Guides The Sims 4

The Sims 4 Eco Lifestyle – Building Community Spaces

Written by Annabelli_22

Community space is a new lot type that came with the new expansion pack The Sims 4 Eco Lifestyle. Different to this lot type is that it actually ties in to the game play of the new EP.

There are 4 sub types to the community space lot type, and your game play decides which of the 4 subtype is active. By default Community Space is the one that is active.
The other three sub types are Community Garden, Market Place and Maker Space. In live mode you can have your Sims vote on any of the 4 sub types to become active (only those in your own neighbourhood).

The new world Evergreen Harbor has 1 Community Space in each neighbourhood. But what if you want them in your other worlds. While it is just like before, you place a lot, it also gets a little different because of the 4 sub types.
But don’t worry, I will walk you through it all, and in the end it’s not that complicated at all.

Place a new Community Space

For this I’m going to assume you have picked a lot that is not already a Community Space, but 1 of the other lot types, doesn’t matter which one. It doesn’t matter if it already has a build on it or not in this matter.
First up, you change the lot type to Community Space. All 4 sub lots will have an exclamation point on it, this only means you’re not meeting the requirements yet. For the Community Space default this is only the Community Board. that’s all you need.

Before you click to any of the other lot types, make sure you have built all that you want for the Community Space.
There is a reason for that, because once you go to one of the other sub lots for the first time, it will copy everything that you’ve placed on the lot to the next sub type. This will make it easier to build the 3 other lots a lot quicker, as you now only have to place or replace a few extra items that are required for those sub lots.

It only does this when you first go into that sub lot, because it didn’t ‘exist’ yet. That’s why you don’t want to do this before you’ve finished building on the Community Space sub type, or you have to do the entire thing 4 times.
Once it has loaded any build on the sub types, you can do with it what ever you want. If you want to keep the same structure/style for all 4 lots, then the copy feature will help you greatly. But if you want to do something entirely different for each sub type, that’s also possible. You can just use the bulldoze button to get rid of the entire thing. It will not touch your other sub types.

It will always copy the current lot you have active in build mode. So if you go from Market Place to Maker Space, it will make a copy of Market Place to Maker Space.
So you have influence of what gets copied over. If you want to make the Community Space your base for all of them, be sure to copy from that lot (or before you make alterations on the others)

Lot requirements

These are the lot requirements for the sub lots separately to fully count as such.

Community Space

  • Community Board (that’s it)

Community Garden

  • Community Board
  • 4 Planters
  • 1 Toilet
  • 1 Sink
  • 1 Waste disposal
  • 2 Insect farms (Optional)
  • 2 Vertical gardens (Optional) 

Market Place

  • Community Board
  • 1 Toilet
  • 1 Sink
  • 1 Waste Disposal
  • 3 Sales tables
  • 2 Market Stalls (Optional)
  • 2 Picnic tables (Optional)

Maker Space

  • Community Board
  • 1 Toilet
  • 1 Sink
  • 1 Waste Disposal
  • 1 Fabricator
  • 1 Recycler
  • 1 Woodworking table (Optional)
  • 1 Easel (Optional)
  • 1 Kid’s Activity table (Optional)
  • 1 Candle Making Table (Optional)
  • 1 Juice Fizzer (Optional)

Oh and a tip, the “Unamusing Public Bathroom” (or the other pack variants) count as both a sink and a toilet.

Community Spaces from The Gallery

If you don’t to build your own Community Spaces, but just want to download and place them from The Gallery, that’s also possible.
Uploading a build from one of those sub type lots, it will actually class them as Community Garden, Market Place, Maker Space or Community Space. So you can search for those sub types directly. (this is not yet updated in the Web based Gallery, it will show the lot type as Unknown there). You are not limited to the specific lot type though, because placing lots from The Gallery also got an update.
If you want to place a lot that is originally on the gallery with a different Lot Type, you can do that now, and you can choose between keeping your current lot type, or change to the one your Gallery lot has.

There are quite a few cool lots already uploaded before this pack that will fit for any of the community spaces (especially the generic Community Space and Community Garden)
With this update it will open up a whole bunch of options you can use as your community lots.

Gallery Showcase

We would love to see your creations, so share those with us on Twitter or on Facebook
Click on the images for the direct Web Gallery link

The Sims 4: Eco Lifestyle is a big pack – far too big to cover in just one post – so over the next few days we publish a series of posts which cover the various aspects of the pack. Check here for a list of Eco Lifestyle posts.

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