Hey Howdy Hey Tappers!
With what seems like a never ending amount of downtime in TSTO popping up more and more we’ve been noticing a lot of Tappers (ourselves included) in the redesign (or design) phase for their Springfield. This is something we love to see. We love seeing all of you guys expressing your creativity and show casing different ways to build certain areas of Springfield. And that is the beauty of TSTO! It’s fluid and you never have to keep a design the same, unless you want to, for very long! This allows for redesign after redesign and allows you guys to express your creativity in what you come up with!
With all this talk of designing going on in towns we often get comments asking for tips and design ideas when it comes to certain areas of Springfield. While we do have a basic design guide here at Addicts (mostly just tips to get started), we thought it would be fun to create a series of posts based on different ways to design various areas of your Springfield. Note: In no way do we consider ourselves “experts” at this design stuff, in fact MANY of you could teach us a thing or two about town designs (especially me). These are just fun and different things we’ve come up with, inspired from our own minds or friends towns, to “spice up” our favorite virtual city!
Now let’s talk about some fun ways to make your Springfielders have a neighborhood they can be proud of! 
In real life, or at least where I grew up, houses face each other. You have 2 sided streets & cul-de-sacs. Places that feel like a neighborhood, and not just a row of houses. Well one of my biggest pet peeves about TSTO is the inability to rotate buildings 360°. I get why they can’t rotate 360° but just because I get it doesn’t mean I have to like it! The most annoying thing about the inability to rotate a full 360° is it prevents you from being able to make double sided streets in your neighborhoods, which in turn means you can’t really create realistic looking neighborhoods in TSTO. Or does it?
You can still create these realistic neighborhoods in TSTO with out the benefit of 360° rotation using just the right placement of trees and other objects in your Springfield and here’s how….
Now bare with me. These step by step design guides aren’t my “thing”. Bunny & Wookiee are usually much better that this than I am…so hopefully I explain it all correctly for you guys!
First thing you’ll want to do is line of a series of houses on either side of the street like you normally would. I’ve found that the houses that work best for this are the ones I have shown here, although you’ll see further down I switched out the purple house for the Wiggum house because the driveway on the purple house creates some issues. Any of the other houses make it difficult to hide the front side of the house to create the 2-sided street illusion.
Next you’ll want to use pine trees to cover up the front side of the houses, to create the 2-sided street illusion. Personally I’ve found that the $135 trees work the best because of their size, but you can use a combination of any of the tress you’d like as long as they fully cover the doors and garages.
Start placing the trees to cover up the doors, windows & garages. Play around with it a little bit, see what works best for your design. You don’t have to completely cover it, just cover it enough so it no longer looks like the front of the house. 
Finally decorate the houses as you normally would, treating it as if it were the backyard.
So that’s how you create the 2-sided street effect, but what if you want to create a cul-de-sac? Aren’t they usually the streets people want their homes on?
For my little cul-de-sac area I started by placing the road around in a circular shape, going off of the 2-sided street in this case).
Next I placed the houses around the road in the order I wanted them. Here I’ve got the Simpson house right in the center, with Flander’s next to them (of course). I then went with the Cool Brown house on the right side, with the purple house set a little further off the street, using pavement as an extended driveway. 
Again, you’ll want to place trees to cover up any doors and windows that make it look like the front of the house. (I used the $135 pine trees again) In this case it’s only the Cool Brown house that needs to be covered. 
Then just design the houses as you normally would. In this case I only added the Left-Handed roadster next to the Cool Brown house, to create the illusion that they have a fancy sports car in their driveway. (seems like it’s only fitting for that house right?)
Finally you’ll want to put some decorations into the little center island created when you made the circular road. In this case I used some of my Valentine’s Day decorations. 
And there you have it…a 2-sided street leading to a cul-de-sac residential section of Springfield!
What do YOU think? Is this something you’ve tried in your Springfield? Is it something you plan on trying? Have you created something different as far as a neighborhood goes? Sound off in the comments below (and send us your Screenshots!), you know we LOVE hearing from you!
All original art and content © Up All Night, LLC and TSTOAddicts.com
All Screen Shots of Game Graphics & Dialogue and Game Graphics from files ™ and © EA, Gracie Films and FOX
Ditto on the rotation thing. If EA at least let us rotate the blue house, brown house etc, tapped out would go to the next level
This is sheer genius!!
But I hope that EA doesn’t see it or it’ll just give them a reason to think that they don’t need to even bother considering giving us 360° buildings! 😉
I want to make a house farm and have a nice Springfield at the same time. How can I do this?
I’m not the biggest fan of house farming but the nicest I’ve seen done is picking one edge of your town for the farm. Line up the houses in a row. I’ve seen anywhere between two to four rows. If you keep your house farm away from your designed Springfield, it looks much better.
This is a great post, for me I do plan my areas residential, industrial, downtown etc and found lots of great ideas from other tappers.
I hope this encourages some house farmers to develop.
May I suggest that you add trees behind the houses on the other side of the road? Otherwise it looks like there are only trees on one side of the road, which is slightly unrealistic (imagine walking down the street and seeing loads of big pine trees on your right and nothing on your left)
This was cool, thank you! I’m on level 22, but still cash poor and as such have decided to go for Krustyland (and possibly friends on Origin – I’ll consider it once I get that last $3K to build, hopefully in the next couple of hours) before adding Mrs. Krabappel. Somewhat needless to say, my town is a jumble of buildings with random decorations squeezed in tiny spaces, the latest addition of which is what seems like a gazillion stop signs mostly centered near the penitentiary. I like to think it goes with the glut of lemonade stands and coffee carts on my poor excuse of a Squidport. That said, I have an unintended semi-rural thing going on by Cletus’ farm that has some potential, and Nelson may end up moving nearby for atmospheric reasons.
If I have a point, it’s that my town looks like crap right now and probably will for quite a while, but stuff like this (along with this site in general) gives me ideas for when I get to the point where design is an option. 🙂
Glad we are able to inspire you. 😉
You shouldve added neighbors several levels ago. They can help you make more money you know 😉
Aww shucks, Fly Guy. 🙂 waiting, be there soon…
😃
I have just come across the idea of using trees to cover certain details myself in this way. It suddenly seemed such an obvious idea after I saw the doors in training walls covered by trees in a friends town. Definitely going to use the two sided street in my next redesign. But whenever I start a redesign, an event starts before I’m finished, and the last bit is just a mess.
I love this idea! I’ve been getting the itch to redo everything from scratch. I’ve never done it before, only made small changes here and there. If there was a “store all” I might jump right in. I’ve got a lot of stuff! Anyone who’s done it before have any words of wisdom?
Patience lol.
Are you a genius? What a great idea(s). I’ll try this soon as I get rich enuf to buy a bunch of trees. Thank you.
She’s a keeper for sure. 😉
I wanna redo my town and add some 3D touches to it but I’m constantly chasing people off my lawn…at least the ones that selfishly avoid my paintables…(setting a trap for Wookiee using beef jerky and cheetos for bait)
I see many towns that use a vast amount of river tiles which I love but right when I feel like actually redoing my town, a new “event” happens.
Love your town, Alissa!!!
🙂
lol thanks Freak! And I’ve been spray painting the heck outta your buildings I promise! 🙂
Did this one in my “B” town, since it’s a complete and total mess and I can easily make changes with out having to deconstruct the entire thing!
I promise it’s not selfishness. It’s actually complete and utter laziness lol.
But you had to pass my paintables to get to the ones you tapped…lastnight when you did it, all I thought was a visual of you, this huge brown beast, sitting back laughing at me so hard you knocked over a drink on the console of the Millennium Falcon…sparks flying around, ending with your trademark “roooaaarrrr”.
🙂
If only I was that clever. Most of the time when I’m visiting neighbors I am on auto-pilot. Tap tap tap, next, tap tap tap, next
Oh now they’re just straight up &%©£ing with me…this person just tapped the building right beside each of my paintables!!! They are soooo gone!!! New neighbors please…
You did just fine! you may be a beginner but isn’t that where everyone starts? Good going Alissa!!!
lol exactly! And if I can do it…ANYONE can do it! 🙂
I loveee seeing people’s ideas and designs. I tend to change around some things in my town & it sometimes drives my husband crazy lol but it keeps things interesting despite the stress it can cause. Posts like this are always welcomed!
Awesome tips, I will definitely be bringing in more trees to hide those front doors on some houses.
Also, have you seen Brock Baker’s Simpsons impersonations?? Hilarious. You can easily find it on an internet search. Well worth the 5 minutes to watch it!
Keep up the great work!!!
Ha that was great! Really great stuff! 🙂
What’s a “Col de Sac”? Is that Allisian for cul-de-sac?
haahaha uh huh. It’s called Alissa is over worked! Correcting it now! What would I do with out you my math whiz 😉
(Says the Cguy that miscalculated his entire tapping strategy.) 😉
Hey! GIGO! My math was right, it was my assumptions that were wrong.
Heheheheh 😉
You know what happens when you assume 😉
No? Tell me what happens when I assume, Alissa 😉
I dunno but I think it has something to do with donkeys…or something like that
well…when you assume…you make an @$$ outta U & ME 😛
Oh, come on bunny – of course, I knew that.
Nope…you didn’t…nope nope nope…you know nothing. NOTHING I TELL YAH!!! 😉
(I just wanted to type it out)