Is there anything a World must have to be exported?

[Seabody]

I'm thinking of creating a world with lots and lots of lots. No roads or Rabbit-Holes. Just Lots.
My question is, is there anything I have to put in my world so that it exports? Or can I just put one gigantic lot on the world and export it?

[ladydragon76]

To my knowledge no, but there might be routing issues for the sims when they go places if there are no sidewalks or roads.  I'd say go for it!   I'm the experimental type myself.  At worst, you'll get a message that the world can't be exported, or maybe you won't be able to play in it.  It really wouldn't take much though to get something like that together.  Camera routing, and where sims can't go routing, an icon, a name, description, and you'd probably be good to go.

*hugz!*
-LD

[Anushka]

If it's an island, you don't even have to bother with camera and sims routing part. CAW will automaticaly block water and high cliffs for Sims, so no problems there.
You can't really put one giant lot, since largest lot possible is 64x64. But you can export map without doing anything but adding description and thumbnail, and see how it look in game.
If you're not satisfied with result, uninstall and delete that world from launcher, and from Export folder, go back to CAW do what you want and export it again.
Only thing you have to keep in mind that it is not good to have more then one world with same name.

If you use mountain map, you can check routing data by clicking view/show routing data (it show white net), if at least one white line is reaching that lot, you're fine. Other not so accurate way of checking this is autopaint map, if your lot is surrounded by high rocky cliffs, you may want to smooth terrain around it.
Also, no roads means no cars, bikes or bicicles. You may want to put road but create custom road with say dirt pawning, so it looks more fitting in your world.

[BellaClo]

Routing questions:
Sorry Anushka, but I'm afraid I can't agree, and I'm a bit a routing-maniac, so I have to share my 2 cents here .
CAW automatically blocks routing in water (ocean/ponds), but as far as I know, not for high cliffs. Has it changed in the last version (generations) maybe?

For what I know, CAW automatically shows steep slopes that should be painted 'non routable'. They appear with a redish paint. But you still have to do it manually.

I strongly recommend paying a lot of attention to your routing. This is the cause of a lot of problems with players' created worlds: lagging, freezing... Even with EA's worlds, there are routing issues (China => near Hot Springs, Bridgeport). In an island, you won't need the yellow "non-camera-no-sims-routing" paint indeed. But the blue paint, "camera-ok-but-no-sims", is still well needed.

The white lines from the routing network always have to be ended by a white dot. And you can't leave dots unconnected, in the middle of a blue paint zone, either.

Pay attention to the routing around the objects (rocks, deco items, flora items...) you place in your world too. Those objects have a red footprint attached to their base, the area within the red mark is automatically non routable. Yet, when you rotate those objects (especially rocks), the red square is often also rotated and results in weird adaptation from the routing white lines around it. To check this properly, you have to hide those objects (top of the screen, second menu from the left, look for 'layers' and toggle off/on the 'objects' and 'flora'). Check the routing again and remove, by painting in blue, all the white lines and dots left in area where there shouldn't be any.

Single lines to access a lot = routing bottleneck, and a huge one :-) I don't think it's a good idea.

Regenerate and check routing often, along your work. If your routing is already on when you regenerate it, move a little bit the camera so that the rendering in the main window is regenerated too. And don't forget, before you export, regenerate routing a last time  .

As a side note, no road also means that some NPC's won't come to your lot (police officer for burglar, maid, pizza delivery...). It's not a big deal. The idea of Anushka, to use dirt road, is a very good one, and an elegant solution to this.

Good work!