Learning Resources for Sims 4 Toolkit

Hey, everyone! I know I haven't posted in a while, and that's because I'm still on a break from modding... or, I guess, a "break", since I've secretly been working on some not-so-small things for Sims 4 Toolkit (S4TK).

What I've Been Up To

I'll post a dev diary soon, so I'll keep this brief. While I haven't been working on mods/S4TK, I've still been very involved in the modding community, and have been helping other modders by generating/batch fixing their mods with S4TK.

The reason I've been helping them with S4TK is because I have not provided many resources for them to learn it themselves. Sure, I've written some pretty detailed documentation, but this can be intimidating for those unfamiliar with JavaScript and Node (and that's, like... the majority of TS4 modders...).

So, that's what I've been working on: learning resources for S4TK. This includes an article to introduce you to JS/Node/S4TK, and online sandbox environment, and guided tutorials for complete beginners.

...Admittedly, I went a little overboard, but I'm proud of what I ended up making, and I hope you find them useful.

Beginner’s Guide to Sims 4 Toolkit

To kick things off, let's start with the Beginner's Guide to Sims 4 Toolkit, an article I wrote on Medium that will introduce you to JavaScript, Node, npm, and S4TK at a high level. If you're entirely new to JavaScript/Node, you should start here.

This article sets the context for the tutorials, and points you in the right direction for learning JavaScript (the article itself doesn't teach you JS... trust me, that would be doing you a disservice - it links you to existing articles that will teach you the basics, because the internet is already saturated with JS resources).

The Sandbox & Its Tutorials

The most useful resource (and also what took me the longest...) is the S4TK Sandbox website, and its interactive tutorials. The sandbox lets you write JavaScript using S4TK right in your browser, without the need to set up a Node development environment. It even provides a mock file system, so you can import existing TS4 files, and download whatever your script generates.

By getting rid of the need to set up Node, hopefully the sandbox makes the S4TK learning curve a bit smaller. Furthermore, the interactive tutorials provide you with real, annotated S4TK code that you can run, edit, and run again to see what happens - it's all about learning by doing.

After reading the beginner's guide, you should start off with the Get to Know the Sandbox and Introduction to S4TK tutorials. These will teach you about working with the sandbox itself, and common patterns you can expect to see in the rest of the tutorials.