Sims 4 Build Mode - First Look
Build Mode
Let's start with building out rooms. The traditional tools are where we start, dragging out a single wall, adding another, maybe 2 more to create a box, or use diagonal walls to create a triangle. Alternatively you can choose a predefined room shape (square, round, triangle, octagon) and drag one out from your placing point, to the size you want. Once an area is 'closed off', the game recognizes this as a room which you can then move, rotate, expand, enlarge, reduce and manipulate in all manner of simple operations. You can even move them up and down floors!
Previously we needed to recreate a room from scratch if we wanted to, say, move a bathroom to the other side of the house. But not anymore! Better still, when you pick up a room and move it, all of the objects and décor in the room will move and even rotate with it. If you click one wall and drag it out to make the room bigger, the objects within will even spread out to fill the room better, and objects placed on the tile next to a wall (wardrobe etc.) will move with it. It now takes seconds to see how it would look if you put the kitchen at the back of the house rather than the front, making the whole build experience more entertaining and less frustrating.
You may have already seen the image floating around showing a curved fence around a building. Adding curves is as easy as a couple of mouse clicks and looks fantastic when used in game, but hold your excitement for a minute, because unfortunately, curves are limited to fences and cannot be applied to walls... "for now", to quote Aaron. Maybe in an EP and subsequent patch?
The next wow moment came with foundations, which you no longer need to plan out meticulously in advance. You can decide on a whim to elevate your house with any of eight different heights of foundations, with stairs being auto scaled to fit as you slide your house up and down the scale getting just the look you want. Currently, this tool levels the entire Lot, prompting questions about levelling different buildings like a garage or outhouse, to which Aaron stated that this 'should' be possible, but not in the current (pre-alpha) build. As for basements, which you are probably considering about now as we were, the answer was "not yet" as the room system was priority, they might come later. Personally I think they will, we had to wait for patches with Sims 3 to get basements. Building height limits on the version we saw was 3 floors plus the roof. Again, they hope to go higher. The issue of sunken rooms was raised here, which are currently not possible but the Dev's are aware how important they are to builders and hope to make them possible in time.