(Tutorial) Updating Lot Monthly Cost While Avoiding Phantom Budget Predicaments

[CorinaMarie 29,593]

(Tutorial) Updating Lot Monthly Cost While Avoiding Phantom Budget Predicaments

 

This tutorial is in reply to @TheMurderousCricket from his post here. The key part being:

On 11/9/2021 at 1:27 PM, TheMurderousCricket said:

My idea is to reduce the costs of some items but... some of these items are already present in my cities en masse!  I just can't remove all of them now! This is why I'd like to try these steps:

1. Create duplicated instances of the chosen items, just like police stations in ModPacc Zero.

2. Modify expenses (and profits! ) for the chosen items.

3. Over time, remove all "vanilla" instances of the relevant objects.

 

This is an advanced concept I introduced in Crime and Police Station Fixes for ModPacc Zero. I'm going to use the vanilla Open Grass Park as the sample for this tutorial.

Here's the extracted version if'n y'all want to follow the steps: Open Grass Sample for Cricket - File 1 - Original Extraction.dat
 

Step 01:

Pic showing the initial file opened in Reader 0.9.3:

In File Explorer, copy that to a new file and give it a new name. I made mine Open Grass Sample for Cricket - File 2 - Cori Updated - v0.01.dat.

 

Step 02:

Control + Click the first three entries:

Right click them, select Copy File(s) then right click in the white space below the DIR entry and select Paste File(s).

 

Step 03:

It should now look like this:

 

Step 04:

Right click the newly copied LotConfigurations Exemplar and select Generate New Instance ID:

 

Step 05:

Edit the IID of the new Building Exemplar to have the same IID as the new LotConfigurations:

 

Step 06:

Generate a new IID for the newly copied LText and update the verbiage:

 

Step 07:

Go to the corresponding original LText and update its verbiage:

 

Step 08:

In the original Building exemplar, open the OccupantGroups property:

^ The 0x00001006 value tells it in which menu to will appear.

 

Step 09:

We want to remove it from the menu so it can no longer be selected. Remove the 0x00001006 and it now looks like this:

^ Be sure to click the first Apply button followed by the 2nd Apply button.

 

Step 10:

Update the name in the new LotConfigurations entry:

^ This isn't strictly necessary, but you'll thank yourself for it later.

 

Step 11:

Change Rep 13 of the LotConfigPropertyLotObject (the one that starts with 0x00000000) to the IID of the new building exemplar:

^ Apply and Apply.

 

Step 12:

Update the name in the new Building Exemplar:

 

Step 13:

Update the IID in the User Visible Name Key to match the IID of the new LText:

 

Step 14:

Update the Lot Resource Key to match the IID of the new LotConfigurations entry:

 

Step 15:

Update the Budget Item Cost:

^ Note: In this case I'm going for minus 10 Simoleons per month. While it converts an entry to 16 hex digits, you need to only enter 8 digits. So for this I typed in 0xFFFFFFF6 then Apply and Apply.

 

Step 16:

Here's how it looks with those changes:

 

Step 17:

Single click the DIR entry:

 

Step 18:

Right click and select Remove File. This pic shows it is now gone:

 

Step 19:

Save the file. Close the file. Reopen the file. It'll now have a new DIR entry:

Ofc, be sure your new file loads last or you've removed any other overrides for the Maxis Open Grass lot.

 

Step 20:

In the game when you query a previously plopped Open Grass lot it'll show the correct original cost and it'll have the new name we gave it:

 

Step 21:

Find the Open Grass in the Parks Menu:

^ Note: Only the new one will show because we told the original to hide (by removing the 0x00001006 OccupantGroups value).

 

Step 22:

Hovering over a plop of the new one with the query tool will show the new name:

 

Step 23:

And here's the query of the updated lot:

 

  Edited February 25, 2025 by CorinaMarie  
Made a correction to Step 08.