How to save your town

I know many people on here have been upset about losing the towns they have spent so much time on. Regardless of if you've only spent a few weeks or a few years on your town, it is still upsetting to see the town you've put love into set to vanish in two weeks. But there is hope for us now!

Today I released a tool called TSTO Friend Puller that allows you to save not only your own town but the towns of all of your friends within the game. The use of the tool is relatively straightforward if you know how to run a python script. The installation and activation of the tool is as follows:

  1. Make sure you have python3 installed (see python.org for the latest Python installer)
  2. When installing python, make sure you install the "pip" component in the command line path. I believe it does this by default now
  3. Open a command prompt (for Windows that WindowsKey-R and type "cmd", for Mac and Linux its called Terminal in your list of Applications)
  4. Download a copy of the tool either by downloading the .zip file or doing a git clone on the repo.
  5. cd into the directory of the tool. (e.g. cd tsto_friend_puller)
  6. Install the required python modules by issuing the command: pip install -r requirements.txt
  7. Now run the tool: python friend_puller.py

Once the tool activates it will ask you for your EA Origin email address (the email address you use to login to the TSTO app). A few moments later it will ask you for the verification code. The verification code will be in an email sent to you from EA with a title such as "Verification Code For The Simpsons: Tapped Out - XXXXX" where XXXXX is the verification code. Once you enter the verification code, the script will download your town and the towns of your friends to a directory named "towns". That's it, you now have a back up of the towns. Being that tool is open source you can see how your information is being used and you can verify that the tool isn't sending your information to anywhere but EA's servers.

The towns are kind of useless without something to run them in. Well we are all in luck. There are at least two open source servers available for you to host your own TSTO instance on. u/whoopsipaniced wrote a server in Javascript (https://github.com/TappedOutReborn/GameServer-Reborn) and I wrote one in Python (https://github.com/tjac/tsto\_server). There is another C++-based server coming but not yet available. Both of these private servers allow you to run your own TSTO servers to keep your town alive. Mind you, by alive I mean you can still interact with your town but there isn't going to be new content like monthly quest lines. These servers are still works in progress so expect errors and hiccups but they are being actively developed.

u/whoopsipaniced set up a discord server where developers and TSTO fans alike chat about the state of the development of these servers and ask for help with the various tools that are available. Please feel free to join, ask questions, and contribute.