You’ve been making world mods for The Sims 4 for quite some time now. How did you get started and teach yourself the ropes?

It’s actually insane as I’ve recently realized that I’ve been doing world mods for 10 years now. When I started doing world mods there weren’t any tools out back in the days besides Sims4Studio which made it hard to understand everything at first but I’ve looked through the existing game files and played around with them. I experimented A LOT. I’ve probably rebooted my game like thousands of times to see if any of my changes affected the game. And after a while I got the hang of it.

What compelled you to create the African Savanna world mod?

Honestly? The lack of representation has always been the driving force behind my world mods. My father was born in Mozambique and besides the Egyptian world in The Sims 3 World Adventures the Sims team never touched the African continent again. It’s honestly a shame because the entire content is so diverse and provides a lot of different areas of exploration.

Tell us a little about the process. How do you like to make a plan, and how do you go about creating world mods?

Every process is different for me. Usually I start asking the community which world theme they might be interested in. Then I start a lot of research, not just environmental but also music, cultural, etc. I listen to a lot of new music whilst working on the worlds. Then I choose an existing world, scrape off all existing assets and retexture everything. Then comes the foliage and places of interest.

You worked with three Simmers from across the African continent, Rodney Ochieng, MyshunoMD, and Momo’s Mojo. What advice did they give you, and how did their insight help you with development?

I’ve done my visual research up front mostly but they really helped me give some ideas to make the place look diverse, lush and inspired by lake Victoria and its surrounding area. The biggest topic of discussion has been the name for the mod itself and in the end we narrowed it down to African Savanna. It’s vague enough but on point as it reflects many areas within the Savanna biome.

What advice would you give to those who are looking to get into modding, or more specifically, world modding?

Experiment! I know a lot of people would say that you should be learning by doing tutorials or reaching out to modders. Whilst that may help mostly you have to just experiment around. Change some values here and there, have fun and play around with it and have no objective at first. We often get stuck with one idea of what we want to accomplish and we fail because we’re still lacking the skillset. Starting without a plan will bring out the best results. Trust me!

Can you share any ideas you have for future projects with us?

I just heard that Sixam was quite small and you can’t really live there as a Sim. Maybe that should be changed soon?

And finally – What is your dream Sims 4 collab or Expansion idea?

If The Sims Team is ever open for it, I would LOVE to collab with them on a unique world experience. Besides the obvious IKEA collab I would really love to see hotels return and an expansion pack surrounding shopping centers with escalators.