Here you can find custom content for The Sims, Sims 2 and Sims 3 including fashion, furniture, houses & decor. No registration is required to use Parsimonious and all the custom content downloads are free.

Just choose a section from the menu above, then choose a category to preview and download our creations. Information and instructions on how to use the downloads is available in our Support Area (click on the ? icon at the top of the page).

January 2012: Parsimonious has been undergoing major maintainance and substantial structural changes for some time now. The workload required to make all this happen has been insane and has taken an utterly ridiculous amount of time already, however all of it has so far happened quietly in the background, unseen by visitors. In the next few weeks, however, the time must come when changes will need to be made online which means the entire site will go dark for an unknown period of time. As much as I'd like to say we'll only be offline for a few hours, I have to admit that given how long everything else has taken me, it's quite possible it'll end up being a few days, maybe even a couple of weeks, however that will only become apparent at the time.

Currently I have planned for this to occur sometime between the last week of February and mid March, but with a general disclaimer that since everything else has been running behind schedule there's no reason why this should necessarily happen on time.

A great deal of time and thought has gone into merging the changes I need to make the site manageable, with changes that make the site more usable but at the same time ensuring it still looks familiar. As such you should find although some things will be quite different, the site will still look similar to our current design and should still be straightforward to use. More importantly, when it is done we should be resuming something more like a regular update schedule for most sections (I say 'we' but really I mean me because we are down to just 2 full time and 2 part time contributing artists these days). I realize that there are huge numbers of Sims 2 players getting very little new content from us as well as from the community as a whole (for some reason the majority of creators all decide to retire long before most of the players give up on their beloved old games). I'm hoping I'll be able to do better for you when these changes are complete as you've been losing out to Sims 1 and Sims 3 over the past couple of years.

In the meantime you will likely find that a lot of information across the site is out of date, pages and other content may be intermittently missing - this is sadly part of the process but we are nearing the end at long last. Since I am extremely busy and horrifyingly tired with my current site workload, you'll also find delays in answering site email, particularly support messages so I thank you for your patience and support.

Shortly before Christmas I posted an appeal on the site asking visitors for help collecting links for community sites. Since that time nearly a quarter of a million visitors have stopped by the site, out of which only 2 wrote in with a few link suggestions for Sims 1 and 2.

Obviously I was hoping for a more, but since I don't want to delay finishing up our maintainance changes any longer, we will be going live with the rather thin selection currently in our database. If you are a site owner who would like your site listed please do let me know - I update our links very infrequently because it always takes a lot more time than seems reasonable to add new links and I have so many other demands on my time, so there may not be another opportunity for a while to get your site added.

To send in links please email me, the information I need is:

October 2011: Like all websites, this one is a perpetual work in progress, nevertheless there are always milestones along the way which mark the beginning of a new chapter and usually involve more than a little transitional chaos. The current version of Parsimonious you see now is V4 and has been gracing the www for over 4 years. V5 has been 'in the works' for over 2 years and there is much still to do. It is rare that I go so far as to commit to major changes publicly ahead of time, many plans have been delayed or dropped over the years, some planned changes to our content management system have been delayed by more than 5 years already. Nevertheless, this is expected to be a large change which is likely to be disruptive whilst it is being introduced, as well as changing the way the site works in the future.

Aside from some intermittent downtime, running into page redirections and other hiccups whilst we switch over, the biggest change afterwards is that we will no longer have 11 individual sections with their own categories. Instead the site will be split into the 3 game versions, each will have the 'major' categories that are currently on our main menu, but no sub-menus. For example, choosing Sims 3 and then Sims 3 Houses will take you directly into download pages, if you bookmark your favourite game version, it'll be just 1 click to see the newest additions. There will be options to filter content just as there are now, but these will be optional to refine the results you see after getting to the downloads, rather than being forced to pick a category beforehand. This is obviously going to be a big change to our previous formats which will no doubt take some visitors a while to get used to (hence the forewarning), however it should make it faster to access content and easier to move between content sections.

If you have questions about The Sims or installing or using Custom content please try:-

We do have a selection of information and help topics available in our Support Area (which you can access anywhere on the site by clicking on the ? symbol at the top of the page, but please note there are quite a few topics, especially those relating to The Sims 3 game play and custom content issues, which are incomplete or out of date.

If you have additional issues NOT answered at any of the above links you can contact support@parsimonious.org BUT any questions which are answered at the above links will be ignored due to time constraints.

All download zips should include any extra files such as meshes or skins the item needs

Installing is quick and easy once you know how:

Click on the photos to download things you want

Unzip the completed download

Put it in your game's Downloads folder...

OR install it with the game Launcher*

*Instructions vary by game version & item type - please follow them!

Remember if you need extra help, have questions about the game or using your computer, then try searching online! It'll get you answers much faster than emailing us and waiting for a reply!

I fudged this website together and then attempted to make it work in Mozilla Firefox 3+ and Chrome 1+ and IE 7+. If you have problems using IE (and you will at some point I'm sure), try using compatibility mode!

Other browsers are pretty much guarenteed not to be supported. If you are using Opera then I'm sorry to say I don't know how to fix the weird spilling over div problem with the galleries, my suggestion is that you allow yourself to be tempted to try a different browser. Yes, it is nice to be different, be a rebel, stray away from the herd. On the other hand... it does just leave you using a weird web browser that doesn't behave well and isn't supported by 98% of the 80 gazillion websites out there (and we all know the other 2% are just doing it to show off).

Straying away from the herd also gets you eaten... by lions.... Ouch...