https://www.patreon.com/posts/how-to-create-37716585

I remembered after receiving several requests that we didn’t have a tutorial on making a custom wrench mod, so decided to make one. Sure, there’s the tutorial I followed on MTS that gave me a general direction, but we need a specific one in case a wrench creator disappears again, or for those who just want to know how for their own ideas.

Before we get started though, just a friendly reminder to respect creators, etc. and if you plan to do “recolors” of a wrench mod, probably ask before doing so if you plan to release it to the public.

The first thing you want to do is make sure you have Sims4Studio (S4S) installed, as well as the UI Texture Squasher and your image editing program of choice (that supports transparent PNGs). Then, make a folder/work area for your mod. This is especially important if you want to be working with multiple colors. I have a main folder, then subfolders for each color, one of them being a base folder that contains the original images in case I made a mistake, need to check something, etc. Organize however you see fit, but this is just the way I do it.

Then, we are going to open S4S and go to the top where Tools is located and click on it, then select “Create Empty Package” from the dropdown menu. A popup will open asking to name the file. Name it whatever you want, but if you plan to release it please fill in your creator name, the name/version/color of the wrench, and use underscores (not spaces or special characters, they lag the game).

Once your empty package has loaded, go to Tools again and this time select “Game File Cruiser” and a popup will appear.

We are now going to copy and paste the Instances of the files we need for our mod into the search system. The instances we need are:

09BBBF9DC6153DF9 – The biggest and contains mostly CAS icons, as well as the main wrench (and used to be swatch wrench, but that has been removed in a recent update).

9AD1293A832706E0 – Second biggest and contains mainly gallery icons, as well as the gallery wrench.

D518B5D7A3BBD37C – The smallest and contains mostly CAS icons, as well as the skin, hair, etc. wrench swatch.

We’ll start with 09BBBF9DC6153DF9. Copy and paste it where it says “Instance”. Now go to the check box area named Type and look for “DST Image” and check it. The cruiser will then filter to just the files we need, which is actually two files for one image. Each image we are looking for comes in a pair of two with a different group ID. Select both (Ctrl + Left Click both) and then click the button “Add to current package” that is located at the bottom right of the popup. They will now be added to the package.

You do the same process for 9AD1293A832706E0 and D518B5D7A3BBD37C, the only difference is that you now hit “Filter” instead of checking a box. This saves you a single click, but you can check and uncheck the DST box as well to reset the search if you prefer that.

Save your package before doing anything else. Now go through each file in the package and export the DST image, which is the weird gray block you’re seeing on the right. You can do so by clicking the little green “Export” button at the bottom right of the screen. Make sure the “Save as Type” is set to “DDS Image (*.dds)” and how you name it is important. I normally do “Color_Group_Instance” so that the Color and Group is front and center and I don’t confuse the two files with the same Instance. Use whatever naming convention works for you though, just make sure you remember which is which based on the Group as that will come back in a few minutes.

Once everything is extracted, it’s time to combine the files so you can work on them. Open UI Texture Squasher and notice the two selection boxes up top with a group ID next to them on the left. We want to select the matching group IDs of the first image you chose to start with, which for this example will be image 09BBBF9DC6153DF9. So, click the “Select” button on the right for group 0x00064DCA, find the image you want with the first matching group ID (so in my case that would be 0x00064DCA_09BBBF9DC6153DF9), select it and click “Open”. Do the same for group ID 0x00064DC9 of your image. Once both are properly setup, click “Convert”. It will ask you to name the merged PNG. This one I normally name after the image, so “Color_Instance_Base ”.