Tagging Skintones for Occults

This is a quick tutorial I wrote for someone wanting to fix some outdated skintones for their game. Once my website is launched I'll move this there, along with any other tutorials I may make (I have at least 2 more).

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This can likely be used for any other tags, but this is mainly for occults since CC can go outdated and batch fixing doesn’t seem to work on skintones for whatever reason. I’m going to cover two different methods, an easy way and then a hard way. I highly recommend the easy way but in case something doesn’t work you can do it a different way at least.

Easy Way (TS4 Skininator)

Setup the program if this is your first time using it. Make sure to follow the instructions on the download page and download the additional file to update the tag system, otherwise witches will not appear as an option. All you need to do after that is add in your creator name and set the game pathways in the popup that appears during your first run. When the program re-opens, click the “Cloned Package Editor” tab.

Find the package you want to edit by clicking the “Select” button at the top right and going through your folders. 

Once the package is loaded it will ask, if your skintone, etc. is old, if you want to update the file to the latest version, click yes. Now click the “Select All” button and then go down and click the “Add/Remove Tag” button.

A new popup will appear. With the dropdown menu labeled “Property Tags” select “Occult” from the list.

Then where the “Value” dropdown is select the occult you want.

When done, click “Add to Selected Skintones in Package” and it will ask for confirmation. Click yes and it will add the new tag to all the selected skintones. Now repeat this step for all the occults you want.

Once you are done click “Save Package" at the bottom left of the screen. And you’re done, very easy!

Hard Way (Sims4Studio)

Open your skintone file of choice. The first thing you want to do is sort the files inside so things are easier to find. You can do this by clicking on the top category in the top left where it says “Type” and the program will sort the files based on what they are.

Now that the files are sorted, find the first Skintone file in the list and click on it. On the right side under the Data tab you need to scroll down to where it says Tags. Click on the button across from Tags where it says “Edit Items”.

A popup will appear with all sorts of tags, like “Occult: Occult_Human,” etc. To add the other occults click Add at the bottom. 

A new slot will be added. On the right where it says “Category” click the drop down that says None and select “Occult” from the options. 

Go to where it says “TagValue” next and click on the drop down like you did before, but now search for the occult you’d like to add. I chose mermaid for this example.

Now repeat this step to add the next few occults. Don’t worry about the number slots, S4S fills them in for you as you add the tags. Once you are done, click “Save” at the bottom right to save your work (closing it any other way won’t save the tags).

And then the hard part, which is doing this for every skintone file in the package. This is long and tedious and is why I recommend TS4 Skininator instead if you are reading this section. Once done, save the package and then test in-game.