The Sims 4 Tiny Living – Build tips

An early access code was provided to us by the EA Game Changers program.

The Sims 4 Tiny Living Stuff will release Tuesday January 21st 2020. It’s the first stuff pack of the year and encourages you to go small, or even Micro!
But building small homes isn’t easy. But there are some tips and tricks you can use to make the most of a build. .

Getting started

First of all, select the new lot type, Tiny Home residential.

TThis will then trigger some limitations and tools. Depending on whether you want a small, tiny or micro house, there are different limits on tile numbers.
But helpful is the tool that appears at the center top, there it will display the total tile count as well.

There are 3 tiers for tiny builds, Small, Tiny and Micro. The smaller you go the more lot perks you get.

What tier you’re in is something the game calculates itself. So you don’t have to choose between the tiers, it’s automatic.
You have to have more than 4, and 100 or less. The top bar will give a warning when you’re outside those limits.
And the 3 tiers each have a shade of blue. Though it’s not that easy to see if you don’t see it next to each other.

What counts for the tile limit

So what does the game see as a ’tile’ and what not.
Foundation and closed rooms are the two easy things that count, no matter if it’s raised foundation or not. So the image below shows a ‘build’ of 18 tiles.

Floor pattern doesn’t count, fountain tool, pools and stair landings also don’t count.

Something that you can can make use of are roofs. When you create a room, a flat roof forms on top. These roofs do not count towards your tile count, but you can use it. But if you want to put fencing around it, it can create a room out of your roof, and once it does that, the tile count goes up.

you could, however, just not close the fencing on top. This works for example if you have stairs on the outside, the open spot in your fence is a natural place to put the stair landing.

There is another trick though, if you do want it to close, without creating a room.
Place all sides of the fence completely except for 1 side. That last side, leave 1 tile open in the fence. Then click on the fence, and use the drag option to extend the fence to close it.
With this method, you do not close the ‘room’ but it will see it as separate lose fences.

Diagonal walls

Ok, with those tips out of the way. There is another one, diagonal pieces.
The game counts the tiles in squares. When you build diagonal, you get the same amount of square, except, the sides are a little longer. This means that essentially, you get a little bit more space. It’s not much, but it can be just enough. See how the diagonal room is almost as big as the one straight on the grid but with a tile less?

What happens if you have, 10.5 tiles because you have a diagonal piece somewhere? The game rounds down, so this works in your benefit.
You can see it in this build. I was trying to get the shape of the house just the way I want it. But that meant, I was 1 square over the limit of 32.
I cut 1 square in half by using a diagonal wall, and the tile count was rounded down to 32.

Cheat

Getting the full potential out of a tiny build is by far, with cheats. In particular the Move Objects (MOO) on cheat.
Open the cheat window with Ctrl+Shift+C (this is for PC, don’t know what it is for MAC). and enter the following cheat
bb.moveobjects
This cheat doesn’t need testingcheats on, or anything.
Now, you can have the ‘footprint’ of objects overlap each other.

Being able to place items closer to each other will save space but can remain functional. Like above bathroom, this layout is only possible when you have the cheat turned on.
Ohterwise the sink, shower, door and toilet overlap each other and won’t place down. This is an easy layout, they snap into their tile place and all are functional. But beware, this layout only works with the shower from The Sims 4 Discovery University. If you have a showerstall, you need an extra tile to place it. (see bathroom layout in the image with the tile count.)
Play around with the cheat and see what is possible. But if you use MOO, be sure to always play test your creation! I’ve seen a 1 tile bathroom on twitter even! Talk about some master MOO skills.

But just overlapping footprints isn’t all that MOO enables. If you hit the 9 key, you can raise items up. Use 0 to bring it down again. You can use this to for example place some decor on surfaces that don’t have item slots, like the plants and clutter on this Murphy bed.

Roofs

As we established before, roofs don’t count for your tile limit.
So you can use this to create extra space in your house as well. The image below shows a 16 tile home (the square in the middle) with 2 huge roof sections on either side of it. The roof sections aren’t counted towards the tile total. And all these items have even been placed without Move objects on.

Another way to use the roofs is to create a second floor loft. Place the roof on top of your room, and place a stairs to that second floor. Don’t place walls or fences around unless you use the pull method we discussed before, because it now only counts as roof instead of a room.

Result

As a result I made this tiny ‘2 story’ 32 tile build. A loft bedroom hidden under the roof, and stairway landing as a front porch. Show us your creations on Twitter or Facebook!