Male hair 17 in black by Raon (note that this is a pay hair)
Eyebrows: Compassionate brows in black by Hysterical Paroxysm
Stubble: Portuguese Stubble in Medium Dark by me
Facial hair: Villa’s Soul Patch, by me (I will upload this along with his Sim at MTS2, if I ever get around to doing so)
“Blush”: Butt Chin by Navetsea; F-INevo4 Freckles by Navetsea; light eye crinkles by Onah; birthmark 26 by Simenroute; pale Dark Circles by Simenroute; Hollow Of The Cheek by Atomic SpaceKitty
Eyeshadow: Pretty/Wreck in Silkkittie by Bruno
Lips: English Garden in Regal Lily by Bruno (converted for use by men)
Costume Make-Up: Freckles 2 by Corvidophile
Skull outfit by Modish Kitten
Stud earrings come with the Free Time expansion pack.
It’s basically an explanation of where you can download the things I use in the game. Of no interest to non-Simmers, unless you want to laugh, for example, at the fact that Zlatan uses Britney Spears’s lips.
First I will give a general description of the sites and creators I use, and then a list of content for each individual Sim.
I will try to keep all the web addresses up to date, but it’ll be a bit of a gargantuan (and boring!) task, so please have patience if some of the links break.
GENERAL RECOMMENDATIONS
Messageboards
Mod The Sims 2 - start here. Game help, masses of downloads, and modding tips so you can make your own stuff. The best site there is, IMHO.
InSIMenator - smaller than MTS2 and with fewer downloads, but still useful. UNfortunately, recently sold up to someone who doesn’t know or care about Sims 2, so we might have to download everything quick before it implodes... Watch this space.
Places NOT to use
The Exchange - so poorly regulated it’s impossible to use, and an ongoing nightmare for people who don’t like having their work stolen. I’m not going to link to it.
Skins
All the skins I use are by Enayla - it helps keep things reasonably simple for me. All her skin have a gargantuan file size (generally at least 5MB, or up to 30MB as a default replacement), but the difference they make to the quality of your Sims is incalculable.
The skins I use are these:
Pixie Glow (as an optional skin and as a default): my second-palest skin, and probably the commonest one I use.
Summertime (as an optional skin and as a default): for Mediterranean-coloured persons.
Pixie Light: even paler than Pixie Glow. For really pasty types.
Pixie Gold: this is actually an East Asian skin, but I use it with eyeshadow over the top for my sallower white folks.
Pixie Rust (as an optional skin, as a default and as yet another default): a lightish black skin. Currently sported by Alessandro Mancini and Sebastian Giovinco.
Eyes
I only use four sets of eyes.
1. LiSims eyes (top of the “Genetica” page), recoloured by me because they looked rather bloodshot;
2. Realistic Sim-Eyes (here and here) by Lienertje;
3. Leon’s Eyes, by Jamelia;
4. 1/30 eyes, by Helaene.
Helaene needs to be introduced separately here, because getting hold of her work presents a problem. There are three locations for most of her stuff: her MTS2 account, her website, and the “graveyard” of her old work. With all these sites to choose from, you would think that getting hold of the download you wanted would be easy; unfortunately, it isn’t, because a lot of the stuff I like best isn’t there any more. However, I might be able to upload it later along with my Sims, if I find the time to do so...
Hairstyles
Hair for male Sims is rather scarce. Almost all creators seem much more interested in Sim women than men. As a result, many of my poor footballers are wearing the horrible barnets provided by Maxis. The rest have wildly varying topknots, as I scoured the Internet desperately searching for anything that looked vaguely acceptable. It, erm, didn’t always work (sorry about that, Monty).
An additional problem is that many of the fanciest hairstyles are pay.
Question: What is your policy on pay sites?
I haven’t really got one - I know they’re illegal as defined by Maxis, by I keep using them anyway... silly of me, I suppose, but there we are.
For those who don’t know what pay sites are, I feel it is important to sum up the basics:
1. Some sites will charge you money (usually by Paypal) to download their custom content.
2. This practice is legally ambiguous and Maxis, the creators of The Sims, have stated clearly that they do NOT authorise it.
3. ...But it seems very unlikely that any pay creator will ever be actually prosecuted.
4. Many sites (such as MTS2) have a free-content-only policy and will not allow you, for example, to offer recolours of pay content, or to use it in your screenshots.
5. There are “pirates” who offer pay items for free, against the wishes of their creators.
6. Some of the creators hit back at the pirates by illegally sharing their Paypal details...
...and the whole thing goes on and on at sim_wank, and occasionally at Fandom_Wank as well, but the only things you really need to know are:
(a) Pay items exist;
(b) If you don’t want to pay for them, you can get them off pirates.
So, here’s the list of hair sites:
XM Sims: Lots and lots of free hair in an extremely large selection of colours (possibly too large; I don’t really need baby pink or dark green that much). Unfortunately, there isn’t very much in the men’s section, and a lot of what’s there is ancient Chinese headdresses - very impressive, but not much use to me, sadly. All the same, an excellent, reliable resource. Ad blockers come in handy again here, though.
HelgaSims used to make a wide variety of very good free hair, but the site is down, possibly permanently; fingers crossed it goes live again.
Nouk (website; MTS2 profile): extremely principled creator who made almost all the half-decent hairs for black women. Not much of her stuff actually seems to be available at her site at the moment, so it might be better to use her MTS2 account. Some of her hair is rather awful, some is amazing.
Dedital Sheep (don’t ask): all free. Not of the best quality, but certainly useful. They also do an excellent line in strange ear accessories. They moved the server recently, and the address changed; will try to keep on top of that if it happens again.
Peggy and Raon: Pay. Peggy’s site is huge, and sometimes very difficult to navigate; Raon’s is more manageable. Both suffer from the Curse of Manga, i.e. some of the hairs look good on chibis but not on anyone else. An ad blocker is recommended if you’re spending much time at Peggy’s... and since this has all been rather negative so far, I’d better admit that Peggy’s textures are amazing, and some of her work is unparalleled.
Rose: Pay. Same as above: some beautiful pay hair, some good free stuff, and some unusable manga weirdness. In fairness, the quality of the pay hair is very high.
Clothes
All About Style is a good place to start, though a few of the clothes are unbearably runway. As usual, there are far more women’s clothes than men’s, but their selection is still useful.
SimGuys suffers from the triplicate curses of (a) a Flash menu, (b) frequent downtime and (c) incredibly skinny jeans, but I’d never be without it. Cesc’s pyjamas alone are worth a lifetime of worship.
Modish Kitten has her own Flash site and occasionally uploads things to MTS2. I have edited a lot of her clothes because the necklines scare me - they look too tight; I was worried my Sims were going to be strangled...
Make-up
Bruno makes astonishingly good lips, although many of them are female-only and have to be converted for use on men. (This is something you can do easily yourself in Bodyshop.) I have also found her aSimmetry eyeshadow to be invaluable.
Simenroute makes a number of make-up items that we Simmers class as “facial character”: under-eye bags, moles, and the like.
Navetsea (MTS2 profile; InSIMenator profile) makes the same kind of things, but confusingly, some are available at MTS2 and others only at InSIMenator, so make sure you check both boards.
RenSim produces various different types of content - eyes, brows, lips, beauty marks and so on. Many of them aren’t my style, but there are several bits and bobs that I find it infuriatingly difficult to manage without when I accidentally delete them. (Oops...)
Alkaloid is a one-stop shop if you’re a ginger. Made some lovely freckles and very useful teeth.
Miscellaneous and varied stuff
Sirona Sims/Corvidophile: Corvidophile used to have an MTS2 account under that name, but left start her (his? Her?) own site. There’s a wide range of stuff there, including some really nice houses.
Inspiration
I am vastly indebted to cloudlessnights's Harry Potter Sims journal. As far as I'm concerned, this is the original and the best.
MASTER LIST OF SIMS
Fernando Torres
Skin: Pixie Glow by Enayla
Eyes: Leon’s Eyes in brown by Jamelia
Hair: Male hair 4 in blond by Dedital Sheep
Eyebrows: Madness brows in brown by Rensim
Stubble: Light Portuguese Stubble by me
“Blush”: F-INevo4 Freckles by Navetsea; Layerable Natural Teeth by Alkaloid; Birthmark 25 by Simenroute; “Shy” Blush in an orangey sort of shade by Corvidophile; Circonflex Anti-Shine Blush by RenSim; Layerable Nose Freckles 2 by Alkaloid; Freckles Variety 2 and Freckles Variety 3 (beginning to sense a theme yet?) by Durka
Eyeshadow: Torres’s Eyes Mk II, by me (will upload one day, when I upload the Sim)
Lips: 901 Lips in Moonstruck, by Helaene (not currently available; again, I’ll upload them with the Sim)
Costume Make-Up: Freckles 2 and Freckles Color 3 by Corvidophile
Outfit: Black top with gold pattern by Frizelbliz; Baggy Ripped jeans by Exportdry.
David Villa
Skin: Summertime by Enayla
Eyes: Leon’s Eyes in brown by Jamelia
Hair: Male hair 17 in black by Raon (note that this is a pay hair)
Eyebrows: Compassionate brows in black by Hysterical Paroxysm
Stubble: Portuguese Stubble in Medium Dark by me
Facial hair: Villa’s Soul Patch, by me (I will upload this along with his Sim at MTS2, if I ever get around to doing so)
“Blush”: Butt Chin by Navetsea; F-INevo4 Freckles by Navetsea; light eye crinkles by Onah; birthmark 26 by Simenroute; pale Dark Circles by Simenroute; Hollow Of The Cheek by Atomic SpaceKitty
Eyeshadow: Pretty/Wreck in Silkkittie by Bruno
Lips: English Garden in Regal Lily by Bruno (converted for use by men)
Costume Make-Up: Freckles 2 by Corvidophile
Skull outfit by Modish Kitten
Stud earrings come with the Free Time expansion pack.