How to edit the landscape of your neighbourhood?

[Monolito]

I would like to level some of the mountains and highlands of Sunset Valley in order to make some new, big lots here and there. How do I do it? Is it even possible without mods/cheats?

[Joria]

In my experience you put down the lot where you can, on uneven ground.  Place a house that fits a smaller lot on it, THEN use the terrain tools to level and smooth.  If you level and smooth before hand, you cannot place an existing house on that lot without the land distorting and swallowing the house.  However, you can smooth the lot and then build from scratch on it.  What will happen is your foundation will be taller and shorter where it's needed and the land will be fine.  Did I make any sense?

[samoht04]

The simple answer is that you can not edit the terrain/landscape of the neighborhood in game, the only way to edit a neighborhoods terrain is in CaW but you will lose the houses and Sims and have to build from scratch. So as Joria said the only way to get around that is to build from scratch.

[Monolito]

I tried editing a freshly made lot by leveling it down. Strangely, it went up and couldn't get down :/ When I bought a new club/disco etc and placed it there the ground was leveled down and some of the lot "cut it" in order to fit the building.

[Joria]

Exactly!  Which is why you place the building in a too large of a lot and THEN smooth and level what you can.  Sometimes you can get it to look ok and sometimes not.  Check out the pictures I posted in the showboat thread and you'll see two buildings that went onto uneven lots.  They aren't totally smooth and flat, nor are they perfect but in these cases it was what I wanted.

[Monolito]

Joria, thanks for your advice but it's not as accurate as I'm hoping. My goal is to set pre made buildings on lots like the ones we're talking about. I don't make custom buildings on a 60 x 60 lot simply because my PC can't take it. My sim's home is on a 30 x 30 lot.

[RunAmokSims]

This is probably going to sound like a real idiot question but I can't figure it out.  I've read  the CAW  walk through and  tutorial and I didn't see the answer. When you open CAW how do you import a neighborhood?  I saw what Joria said  in another thread about editing Twinbrook and I'd like to try my hand at it. I don't want to create a new world, just play with existing worlds and for the life of me I can't figure out how to open one in CAW. I have some experience with graphics programs so I think I can play and figure it out. I just can't figure out how to import one!