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hat_plays_simsSo, originally, these were going to be separate uploads, and then I took preview pics of everything all together, and I said, screw it! They both start with Medi, let's go.
There are selections from five Tarox sets behind the cut-- the Medieval Bathroom, Medieval I Kitchen, Medieval II Dining Room, Medieval III Bedroom, and Mediterranean Kitchen. They are old, and sometimes a little funky, and it was in fact a challenge retexturing some of them.
Let's go.
All woods are my go-to SDA Medieval Castle Kitchen/Piggi 03 blend in Pooklet's Project Mayhem naturals. Fabric colors (on the curtain, mostly), are Pooklet's naturals, CuriousB's Any Color You Like, and Aelia's Autumn, and where linens happen? I used that eight-linen selection from Project Mayhem (Time Bomb, Primer, and Grenade), ACYL (Milk & Oyster), and Aelia's Eco colors (Ecru, Vanilla, and Beige).
Let's start with the bathroom!
You're only getting a few pieces from that set because I will admit right now that the whole of Buy Mode Blitz is me recoloring the things I, me, personally, need various recolors for. So since the version of Tarox's Medieval Bath toilet I use has been texture-referenced to Buggy's niches, the tub is too wide for its footprint and that bothers me, and the bench... is not well-mapped (I tried! I did try. I had such plans for that bench), the sink, curtain, torch, and mirror are all I did.
Are these (bathroom, we're gonna ask again later for other rooms) pieces historically accurate?
Ehhhh.
Okay the first thing you have to keep in mind is, there's no such thing as a Medieval bathroom. A little room with a place to poop, a place to bathe, a place to wash your hands or face or brush your teeth, and a mirror? Nope. Not a thing.
Which is not to say sanitary facilities weren't a thing. I do go on about garderobes! But you didn't have one room set aside for Large Non-Kitchen Plumbing Fixtures, so these pieces are best looked at individually.
Let's start with the easy one. This is Tarox's Medieval Bath curtain, it's conveniently three tiles wide, it sticks to the wall on the end that it's "open," but Sims can just walk on through.
And it's a curtain on an iron rod. It doesn't work for me as a bathroom-specific item-- because in an age when 'pooping off the bridge' is acceptable behavior when you're out and about and the richest man in town has another, slightly-less-rich man whose job it is to wipe the richest man's butt, bathroom privacy isn't really a thing-- but there's no reason you couldn't use it wherever you need to give the illusion of privacy, reducing drafts, or cordoning off a backstage area. (For actual privacy? Stick that sucker across a three-tile-wide alcove and close off the alcove with the floor divider of your choice. Or, invisible fence and gate!)
I have recolored it for you 90 times, in Magpie's linen and TS3 twill. Technically the twill is a little out of scale, but it's also about as small as it can usefully be given the size of the texture. The iron rod on my recolors uses the black/iron texture from Sunni's Wizard's Tower metals.
DOWNLOAD in 8 Linens
DOWNLOAD in Pooklet Project Mayhem Naturals
DOWNLOAD Aelia's Autumn
DOWNLOAD CuriousB's Any Color You Like
The sink is perfectly historically plausible; it's a bucket of water on a square table with a pitcher shelved underneath. It might not look quintessentially Medieval, but not even the shape of the pitcher is out of the realm of plausibility. Stick it in your garderobe or your kitchen or your bedchamber and have a nice place to wash hands, do dishes, or have a spit-bath. The bucket's cooping/banding is, like the curtain rod, Sunni's iron/black Wizard's Tower metal, and the sink's pitcher has been retextured using either Felicitations's Pirate Bay Redux White Plain or Sandy Plain, Boggy1's Wottle-And-Daub White or Brown, or Windkeeper's Tavern 8 wallpapers. ... I thought I got all of them for this shot but apparently I missed one.
DOWNLOAD Sink
The mirror is too big, as is often the case, but the shape of the frame is nice and really, it's no worse than any other 'four times bigger than it should be' Medieval mirror. Besides, they're clearly trying to make the mirror look bigger using a massive wood frame. Someday I'd like to put carved textures on that frame, but that day is not today.
Please note I may have re-priced the mirror (I sorted my mirrors by size of the mirror part), so if you don't want to risk that, you may not want to let my copy of the mesh overwrite the original, if you have it installed.
DOWNLOAD Mirror
The torch has been retextured in Sunni Wizard's Tower metals, and... Okay listen, I followed Tarox's example and the whole torch is metal, I think this might actually be an oil lamp designed to look like a torch, not that torches were used in wall fixtures anyway. I don't know what's going on there. It's not particularly period or particularly physically possible but it's also shiftable, quarter-tile-enabled, pretty unobtrusive aesthetically, and uses fire light no matter your lighting mod, so. From a historical standpoint, extremely confusing, but from an art direction standpoint, dead useful.
And no matter how much I love historical accuracy, adequacy, or plausibility, sometimes you just need art direction.
DOWNLOAD Torch
And that's all I've got for the bathroom!
Let's move on-- to the bedroom! Or, to Medieval III.
In this set, I only did the dresser and the end table, again with SWT Black/Iron metal fittings, and 20 Pooklet Project Mayhem naturals over the SDA/Piggi03 wood blend.
(I did not do the bed because I don't like it, the tapestries because those require more art and/or art research than I'm ready for at the moment, the chest because it's got huge Art Nouveau cutouts at either end and that my friends is Elvish, not Medieval, and the sofa and chair because they look more like that mid-century colonial revival look than anything Medieval, with their bentwood arms and piles of turnings.)
So let's discuss the pieces I did do.
The dresser is a little more Tudor than Medieval, with those fantastic turned legs, but I have few enough dressers that I'm willing to call that big square beast close enough. There are, as there often are on Tarox meshes, a few places where I couldn't make the woodgrain go the right direction because the section is mapped to about two pixels (even with the texture size doubled), and this is another piece that would've been either heavily carved or gaily painted and I just don't have the patience for more than what I did to it.
Also, save this swatch, I forgot to put it in the zip file.
DOWNLOAD Dresser
I am not in love with the end table; it matches the Dining Room Bookcase as well as the Bedroom Dresser, but the cabinet part doesn't have a bottom and while the mapping on the legs is a little better than Tarox's usual, I still can't figure out how to shade the pierce-carving on the door. I don't feel like it's an accurate piece but it matches a couple of more accurate pieces and we all need places to put our newspapers or Move_Objects our vessel sinks, so whatever.
(I really feel like these three pieces could be texture-referenced, but they'd have to be remapped. ... Which is not. Not the worst thing.)
DOWNLOAD End Table
But hey! The end table leads us into the dining room! Tarox's Medieval Dining set comes in 20 Pooklet Project Mayhem naturals over SDA/Piggi 03, with accents in Sunni Wizard's Tower black/iron metal.
Once again, this isn't the whole set. I have only recolored the dining table (1x3), chest coffee table, and bookcase. The deco pieces that come with this set are interesting, but I don't use them and Tarox tends to map rounded objects VERY strangely, so I'm not bothering with them. And the dining chair? The dining chair is a copy of Greydragon's Gothic Arch Breakdown Chair, and while I do love House Greydragon (I've learned a lot from their site) and would have happily recolored the Plywood Gothic Camping Throne... Tarox's mapping doesn't even let me use straight-grained wood, much less do anything with shading to let the gothic arches pop. If someone wants to fix the chair, I will recolor it.
Okay, more pics and historicisity.
The bookcase (I did not get detail pics somehow) is fantastic, definitely something you'd see in an early-period castle or a later-period upper-middle-class home. I have done my best to deal with Tarox's mapping but NATURALLY some of the bits mapped to tiny, tiny areas (that therefore stretch a couple of pixels in an unseemly fashion) are right on the front. This one actually might be a piece that'd look better painted (and real Medieval people would probably have painted it), but I couldn't figure out the mapping for the pierced bits to figure that out. Great piece with frustrating mapping!
DOWNLOAD Bookcase
The chest-as-coffee-table is fine! It's maybe a little squat but it has feet to get it up off the floor (meaning it was meant for indoor storage as well as travel) and although it doesn't exactly have a domed top (ideal for keeping rain out, as opposed to a flat top, ideal for stacking), it sort of has a faintly hipped top, and with the way Tarox meshes things, that's good enough for me. ... Although on THIS mesh, I can't actually complain that much about mapping-- every single piece of wood is mapped in such a way that woodgrain works on it! Carving or painting might even work, which would both be very accurate and are both things I'm not bothering with myself.
DOWNLOAD Coffee Table
The table is Fancy, and later-period because of the turned legs. Not that there couldn't be turned table legs early on, but in the early Middle Ages, the Great Hall was basically where everybody ate, cooked, and slept. Thus the tables and benches were on trestles, so when the table-based part of the day was over, they were disassembled and flat-packed against the wall so everybody could sack out on the floor. A permanent table meant the room couldn't be used for non-table activities without moving the tables, which was harder than moving tabletops and trestles, and so if you had a dedicated ballroom or enough guest rooms and servants' quarters that nobody HAD to sleep on the floor of the Great Hall, well dang, that was posh even for a castle.
DOWNLOAD 3-Tile Dining Table
And that's it for the dining room, but you'll notice there are two tables in that shot. So let's move to the other Medi- in this post, and look at Tarox's Mediterranean Kitchen. I only did two pieces from this set, the table and the lounger, and they come in 20 Pooklet Project Mayhem naturals over SDA/Piggi03, and two variations on the theme of lounger-- one all wood and with one of Sun & Moon's Basket-Weaving... basket-weaves.
Are they Medieval pieces, since the set doesn't actually claim to be Medieval?
Well, the table is exactly as accurate as Tarox's Medieval Dining Room table, because it's effectively the 2-tile table of that 3-tile mesh, despite being mapped differently. (Similar parts, just... scattered over the UV map.) So, being a permanent table with heavy turned legs, it's reasonably accurate to later in the period.
DOWNLOAD 2-Tile Kitchen Table
I'm not even going to pretend I think the lounger is accurate, swoopy as it is, but it's a decent-enough lounge chair for Medieval (or fantasy, or other historical) Sims without being from Castaway Stories or the WFS Fisherman lounger (which is fantastic but you can't put a fishing-net chair in your Lady's chambers). An important note on the lounger-- there's a weirdie in the mapping right at the seat. I have done what I can to mitigate it in the basketweave (the grain of the wood just stretches, that's fine), but short of someone re-mapping the dang thing, it's as good as it's getting.
Fun fact, one reason I know the lounge chair isn't historically accurate for a Medieval game? It's a lounging chair. Comfortable sitting furniture-- besides beds-- wasn't really a thing until just after the end of the Middle Ages, when Herr Gutenberg's printing press made European novels a possibility, and people suddenly needed a comfortable place to relax for hours without just slothfully taking to their beds. Thanks, Cervantes!
DOWNLOAD Chair WOOD
DOWNLOAD Chair WOVEN
And that is as Mediterranean as we get.
Tarox's Medieval I Kitchen is-- well, it's still selections? But it's more than any previous set has gotten. You're getting the table, bench, table/hutch thing, sacks, shelf with candle, and MotherOf70's texture-referenced and undecorated shelf with candle, but you are NOT getting the fireplace, cauldron, decorative pottery, broom, barrels, stove, or window, either because I removed them for frustrating me or because it's a really neat window but this is BUY MODE Blitz. Wooden items come in 20 Pooklet Project Mayhem colors over my now-standard blend of Piggi Wood 03 and Sims Design Avenue's Medieval Kitchen wood, sacks come in my 8 Linen selection (Pooklet, CuriousB, and Aelia Eco colors) over a burlap texture I found on Google YEARS ago, and a few of the plates I used on the ATS Church End Table and the five simplest pottery-looking wall textures I've got. The decorative bits on the candle shelf include WFS Barn wallpapers, Felicity's Pirate Bay Redux wallpapers, Magpie's linen in my 8 Linen selection, and Sunni Wizard's Tower metals, applied... uh, pretty randomly.
Is the kitchen stuff historically accurate?
Okay the thing about Tarox historical meshes is that they're a fantastic blend of actual period pieces and stuff made up out of whole cloth to provide an in-game necessity for Sims. So, as is often the case with Tarox meshes, yes and no.
Yes, the bench is historically accurate! As with most woods it would probably have been gaily painted by anyone who could afford paint, but I gotta admit I do like the stained wood look (plus it's a lot easier to make woodgrain work with Tarox's sometimes-strange mapping than fancy paint details). Also, fun detail, if you look closely at the bench (which is a dining chair), you can see that it's held together with gravity and tension and could very easily be taken apart, packed in a chest, and either stored because you were just having guests over or taken along on a move or a progress or a piligrimage or whatever. That was HUGELY common with Medieval furniture, and with EARLY Medieval furniture, seems to have been the norm. The bench is great!
Fair warning, the bench has two subsets that are exactly the same but they use different textures and I can't figure out why. Since I didn't figure anyone would want the Flash Powder seat but not the Flash Powder legs, each color has both subsets in ONE PACKAGE. Deleting one subset deletes both, but saves your game loading time.
DOWNLOAD Bench
The table feels more Roman than Medieval to me, somehow, and I kind of can't figure out why? Maybe it's the way it's sitting on four cross-braced legs instead of a trestle, I dunno. But it's not implausible and, as tables go, it's generally pretty unobtrusive. The table is okay!
DOWNLOAD Table
The hutch-table is... awkward? It functions as a table, not a desk, and I'm pretty sure Tarox intended it to be the place you serve food. Trouble is, the construction of the thing can't seem to decide what class it belongs to. There's a LOT of solid wood involved, which suggests upper class, but it only displays one plate and some practical, round-bottomed jugs, which suggests either upper lower class or a food-prep piece in an upper-class kitchen. (Tarox did not map the jugs in a way I can texture them to be decorative.) It's also definitely a permanent piece, making it later-period, but there's no enclosed storage underneath, making it... weird. There's nothing about the hutch table that's glaringly out-of-period, but by itself I just don't know what to do with it. The hutch is having some kind of identity crisis.
DOWNLOAD Hutch Table
The wall shelf (both versions) is... let's call it accurate enough-- although wall shelving looks, from what I've seen, more likely as built-ins or as paneling than just... something hung on the wall. So it all depends on how you use it! The shape is great. Fair warning, though--
Tarox's original shelf let me recolor it with SimPE-- great for MotherOf70's texture-referenced version-- but I sure as heck can't recolor the ding-dang thing in the actual game. Both meshes are included.
DOWNLOAD Candle Shelf
The sacks are sacks! They're fine! Anything could be in there, the sacks are very anonymous. You can't go wrong with a nice anonymous sack! ... But I gotta say they're MUCH more meant for transport than storage, because pest control in the Middle Ages was... very organic. Like, fragrant herbs, cats, chickens, weasels, dogs kind of organic. A burlap sack isn't REMOTELY proof against mice or rats or weevils. So, uh...
Since Tarox's sacks felt to me so much like a transport rather than a storage option, I looked up DeeDee's fridge-stockable deco food tutorial and Creesims' food points tutorial and there are now two options for the sacks: One, Tarox's original $10 deco sacks, found in Deco/Misc, which function as intended, and two, 102-food point fridge-stockable sacks, costing $200 and found in Appliance/Misc. I don't know what kind of staples are in those sacks, could be wheat or rice or beans or pease or frickin' popcorn, but the GUIDs are the same, so you do have to pick one, and my version retains Tarox's umlaut but also adds a Z, so it'll load last.
DOWNLOAD Table
And that's it for the Tarox 'Medi' selections!
Wanna help me feed my cats?
In case you feel like dropping me a buck or two, should you have a buck or two to spare. Donors get two things at the moment: a) a link to the Super Secret Cat Gallery, full of pictures of the cats you'll be feeding, updated sporadically when the cats do something photogenic and I'm fast enough on the trigger to catch it, and b) a link to the list of content I have done-but-not-screencapped, nearly done, partly done, or in the planning stages, and the option to suggest what ought to be in the next batch of things I focus on.
There are selections from five Tarox sets behind the cut-- the Medieval Bathroom, Medieval I Kitchen, Medieval II Dining Room, Medieval III Bedroom, and Mediterranean Kitchen. They are old, and sometimes a little funky, and it was in fact a challenge retexturing some of them.
Let's go.
All woods are my go-to SDA Medieval Castle Kitchen/Piggi 03 blend in Pooklet's Project Mayhem naturals. Fabric colors (on the curtain, mostly), are Pooklet's naturals, CuriousB's Any Color You Like, and Aelia's Autumn, and where linens happen? I used that eight-linen selection from Project Mayhem (Time Bomb, Primer, and Grenade), ACYL (Milk & Oyster), and Aelia's Eco colors (Ecru, Vanilla, and Beige).
Let's start with the bathroom!
You're only getting a few pieces from that set because I will admit right now that the whole of Buy Mode Blitz is me recoloring the things I, me, personally, need various recolors for. So since the version of Tarox's Medieval Bath toilet I use has been texture-referenced to Buggy's niches, the tub is too wide for its footprint and that bothers me, and the bench... is not well-mapped (I tried! I did try. I had such plans for that bench), the sink, curtain, torch, and mirror are all I did.
Are these (bathroom, we're gonna ask again later for other rooms) pieces historically accurate?
Ehhhh.
Okay the first thing you have to keep in mind is, there's no such thing as a Medieval bathroom. A little room with a place to poop, a place to bathe, a place to wash your hands or face or brush your teeth, and a mirror? Nope. Not a thing.
Which is not to say sanitary facilities weren't a thing. I do go on about garderobes! But you didn't have one room set aside for Large Non-Kitchen Plumbing Fixtures, so these pieces are best looked at individually.
Let's start with the easy one. This is Tarox's Medieval Bath curtain, it's conveniently three tiles wide, it sticks to the wall on the end that it's "open," but Sims can just walk on through.
And it's a curtain on an iron rod. It doesn't work for me as a bathroom-specific item-- because in an age when 'pooping off the bridge' is acceptable behavior when you're out and about and the richest man in town has another, slightly-less-rich man whose job it is to wipe the richest man's butt, bathroom privacy isn't really a thing-- but there's no reason you couldn't use it wherever you need to give the illusion of privacy, reducing drafts, or cordoning off a backstage area. (For actual privacy? Stick that sucker across a three-tile-wide alcove and close off the alcove with the floor divider of your choice. Or, invisible fence and gate!)
I have recolored it for you 90 times, in Magpie's linen and TS3 twill. Technically the twill is a little out of scale, but it's also about as small as it can usefully be given the size of the texture. The iron rod on my recolors uses the black/iron texture from Sunni's Wizard's Tower metals.
DOWNLOAD in 8 Linens
DOWNLOAD in Pooklet Project Mayhem Naturals
DOWNLOAD Aelia's Autumn
DOWNLOAD CuriousB's Any Color You Like
The sink is perfectly historically plausible; it's a bucket of water on a square table with a pitcher shelved underneath. It might not look quintessentially Medieval, but not even the shape of the pitcher is out of the realm of plausibility. Stick it in your garderobe or your kitchen or your bedchamber and have a nice place to wash hands, do dishes, or have a spit-bath. The bucket's cooping/banding is, like the curtain rod, Sunni's iron/black Wizard's Tower metal, and the sink's pitcher has been retextured using either Felicitations's Pirate Bay Redux White Plain or Sandy Plain, Boggy1's Wottle-And-Daub White or Brown, or Windkeeper's Tavern 8 wallpapers. ... I thought I got all of them for this shot but apparently I missed one.
DOWNLOAD Sink
The mirror is too big, as is often the case, but the shape of the frame is nice and really, it's no worse than any other 'four times bigger than it should be' Medieval mirror. Besides, they're clearly trying to make the mirror look bigger using a massive wood frame. Someday I'd like to put carved textures on that frame, but that day is not today.
Please note I may have re-priced the mirror (I sorted my mirrors by size of the mirror part), so if you don't want to risk that, you may not want to let my copy of the mesh overwrite the original, if you have it installed.
DOWNLOAD Mirror
The torch has been retextured in Sunni Wizard's Tower metals, and... Okay listen, I followed Tarox's example and the whole torch is metal, I think this might actually be an oil lamp designed to look like a torch, not that torches were used in wall fixtures anyway. I don't know what's going on there. It's not particularly period or particularly physically possible but it's also shiftable, quarter-tile-enabled, pretty unobtrusive aesthetically, and uses fire light no matter your lighting mod, so. From a historical standpoint, extremely confusing, but from an art direction standpoint, dead useful.
And no matter how much I love historical accuracy, adequacy, or plausibility, sometimes you just need art direction.
DOWNLOAD Torch
And that's all I've got for the bathroom!
Let's move on-- to the bedroom! Or, to Medieval III.
In this set, I only did the dresser and the end table, again with SWT Black/Iron metal fittings, and 20 Pooklet Project Mayhem naturals over the SDA/Piggi03 wood blend.
(I did not do the bed because I don't like it, the tapestries because those require more art and/or art research than I'm ready for at the moment, the chest because it's got huge Art Nouveau cutouts at either end and that my friends is Elvish, not Medieval, and the sofa and chair because they look more like that mid-century colonial revival look than anything Medieval, with their bentwood arms and piles of turnings.)
So let's discuss the pieces I did do.
The dresser is a little more Tudor than Medieval, with those fantastic turned legs, but I have few enough dressers that I'm willing to call that big square beast close enough. There are, as there often are on Tarox meshes, a few places where I couldn't make the woodgrain go the right direction because the section is mapped to about two pixels (even with the texture size doubled), and this is another piece that would've been either heavily carved or gaily painted and I just don't have the patience for more than what I did to it.
Also, save this swatch, I forgot to put it in the zip file.
DOWNLOAD Dresser
I am not in love with the end table; it matches the Dining Room Bookcase as well as the Bedroom Dresser, but the cabinet part doesn't have a bottom and while the mapping on the legs is a little better than Tarox's usual, I still can't figure out how to shade the pierce-carving on the door. I don't feel like it's an accurate piece but it matches a couple of more accurate pieces and we all need places to put our newspapers or Move_Objects our vessel sinks, so whatever.
(I really feel like these three pieces could be texture-referenced, but they'd have to be remapped. ... Which is not. Not the worst thing.)
DOWNLOAD End Table
But hey! The end table leads us into the dining room! Tarox's Medieval Dining set comes in 20 Pooklet Project Mayhem naturals over SDA/Piggi 03, with accents in Sunni Wizard's Tower black/iron metal.
Once again, this isn't the whole set. I have only recolored the dining table (1x3), chest coffee table, and bookcase. The deco pieces that come with this set are interesting, but I don't use them and Tarox tends to map rounded objects VERY strangely, so I'm not bothering with them. And the dining chair? The dining chair is a copy of Greydragon's Gothic Arch Breakdown Chair, and while I do love House Greydragon (I've learned a lot from their site) and would have happily recolored the Plywood Gothic Camping Throne... Tarox's mapping doesn't even let me use straight-grained wood, much less do anything with shading to let the gothic arches pop. If someone wants to fix the chair, I will recolor it.
Okay, more pics and historicisity.
The bookcase (I did not get detail pics somehow) is fantastic, definitely something you'd see in an early-period castle or a later-period upper-middle-class home. I have done my best to deal with Tarox's mapping but NATURALLY some of the bits mapped to tiny, tiny areas (that therefore stretch a couple of pixels in an unseemly fashion) are right on the front. This one actually might be a piece that'd look better painted (and real Medieval people would probably have painted it), but I couldn't figure out the mapping for the pierced bits to figure that out. Great piece with frustrating mapping!
DOWNLOAD Bookcase
The chest-as-coffee-table is fine! It's maybe a little squat but it has feet to get it up off the floor (meaning it was meant for indoor storage as well as travel) and although it doesn't exactly have a domed top (ideal for keeping rain out, as opposed to a flat top, ideal for stacking), it sort of has a faintly hipped top, and with the way Tarox meshes things, that's good enough for me. ... Although on THIS mesh, I can't actually complain that much about mapping-- every single piece of wood is mapped in such a way that woodgrain works on it! Carving or painting might even work, which would both be very accurate and are both things I'm not bothering with myself.
DOWNLOAD Coffee Table
The table is Fancy, and later-period because of the turned legs. Not that there couldn't be turned table legs early on, but in the early Middle Ages, the Great Hall was basically where everybody ate, cooked, and slept. Thus the tables and benches were on trestles, so when the table-based part of the day was over, they were disassembled and flat-packed against the wall so everybody could sack out on the floor. A permanent table meant the room couldn't be used for non-table activities without moving the tables, which was harder than moving tabletops and trestles, and so if you had a dedicated ballroom or enough guest rooms and servants' quarters that nobody HAD to sleep on the floor of the Great Hall, well dang, that was posh even for a castle.
DOWNLOAD 3-Tile Dining Table
And that's it for the dining room, but you'll notice there are two tables in that shot. So let's move to the other Medi- in this post, and look at Tarox's Mediterranean Kitchen. I only did two pieces from this set, the table and the lounger, and they come in 20 Pooklet Project Mayhem naturals over SDA/Piggi03, and two variations on the theme of lounger-- one all wood and with one of Sun & Moon's Basket-Weaving... basket-weaves.
Are they Medieval pieces, since the set doesn't actually claim to be Medieval?
Well, the table is exactly as accurate as Tarox's Medieval Dining Room table, because it's effectively the 2-tile table of that 3-tile mesh, despite being mapped differently. (Similar parts, just... scattered over the UV map.) So, being a permanent table with heavy turned legs, it's reasonably accurate to later in the period.
DOWNLOAD 2-Tile Kitchen Table
I'm not even going to pretend I think the lounger is accurate, swoopy as it is, but it's a decent-enough lounge chair for Medieval (or fantasy, or other historical) Sims without being from Castaway Stories or the WFS Fisherman lounger (which is fantastic but you can't put a fishing-net chair in your Lady's chambers). An important note on the lounger-- there's a weirdie in the mapping right at the seat. I have done what I can to mitigate it in the basketweave (the grain of the wood just stretches, that's fine), but short of someone re-mapping the dang thing, it's as good as it's getting.
Fun fact, one reason I know the lounge chair isn't historically accurate for a Medieval game? It's a lounging chair. Comfortable sitting furniture-- besides beds-- wasn't really a thing until just after the end of the Middle Ages, when Herr Gutenberg's printing press made European novels a possibility, and people suddenly needed a comfortable place to relax for hours without just slothfully taking to their beds. Thanks, Cervantes!
DOWNLOAD Chair WOOD
DOWNLOAD Chair WOVEN
And that is as Mediterranean as we get.
Tarox's Medieval I Kitchen is-- well, it's still selections? But it's more than any previous set has gotten. You're getting the table, bench, table/hutch thing, sacks, shelf with candle, and MotherOf70's texture-referenced and undecorated shelf with candle, but you are NOT getting the fireplace, cauldron, decorative pottery, broom, barrels, stove, or window, either because I removed them for frustrating me or because it's a really neat window but this is BUY MODE Blitz. Wooden items come in 20 Pooklet Project Mayhem colors over my now-standard blend of Piggi Wood 03 and Sims Design Avenue's Medieval Kitchen wood, sacks come in my 8 Linen selection (Pooklet, CuriousB, and Aelia Eco colors) over a burlap texture I found on Google YEARS ago, and a few of the plates I used on the ATS Church End Table and the five simplest pottery-looking wall textures I've got. The decorative bits on the candle shelf include WFS Barn wallpapers, Felicity's Pirate Bay Redux wallpapers, Magpie's linen in my 8 Linen selection, and Sunni Wizard's Tower metals, applied... uh, pretty randomly.
Is the kitchen stuff historically accurate?
Okay the thing about Tarox historical meshes is that they're a fantastic blend of actual period pieces and stuff made up out of whole cloth to provide an in-game necessity for Sims. So, as is often the case with Tarox meshes, yes and no.
Yes, the bench is historically accurate! As with most woods it would probably have been gaily painted by anyone who could afford paint, but I gotta admit I do like the stained wood look (plus it's a lot easier to make woodgrain work with Tarox's sometimes-strange mapping than fancy paint details). Also, fun detail, if you look closely at the bench (which is a dining chair), you can see that it's held together with gravity and tension and could very easily be taken apart, packed in a chest, and either stored because you were just having guests over or taken along on a move or a progress or a piligrimage or whatever. That was HUGELY common with Medieval furniture, and with EARLY Medieval furniture, seems to have been the norm. The bench is great!
Fair warning, the bench has two subsets that are exactly the same but they use different textures and I can't figure out why. Since I didn't figure anyone would want the Flash Powder seat but not the Flash Powder legs, each color has both subsets in ONE PACKAGE. Deleting one subset deletes both, but saves your game loading time.
DOWNLOAD Bench
The table feels more Roman than Medieval to me, somehow, and I kind of can't figure out why? Maybe it's the way it's sitting on four cross-braced legs instead of a trestle, I dunno. But it's not implausible and, as tables go, it's generally pretty unobtrusive. The table is okay!
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The hutch-table is... awkward? It functions as a table, not a desk, and I'm pretty sure Tarox intended it to be the place you serve food. Trouble is, the construction of the thing can't seem to decide what class it belongs to. There's a LOT of solid wood involved, which suggests upper class, but it only displays one plate and some practical, round-bottomed jugs, which suggests either upper lower class or a food-prep piece in an upper-class kitchen. (Tarox did not map the jugs in a way I can texture them to be decorative.) It's also definitely a permanent piece, making it later-period, but there's no enclosed storage underneath, making it... weird. There's nothing about the hutch table that's glaringly out-of-period, but by itself I just don't know what to do with it. The hutch is having some kind of identity crisis.
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The wall shelf (both versions) is... let's call it accurate enough-- although wall shelving looks, from what I've seen, more likely as built-ins or as paneling than just... something hung on the wall. So it all depends on how you use it! The shape is great. Fair warning, though--
Tarox's original shelf let me recolor it with SimPE-- great for MotherOf70's texture-referenced version-- but I sure as heck can't recolor the ding-dang thing in the actual game. Both meshes are included.
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The sacks are sacks! They're fine! Anything could be in there, the sacks are very anonymous. You can't go wrong with a nice anonymous sack! ... But I gotta say they're MUCH more meant for transport than storage, because pest control in the Middle Ages was... very organic. Like, fragrant herbs, cats, chickens, weasels, dogs kind of organic. A burlap sack isn't REMOTELY proof against mice or rats or weevils. So, uh...
Since Tarox's sacks felt to me so much like a transport rather than a storage option, I looked up DeeDee's fridge-stockable deco food tutorial and Creesims' food points tutorial and there are now two options for the sacks: One, Tarox's original $10 deco sacks, found in Deco/Misc, which function as intended, and two, 102-food point fridge-stockable sacks, costing $200 and found in Appliance/Misc. I don't know what kind of staples are in those sacks, could be wheat or rice or beans or pease or frickin' popcorn, but the GUIDs are the same, so you do have to pick one, and my version retains Tarox's umlaut but also adds a Z, so it'll load last.
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And that's it for the Tarox 'Medi' selections!
Wanna help me feed my cats?
In case you feel like dropping me a buck or two, should you have a buck or two to spare. Donors get two things at the moment: a) a link to the Super Secret Cat Gallery, full of pictures of the cats you'll be feeding, updated sporadically when the cats do something photogenic and I'm fast enough on the trigger to catch it, and b) a link to the list of content I have done-but-not-screencapped, nearly done, partly done, or in the planning stages, and the option to suggest what ought to be in the next batch of things I focus on.
no subject
Date: 2022-01-28 06:02 pm (UTC)Okay. So. I've had that medieval bath curtain in and out of my game for years over multiple reinstalls, sourced from a Victorian era slum lot on MTS2 called The Frying Pan. I love that curtain. I never knew where it actually originated from.
Now I know its origins AND it now comes in a vast array of beautiful colours suitable for a wide range of purposes? Absolutely delightful. I've used this primarily in the past to cordon off bathing areas and create privacy for sim kiddos bunking in the same room, but the Autumn and ACYL palettes are giving me ideas for cordoning off private areas in bars/pubs/theatres, amongst other things.
I should add that everything else also looks fantastic and I'm definitely going to be going on a building spree this weekend, I just. Apparently have Feelings about this one particular curtain item that feels like an old friend.
no subject
Date: 2022-01-29 02:36 am (UTC)I normally use it for 'and behind this curtain, a toilet and or bathtub,' myself, but I could easily see a million other uses for it. Employees-only area? Protect your bookshelves from the light? Backdrop for a portrait? Lots of options!
Thank you for downloading and commenting and I'm happy to dress up your old friend for you.