Sims 4 Official Let’s Play: Tactile and Intuitive Build Mode

Starting today until The Sims 4’s launch, the official Sims Twitch channel will be hosting livestreams of the game at 3 PM EDT. Today’s livestream was hosted by Sim gurus Ryan Vaughn and Aaron Houts and focused on building a weird house with the game’s “tactile and intuitive” building tools.

They started off by using the classic Motherlode cheat to increase their household’s Simoleons. In Build Mode, they opened the Styled Rooms menu. Clicking on one of these rooms brought up a display.

Each room has three different color designs to choose from. Hovering over individual components of the room displayed information about them. You can place any individual piece of furniture from the room into your lot from here, or the entire room itself. There are special career themed rooms, unlocked by reaching level 10 of different career paths.

While decorating a bathroom, Aaron made use of Build Mode’s text search function. As he typed, various objects, tools, and categories matching the text appeared above. You can also filter objects by color. After placing a few rooms, Aaron showed off the three door heights. These correspond with the short, medium, and tall wall heights. Wall height can be adjusted on the fly, and objects affected by this may automatically adjust.

 

A foundation was instantly added under the house with a simple eight level height slider. Windows can be placed by room, in addition to standard placement. This automatically places evenly spaced out windows across the exposed walls of a room. Aaron displayed the free vertical placement, holding the Alt key to smoothly move a window up and down the wall.

 

In The Sims 4 you no longer need supports for rooms spanning more than two spaces past the ground floor. They can even float in midair! You can move a room up a floor by placing it on top of itself. Roofs are highly customizable, allowing you to resize and curve the shape. The eaves, or bottom edges of a roof, can be adjusted together or individually.

 

On the toolbar at the top of the screen you’ll find many familiar tools. The Design Tool allows you to choose a different color design for an object.

 

In the Lot Info Panel you can edit certain details of your lot, including the name, number of bedrooms and bathrooms, and the lot type. It also displays the current value of the lot.  This ties into sharing it on the Gallery. When changing the lot type, it will display what items you’ll need for the lot to work properly. You will be unable to change the lot type while there are Sims living there.

 

Saving your room to the Gallery or your library is done by selecting the room and clicking the Save To My Library button on the toolbar. You can save the room or the entire lot. Now you can change the display image and the room or lot’s information.

 

Aaron began placing grass over the harsh desert terrain with the terrain tool. The size and feathering can be adjusted. To liven up the environment, various outdoor plants were added to the front of the house. In The Sims 4, terrain and outdoor plants can be placed on top of rooms. Surrounding the top with a fence turned it into a block. This removed the terrain, but Aaron was able to quickly add it back. Now the whole block and its contents could be moved together.

 

Fountains can be created with a selection of different shapes. You can customize your fountain with trim and place different water emitters and decorations inside of it. Differently colored water emitters will change the color of the water as it passes through and glow at night.

 

After completing the strange house, it was uploaded to the Gallery. They pulled up Edna and Mary’s Place, a residential lot uploaded by Graham Nardone.  When placing a lot from the Gallery, you can choose whether or not it is furnished. After placing the lot, a notice popped up noting that items were removed. The lot contained the Plumbob Lamps rewarded to owners of The Sims 3 and its expansions, which Aaron and Ryan did not have in their game. After a quick look around the house, they decided to show off the object resizing cheat.

You’ll be able to find the lot they created on the Gallery after the game’s release under the TS4LiveStream Origin ID. We’ll continue our rundown of the livestreams in the coming days. Stay tuned!