The Sims 4: Oughties Big Rapids Living Stuff/Icons

In the spirit of the Albums Master, and the Dozerfleet Project Icon Series that followed it, The Sims 4: Oughties Big Rapids Living Stuff featured various folder icons as a bonus for downloaders. While not functional components of gameplay for The Sims 4, these folders allow fans to create folders with custom icons - themed around whichever Big Rapids-relevant business interests them the most.

Three different versions of these folder icons have been released to date, centered around five different businesses in the Big Rapids area.

Targeted businesses
The main red folder icon in each set is the official folder icon for the stuff pack itself, created primarily in Photoshop Elements 2019 and in IcoFX 1.6. Fans of BlueTriton Brands / Nestlé can find a nice Ice Mountain-themed icon, for making folders about Ice Mountain, should they so choose. A Sleet Mountain parody version, while considered, has never been officially implemented.

Mancino's also gets a folder icon in the set, one designed so that it can be used by literally any Mancino's location to theme its folders with. Since it has custom signage in OBRL, Boost Mobile is given a folder icon too. Biggby is likewise granted a custom folder icon. Finally, one was made for the Szot's Bar and Grill. This can be used either by official Szot's staff, or fans, or dealers / distributors that do business with Szot's.

Classic set


The classic folder icon set seen above was first implemented in late July and early August of 2020, with The Merre Edition. The visual aesthetic for this version centered heavily around the at-the-time main theme for Dozerfleet custom iconography in general, which sought to mix plastic Albums Master quasi-realism with early Mac OS X Tiger skeuomorphism with the Windows 10 design language's school of iconography, in the hopes of achieving some sort of balance.

Folders became very dark-looking, however, and lacked healthy contrasts in the right places. The extreme skeuomorphism further produced a heavily dated look - like a custom Linux skeuomorphic UI from 2003-2005.

The Sherpa Patch
October of 2021 saw the release of Windows 11 for newer PCs and tablets, ushering a realization that downloaders of OBRL may very well wish to run The Sims 4 on this newer OS rather than some older one. This, along with a desire to put Matt Kamrowski's character of the Sherpa Sheriff into OBRL - and make him retroactively canon to the pack - led to the November 22nd release of "The Sherpa Patch." This add-on to OBRL fixed not only Sherp's absence with the initial release of The Merre Edition; and not only introduced new folder icons; but it also offered a hotfix for a custom 300 movie poster. This overwrite adds an additional swatch to the poster, so players can have a standard poster or the custom "Tonight, We Dine in Hell!!!" quote movie poster that featured in the pilot episode of Blood Over Water.

The Sherpa Patch splits its folder icon offerings into two categories:

Windows 11 Set


Built as a collection of multi-res ICO files, this set's icons are in 256x256, 128x128, 96x96, 72x72, 64x64, 48x48, 32x32, 24x24, and 16x16 resolutions. Each of them is designed with an emphasis to create more color pop, improve contrast, and make the folder icons' overall appearance be slightly more compatible with the Windows 11 design language and iconography school. The basic gist of this set is to allow users on Windows to do the same thing with this set on Windows 11 that they would do with the classic set on Windows 10. However, using this on Windows 11 would ensure Win11 users don't completely sacrifice visual continuity for the sake of folder identity.

MacOS Mojave set


In keeping with respecting visual design continuity demands, players of The Sims 4 on a Mac running the Mojave version of macOS are granted the option to customize folders with this set. It allows folders to retain visual continuity with the general feel of a Mojave interface; in much the same regard as to how the Win11 set preserves this for Windows 11 users. These images are each in ICNS format, encoded using IcoFX 1.6.4. They run in resolutions of 256x256, 48x48, 32x32, and 16x16 - all standard for the ICNS format. In May of 2022, testing of them in a Mac environment was enabled.