The Sims 4 has officially become
free to play and so with that, obviously a ton of new players are going to
pick the game up for the very first time. And let's be real, building in The Sims
is kind of hard, it's kind of confusing, and it can be really daunting when
you haven't done much of it before. And so today I'm going to walk
you through 20 tips that I have found extremely useful when it
comes to building in The Sims. These are things that I get questions
about all the time. Like I said, it's just kind of confusing even if you've
played the game before or have been for a while. So even if you're already a big Sims fan,
you might not know about a lot of these. The first one is to hold CTRL
and redraw a wall to delete it. So instead of going through and
like, individually deleting a wall or trying to delete it like this,
instead you can get the wall tool, hold CTRL, and then draw over it
again and that'll delete the wall. This is super useful for trying to delete
walls quickly. It even works on fences, you can hold CTRL and delete the fence. You can do it with the room tool even, you
can hold CTRL and delete part of the room. Even on pools you can hold CTRL and
redraw to delete part of that pool. It's pretty useful because you can get to like,
random parts that you might have missed otherwise. You can even do it with like, diagonals if you
want. This one in particular I get asked about so often, my Twitch chat will be like, wait, wait,
wait, what did you just do? How did you do that? So remember, you can hold CTRL
and redraw things to delete them. This next one might be a bit more
common, but it is the move objects cheat. If you type bb.MoveObjectsOn, you can
freely place items. So in your game, you can open up the cheats panel by
holding CTRL + shift + C all at once, and that's going to open up this
little text box in the top left corner. And in there you can type bb.MoveObjects on, and then you press enter and that
turns on the move objects cheat. With that, you can completely freely
place objects so I could like, put these two beds on top of each other. I could put the dresser in the bed, you
can place anything anywhere essentially. N ow obviously you probably don't want to
do that. It's more useful for things like, scooting the nightstands closer to the bed, maybe you want to stick a plant in this
corner because it wouldn't fit otherwise. It's possible you could run into some issues
with this by like, making things unplayable. For example, if you put like, a table in the
bed, your sim probably can't get into the bed, but if you stick it at like, the end of the
bed, you probably won't have any issues. A good rule of thumb is that if
it looks like it won't function, it probably won't function,
but you can always playtest it. Again, it's more useful for like, decorating and placing things where you
want for them to be a little bit cuter. Kind of in a similar vein, you can
hold alt to freely place objects. So I mentioned wanting to like, scoot the nightstand a little bit
closer or scoot the plant in the corner. By default, where it places on the grid
isn't super good, but if you hold alt, you can free place it and like, scoot
it and put it wherever you want. When holding alt, you can also freely rotate
objects so instead of it just rotating like, on these slots, you can hold all
and put it however you'd like. Weirdly, that alt rotating doesn't always work, you might have to switch
your game's camera settings. So the next tip is to use The Sims 3 camera. In-game, there's a Sims 4 camera and
a Sims 3 camera and they change the controls which can be kind of confusing. I personally always use The Sims 3
camera instead of The Sims 4 one. I just find it's better because I can get
better angles, I can rotate around more. To switch the camera settings, do you see this
little camera icon in the top right corner? There's a few things you can like,
zoom out, you can use it to rotate, but you can also change between The
Sims 4 and Sims 3 cameras this way. And also put it into a top down
view which can be kind of useful. The Sims 4 camera is completely different, you can't really get those same angles
that you can with The Sims 3 camera. Frankly, I find The Sims 4 camera like, really
difficult to use. It's just really unfamiliar to me, but I understand that most of you probably
have the opposite because it's the default. I just think The Sims 3 camera is way
better and you can do way more with it. At least you can really easily swap between
them so if you're having issues with like, wanting to freely rotate things or you
want to get a better angle like this, like inside the build to see
it, use The Sims 3 camera. Talking about some more detail work
and like, freely placing objects, you can actually raise items up
and down as much as you'd like. If you use the zero and nine keys, you
can raise and lower objects in game. So for example, maybe you wanted
to decorate some shelves above your kitchen counters and say you wanted to
place this tabletop potted plant there, but obviously it's not slotting, like
I can't get it to go up on the shelves. Shelves in this game can be kind of
weird because some things slot and some things don't, but if you're having
those problems, you can always like, force it to go up there by using
this raising and lowering objects. So I currently have that move objects
cheat on, remember, and now I'm gonna press nine and each time I press it, it
raises the object up a tiny bit more. And so I can just raise this
plant up to the perfect height and then try and alt place it
and sit it there on the shelf. Then I can put some books next
to it, these candles won't place either so maybe I'll try and raise
those up and place them myself too. And this way you can pretty much custom place
objects to be wherever you want them to be. This is really, really useful
for like, clutter and decorating. You might run into an issue though where you press the nine key and all of a sudden the
camera does this, like it jumps around. That's because you can set camera positions
by holding CTRL and a number in game. It's pretty useful for like,
cinematic stuff and like, taking screenshots and filming videos, but
the average player probably doesn't need it. In fact you're probably just getting
confused as to why your camera keeps jumping. So if that keeps happening, if you press nine
and it moves the camera and it's really annoying, just hold CTRL while you do it and it'll be fine. You're also setting a new camera position, but that's okay. I also do it by accident
all the time, so don't worry about it. And while we're talking about raising and
lowering objects and getting them to fit to the right spots I want to tell you another way to
fix objects that are slotting to the wrong place. So say you want to put the paper towels
next to the sink, but it keeps slotting, it's really annoying, it won't
place where you want them to place. When you try and do the raise objects up trick
it just keeps slotting to the wrong spots. There is a way to fix this. It's a
little bit weird, but hear me out. When you have move objects on, if
you move the object off the counter, it stays at the exact right height. To give you a bit of a comparison,
sometimes if you try and raise and lower the item to the exact height, it
might be floating a little bit, like, you might have an issue with it floating a
little bit above where the slot actually is. But if you just put it there and then
move it off, it stays at the exact height. So to put these paper towels next to the sink
where I want them just a little bit closer, I'm gonna move both of these counters just away
from the wall and then I'm going to move the paper towel off the counter, hold alt, and then
kind of like, guess where I think I want it. And then when I put the counters back, you can see
that it looks like it's in the perfect position. You might have to like, move it back
and do a little bit of adjusting, it's weird because you gotta move the counter
out of the way so it doesn't slot to anything, but with this, you can pretty much sneak around
and place any item wherever you want it to be. Some things are a bit easier than others, like I always have a hard time
placing soap for some reason. I think it's because it's so small, but when I
do the same trick with the soap and I try and put it next to the sink, it takes me like,
three tries to get it in the right spot. I have to keep like, moving it and then
putting it back and trying to make it work, but this is super useful for trying
to clutter up your kitchen counters or your coffee table or like,
your nightstands and stuff. I can do this same thing over here
and like, try and mess around with the nightstand to get it to look more full. Again, it can be kind of weird because you have
to like, try and figure out where it needs to be placed, like this is obviously wrong so
now I gotta scoot it all back a little bit further and maybe over to the right, and
then put the nightstand back so again, kind of annoying, but it does
look cute when it's all done. Another super useful tip is
to change the size of objects. You can scale them up and down by
using the left and right bracket keys. So for example, I can use the right bracket
key to make this a giant rubber duck. Or I could use the left bracket key
to make this rug a tiny bit smaller. I wouldn't do this with like, functional
objects, think like the fridge, the toilet, the bed, stuff like that just in case it breaks
anything, but it is really useful for decor. Like I mentioned, I probably do it the most for
rugs. Sizing them down sometimes just a tiny bit makes it fit a little bit better, or maybe you
want to have a bigger rug so you size it up one. Sometimes the scale is a little bit weird, like sometimes I wish there was a bit
of an in-between of these two sizes, but when you play around with it you can find
a lot of objects that change size really well. I probably use it the most for rugs and
landscaping. I find it really useful to like, maybe have a slightly smaller version
of the plant and then kind of alt rotate them so it looks like they aren't all
the exact same because obviously all of this landscaping is basically
just like, plastic plants, right? And so when you like, make one a little bit
smaller and then rotate the one next to it, you can maybe pretend that there
are a little bit different. It's also super useful for like,
artwork on the walls. Maybe you want to have this cheap painting be a little
bit bigger, or maybe this painting is like, slightly too big so you want it to
fit a little bit better on the wall. You can like, really
customize your decor this way. Another way to like, really customize
placement is to use quarter tiles. So kind of similar to alt
placing, you can actually place items on quarter tiles instead of
the default half tile by pressing F5. When you hit that F5 key, it
turns on quarter tile placement. So as you've probably noticed, by default
everything slots in half tile increments. When you hit F5, it switches it to quarter tile
so it moves in like, way smaller increments. I find this really useful for
like, maybe decorating a slightly smaller living room because I can
scoot the rug closer to the wall. And then I can slot the couches
like a little bit closer too. You can just get a slightly
finer placement without having to worry about alt placing it into the right spot. This is I think most useful for windows
because sometimes you want it to be like, a little bit further over, but by
default it doesn't really do that. And then to alt place it is kind of annoying
because you got to get it to the right height and stuff, but when I hit F5, you can
see I can get a slightly finer placement. I can also raise it up like, a tiny bit
more without having to worry about like, trying to raise it up using alt and
then having it be a little bit off. S o you might not use this every day,
but in certain situations it's really useful and then you can just hit F5 again
to turn it off and it goes back to normal. Another tip that I get asked about all
the time is how to rotate flooring. And you can do that using the angled bracket
keys. Maybe you want to change the direction of the wood, so when you hit the angled
bracket key, you can just swap it around. This is even good for like, trying to
place concrete pads because maybe I want it to line up with this front door, but
obviously it looks kind of weird like this. You can just use that angled bracket key to rotate the flooring until it lines up
and looks a little bit better. I even like to do this on porches.
While we're talking about flooring, you might have just seen me
place it in the entire room. I did that by holding shift. You
can hold shift to place flooring or wallpaper in an entire room, and you
can hold alt to paint just one wall. So say I wanted to paint this entire room
yellow, instead of like, going around and painting each wall, I could just hold
shift and then it paints the entire room. Or if I want to just have
this entire wall be yellow, I can hold all and it just paints the one wall. This can be a little bit weird when
you're painting the exteriors of houses because the game sees each of
these three boxes as separate rooms. So if I wanted to paint the house,
I have to do each room separately, but it is really useful for
making it go by quicker. Something else that I get asked about
a lot is how I have this infinity sign, like how I'm building with infinite money. That's because I'm building from manage worlds. So instead of using like, a
Sim and living in their house, I'm just building on an
empty lot from manage worlds. So on the main menu, I pop into a world and then I pick a random lot and when I click on
it, there's like a little build icon. And then I go into build mode from there, that way there's no sim living here and I
can just build whatever with infinite money. I f you want more money you can also just use
money cheats. Kaching gives your sim a thousand simoleons, motherlode gives your Sims 500,00
Simoleons, and money space whatever number you want gives your Sims whatever amount of money you
want, so those are also some pretty useful tips. But I think you might have heard
of motherlode before, right? But now I want to get a little bit
more advanced and talk about roofing. I've actually made entire videos on roofing
tutorials and stuff so if you need those, I can link them down below for you. But these are going to be some tips
to like, really customize your roofs. The first of them being that you can hold shift
to edit just one side of the roof at a time. There are a lot of buttons on these
roofs, you can raise them up and down, you can change the curve, you can extend the
overhangs out in like, pretty much any direction, but say for example you want to get rid
of the overhang, but not on both sides. You just want this overhang
on the right side to be gone. If you hold shift and then use
the arrow, it'll remove it there, but it'll leave it on the left
side where I wanted it to stay. That also works on like, the front overhangs. I can hold shift and then just
edit this side, but not this one. So like on this house, maybe I want
to have the overhang in the front, I want to see it over here, but I
don't want it to clip into the back. I can hold shift and then I can
get rid of it just on that side. And then I can try and make it
fit the walls a little bit better. Now as if this many roof options weren't already
enough, there's actually a way to get some more. If you press shift and C, it gives you more
options to adjust the curve of your roof. So if I wanted to have a kind of fan fancy curved
roof, I can use these little circles to do it, but you can see it's kind of
jagged, it looks kind of weird. If I press shift + C, it's gonna like, smooth
the curve which is really useful, but then it also gives me a couple more circles so you can use
that to get like, a really fancy type of curve. There are a lot of options with this,
it's kind of fun to experiment with. I don't really use all the
fancy curves all that often, but it's definitely a nice tip to
know especially with the smoothing. And one final roof tip is
that you can actually use alt on roofs as well to get
a slightly finer placement. By default when you try and adjust the height of
a roof it kind of slots to a bunch of different heights, but you can hold alt and then just like,
freely place to whatever exact height you want. This is really useful for roofs like this where by default I might not be able to
get it to line up perfectly. You can see there's a little bit of a gap there, I can just use alt to place it a little
bit better just so it lines up perfectly. And then it kind of melts better and looks
a little bit nicer. There's also obviously a ton of like, trim and frieze options in this
game and these can be kind of overwhelming. I find these friezes in particular to be
extremely annoying just because of how they place. The game's auto placement is
like, really irritating sometimes. So a good tip for both friezes
and roof trim is that you can place them on just one wall
at a time by holding shift. So instead of it by default
trying to place on an entire room, if I hold shift, it goes on just one wall. And with that I can get a little bit more
control over where I'm trying to place it. It's still sort of attached to the room,
like when I try and place it on this wall, it places on this part of the room and then
this part of this next room separately, but it does make it a lot easier to get it to
look how you want when you do it like this. And that also works on just these
trim pieces as well instead of it placing on the whole room, I
can place it on just one wall. That can be really useful for trying to place it
like, maybe on the front of the roof, because like for example, sometimes it kind of clips and it
places weird, but I only want it in the front, so you can do that by just holding shift
and placing it literally only in the front. Now speaking of clipping, I am
sure we have all unfortunately experienced issues like this when
we're trying to make stair landings. Sometimes you just want to have a
nice open space around your stairs and the game decides to do this with the roofs. I want to show you how to fix that, so these are
going to be some tips for fixing roof clipping. The main problem we're seeing right
here is that these roofs are like, overlapping and overhanging into the building. I can fix that by trying to
line them up with the walls. So right now, they're one tile over,
I can try and scoot it one tile back, and then when it's lining up with
the wall, it doesn't come through. I can do the same thing right here
and try and line it up better there. It looks fine from the outside, it looks okay
from the inside. We still have this little issue right here, you can fix that also by like,
scooting this over and lining it up with the wall. Obviously that ruins the outside. This
does get a little bit complicated because you can fix that by like, adding in extra
roof pieces and trying to line those up perfectly with the wall as well to
like, make it flush with the wall. Again, I made an entire tutorial on
roofing so you can watch that separately. I think a more reasonable solution for a
lot of people is to mess with the walls, because the reason this is happening is
because the game sees this whole thing as a room and the game is confused about this part
because the room is messed up with the fences. So if I were to put like, a bedroom back here, that actually fixes the clipping because
the game sees this as a real room. So oftentimes you won't really have that
issue once you finish the floor plan, at least in some places. It's usually just in the stair
Landing where you have that problem. And again, the best way to fix that is to just adjust the roof so they line
up perfectly with the walls. It might take you a bunch of roof pieces, like I was using three at one
point, but you will get there. And while we're talking about stairs, I
actually have a super useful money saving tip. If you're trying to build on a budget, you can delete the underside of the stairs
and the fence behind the stairs to save money. So for example, on these porch stairs here
I'm placing my fence, I placed the stairs, it's all decorative, but there's actually a fence behind these two stairs that I don't
need because you can't even see it. That holding control tip comes in handy here because I can hold control
and then redraw that fence. It's weird because I can't see it, but you can
tell that I'm getting 56 simoleons back here. That's because I just deleted the
fence that was behind those stairs. There's no point in it being there, you can't
see it, and then you save a little bit of money. But more importantly and a lot easier,
you can just delete the underside of these stairs and and that'll give
you back like, 150 simoleons. Some stairs are more expensive than
others, but you'll always save money on that and you don't really need the
underside of like, the porch stairs. On the inside it's a little bit
tougher because I usually like, how the wall looks there, but you can save
like, 600 simoleons by deleting that wall too. So that is really useful for budget houses
because why spend 600 simoleons on like, an empty wall when you could buy like, a
TV with that amount of money, you know? I'm kind of going all over the place right now, but another decorating tip
involves custom cabinetry. You might not know this, but you can actually access a ton of
custom Cabinet pieces in the base game. All of the cabinets have a ton of
different variants that you can use. And by default you might not even realize it
because automatic counter placement is on. And the counter placement is pretty useful, it's
nice how by default it gives you like, the corner cabinets, but if you click on the cabinet you want
to use and then you click that little gear icon, you can turn off automatic counter placement and
it gives you a menu of all the different variants. And with that you can get
like, special end pieces, they've got like, outside
corners and inside corners. The upper cabinets have even more options, they have like a left end piece and a right end
piece, they have like a mini shorter cabinet. They have a tall cabinet, they've
got like, an outside corner piece. So when you use these custom cabinets,
you can get way more options and like, a way more custom looking kitchen. And it's just that little gear icon, you would never know that hiding
behind it is all of those options. A lot of people have never even
seen these variants before, and every single cabinet in
the game has all those options. Now number 20 and my final tip for you
is also about accessing more objects. It's about the debug cheats. Now these
are like, kind of "advanced," and maybe a little bit confusing, so not every
player is going to want to do this. The first of them is bb.ShowHiddenObjects
and that opens up the debug menu. So when you type that cheat in, it
gives you all of the debug options. You can search in build mode for
debug and it all comes up at once. These are mostly things that you
would never want or never use. This is all of the like,
gameplay items, so think like, all of the drinks you can order at the bar
are and like, all the frogs you can collect. Scary doll heads and like, random brooms and stuff. This is literally a
baby that you can get in debug. Kind of scary, but sometimes this
can be kind of useful for build mode. For example, there's this corkboard
in game there's actually a postcard collection so if you search postcard
and you have the debug cheat on, you can get all of those postcards and
like, decorate your Sims corkboard. Maybe you want to have like, a
frog or a crystal or anything, like those collection things are
sort of easy to get from debug. But there's also a second debug
cheat that opens up even more scary items and that is bb.ShowLiveEditObjects. And with this live edit objects cheat,
again it opens up an even wider debug menu. When you search debug this time, you
can access even landscaping options. This basically gives you access to all
of the landscaping that's in the world, so they used like, all of these
trees and plants in the environment, but we don't necessarily
have all the same options. There's some that we have in
build mode, but they have like, different sizes and different
swatches and things like that. Well, you can access that in
the live edit objects menu. The problem is it's not organized, it's
not labeled, they're all just called debug, so when you scroll, like there's
a lot of scrolling to do. And they aren't real objects either, like there's this table -- your Sims can't
use it, it's like, purely decorative. Some of them your Sims will walk straight
through, but there's also a lot of cool stuff, like there's interesting fence
pieces that you can try and use. There's like, base game plants that have extra
swatches that we don't have in the real menu. There's even like, giant shells of buildings
and stuff so there's a lot of weird stuff, but also a lot of useful items. So if you want to explore through, you might find
some kind of cool things to use in your build. Just you know, enter at your own risk
because it can be kind of overwhelming. I tend to use this in my like, starter home type builds because all of this landscaping
is free because it's not like, real. So it's great to have like, beautiful
plants outside of a really cheap Sims house, but don't feel like you have to go in and use
that cheat, it definitely can be a bit scary. And that my friends is 20 tips
for building in The Sims 4. I'm also gonna stick like, a list of all
of these tips in the description box so if you want to more easily reference it or
like, screenshot it, feel free to do that. I know I talked for a super long
time, but hopefully it was helpful. And I've got a bunch of other like, actual
tutorial videos on my channel where I like, walk you through how to build
a certain house or like, talk more in depth about roofing,
so I'll link those down below. And let me know if I should
do more tutorial type content. I know a lot of you especially now are new to the game and you might be into that kind of
thing, so just tell me in the comments. I also post a lot of regular Sims videos, like
building houses and playing the game for real, so if you like that kind of
thing, feel free to subscribe. I play The Sims a lot as you could probably tell,
so if you're into that, come on, hang out with us. And with that being said, I'm gonna cut the video right here and I will catch you
all tomorrow, okay? Bye everybody. I meant for this video to be short,
it was gonna be like a quick 20 tips. I've been filming for an hour and a
half. That is not a quick 20 tips video! How am I gonna cut this down to be reasonable? [ JAZZY OUTRO MUSIC ]
