Preface / Purpose of this thread:

Did you ever want to create suburbs without any of the Maxis houses like this?


Or have a uniform looking neighborhood of mid-rise appartments like this?


Plopping commercial/industrial buildings works just fine. Open the landmarks menu... plop skyscrapers... downtown finished...
The problem with plopping residentials should be mostly known by everyone. While you can certainly use the Extra Cheats Plugin.dll to plop whatever building you want, they don't function right when they are plopped. They get abandonned pretty fast and even if they not, the sims won't find their way to work because the pathing does not work. So the only way to make those residentials work in-game is to let them grow.

The techniques I will be showing are mostly for newcomers to the game who want to gain control over their residential plugins.
Of course, if some veterans want to join the conversation, feel free to share your best-practices when using custom residentials

IMPORTANT NOTE:
This is NOT a tutorial about demand, basic infrastructure or growth stages!
I will always assume that you meet the requirements for these buildings to actually being able to grow!
This is about growable RESIDENTIALS ONLY, the same principles can be applied to growable commercial/industrial though.

What's needed:
- Ilives reader (latest version 1.5.2 can be found here)
- BSC No Maxis Files (here)
- A general idea what look you are going for
- Patience

Basic idea:
To make sure we get the buildings we want to grow, we will use these variables to our advantage:
a) Building style (tileset)
b) Zone density
c) Zone size

Here is a quick example what this means:
Let's assume we want a specific type of house to grow in a suburb. (see 1st picture)
We know the house only (!) grows in the Chicago tileset.
Furthermore it's a small house, so it will only (!) grow when we zone for low density residential.
And finally we know the lot size of this house is 1x2.

So we pause the game, set the building style to "Chicago only" and zone low density residential with a size of 1x2.
Then we hit play again and voila, exactly the house we wanted will appear.

Another one (see 2nd picture):
We want to create a block of those w2w buildings.
We know these houses only (!) grow in the Houston tileset.
It's an appartement, so it will only (!) grow when we zone for medium density residential.
And finally we know the lot size of these houses are 1x2 and 2x3.

Pause the game, set the building style to "Houston only" and zone medium density residential with a size of 1x2
or 2x3, depending on where want each building to go.
Tadaa.

As we don't want or have enough variables to assign one to every single building we want to grow, we will form groups of buildings.
Now let's get to work:

Step 1: Organize your plugins
Here is an example folder structure to use. It makes it easy to add or remove buildings while you play.
Basically, before starting a new region, you set up your plugins for that region.

plugins
-my_region A
--res_low_density_chicago
---houses A
---houses B
---houses C
--res_mid_density_houston
---mid_rises A
---mid_rises B
---mid_rises C
--res_high_density_newyork
---high_rises A
---high_rises B
---high_rises C
.
.
.

In the top folder ("my_region A") we have our maxis blockers:
From the BSC No Maxis Files copy "Stop_R$.dat", "Stop_R$$.dat" and "Stop_R$$$.dat".

The other folders hold your downloaded plugins. You decide where you want everything to go.
In the next step, we adjust the in-game values of these downloads to match the folders.

(Again: This is for residential only! If you want to expand on this concept, you could add com_low_density_chicago, etc...)

Step 2: Edit the plugins
Open Ilives reader and go to first folder we have created ("houses A" in "res_low_density_chicago")
Depending on the download, you will find .sc4lot and .sc4desc files or a .dat file.
We now match up the plugin with our folder structure.

So we are looking for our variables we want to use:
a) Building Style (tileset)
 
That would be "OccupantGroups" (in my example in a .dat file). Style has to be only (!) Chicago.
Picture:


b) Zone density
That's "LotConfigPropertyZoneTypes" (in the .sc4lot file), which has to be only (!) "R - low density"
Picture:


It's easy to change any of these values using the drop down menu. Always save before you close the file.

c) Zone size
This is not something we can change that easy. It's the way the lot was made.
What we want to do, however, is delete all .sc4lot files we don't want.
In my example I have a couple of those files like
"American Four Square 1x1_2faba7d8.SC4Lot" and "American Four Square 1x2_afac2d37.SC4Lot" etc.
So if I dont want these houses on a 1x1 lot, I just delete files with "1x1" in the name.
If the filename doesn't say anything like this, it can be found under
"LotConfigPropertySize" (in the .sc4lot file)
Picture:


We need to check these 3 variables for all files in the folder ("houses A") before we move to the next folder ("houses B") and do the same.
After we are done with everything in "res_low_density_chicago" we move on to "res_mid_density_houston".
There, we make sure all buildings match only (!) the Houston tileset and zone density "R - medium density".

I hope you get the principle now and can come up with a way this could work for your cities.
If you have any questions or any feedback on how to improve this guide, feel free to post