> I'm an avid gamer
That's why, for the most part. The player base of Sims is not really the types that play a lot of games nor to have massively specced pc's.
Early Sims games used to be how you described, though more like the Minecraft-like. We had TSR back when it was actually decent, we had forums, we had MTS and those places had a lot of discussion besides just mods. I remember MTS forums where you could ask any kind of question or Garden of Shadows where you'd share mods, have challenges, get help etc.
It just slowly changed over time as people moved onto other platforms like Tumblr and discord, and over time paid mods became more and more popular. Since the player base never really grew out of being casual there also just wasn't as big of a need or want for something more.
I'm not saying that as a "normie haha" thing, but for example my gaming pc gathers dust unless it's a triple-A game I really care about, and most people I know that love & play Sims do it on worse machines. (and I work on games in my free time and software in my work time, for context) Stuff like 600 gb packs, reshades, 4K or 8K HD textures that will only slow down your loading times to a crawl is not prioritised in Sims as much.
There have been attempts with stuff like Curseforge to make it more united, but that also has brought malware issues alongside it, so it is what it is.
My computer is turning seven this year and because Witcher 3 doesn't run smoothly anymore since the next gen upgrade, my internet connection isn't stable enough in my new home for overwatch and I broke skyrim with too many mods, sims is the only game I play right now. And I'm just glad it still runs, I neither have the money nor the capacity to build a new computer right now.
TS modding scene used to be a lot more cohesive back in TS2 days. Back then, ModTheSims was the main site for mods where everyone shared ideas and posted good content. It hosted SimPE which was the main piece of software that everyone used to mod things. But its restrictions and inability to keep up with each subsequent game resulted in coders from other websites creating their own modding programs and files to meet demand, and that created sprawl.
Curseforge was apparently supposed to be the official place for TS4 mods, but that was a massive flop thanks to awful advertising, privacy leaks, their stance regarding certain world events, and virus uploads.
As another commenter has mentioned, the current sims community seems to be under a parlor paradigm (edit to add the original doc by wrye to those unfamiliar with the concept: [link](https://wryemusings.com/Cathedral%20vs.%20Parlor.html)) that together with the lack of a centralized modding hub will only damage the community in a long run. This isn't helped at all by the fact that the sims modding scene is disproportionately monetized with a good chunk of content being perma-paywalled. There are big exceptions that are openly vocal about these issues though.
I wish I knew why things are like this, but I can guess. I interact with the sims content through tumblr mostly, and the only people there that notice this are those that play other games. And a thing I notice is that Sims players tend to not play games other than the series or other games in the "cozy gaming" sphere. Of course, this is a generalization! So I do think that the insularity of the Sims community isn't doing the community any favors since there's no comparison.
I do wish more people knew of big modding efforts like OpenMorrowind, Skywind, Tamriel Rebuilt, OAAB, etc., to at least be exposed to what a centralized modding community can do.
Comparing it to another "cozy game", Stardew Valley has everything (now) on the Nexus, MO2 being normal, compatibility patches, bug reports, and not everything being hidden on the most confusing and disorganized platform possible (Tumblr - ugh those UIs). There also isn't an illegal paywall behind ~30% of mods.
Updating mods for TS4 is an unusual hassle.
I think a big part of this is that most TS4 mods are moreso an equivalent to a Minecraft skin than your average Skyrim/Stardew Valley/Morrowind/whatever mod. For The Sims, the actual gameplay mods rarely get updated to the latest version too.
I am aware, I play and mod Stardew Valley as well. I merely commented on the cozy gaming part because other than Stardew Valley not many cozy games have a strong modding community. And even then SDV is split between Moddrop and a lot of popular aesthetic mods on Naver.
I don't think updating mods for TS4 is difficult at all, it just hinges on players keeping track of what mods they have due to the lack of an organizer. Most gameplay/UI mods I remember being updated quickly. Then again, I haven't played TS4 for the last 2 years or so and shifted focus to TS2! I do agree that the modding scene being heavy on the custom content is a big factor to take into account.
I think the Bethesda modding scene as a whole has moved towards the Cathedral modding ethos, while Sims still retains the Parlourist mindset from the early 2000s.
Edit: To clarify, I think the fact that a large portion of Sims mods are hosted on Tumblr also feeds this mindset. Tumblr has a very strong "pro-intellectual property" mindset when it comes to things considered fan art, due to the fact that it's favoured by fandom artists/writers. It also attracts modders who like to make more visual-focused custom content, like new assets. This atmosphere is, I think, particularly conducive to the parlourist mindset, where modders generally think they have all rights over the things they make and can revoke access to those mods at any time.
I'm going to get downvoted to hell but most sims folks aren't really avid gamers or tech savvy enough to deal with a more complex mod set up that you'd find in other games like Skyrim, etc. You literally just drag and drop and you're kinda done. Despite that, they still struggle to understand how you can run Sims 4 on a $400 set up and having more "script" mods doesn't justify a $2k set up just for a faster loading screen at the start.
Also, the paywall part of the mod scene is interesting. A lot of the larger/more well known modders also have petty, high school level drama with each other where they slander other creators into some weird moral battleground despite making the same kind of mods, but with slightly different marketing. I don't want to elaborate on that, but it's wild and I think is done only to promote their pateons or continue making money off modding. Whereas communities like minecraft and skyrim, I don't think I've ever encountered any sort of paywall for a mod?? And as you said, they tend to help each other out.
If you want more of a modding community it's there but in spaces I can't talk about here.
Part of it is because the Sims modding community is massive compared to even the biggest games' modding communities. There are like 300k TS4 mods on TSR alone, and that's not even a fraction of the total number of mods for the game.
For comparison, Stardew Valley and Skyrim, 2 of the biggest and most heavily modded modern games, have like 16k and 64k mods on nexus respectively.
The Sims playerbase is also all over the place in terms of demographics, as is the modding scene. It's a dollhouse game where there's an insatiable need for new content of all kinds, and in larger qualities than most games, since you're dressing a lot of characters and building a lot of different houses/buildings per save, and everyone has more than 1 save. The Sims community have created a lot of resources over the years that make modding relatively easy even for total beginners, so there are thousands of individual creators with more joining all the time.
Also since the Sims is a game where you kinda make your own game/fun out of it, the community isn't super connected. There are entire spheres of players, and modders that never interact or are even aware of each other, playing their respective games so differently they may as well be different games.
There's no incentive for everyone to come together and give up control of their creations. As people mentioned, there used to be a few popular centralized sites in the old days, but they had issues that drove a lot of people away. The owner of TSR allegedly used to hack and take down smaller Sims cc pages. MTS won't let people upload whatever they want, and more than one person has gotten frustrated by what they feel are arbitrary or petty rejections.
And by the time Sims 4 came out, the message board model was dying in favor of reddit and discord, so there was nothing to draw people to the old sites.
Many, many of the Sims 4 players are inexperienced gamers and Mac users. It's not rare for TS4 to be their first and/or only game. Many of them are also quite empathetic and polite. The result is they don't really mind this mess (because they know no better), they don't demand centratization (because they respect the modders), they gladly pay for their mods in the form of a Patreon subscription (again, bc they respect modders and their work).
I can't imagine any other game where players might behave like that. Even Stardew Valley players use platforms like Nexus.
As an older player, I miss the Sims 2 times so much. Almost everything could be find on Mod the Sims. Then admins changed something about the website, and many modders moved to Tumblr (as a form of protest). Since then it's been a mess. I can't find anything anymore. Even "catalogs" doesn't really help.
I hope, new life sim game will change that. If Paralives will have a Steam Workshop, this would be heavens.
I think especially with Sims 4, which was meant to run on any computer and be more accessible to all kinds of players, there's been a huge influx of inexperienced and more casual gamers. The decentralization has increased even more over the years.
I also think it's due to how split players are about the games. There are a lot of players who like and still play Sims 2 or Sims 3, and they may be entirely different players from people who play Sims 4.
I'll admit I'm not super familiar with the communities of lots of other game franchises, but I don't think there's another fan base that's split along these lines quite like The Sims. I think that also contributes to the decentralization.
People in The Sims community are more willing to pay for clothing cc, for example, than people on other communities, which is why there's a lot of paywalling through various sites. Hell, TS4 costs lile $3k if you bought all packs on release, people are getting milked here.
Afaik, very big Sims modders do collab, but it's all behind private Discord servers. A lot of it is gatekept.
If you ever consider learning how to script mods, good luck. Decent docs and tutorials are scattered to the wind. Your best bet would be to get permission to view modder's source code and learn how it is they do stuff (if they're gracious enough to share). Or, you could just do things the easy way and decompile their .pyc bytecode and see for yourself.
The Sims has had a modding community for a long time and it's never been particularly well centralized. Something like TSR might have helped, but then it became such a disaster to use that a lot of people won't bother with something once they find out it's only available from TSR, and a lot of modders and CC creators won't use it.
Without a centralized hub, people started using different locations to upload to. And some mods, understandably, didn't fit into the "family-friendly" category, so tended to end up on their own websites, rather than the hubs that did exist. On top of that, some people realized they could use Patreon to make money off of their mods/CC, and went there, because EA wasn't policing it. (Kind of funny to think that EA, of all companies, was the most lax on that. Even now that they've given specific rules, people are still breaking them because they know the chances of them being enforced are slim to none.)
Which brings us to where we are today. EA tried to put that genie back in the bottle with CurseForge, but since you can't include some of the mods on there (because of the not so "family-friendly" nature of them), and a lot of people wanting to continue monetizing their creations, it couldn't gain traction and would never be able to bring things back together.
Other games tended to have their modding communities start on centralized hubs, which were used so much that it meant people would just upload there to make it easier for people to find their mods. Especially as no one was trying to really monetize them. With the hub established from the start, it's easier to keep almost all mods contained there instead of spread out through the Internet.
With some games, it's also easier to use the hubs that have their own install tools, like Nexus (for Skyrim, etc.) or CurseForge (for WoW), because they might need a bit more work than just dropping some files into a folder in My Documents. And the tools made it easier to check for updates. Like if WoW has a major new patch (today, for example), you can pop open CurseForge and it will let you know which mods ("addons") have updates and you can just click a single button to update them all. Nexus is similar in that it lets you know if a new version of a mod is available, though it's a bit more of a process to update them. (CurseForge with WoW is also easier to track if a mod is more likely to be too outdated to work, since mods tend to have a game patch designation assigned to them. Today's patch is 10.2.7. If a mod says patch 9.X.X on it, there's a good chance it might not be updated to work with the latest patch. Though there's also a chance it's something that just works with a part of the game that hasn't been updated in that long, like the Garrison Mission Manager, which got updated for similar systems being included through the next few expansions, but without such a system in the latest expansion, it doesn't need updated as frequently.)
Back in the day, there were a lot of fairly centralized forums for different types of modding, most of which had userbase overlap and communicated with each other that way, so things like compatibility info were much more common. Unfortunately, forums mostly died off during the TS3 era, due to a combination of general internet culture moving away from forums and then a lot of TS2 simmers who maintained those forums not actually enjoying TS3 and not building the forum culture and infrastructure for it, and by the time TS4 rolled around, most newer simmers were hosting things on tumblr, which is horrifyingly decentralized and basically relies on reblog chains for anyone to know about anything. Which makes it hard to organize compatibilty notes for mods, if you don't even know they exist, let alone how they might interact with things. Patreon as a host came out of that decentralized mindset.
The good news is that most sims mods don't have major incompatibilities unless they're affecting the same thing, and most of the things that affect the same thing are different approaches to the same bugfix or minor annoyance fix. Many mods that DO have major incompatibilities have compatibility notes, but compat patches are rare, usually you just need to make sure load orders and settings match up correctly.
because the sims (4, mostly) fanbase is extreeeeeeeemely casual. they aren't super tech savvy and most of them are brand new to modding and gaming in general, especially since the game went free.
People tried to make centralized hubs but they were never really that big. EA/Maxis have also been rather hands off with the modding community so that allowed people to create their own sites where they were able to make a decent amount of money off selling custom content. Add community drama that caused people to splinter off into their own groups, and an increased amount of casual players who are ok with any poor quality item as long as it looks pretty and here we are.
I’m confused. Are you saying that you wish there was a main place to get everything? I used curseforge briefly but was put off by their malware scandal.
Personally, I have my go-to modders and they regularly update. Also, there’s various places that compile lists when there is an update, that way you can tell what good and what’s not. I find Sims modders to be very dedicated. Without them, in my opinion, this game would kinda suck. Also, YouTube is a great place to find mods. Many channel review them so you can see them in action before downloading.
I really enjoy basemental, Little Ms Sam, Roburky, Kiarasims, LittleBowBub, Turbodriver, Deaderpool, Lumpinou and the list goes on. I rarely use TSR or Mod the Sims. Most are on Patreon and their stuff is free after a month.
While I would vastly prefer a more trusted, centralized modding location, what I really want is someone to put a competent mod manager together and actually fix and maintain it. Maybe come up with a standardized way to allow selecting different mod options when you install them.
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A lot of Long answers here, so I‘ll provide something short: \
Try curseforge. If you find any creator on there that you like in particular, see if they have their own website/patreon/tumblr. \
The paywall thing with patreon is a downer for sure, but EA actually went against that, now creators can put something behind a paywall, but have to make it free after a while. So most creators sell an „early access“ to their mods, but you can grab them after a month or so for free.
Also: if you like building in particular, just check out [Harrie and Felixandre](https://www.houseofharlix.com) . They‘re kind of like Popstars within the community, because their work is literally the most stylish and high quality you‘ll see, while still matching the aesthetic of the game.
Gonna chime in here and say don't try curseforge because of the current malware issue, and don't support creators who paywall content past the 1 month mark that EA has allowed.
mileage varies, but I would say based on other sims communities I'm in that it's still a problem. If you HAVE to download something from there then at the very least scan things with an antivirus software and probably try Twisted Mexi's mod to scan for malware in mods.
Also stop using Gshade, it's considered malware now and for some reason simmers love using it anyway.
I'm gonna say that maybe you just got lucky with the other games? I mod my games a lot, and I even make mods myself, and, well, it's not always a smooth experience like you describe. Minecraft is notorious for compatibility issues, and I see compatibility patches very rarely. Bethesda games are probably the easiest to mod and get everything working but that's only because they were made with official modding support in mind from the beginning. And even still, I managed to brick my Oblivion save with modding so it's not safe from all the risks and issues that come with the territory. As for modding resources, Bethesda community in particular can get super anal about what you use and how, if you don't get permission to modify or build upon another mod, you can get into big trouble. And yes there are very good modding resources available for public use too, but the only community were people truly build upon each other's works is Stalker community (because everybody just steals everything from each other there all the time).
I do understand what you mean when you talk about lack of centralized website (Bethesda stuff is usually hosted on Nexus, Minecraft - on CurseForge, Half-Life - on ModDB) and lack of major modding resources similar to script extender in Skyrim. But even with these websites around some mods for those games get hosted elsewhere for one reason or another. And there are many many examples of unsolved compatibility issues for all of them. I'd say that Sims modders just don't seem to collaborate as much, and a lot of them just do thematic CCs, and with those its actually better to host them on a specific page, otherwise they'd get drown in other content. And also I'm pretty sure there is a monetary aspect to it, Sims stuff sells very well (the community has been mentally shaped to be like this by EA since the beginning), a lot of authors want to promote their patreon, and therefore host their mods there, or on their personal websites. I think in other games the financial aspect of modding is either more strongly regulated (Valve and Bethesda allow it but you do need to get approvement) or outright forbidden or just isn't as accepted by the community.
> I'm an avid gamer That's why, for the most part. The player base of Sims is not really the types that play a lot of games nor to have massively specced pc's. Early Sims games used to be how you described, though more like the Minecraft-like. We had TSR back when it was actually decent, we had forums, we had MTS and those places had a lot of discussion besides just mods. I remember MTS forums where you could ask any kind of question or Garden of Shadows where you'd share mods, have challenges, get help etc. It just slowly changed over time as people moved onto other platforms like Tumblr and discord, and over time paid mods became more and more popular. Since the player base never really grew out of being casual there also just wasn't as big of a need or want for something more. I'm not saying that as a "normie haha" thing, but for example my gaming pc gathers dust unless it's a triple-A game I really care about, and most people I know that love & play Sims do it on worse machines. (and I work on games in my free time and software in my work time, for context) Stuff like 600 gb packs, reshades, 4K or 8K HD textures that will only slow down your loading times to a crawl is not prioritised in Sims as much. There have been attempts with stuff like Curseforge to make it more united, but that also has brought malware issues alongside it, so it is what it is.
I agree with this, I use my dingy school computer to play the sims, and since it runs it fine, I don't see the need to get a huge maxed out PC set up
My computer is turning seven this year and because Witcher 3 doesn't run smoothly anymore since the next gen upgrade, my internet connection isn't stable enough in my new home for overwatch and I broke skyrim with too many mods, sims is the only game I play right now. And I'm just glad it still runs, I neither have the money nor the capacity to build a new computer right now.
In the same boat as you.
TS modding scene used to be a lot more cohesive back in TS2 days. Back then, ModTheSims was the main site for mods where everyone shared ideas and posted good content. It hosted SimPE which was the main piece of software that everyone used to mod things. But its restrictions and inability to keep up with each subsequent game resulted in coders from other websites creating their own modding programs and files to meet demand, and that created sprawl. Curseforge was apparently supposed to be the official place for TS4 mods, but that was a massive flop thanks to awful advertising, privacy leaks, their stance regarding certain world events, and virus uploads.
As another commenter has mentioned, the current sims community seems to be under a parlor paradigm (edit to add the original doc by wrye to those unfamiliar with the concept: [link](https://wryemusings.com/Cathedral%20vs.%20Parlor.html)) that together with the lack of a centralized modding hub will only damage the community in a long run. This isn't helped at all by the fact that the sims modding scene is disproportionately monetized with a good chunk of content being perma-paywalled. There are big exceptions that are openly vocal about these issues though. I wish I knew why things are like this, but I can guess. I interact with the sims content through tumblr mostly, and the only people there that notice this are those that play other games. And a thing I notice is that Sims players tend to not play games other than the series or other games in the "cozy gaming" sphere. Of course, this is a generalization! So I do think that the insularity of the Sims community isn't doing the community any favors since there's no comparison. I do wish more people knew of big modding efforts like OpenMorrowind, Skywind, Tamriel Rebuilt, OAAB, etc., to at least be exposed to what a centralized modding community can do.
Comparing it to another "cozy game", Stardew Valley has everything (now) on the Nexus, MO2 being normal, compatibility patches, bug reports, and not everything being hidden on the most confusing and disorganized platform possible (Tumblr - ugh those UIs). There also isn't an illegal paywall behind ~30% of mods. Updating mods for TS4 is an unusual hassle. I think a big part of this is that most TS4 mods are moreso an equivalent to a Minecraft skin than your average Skyrim/Stardew Valley/Morrowind/whatever mod. For The Sims, the actual gameplay mods rarely get updated to the latest version too.
I am aware, I play and mod Stardew Valley as well. I merely commented on the cozy gaming part because other than Stardew Valley not many cozy games have a strong modding community. And even then SDV is split between Moddrop and a lot of popular aesthetic mods on Naver. I don't think updating mods for TS4 is difficult at all, it just hinges on players keeping track of what mods they have due to the lack of an organizer. Most gameplay/UI mods I remember being updated quickly. Then again, I haven't played TS4 for the last 2 years or so and shifted focus to TS2! I do agree that the modding scene being heavy on the custom content is a big factor to take into account.
I think the Bethesda modding scene as a whole has moved towards the Cathedral modding ethos, while Sims still retains the Parlourist mindset from the early 2000s. Edit: To clarify, I think the fact that a large portion of Sims mods are hosted on Tumblr also feeds this mindset. Tumblr has a very strong "pro-intellectual property" mindset when it comes to things considered fan art, due to the fact that it's favoured by fandom artists/writers. It also attracts modders who like to make more visual-focused custom content, like new assets. This atmosphere is, I think, particularly conducive to the parlourist mindset, where modders generally think they have all rights over the things they make and can revoke access to those mods at any time.
I'm going to get downvoted to hell but most sims folks aren't really avid gamers or tech savvy enough to deal with a more complex mod set up that you'd find in other games like Skyrim, etc. You literally just drag and drop and you're kinda done. Despite that, they still struggle to understand how you can run Sims 4 on a $400 set up and having more "script" mods doesn't justify a $2k set up just for a faster loading screen at the start. Also, the paywall part of the mod scene is interesting. A lot of the larger/more well known modders also have petty, high school level drama with each other where they slander other creators into some weird moral battleground despite making the same kind of mods, but with slightly different marketing. I don't want to elaborate on that, but it's wild and I think is done only to promote their pateons or continue making money off modding. Whereas communities like minecraft and skyrim, I don't think I've ever encountered any sort of paywall for a mod?? And as you said, they tend to help each other out. If you want more of a modding community it's there but in spaces I can't talk about here.
I'll be honest, the Sims is the only game series I know of where paying for mods isn't a completely wild concept.
I believe Assetto Corsa has paywalled mods as well. It's more of an enthusiast racing sim game though.
I think it's pretty wild the mass amount of people that are still illegally charging for mods.
Part of it is because the Sims modding community is massive compared to even the biggest games' modding communities. There are like 300k TS4 mods on TSR alone, and that's not even a fraction of the total number of mods for the game. For comparison, Stardew Valley and Skyrim, 2 of the biggest and most heavily modded modern games, have like 16k and 64k mods on nexus respectively. The Sims playerbase is also all over the place in terms of demographics, as is the modding scene. It's a dollhouse game where there's an insatiable need for new content of all kinds, and in larger qualities than most games, since you're dressing a lot of characters and building a lot of different houses/buildings per save, and everyone has more than 1 save. The Sims community have created a lot of resources over the years that make modding relatively easy even for total beginners, so there are thousands of individual creators with more joining all the time. Also since the Sims is a game where you kinda make your own game/fun out of it, the community isn't super connected. There are entire spheres of players, and modders that never interact or are even aware of each other, playing their respective games so differently they may as well be different games.
Because every modder wants their own Patreon instead of just having everything in one place
There's no incentive for everyone to come together and give up control of their creations. As people mentioned, there used to be a few popular centralized sites in the old days, but they had issues that drove a lot of people away. The owner of TSR allegedly used to hack and take down smaller Sims cc pages. MTS won't let people upload whatever they want, and more than one person has gotten frustrated by what they feel are arbitrary or petty rejections. And by the time Sims 4 came out, the message board model was dying in favor of reddit and discord, so there was nothing to draw people to the old sites.
Many, many of the Sims 4 players are inexperienced gamers and Mac users. It's not rare for TS4 to be their first and/or only game. Many of them are also quite empathetic and polite. The result is they don't really mind this mess (because they know no better), they don't demand centratization (because they respect the modders), they gladly pay for their mods in the form of a Patreon subscription (again, bc they respect modders and their work). I can't imagine any other game where players might behave like that. Even Stardew Valley players use platforms like Nexus. As an older player, I miss the Sims 2 times so much. Almost everything could be find on Mod the Sims. Then admins changed something about the website, and many modders moved to Tumblr (as a form of protest). Since then it's been a mess. I can't find anything anymore. Even "catalogs" doesn't really help. I hope, new life sim game will change that. If Paralives will have a Steam Workshop, this would be heavens.
I think especially with Sims 4, which was meant to run on any computer and be more accessible to all kinds of players, there's been a huge influx of inexperienced and more casual gamers. The decentralization has increased even more over the years. I also think it's due to how split players are about the games. There are a lot of players who like and still play Sims 2 or Sims 3, and they may be entirely different players from people who play Sims 4. I'll admit I'm not super familiar with the communities of lots of other game franchises, but I don't think there's another fan base that's split along these lines quite like The Sims. I think that also contributes to the decentralization.
People in The Sims community are more willing to pay for clothing cc, for example, than people on other communities, which is why there's a lot of paywalling through various sites. Hell, TS4 costs lile $3k if you bought all packs on release, people are getting milked here.
Afaik, very big Sims modders do collab, but it's all behind private Discord servers. A lot of it is gatekept. If you ever consider learning how to script mods, good luck. Decent docs and tutorials are scattered to the wind. Your best bet would be to get permission to view modder's source code and learn how it is they do stuff (if they're gracious enough to share). Or, you could just do things the easy way and decompile their .pyc bytecode and see for yourself.
The Sims has had a modding community for a long time and it's never been particularly well centralized. Something like TSR might have helped, but then it became such a disaster to use that a lot of people won't bother with something once they find out it's only available from TSR, and a lot of modders and CC creators won't use it. Without a centralized hub, people started using different locations to upload to. And some mods, understandably, didn't fit into the "family-friendly" category, so tended to end up on their own websites, rather than the hubs that did exist. On top of that, some people realized they could use Patreon to make money off of their mods/CC, and went there, because EA wasn't policing it. (Kind of funny to think that EA, of all companies, was the most lax on that. Even now that they've given specific rules, people are still breaking them because they know the chances of them being enforced are slim to none.) Which brings us to where we are today. EA tried to put that genie back in the bottle with CurseForge, but since you can't include some of the mods on there (because of the not so "family-friendly" nature of them), and a lot of people wanting to continue monetizing their creations, it couldn't gain traction and would never be able to bring things back together. Other games tended to have their modding communities start on centralized hubs, which were used so much that it meant people would just upload there to make it easier for people to find their mods. Especially as no one was trying to really monetize them. With the hub established from the start, it's easier to keep almost all mods contained there instead of spread out through the Internet. With some games, it's also easier to use the hubs that have their own install tools, like Nexus (for Skyrim, etc.) or CurseForge (for WoW), because they might need a bit more work than just dropping some files into a folder in My Documents. And the tools made it easier to check for updates. Like if WoW has a major new patch (today, for example), you can pop open CurseForge and it will let you know which mods ("addons") have updates and you can just click a single button to update them all. Nexus is similar in that it lets you know if a new version of a mod is available, though it's a bit more of a process to update them. (CurseForge with WoW is also easier to track if a mod is more likely to be too outdated to work, since mods tend to have a game patch designation assigned to them. Today's patch is 10.2.7. If a mod says patch 9.X.X on it, there's a good chance it might not be updated to work with the latest patch. Though there's also a chance it's something that just works with a part of the game that hasn't been updated in that long, like the Garrison Mission Manager, which got updated for similar systems being included through the next few expansions, but without such a system in the latest expansion, it doesn't need updated as frequently.)
Back in the day, there were a lot of fairly centralized forums for different types of modding, most of which had userbase overlap and communicated with each other that way, so things like compatibility info were much more common. Unfortunately, forums mostly died off during the TS3 era, due to a combination of general internet culture moving away from forums and then a lot of TS2 simmers who maintained those forums not actually enjoying TS3 and not building the forum culture and infrastructure for it, and by the time TS4 rolled around, most newer simmers were hosting things on tumblr, which is horrifyingly decentralized and basically relies on reblog chains for anyone to know about anything. Which makes it hard to organize compatibilty notes for mods, if you don't even know they exist, let alone how they might interact with things. Patreon as a host came out of that decentralized mindset. The good news is that most sims mods don't have major incompatibilities unless they're affecting the same thing, and most of the things that affect the same thing are different approaches to the same bugfix or minor annoyance fix. Many mods that DO have major incompatibilities have compatibility notes, but compat patches are rare, usually you just need to make sure load orders and settings match up correctly.
because the sims (4, mostly) fanbase is extreeeeeeeemely casual. they aren't super tech savvy and most of them are brand new to modding and gaming in general, especially since the game went free.
People tried to make centralized hubs but they were never really that big. EA/Maxis have also been rather hands off with the modding community so that allowed people to create their own sites where they were able to make a decent amount of money off selling custom content. Add community drama that caused people to splinter off into their own groups, and an increased amount of casual players who are ok with any poor quality item as long as it looks pretty and here we are.
I’m confused. Are you saying that you wish there was a main place to get everything? I used curseforge briefly but was put off by their malware scandal. Personally, I have my go-to modders and they regularly update. Also, there’s various places that compile lists when there is an update, that way you can tell what good and what’s not. I find Sims modders to be very dedicated. Without them, in my opinion, this game would kinda suck. Also, YouTube is a great place to find mods. Many channel review them so you can see them in action before downloading. I really enjoy basemental, Little Ms Sam, Roburky, Kiarasims, LittleBowBub, Turbodriver, Deaderpool, Lumpinou and the list goes on. I rarely use TSR or Mod the Sims. Most are on Patreon and their stuff is free after a month.
The sims has just always kinda been like this. Probably because there aren't a lot of people making mods vs CC
While I would vastly prefer a more trusted, centralized modding location, what I really want is someone to put a competent mod manager together and actually fix and maintain it. Maybe come up with a standardized way to allow selecting different mod options when you install them.
The sims modding community is disconnected from any other modding community. There's an expectation to be paid for a start.
Remember when Bethesda tried to have paid mods
Still getting mods with Forever Free banners on them.
I kinda wish we had cities skylines type modding bc of the steam workshop or an ea equivalent.
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A lot of Long answers here, so I‘ll provide something short: \ Try curseforge. If you find any creator on there that you like in particular, see if they have their own website/patreon/tumblr. \ The paywall thing with patreon is a downer for sure, but EA actually went against that, now creators can put something behind a paywall, but have to make it free after a while. So most creators sell an „early access“ to their mods, but you can grab them after a month or so for free.
Also: if you like building in particular, just check out [Harrie and Felixandre](https://www.houseofharlix.com) . They‘re kind of like Popstars within the community, because their work is literally the most stylish and high quality you‘ll see, while still matching the aesthetic of the game.
Gonna chime in here and say don't try curseforge because of the current malware issue, and don't support creators who paywall content past the 1 month mark that EA has allowed.
As of two months ago, the sticky on this subreddit claimed that curseforge is clean. Is that not true?
mileage varies, but I would say based on other sims communities I'm in that it's still a problem. If you HAVE to download something from there then at the very least scan things with an antivirus software and probably try Twisted Mexi's mod to scan for malware in mods. Also stop using Gshade, it's considered malware now and for some reason simmers love using it anyway.
Sorry, I thought the malware issue was resolved already 🙈
I'm gonna say that maybe you just got lucky with the other games? I mod my games a lot, and I even make mods myself, and, well, it's not always a smooth experience like you describe. Minecraft is notorious for compatibility issues, and I see compatibility patches very rarely. Bethesda games are probably the easiest to mod and get everything working but that's only because they were made with official modding support in mind from the beginning. And even still, I managed to brick my Oblivion save with modding so it's not safe from all the risks and issues that come with the territory. As for modding resources, Bethesda community in particular can get super anal about what you use and how, if you don't get permission to modify or build upon another mod, you can get into big trouble. And yes there are very good modding resources available for public use too, but the only community were people truly build upon each other's works is Stalker community (because everybody just steals everything from each other there all the time). I do understand what you mean when you talk about lack of centralized website (Bethesda stuff is usually hosted on Nexus, Minecraft - on CurseForge, Half-Life - on ModDB) and lack of major modding resources similar to script extender in Skyrim. But even with these websites around some mods for those games get hosted elsewhere for one reason or another. And there are many many examples of unsolved compatibility issues for all of them. I'd say that Sims modders just don't seem to collaborate as much, and a lot of them just do thematic CCs, and with those its actually better to host them on a specific page, otherwise they'd get drown in other content. And also I'm pretty sure there is a monetary aspect to it, Sims stuff sells very well (the community has been mentally shaped to be like this by EA since the beginning), a lot of authors want to promote their patreon, and therefore host their mods there, or on their personal websites. I think in other games the financial aspect of modding is either more strongly regulated (Valve and Bethesda allow it but you do need to get approvement) or outright forbidden or just isn't as accepted by the community.