In this installment of DID (Designing In Downtime), we are going to address the options you have for designing with the “New Normal.”
What is the New Normal?
Many of you are facing the growing number of restrictions that have become “normal.” And as we have mentioned before, these are the hurdles you may need to jump if you are going to keep playing a game that seems to be sputtering to meet the demands of long-time users.
I’ll deal with a couple…
Lack of Land, and Item Limits That Seem Stuck
First, as it pertains to the “Lack of Land,” it really is more of a problem for some, in that they are still stuck in the inability to earn enough Land Tokens in order to be able to access the remaining land being offered. A rEAl conundrum, indeed!
Yes…many of us have the Golden Goose Realty, which continues to spit out Land Tokens at a regular pace. But, the fact is…there are some that don’t. For those of you who are stuck…the only rEAl answer, is to Do MORE with Less! Sorry…
I have a TON of untapped/un-bought land left…and 147 sitting in limbo…
What that means for others, is maximizing space, into logical designs of neighborhoods, that still look good, but don’t take up as much space to do so.
I get it. Some of you are from smaller towns, or cities that have LOADS of wide-open spaces. But, the fact is, in most places (including Springfield), land is at a premium. Main streets are packed with businesses, and neighborhoods are usually restricted to smaller lots. This is the case in loads of European countries. This requires the need to be very creative in small places.
Take for instance, the beautiful English garden in our very own Loobs’ home in blighty! Gorgeous! (and the flowers are pretty too, wink, wink).
If we were to try to recreate this lovely space, and maximize the color and texture, using the tools available to us in TSTO…It might look something like this…plenty of color…room for some neighbors…and all in less than one square of land.
Compared to using an entire chunk of land…for ONE house…and sparse decoration.
And…if you are going for a higher density, MORE REALISTIC neighborhood, you can get a TON of houses into relatively small footprint of just 4 squares of tiles.
BUT…all of this lovely landscaping requires enough headroom on your Item Limits…WHICH DIDN’T CHANGE.
I have been trying to give EA the benefit of the doubt recently…but, the “new normal” always came with a bump in the limit with each new major event. But, NOT THIS TIME. Same…old…limit. Capped at 13,000 Items.
Which means, when I wanted to create the example of Loob’s house…I was only a couple of multi-colored fences into the design…when I saw this…
So…once again…I had to scour my town for “Over plantings” that happened when I didn’t care about item limits. Things I could delete, without changing the look too much. In this case…it was a handful of shrubs and flowers hidden by a business…
So…delete to make room for more designing? Many of us don’t have a choice. Which is why I ended up storing a lot of what I “won” in the Year Book, and even stuff I got during this past event.
I have to admit it. I really didn’t offer much of a solution for either limit, except “be creative…and learn to live with it.” Unfortunately, life is full of compromise…and in the case of TSTO these days, compromise is at almost every turn.
In my case, I moved my newest creation into “Krusty’s Very Minimum Security Prison for the Elite and Bribe-Worthy.” (nothing implied here, Loobs), fete all, it is Sideshow Bob’s house.
Here’s hoping for two things… That the GOLDEN GOOSE comes back for those who don’t have it…and EA INCREASES THE ITEM LIMIT sometime soon. Otherwise…designing during downtime is going to be a moot point.
Are you listening EA???
Can’t help with the building limits, as I haven’t hit that limit yet, but I have a small fix that may help some players. Apparently, every tile of pavement, dirt, etc. counts as 1 item. If you built like I did and layer pavement across every parking lot or large building, you can save tons of items just by deleting the “under-pavement”. I had all land unlocked and continually crossed 11,000 items no matter how much I stored. Now, after going back and deleting all of that extra non-visible pavement and dirt, I haven’t had the message since! This could be a simple fix for those late in the game.
But if EA needed some simple suggestions that wouldn’t screw us over – additional items combining previous items. Essentially, they could create a pair and line of four parking spaces as 1 item so people didn’t have to use multiples. They could easily do the same with trees, fences, various plants, etc. It would give us a little work to replace items, but very little effort to fix an annoying problem from their end.
Would love it if they increase the item limit. The regular decor I don’t really care much for, but being a lover of the Halloween and Christmas updates, I want to build a large christmas wonderland and a large haunted forest for those events to be housed. Do hope EA reads these 😉.
“Lack of Land, and Item Limits That Seem Stuck”
You know me, Zero Expectations from EA, but it wouldn’t hurt if they would make that space adjacent to Springfield Heights available finally! I literally would want that before increasing how much we are allowed to work with “Item Limit” wise (I can put stuff in Storage, we could all use that available space – lEAzy knows it but their lEAzy to acknowledge it (lol)!
I have gone back to this visiting a few Neighboreenos, very impressed with those who take inspiration from pop culture 😀👍
If EA is reading this, here are a few easy way to free up items without increasing the item limits.
(1) Allow users to combine bonus items. For example: exchange 5 white vans for a red van, 10 whites vans for a blue van, 25 whites vans for a green van, 100 white vans for a black van.
(2) Fences and walls are used in lengths. Have lengths of 5,10, and 20.
(3) Allow users to create custom groups of decoration items. Since they don’t produce income. A person could lay out 100 trees and flowers, save it as a group then it becomes a single item.
Wonderful to see her FB photo here on this site. I wish I had her green thumb instead of my brown pinky.
No worries… I am not a colorist!
Whats the maximum in game money level, and total donughts allowed? I would like to see how much more i can accumulate. Thanks
The maximum amount of Money a player can have is Cash.png4,294,967,295. Everything earned passed this amount gets spoiled.Donuts limits never heard of it, since its related to real dollar, don’t think there is a limit, I’m having 60,000+from farming,just keep stock it if you like, after a point of time you will find other things about the game not just money, like everything else in the world……
Hello 🖑 everyone for me I’m a little over 14000 decorations.
Thanks for the information 👍
thanks for the info! I haven’t made it to that point yet.. but I do have 2 questions.. 1. the railroad tracks we gain doing the trash for donuts… do all those unused in inventory count toward the limit? 2. How do you find out the # of items in your inventory?
Your inventory does not count towards your limit. I would be in trouble since i have over 5000 trackpieces in storage
Nope on the Monorail…
And trust me…you will know. You’ll start getting warnings with the numbers. “You have 1280 decorations, we reccomend staying below 10,000,” or something like that. I have been hovering at 13,000 for a long time now.
It’s just one of the several annoying things thst EA doesn’t really listen too.
How about the unemployment agency? When you have a task for 5 Springfielders, you send 5 springfielders, and the rest you send on their tasks with the unemployment agency. NOT. All others are being held hostage by the “open” task. So have fun sending over 350 characters (in my case) on a task manually. Seems like it could be fixed easily, but do they listen?
YES!!! this is super annoying! (and I only have about 230, lol). What I’ve been doing lately is just sending them ALL on that 4 hr task…it’s super annoying, and throws off my time, but it is fun seeing the GIANT row of fingers, and spending a good couple minutes collecting XP! But yeah, that frustrates me to NO END! On a related note, I wish they had a KrustyLand option. When they decided to blow up the old KL and give us the new KL, that seemed like the perfect time to add a button to the employment agency “Send characters to KL for 1, 4, 8, 12, 24 hr jobs” seems like a new tab at the top and another drop down wouldn’t have been too hard. I guess with only a couple dozen characters being available for KL, they didn’t see this worthwhile. But I love sending the non-essential characters there to build up my KL bucks. I think I have enough to cash in for 4-5 million SF$, which will come in handy if I ever decide to KM farm intensely! haha. I also like KL (both in the show and in the game), so I like for it to get “used”.
I have often send all characters on the task too. But that is terrible as well. Sometimes I don’t feel like going through my whole map to collect everything. If I just collect the figures which are spread around the map, i still collect plenty of buildings. But now almost all my characters are in 1 spot.
It should be simple to check if enough characters have been send on a task and then free the others.
I have the same issue.. just today my daily task consisted of sending pessimist to do some job for a cash reward, but I canceled and got a donut reward task instead, now I can’t send everyone to tasks from the unemployment office, even though none are needed for the ‘original’ cash price… and what about adding tasks for 2, 3, 5, 6, 7, 10 and 16hrs jobs… it is a pain having to send one by one to those hours tasks… I know it is pushing it but……… BUT…. how about a job list for Visual and Non Visual tasks…
Too many houts to chose from isn’t needed. They have most things always on 4 or a multiple of 4 But atleast every character should have a 4 8 12 and 24 hour job. Although fixing the unemployment office should have priority.
In that case you can visit friends and come back to the city. The characters will no longer be “tagged” for the repicked task 😊
I have the GGR, but like Patric, I have tons of tokens and unused land. I think EA is missing a little cash grab here. Offer GGR along with a box of donuts that you have to purchase using real money.
From this website alone it seems like there would be lots of takers.
Agreed!! Not that I am promoting a cash grab. But it is the most desired…
Patric I don’t have an option to buy land with cash – only with free land tokens. So the screenshot you posted shows something that I can’t do. How do we get access to buy land with cash. I have soooooo much money that I’ve barely spent over the last few years.
There is a limit too how much land you can buy with money. Once you have reached it, land tokens only.
You can’t there is a limited amount of “cash land”. I still have some…hence the screen shot.
I’ve bemoaned this before. But longer walls, fences, monorail pieces and clusters of foliage would all be amazing ways to reduce the item limit.
I’ve removed my monorail, reduced my walls and fences, deforested my forest.
I just want to design and EA scuppers me.
I hope they read this and care, but I also hope for a lottery win and the power of flight so we can see where Hope gets me.
Removed your Monorail?! I LOVE the Monorail!
Monorail, monorail, monorail!
Hear, hear! No item limits would be nice. If EA offered the chance to pay some dollars to avoid being limited, their coffers would fill immediately.
Thanks for your thoughts Patric ❤
That is one thing most designers would actually pay cash for…offer space for 1000 items for $4.99 per thousand and I bet there would be bunches of takers. It’s the one thing you can’t farm or buy with donuts.
💰🤩💰
I’d even pay $9.99