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.
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!
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