START: September 15

CLOSE: October 30

All households should have an obligatory stay in the Training Center hood before they move into the main hood. The Training Center stay will give each household a chance to gain some of their previous status. 

So, one of the first things we will do is to reserve a hood for this purpose, and start building small temporary homes that the families can use during their stay.

This will be our first building experience in the Modern Times, and although the constructions shouldn't be impressive, it might be useful to play around a little just to learn about the building tools and possibilities.

A good thing about building after the Transformation, is that a house is not restricted to a certain address. Say you want everyone to live in a similar house in your Training Center, then just build the house once and duplicate or reimport (or whatever term will be valid) as many times as you like. Each time you will need to find enough free space to put it down. A house can be turned 90 degrees just like furniture. Just make sure the mailbox approaches the street. Later on, when you find houses offered in catalogues, they can be placed exactly where you like, as long as there is enough free ground. And if a household like to move to another corner of the hood, they can actually bring the house! This will of course be a nightmare to hood planning, because if you assign an area for higher class families, you wouldn't allow a poor family to move their little house in there just because there is a pree spot. Now, would you?

For the Training Center you might not need to worry about the hood layout or the better and worse parts of the area. This kind of things will be more important when you plan your main hood (Step 10).

The Training Center hood should also have a low standard community lot providing only food and gifts. This will give your construction team a chance to check out how the community lot features work before building them in the main hood.

If your operation includes few households you might not need to build a separate training center but move the Sims into temorary houses in the main hood and from there improve the builds as the residents get familiar with everything. When the operation includes many households grouped into several teams (Simmerville's operation includes 4 teams) running the Training Center will allowing Sims to start building skills and contacts before they move into their permanent home.

TODO: Locate a (custom) hood, build at least 1 small house that can be duplicated, and build at least 1 community lot. Step 8, 9, 10 and 11 will be ongoing simutanously for as long as there are more Sims/teams to arrive the new hood.

[click here to send in your brief results from this step]

Simmerville:
As the operation pregressed we found that a complete training center would  be too time consuming. A negative side effect was that Sims moving in via  the training center would need to reetablish contacts from scratch at the  time moving into the final Simmerville hood. 

Because of this, the training center was used only by households that  needed to build their past before moving into the final hood. One example  is the Mervil family that has a long history that we wanted to include in  their family trees. The household consists of Mr Mervil and his 2nd wife,  a house keeper and a gardener. There are also the two adult sons living by  their own. When Mr Mervil moved into the training center he was married  with his 1st wife and the two sons were teengers. Also Mr Mervil's dead  parents (elders) were included in that household. During the stay at the  training center the elders died, and Mr Mervil's father now haunts the  house), sons grew up to adults and moved out. Simoltanously, elsewhere in  the training center hood the housekeeper, the gardener and Mr Mervil's 2nd  wife to come, all lived with their parents and siblings eventually. Then  the history was repeated, Mr Mervil's 1st wife hired the housekeeper (her  cousin) before she died, then the housekeeper hired the gardener (they had  built a good relation already), and finally Mr Mervil's 2nd wife moved in  as they got married. Before the house was transported to the final hood  the two sons moved back in temporarily, in order to keep their family  relations. If the two households were transported separately they would  still keep their family trees, but not being able to recognize relatives  in the new hood.