I made a mess last night with new mods. I was planning to start over soon anyway. It just happened sooner than I planned.
For now, I am just going to stick with cc.loader, the icemunmun mods that use only cc.loader, and other mods that work the same way. I need to be more familiar with the game itself before I start trying to tweak it too much. I was in over my head.
I really like the basic gardening and food system of Sims 3. I understand better now what the Sims 4 mods are trying to accomplish. Context is so important. At the very least, this time spent playing Sims 3 will make me a better Sims 4 player.
At first, the icemunmun mods made no sense to me! As soon as I understood the option that only needed cc.loader and the files that worked with just cc.loader, I knew what to download and install for a lite experience. Sometimes less is more.
For someone that knows more about all this, a beginners tutorial would be helpful, with a list of links to some compatible files that can simply be dropped into the packages folder. And then show a picture of the complete set of files as it looks in the folder, so someone can double check that they nothing extra and nothing missing.
I made the mistake of downloading and running exe files that I had no business playing around with. Each mod is linked to more mods that are linked to more mods that are linked to more mods. I was so confused. I am a bit above average in my computer skills. When I struggle, it usually means there is a large group of people struggling even more. I came very close to giving up. I had to go take a walk to walk off my anxiety, and then come back and start over at the very beginning, making sure to read EVERYTHING.