The Sims 3 – Create-a-Style
Before creating your alternate life in The Sims 3, you must give your alter ego someplace to call home. You don’t need to erect a palace on Day One in the neighborhood — in fact, you can’t since your pocketbook is limited when you first move in. So, until your career is underway and you have a substantial bank account, you must make a modest home with your limited Simoleons.
When I first started on The Sims 3, I quickly threw together a small home with the essentials (place to eat, place to sleep, place to go numero uno) and then attended to all the demands of my new life. My austere surroundings were good enough to get me through a few days, but then I made the tragic mistake of really digging around the catalog of household objects. Seriously, you could tell me you ran over my cat and if I had my coffee and a couple of my favorite catalogs in front of me, I would just nod you away. It’s not that I’m some crazed consumer; I just like to plan my post-lottery life. After I made Bono proud with all of my charitable contributions, of course.
The Sims series has long let me and like-minded people indulge dream house fun for the cost of, well, a copy of The Sims. The Sims 3 keeps those dreams alive, but not just by offering several room choices with loads of furniture options, gadgetry, art, and furniture. The Sims 3 really lets you go wild with its Create-a-Style toolkit for easily customizing objects to your personal taste.
This threatens my deadline.
No longer can I just build a personal study with a desk, chair, computer, and a bookcase. Now I have control over every detail of these objects. I have this thing about matching. By “thing,” I mean freakish obsession that makes decorating with me about as fun as walking into a glass door — over and over. I decided to do my Sim’s study over in wood, starting with a bookcase. There are lots of wood textures to choose from. After spending several minutes browsing in the Create-a-Style tools, I settled on a rich cherry. Now it was time to match the desk, chair, and even the easel I has artfully placed in the corner, tilted in front of a huge window. Instead of having to click on each object and then root around in all of the textures and find the one I previously picked, I just clicked on the bookcase to bring up its texture pre-set and dragged it over the other objects. Immediately, the chair matched the bookcase. Then the desk. I was seconds away from making the computer on the desk wooden, but I managed a little self-control. I may be crazy, but I’m not silly.
The easy-to-use presets are the key to decorating your whole house within seconds. You can spend so much time picking just the right decor for a specific item, like a couch, and then instantly transfer those textures to other objects. For example, I used the Create-a-Style tools to turn the green cushions on a couch purple with little flowers. I liked it so much, that I wanted it to match the wallpaper. All I needed to do was grab the texture pre-set of the couch and drag it on to the walls. Hello, grandma’s house where everything has matching flowers!
These presets are just as useful when you are designing clothes, too. You know those families you see on vacations that all dress alike in case somebody wanders off? I made that family. Their matching running suits are so cute. I just wish there was a fanny pack to put on the mom. I would make it match the purple couch in their house.
Everything I read makes me even more excited for The Sims 3, and this is no exception! I’ve always loosely enjoyed decorating for my Sims, but I could never quite get things to look just the way I wanted them. Now that shouldn’t be a problem anymore. . . . Of course, I’ll probably play around with the game a little first thing when it comes, but I won’t do anything really serious until I’ve read my Prima Guide – and if this blog is any indication of what we can expect in the guide, it should be very entertaining indeed! You must be the luckiest person on the planet, to get to play TS3 before the rest of us – and write about it!
Thank you for the testingcheatsenabled true/false from the Prima guide, but that only enables the [Ctrl]+[Shift] click cheats on sims and the mailbox.
The aging cheat is only one way, you have to click on a sim to use it and once you age a sim past elder they are D E D dead.
Edit in CAS doesn’t work, you can click a sim with [Ctrl]+[Shift] and edit their traits, but that’s it.
[Ctrl] and clicking on a mood makes it disappear.
Thanks for they guide EA probably snowed you about the rest of the cheats, or they removed them from the end version.
Mike Steffens
Very nice explanation. Thanks!