Back in December 2020, which might feel like 3000 years ago already, The Sims 4 base game receive a huge update. After nearly six years, players finally got sliders for creating more customised skin tones and for adjusting make-up swatches.
The December skin tones update added sliders to allow players to make adjustments to opacity, hue, brightness and saturation. While not all of those elements work on all the different CAS make up assets, it was a marked improvement on what The Sims 4 offered until then.
Players who played The Sims 3 fondly remember the game’s colour wheel ? or Create A Style ? which could be used on everything from clothing to curtains in game.
While many players remain hopeful that The Sims 4’s ?colour wheel? will continue to see improvements, the door has been opened for modders to use their ingenuity and add these create a style options to the game. And there is a mod which has done just that.
Color Sliders mod for The Sims 4
Created by thepancake1 and MizoreYukii, the Color Sliders for Hair and Clothes mod allows players to use the swatch sliders on all Sims 4 Create-a-Sim items (not including CC).
Early access to the mod was released on Patreon in early January and has now been made available for public access.
There were some issues with the mod after the Paranormal Stuff Pack update, but those have been fixed and everything is working as expected.
The mod currently works only for CC that, according to the mod’s FAQs, “have been converted to LRLE, the new image resource format will work”. However, there are plans to create a batch converter to allow players to automatically make all CC clothes and hairs to be recolourable.
A word of warning, though, the mod is substantial in size, so if you use a lot of Sims 4 custom content or mods already, be warned. Currently, the mod with both clothes and hair for only the base game is 3.6 GB. The hair only version for the base game is 1.20 GB.
When DLC is include, the size grows quite a bit:
- All EPs with all clothes and hairs is 9 GB.
- All GPs with all clothes and hairs is 3 GB.
- All SPs with all clothes and hair is 2.7 GB.
- All in all, the mod total size with the base game, all EP\GP\SP is 18 gigabytes.
Again, this is something that is actively being worked on the creators.
The sliders work on all CAS items, but some have a few quirks. Hair sliders, for example, will unlock two swatch areas in CAS. On clothing, the colour sliders work as expected, but maxing saturation on mostly white clothes might result in some visual glitches.
Opacity on clothes will cause the Sim’s skin to show on the clothes mesh, which may or may not be what you want. It’s handy for beards though. If you any of the “realistic” Sim skin overlays, these details will be visible when the opacity is toned down.
Additionally, the sliders do not work on pet clothing yet either and skin detail and tattoos are also a work in progress.
You can find out more about the mod and download it on the creators’ Patreon (public access is free). Be sure to read the instructions thoroughly, though. While it is a fairly straight-forward install, it is worth reading through everything to make sure you don’t overwhelm your game.