Welcome to the TSTO lifestyles of the not so rich and famous…
Hey hey friends! So in case you’ve been enjoying a real life without a lot of TSTO or the blog, you might not have noticed that EA has been busy. Not only did they dish up a fun Tap Ball Event and Level 55 and 56 but they decided to add Cookiee Kwan and an entire new district with 56 pieces of land! If you don’t count the 14 water strips… that’s 42 new pieces of possible real estate development!
But wait a tick… Springfield Heights is a district for all the rich folks… the “whales” as Homer calls them. Not all of us skyfingers are fabulously wealthy and that Kwan always rubbed me the wrong way. She can have the West side. Let’s not tell her we always though of that land behind the mountains as North anyways. As a native Californian… you won’t convince me that the water side isn’t the West anyways.
So before the uber rich land became available… EA actually gave us not one but two strips of land with the Tap Ball Event and what’s a Wookiee to do when he has so much more “regular folk” space for designing? Get to work of course (after getting all his origin posts done first). FYI… if you ever wanted to see my town, it’s below the break.
REALITY NOTE: I actually do resemble this image when working on the blog lol.
So I did a little chart a ways back showing all the available land in TSTO (August 2014) so first I figured I’d update it for my favorite tappers. As of this writing, we have a 17×17 grid available in TSTO. Grand total for all of it… 34 million, 54 thousand and 40 doll hairs.
Yeah… I know it’s not as pretty as Bunny’s Heights map but I’m like Kwan in one respect… I dig excel reports. I’ll leave the excellent (hope you pictured me with steepled fingers) pics to the cottontail. Before the two strips of land were added, we saw tons of folks requesting more land over and over. I was always one of those tappers that although I had everything, I actually felt I’d manage to fit everything with space leftover. Of course, then Level 54 dropped and I ran out. (Click image for larger view.)
You can see I used some large areas for a few of my designs. I did make some things smaller (like my prison) and I got rid of my 2D in the center of my town. I miss that so some day I plan to bring it back. Here’s an old view of Wookieetown for comparison.
Town design is what this game is all about and I’m constantly tweaking Wookieetown. With all the new land, I initially thought I’d do a complete overhaul of Wookieetown but since I’m not sure I have that sort of time on my hands, I haven’t taken that leap yet. Jebus knows I’ve done it before and it’s time intensive. I was able to do some tweaks to the right border of it all to fit in all the new stuff from the Tap Ball Event. So far I’m pretty pleased with how it’s coming along. (Click image for larger view.)
Of course, I also built a sports zone complete with International themed obstacle course. I picture Radioactive Man and Fallout Boy practicing on it frequently.
My Dreamhouse also found a new home near the other mansions and Herb’s mansion will probably join the rich folks when I can afford it. I also have a big gap where my evil Boss lairs used to be but that’s room for the next expansion/level/event.
Of course, with 42 new plots up north, a lot of my town may change in the future and I might actually hit that nuke button again once I have everything on the “West” side. The mansions really feel like they belong with all the other swanky stuff. The best part of this game is just designing and redesigning and so on. If you’re wondering how I stitched all this together, I screenshot it all and slowly aligned the images in Microsoft Paint. Here’s two other ways you can stitch your town together.
And that’s really it. A new land chart and a view of my creative madness. Do YOU have any big plans for your town with Tap Ball madness over and a plethora of new land available? Are you happy with all the new land or do you already need more? Feel free to comment on my town, good or bad. I’m always up for constructive criticism. As always, if there’s something you especially like, feel free to borrow/improve on the design. I’d certainly be lying if I said I’d never done that. If you’d like an image of just one area, let me know and I can add it at the bottom of this just for YOU. I hope y’all are having fun in your games and enjoying it as much as me. Keep on tapa-tapa-tapping in the free world and stay classy like usual.
TTFN… Wookie out!
FYI the image on the article is out of date (couldn’t find an updated one). It’s missing one column to the East, and one row in the South. I thought they were introduced in the Tap Ball event, which this article mentions so it’s weird it’s missing from the images. It’s actually a 18×18 grid with 16×18 being normal land (the other 2 columns for water) or 15×18 if you don’t count the beach ones as ‘normal’:)
Introduced during the monorail
When you all take screenshots of your towns do you edit out/cover up all of the icons on the screen or wait the ~10 seconds for the icons to disappear between taking each picture? Is there a way to shorten the time before the screen goes idle and the icons disappear?
Yes, and no.
Thank you!
Wookie, I want to make a picture of my whole town too. Did you hand-stitch the screen shots together or do you have a program that saves all that time.
He hand stitches them…
Wow. I’m impressed with his commitment to TSTO.
I do too. Nothing works like doing it yourself. My town takes at LEAST 150+ photos to stitch. 😉
I wish EA would release some software that could do it They could even have a way to upload to Facebook so I wouldn’t have to see so many posts of people on holidays and political stuff.
Is there any benifet to nuking your town??? I want to redo my town all of it but I have put so many hour of time and money into it, I am fearful of losing what I have worked for and paid for. I usually do it in sections but thinking now to start fresh… Please help!! Thank a bunch and and keep tapping…
Personally it’s something i could never do….but I know Bunny and Wookie both have before.
Love your town. Thanks for the idea of moving some of the mansions into the west side. I have been trying to think of ways to make it more visually interesting. I moved some of the swankier stores from Springfield proper over the the west, but never thought about the big houses. I need more land, but once I get the space I think some folks are movin’ on up!
I’ve never been one to complain about land and now I feel like I have too much land. I had just bought several new plots and then the new Hieghts expamsion hit. For me also, finding time to design and incorporate the building has been difficult but it is also the most enjoyable part of the game in my opinion. Great town design Wookie, cant wait to see what you do with Springfield Heights.
How could you get rid of the 2D Wookie? It’s too iconic. It’s like if Chicago tore diwn the Sears Tower, it just isn’t done.
I live in Western-Europe and I can confirm the water side is the West.
I’m hoping for more land in Springfield heights soon. I wanna build a proper Springfield heights shopping district like on the show. Started too but then realized i wouldn’t have enough room then to move in all my mansions how i want, not to mention the new build your own mansions and other buildings that came with the update. I want it to be classy and sophisticated and scream wealth, kinda a Hampton’s feel (going by what i see on TV, never having been to America). Once I can move my mansions into Springfield heights I’ll have lots of room in Springfield and will be able to fit Springfield gorge and my other nature items into a nice new area. It will be awesome! (designing it that is, I’m not that big headed about my ideas!)
Any update on the keywords contest??
Patience the winners will be posted soon…
Cool pics! My town is a complete mess – I fantasize about nuking it and redesigning from scratch, but I’m also worried about all the time that will end up sucking up. And although there are some areas that look good as they stand and I’d like to keep them, I’m worried that if I start redesigning without nuking first it might actually take me longer, as there would be a lot of stuff to put in the inventory…
By the way, from the Play store description: “…Cookie Kwan has put aside her precious West Side to be your guide to this brand new area of Springfield – Springfield Heights!”
I take that to mean Springfield Heights is NOT in the West Side – don’t you?
Sure… let’s go with that. A good idea is to screenshot the areas you really like so you can recreate them later. That’s what I’ve done when I nuked my town.
Good one, I might do that. Thanks for the tip 🙂
I’d love an option to be able to “cut and paste” certain areas and move them en mass. It’s not even so much as not being able to redo them again (since I have already taken screen shots) but just avoiding the hassle of moving every piece of fence, tree, shrub etc. would be great
I lived in California too, near Santa Barbara. And to get to the ocean from Santa Barbara… you go straight south. Location of Springfield finally solved!
Interesting seeing your town Wookie… count me in as a vote for bringing it back. I’m working on simething similar in my town, since the new land took my old city center out of the center of the map and I haven’t had the guts to nuke everything despite my Simpsons House being in the same place I put it when I first started the game over 2 years ago.
Hey Wookie!
Thank you very much for sharing the new pieces-of-land map … after consolidating my own Excel map i was running back and forth because your number 34,054,040 was missing 600k against my map – but then i figured!
Columns F and G only sum up Rows 1 through 15 … 16 and 17 (300k each) are missing. Since you’re calculating the total from the sum of the Column-sums it’s 600k less. For what it’s worth: The Row sums 2 and 3 are missing the Column Q.
So the Row sums are (from 1 to 17): 569,62 – 443,1 – 443,1 – 555,62 – 672,4 – 797,2 – 923 – 1044 – 1154 – 1278 – 1413 – 1558 – 1712 – 1877 – 2064 – 6050 – 12100
The Colum sums are (from A to Q): 3280 – 2282 – 1645 – 1190,6 – 948,6 – 719,92 – 719,92 – 798,6 – 1040,6 – 1294,8 – 1561 – 1818 – 2076 – 2337 – 2758 – 3636 – 6548
TTFN ^KMP
Sorry… just woke up so maybe that’s why I don’t get this? Which columns do I need to update?
Hey Wookie, please don’t take it as an offence! I was just wondering 😉 This is a Picture with the new values: http://poppe-online.de/tsto-land-july-2015-values.jpg
Btw, are you going to add the land value Picture to the TSTO 101? I was looking there a few weeks ago only to find, that that Picture was way outdated…
Regards ^KMP
No offense taken at all… thanks for double checking my work. I’ll fix the images.
I started playing in the middle of the Superheroes event and ever since Tap Ball I’ve been telling myself I’m going to nuke and “do things right”. But it never seems like the right time!
Also, is there any way that I’ve perhaps missed to zoom in REALLY close when you’re building? Things like flowers are so small and hard to place when you’re going for that “just right” design!
Unfortunately you can’t zoom too close. Playing on larger screens can make the zoom issue easier. This said from the guy who has played for almost 3 years on an iPhone exclusively.
Man, I play on a Kindle Fire 7 and I still think it’s too small! Oddly enough, I used to play on an original Kindle Fire (yep, old school) and I could zoom in a lot closer on that than I can the 7.
On the other hand, I can now actually play without the game crashing constantly. Trade-offs!
I usually play on my Note 4, which comparatively has a fairly large screen. But I’ve also run the game a few times lately on my PC using Bluestacks, and I have to tell you, seeing the game on a 32 inch high def monitor is something to behold. I’ve been amazed at some of the details in this game I was never able to see/pick out before
Wookie,
Always nice seeing a Diary entry, and extra cool seeing your landscaping. snap shot and studying it later.
The other day I saw a Chew-back-a Pack (yes I spelled it wrong for a lame Back Pack pun) at Barnes and Nobles because they had a Star Wars promotion in full FORCE (that should be a clearer pun). Imidiatley thought of you and presuming you already have one. :p
Also wondering what’cha drinking in that beach image of you. Or better yet what would be your beverage of choice?
I do have a Chewbacca backpack but just the other day I saw another I really want to take to school. In the pic, it’s supposed to look like a Buzz Cola. As for bev of choice, RC Cola or Pecksi for colas. Also a bit of a beer connoisseur (well… not an expert in taste but you get my drift). My current fave is a doublepint of shock top with an inch of OJ on the bottom. Very tasty but I also love a nice PBR draft. Also a big fan of berry pomegranate Mio in a water bottle. I love puns, I better since I’m a Jungle Cruise Skipper. Puns rock even if most people take them for granite. I know, my sediments exactly but I think they’re gneiss and really a butte. I appreciate alkynes. I’d apologize but I get these jokes on shale and they really are rock solid…. marble-ous even. Sorry if they fluorite over your head. Next time I’ll be a bit boulder in my delivery. As you can see I tried to make you laugh but no pun in ten did.
About the only design flourish I have in my town is salt beds, and a tent city a la calais’s refugee camp.
Expatrie-
@ Wookie: Love your central Wookie art logo. That must have taken a while on its own.
As for what we perceived as being the North before this update, to me, it makes sense. Springfield was never in any really known geographic location, and putting the water to what EA perceives as the South just makes the location all that more questionable.
Thought about hitting the nuke button many times myself, but find I am rearranging more and more as I unlock plots of land rather than the whole town at once. Thankfully I’m somewhat new to the game still, and have loads more land to unlock 😀 Anyway sorry for the wall of text.
Thanks for sharing! I have always thought of the mountains as north and the water as west as well.
Nuking and rebuilding is time intensive. I finally nuked my town after the SSB event ended and in still not done fixing everything. Most everything is out but not how I want it yet. I’m still only 4.5 stars 😢 due to tree hugging being behind with most decor in storage.
Now Springfield Heights has really messed me up as I have to decide how to do that area and possibly redoing my mansions… Such troubles 😉
I couldn’t see your town yet because my cell phone is very laggy, but I have one thing to say: THANK YOU sooooo much for the chart! I’m completely redesigning my Springfield and was about to look up here in the blog how much land I have left, but I didn’t wanna bother anyone asking, so your chart came in handy 😀
“REALITY NOTE: I actually do resemble this image when working on the blog lol.”
I explicitely noted the opposite to myself when thinking of these things. Thanks for ruining that! \*quietly sobs\*
When I nuked my whole Springfield the mountains that separate west side and the other one disappeared, is that normal
Did you exit out and come back to see if they returned? I know they are smaller with the addition. Just a group section. So it could just be an image rendering issue too. Give it a bit to come back.
I found the mountain parts in my inventory, but when I placed it somewhere it can’t be moved again, i tried nuking again, but the misplaced mountain part is still there
What part exactly are you talking about? Can you post an image?
I’ve heard it noted to be true when nuking, mark. No personal experience, but anectode is that they’re in your inventory and you have to re-place them.
Awesome town Wookie! Design and the challenge of constantly tweaking my Springfield keeps me addicted…and buying donuts!
My favourite part is your WE DO stonecutter design!! I always think of that song when I see the lodge which I missed out on. I actually had a question for you Wookie, I was reading an article that said something along the lines of Duff Beer being named after Duff McKagan of Guns n Roses, based on his, er, fondness of alcohol lol. I figured you’d know the story behind that!
Completely untrue… just an example of rockstar hubris. McKagan made that claim and people took it as fact. As I understand it, the name was simply chosen because of the slogan “Can’t get enough of that wonderful Duff.” Also a parody of one word beers in America I’m sure.
Ahh interesting. Thanks! I knew you’d know.
The wookiee in the middle of the town looks awesome. Any word about when the keychain drawing is?
I am going through the verification now. Once ALL Winners are verified, I will post the results. 😉
Love your town, Wookiee. I love getting a peek into other towns and seeing what people do and come up with. When I can afford The Gorge, I am going to do a nice outdoor area with that, the Murderhorn, Kamp Krusy, Fort Sensible, Rolling Rock and Lake Springfield. I have lots of land available. I also want to redo my Squidport as mine is very plain and boring but I need more tiles and they take a long time to build.
Thanks! Designing is the best part of the game and it is never truly over.
Nice town, man. I’ve also purchased every item released throughout the years and managed to place it in my Springfield with a bit of space left over. Oh, also #nevernuke!
I’m still debating whether to push the button. I like so many things in my town but then again, I loved a bunch in my previous iterations. Only time will tell.