Building in 4, the Basic Room

I've been sticking to gameplay with Sims 4 and not letting myself get caught up in the addiction of building new houses. I've done minor remodeling on the Goth house,but not enough to really dip into the features of Build Mode. I think I've mostly been waiting because I wanted to understand other facets of the game before I lost myself in the building process for a while. Believe me, I can totally do that.

Anyway, Sims 4 has made a lot of changes to Build Mode. I didn't have Sims 1, but I know that the changes between 1 and 2 were significant. The changes between 2 and 3 were fairly minor, really. I have been used to that system. Sims 4, however, introduces a lot of new features. At first, I was pretty resistant to the changes, but some of them are becoming my favorite things.

To begin with, creating rooms is very simple now. Honestly, if you really don't even WANT to bother with building a room, you can just purchase one of the 'ready made' ones and slam it down into your lot. I get that some people probably enjoy this because it saves time and the effort of decorating. I really don't though. Mind you, the rooms can be altered as you see fit, but to me, it's still taking a lot of the joy of the Sims experience out of it.

If you want to build traditionally, you can. In fact, you can even do walls the old way, by 'drawing' them where you want them and letting them snap into place. You can also select shapes for your rooms, which, honestly, does make things easier. It's not that doing octagonal rooms was hard, but it would get fussy sometimes because you have to keep moving the camera.

The best feature about room construction is that Sims 4 includes options once the room is made. A box appears, letting you turn the room or alter its location. You can also choose ceiling height, meaning you can have houses will high ceilings without having to sacrifice two floors to do so. There are also options that appear around the room itself, allowing you to alter its size. You can see these on the picture I posted.

I think of all the changes in the game, this one is the most helpful. I can't tell you how many times I have tried to make a room where I could put a door evenly in  the middle and found that I was one grid row too short. In previous games, this meant I would have to erase one side, add the extra grid panel, and then rebuild the side. Now? I just push the arrow one space and I have my desired size. YAY!!!!!!

So this is the room building. Tomorrow, I'll talk some about other changes. Some I have liked, others.....not so much.