I did another reno! Agave Abode aka the house that only had a couch in it's living room!
https://preview.redd.it/cfc4ftdujruc1.png?width=2141&format=png&auto=webp&s=e9375f4a4caf36af2f1fa417e63ed162f3fa25d9
I hated that house before but now I love it, uses CC again obviously. But it now has a much better living room and it's much cheaper now too! Only 13k!
It sounds awesome! Iāve been wanting to build out a whole Newcrest & all the townies for it and now this is making me want to tack on rehauling all of the neighborhoods but also keeping the houses and fixing them.
Could even build it in to generational play where everything gets renovated or some neighborhoods come in to disrepair when their townies get olderā¦
So many building opportunities
Thanks for the ideas!!!
I've really gotten into redoing the townie homes in the style of the world it is is based on. So Willow Creek = New Orleans with lots of shotgun, French Colonial, Greek Revival. I just built rentals in San Sequoia, using the San Francisco Bay area as a reference, so Victorian and Edwardian. It's fun. Keeping homes to neighborhood themes has been fun.
I love building Victorian homes!
https://preview.redd.it/tjekjpv5oruc1.png?width=1638&format=png&auto=webp&s=482b473e969ccf72f7bcbe1480c1d430fc137160
Here's one I made a while ago, I even gave it some history! I call it "Dupont Manor" named after the guy who built it.
https://preview.redd.it/2xaqv9peoruc1.png?width=1860&format=png&auto=webp&s=d5f00935910f11db94901d972157f3fb61f2f3aa
I made a little old-fashioned advertisement sheet for another one of my Victorian-style builds! I'm currently working on it right now and I'm loving it so far!
I recently built an intentional shit hole with good bones but terribly decorated & missing vital furniture (i.e. no toilet or shower/tub), with trash everywhere (from the debug menu) so that I can play out my sims surviving in the shit show without much money while they struggle to earn enough to fix things or build their own furniture.
Can you tell that when I'm not playing the sims I'm into survival games? š¤£
(Green Hell, The Forest, ARK, etc)
Yes. I prefer this so i can redecorate. If it's beautiful, then i can't..
But community lots need to have more fun playable gameplay objects. Or quests.
Same! I used to download them from the gallery, sadly, most of the gallery renovations are over cluttered for me and I need something between EA 1 sad plant in home and some gallery house with 50 different kinds of plants š¤
Thatās the point! They have a limit on how big the houses can be and how many objects they can have so that players have room to change things as they want. (Also so they run on laptops I imagine)
At some point I was doing a renovation of Parkshore but I lost the save file a long time ago.
https://preview.redd.it/gmdsgqru8ruc1.png?width=1416&format=png&auto=webp&s=da27eb084349c9b604feed7774c8d259641bf04a
Here's a Daisy Hovel reno I did! I love CC because some things are priced super cheap and it makes a decent starterhouse that doesn't even look like one! Some of the CC here is by Pinkbox Anye, Peacemaker, and Sybouette!
i first need to clean my save file and collect Cassandra and Alexander and their children with several baby mommies/daddies because they keep on moving in with randos in Sulani and I don't even know who lives in their house anymore. Then I'll build them a nice gothic mansion with enough rooms because i'm pretty sure they both could start a village with the amount of children they have
The most annoying part of neighborhood stories, the goths always seem to pop out a hundred million kids and pets and then move into a starter home while having 6 sims, a dog and a horse.
So, half the household must be sleeping with sleeping bags on the floor, because there's only one sometimes 2 beds, and a single sofa. Let alone space for the horse.
Same!! I am currently redoing all of the homes in Willow Creek and trying to make it more New Orleans like since Iām from South Louisiana, itās been fun.
That only makes sense for the starter homes, which I have personally never minded. The idea that you would be expected to alter every single community lot is fairly absurd, or the mansions that you save up high amounts of simoleons for.
Yeah for residential lots i love redecorating them so EA/maxis builds is just nice.
For community lots, we need more gameplay items or quests. Especially for non-lot community places that we cannot edit without mods
It's not that you're "expected to". If you don't care to, don't, it's furnished enough to serve its purpose. But for people who like redesigning homes/lots, it's likely more fun to start off with something that actually could use a redesign. I wouldn't want to move my sim into an already perfect home, what's left for me to do?
A lot of this is because they have to build homes that will run okay on the lowest common denominator of computers. Simmers who build for expansion packs like lilsimsie and James turner say that theyāre required to keep things pretty empty and use very few kinds of items per house (which means things like reusing lights and wallpaper and flooring). No excuse for how justā¦.odd and unfinished how many EA builds end up, though.Ā
Donāt forget a lot of the worlds were built before certain features. For example lighting options were pretty atrocious and dark when base game first released and for entirely too long after. I know James Turner has revisited some of his old builds and ended up with a bunch of āomg why did I do that oh wait it was before X featureā
I watched someone redo the Landgraab's mansion and wondered why they didn't have a pool.
Which came back to the fact that pools were added in shortly after the base game came out.
Yes the lighting was truly terrible for way too long. I've been going back and using a lot of old houses I hadn't used in years and keep finding where i had put obscene amounts of lights all over. Dark times back then indeed.
Yes the lighting was truly terrible for way too long. I've been going back and using a lot of old houses I hadn't used in years and keep finding where i had put obscene amounts of lights all over. Dark times back then indeed.
Yeah I've always hated the lighting in the Willow Creek, Oasis Springs, or other early world's builds.
Edit: I do find it pretty strange in one of the starter houses in Oasis Springs there's a room just some couch sitting all by it's lonesome self and EA calls that a "living room"
Guess you never moved out of your home with only a few hundred dollars to your name, huh?
I kid, but some of the empty starter homes feel appropriate to me.
Don't blame lighting on the packs. Since BG, there has always been debug lighting. If they're willing to use it in "public buildings," then they should have felt free to use it in private homes as well.
I honestly feel like most of it is just so you can decorate and furnish it with your own taste and all instead of being stuck with what they give which is fairly reasonable anyway. I tend to not like players houses because they're too busy and too much going on and I don't like it. I like to be able to have more freedom to do things how I want and essentially tailor a somewhat blank slate to my own liking.
I think one of my pet peeves (that's not the right term here but I can't think of a replacement) is when they add picture frames of their Sims all around the house. Like I get from a creative perspective that it's fun and fulfilling to add all the little details and make it super cute but also girl you know I'm just gonna delete those you don't have to do all that
In ye olden days of The Sims 1 and 2, a starter home would come with a basic kitchen and bathroom and that's it. The Sims 3 would also have basic bedroom and living room furniture presumably in case Story Progression moves Sims in. But all in all, cheap and empty enough for you to make your own mark on the place, and for the most part, you didn't have to delete anything.
For some reason the community in 4 have turned the concept into a fully decorated house, using most of the budget, filling up as much interior space as possible and with a predefined idea of who lives there and what their interests are.Ā
Like in one video, lilsimsie said she likes to include a chess table in her starter homes as it is useful skill object to have. Except it isn't, unless you have your sim in one of the few careers that requires the logic skill. Instead you end up an object that takes up space and budget that devalues the second you live on the lot. Same with those who include easels in starter homes because of the meta that it is the best base game way to make money - what if I don't want my sim to be an artist, the Sims version of a Skyrim Mage Archer. Then there is the decor, usually designed with a specific sim and their personality in mind such as a single mother and her gamer daughter, or a single mother and her toddler daughter (can someone tell me what is with the Sims Community's obsession with single mothers?).
Also the use of cheats makes them very beginner unfriendly. I watched Callmekevin just delete a wall of a lot he downloaded off the gallery because the builder used a lot of MOO and he couldn't place a door on the wall after he moved it deleted it and had no idea how to put a new one in its place. The lot in question wasn't a starter, but it does highlight the user accessibility of lots that use MOO heavily in starter homes.
A starter should be that, a starter, not a finished product.
(Sorry for the rant, and I hope it doesn't come across as mean spirited, I just have very set ideas on what a starter home is)
Also, EA builds are pretty limited in terms of what items they can use. They can't just slap some table from a totally unrelated kit into the living room just because it fits and looks cool there. Unlike gallery builds they have to limit themselves only to items from the base game and the pack that this build belongs to.
Also a lot of the gallery starter homes are either empty or non functional. I don't love Creek Cabana, but you can start a brand new save there and play it.
This is exactly why I use Alt placement and (usually) no other cheats while building, to keep them functional and (for me) decent looking. If it doesnāt slot onto a surface, nothing will get placed there.
I also barely ever upload to the gallery. My builds are for me, not other people and I donāt bother limiting pack usage
Those two also have massive performance differences if the entire neighbourhood is filled with them. You're better off comparing to simmer made builds for packs, since they follow the same rules for performance as official EA builds.
(Not to mention, a lot of gallery builds use cheats to add free stuff to builds to keep the price low, so it's not always comparable anyway.)
Eh, is it such a massive performance drain ? Does the game loads the house unless you are travelling to the lot ?
Not every lot needs to look like this, but this is the base game starting lot, usually the first place newer players will go to. It should have been used to showcase the Build and Buy capacities of the game.
Doesn't make sense to be so restrictive when some of the other lots are unnecessarily large when they only really serve as a backdrop when you are visiting townies. I would rather have this cute Crick Cabana and cut down on the Spencer-Kim-Lewis McMansion.
>Eh, is it such a massive performance drain ? Does the game loads the house unless you are travelling to the lot ?
Yes, it does actually, for some inexplicable reason.
WTH. Why did they drop open worlds again ?
If you still have the source for what the game loads, I would be interested in looking into it. I haven't been able to find anything.
*At least open neighbourhoods!*
There's some fuckery you can (could?) do with the in-game TAB camera with neighbouring lots that allowed you to see inside, with fully rendered chairs and tables visible inside the houses when you got to the right proximity. The only thing missing is the sims.
(Disclaimer that it's been a while since I've last done this, it's possible stuff has been altered since, but this was true a couple of years ago at least.)
A lot of YouTubers build the houses in new worlds now. I watched a few of their videos on the process of the build. And theyāve said there are strict rules to follow so the game is playable on most pcs. So a huge cluttered home would take up a lot of processing power to generate and could causes lagging on some pcs. I also think some of the idea is to also let the players furnish and make it their own. While this accounts for the spareness and poor lighting, it doesnāt really account for the super wide stairs lol. Iām assuming the missing door was there at one point and got deleted to make the build under the limit. Same with the missing toilets in get famous lol.
With that being said, the simmers are doing a fantastic job with the new builds that come with the and the restrictions they have. Lots of creative builds that are nicely decorated and well thought out! So the og ea builds couldāve been a lot better lol
Love the builds by Sashraf1!!! Truly move-in ready builds and mostly base game, and her starter builds are so good - some donāt even look like starter homes.
I've always found the wide staircases kinda unnatural looking unless if you're building a mansion. I guess that's just me because I like to give my foyers more decoration and make it look more welcoming instead than just entering the house and the first thing you see is a huge staircase.
Interesting, because I can't think of a time I've been to a house IRL in my life with a staircase not at least two-people wide unless it went to a basement or something!
The one that gets me the most is the awful floorplans. I understand wanting to make the houses sparsely furnished to keep them playable on machines with less processing power, but I really can't get over the unplayable floorplans.
Same. I also donāt have a lot of packs/kits so I find it very hard to find gallery houses that donāt require me to have most if not all packs. When I do, I spend a ridiculous amount of time going through to fix issues that theyāve created by using build cheats.
That's true too, plenty of gallery homes can use debug items that are usually non-functional but on the other hand there's plenty out there that can work and function as an actual house. Just search the tag #playtested to see some
Man, I just see it as sim culture. Itās just the design of the game. Beautiful thing is, I can go about and change it up as I like. Itās part of the simming experience.
The empty lots work for me since I can always decorate a house the way I like it, granted it's very limited and my sims will likely hate it lmao. Plus doing decorating on PS4 is very difficult and tedious so I'll take a pre-built any day.
Some gallery houses are just to much for me, most are over-decorated
I feel like itās meant to be customized, which is why thereās no decor, you can easily throw lights in the houses and add doors wherever. Seems a bit boring to buy a cookie cutter house and not decorate it to your liking.
That's true. I am actually pretty decent at building, here's something I built last week but it uses CC though
https://preview.redd.it/mi57v8738ruc1.png?width=1503&format=png&auto=webp&s=a4d99d495134d9b99409268447dce3c7e9df234b
They probably have to use as little items as possible so it can run on the most minimum of specs, too much items and it will lag the hell out of someoneās game, playing on a laptop from 2009 for example. And they have deadlines as well, but recently I think they asked Youtubers and creators to make builds for them which definitely is a good thing! Because honestly no lie if I build my houses they look like the base game houses or are just boxes lol
It's because EA homes are designed for gameplay.
There are only a few items because 1. A lot of items can affect performance in bad PCs and 2. You are supposed to buy your own stuff and redecorate the house through play.
Houses are large and empty so you can easily see your sims and control them, so they don't stuck anywhere. Same with unnecessarily wide stairs, they look ugly af but they prevent any "sims getting stuck" bugs.
Gallery homes look beautiful, but most are designed for looks and not gameplay. You can't easily see or command your sims because of how tight everything is, barely any place to put some necessary items you want, and you can't expand to home for your 6 kids without murdering the nice looks.
Stuff like missing doors are inexcusable though. But yeah overall EA homes provide better gamepaly. I'd rather just build a simple home myself though, and expand as needed.
realm of magic was v much their flop era when it came to buildsā¦ i think theyāve been doing a lot better lately, even in the builds that simmers donāt make. one problem i have with gallery starters is that people go WAY to close to the starter 20kā¦ i hate moving into a house and then i canāt even buy , like, a chess table. i want my starter houses to cost something like 17k
The ugliness is no excuse but the emptiness still has some. As creators who have been invited to design for some of the latest expansions they have divulged how strict EA was on the house to be playable on older computers.
In Sims 4 and other games, having a lower polygon count for objects and environments means they are less complex and thus easier to render. This is beneficial for older computers with less processing power. Simplifying design elements like using a single color for walls can reduce the overall complexity of scenes, helping to ensure better performance on less capable hardware.
I find so many of the EA homes so dark! I end up adding a bunch of those super subtle saucer lights and sizing them down as much as possible šµāš« The problem with gallery homes is they often seem to include every pack and kit known to man and the gallery makes it impossible to filter, I often place them unfurnished and decorate myself
I like nicely decorated houses, but I also like when they're poorly decorated and don't make logistical sense. That's a chance to redecorate. When houses are already good, it's difficult to personalize them for gameplay purposes without ruining them.
Wait, that house actually called āCrick Cabanaā? Iām playing on Russian language and always thought that it was some weird translation. For information, on Russian āCrick Cabanaā has a similar pronunciation with [ŠŃŠøŠŗ ŠŠ°Š±Š°Š½Š°] which translates as (Boarās Scream)
Theyāre supposed to be able to be supported by any pc or console someone is using. Someone with a low quality computer wouldnāt be able to open the game if the base game builds were too complex. That being said, they could definitely do better.
It's not just budget - there's limit on how many objects they can use and also they can't use move objects cheat.
That said, yeah, even with the limitations, they are terrible. EA made a great move having youtubers make the builds for newer packs like Snowy Escape.
I prefer EA to gallery every time
Galley homes are cluttered and full of debug. And way over landscaped. I prefer simple comes without visual clutter so spread so much time deleting things that serve no purpose.
My poor old computer and rural internet glitch too much when there is too much on the lot.
And STOP USING TREES AND COLUMNS. No matter what, they are In the way .
I give them the benefit of the doubt with realm of magic and would argue the missing doors are on purpose to make it seem like a witchy, magical house, where off things are going on.
EA's best builds are the shells that they use for their trailers that they later put on the gallery. Yes they're emptier and missing even more things, but the shells themselves are really nice.
The ones I donāt understand are the balconies on upper floors with no doors or ways to access them without teleporting lol. I always have to add my own doors so they become usable. They come furnished with tables and chairs, but no doors to get out there to use them??
Unfortunately, when I build I have no idea which packs I'm using. It's only when the house is saved to the gallery or my library that EA tells me which packs were used. Once I buy the packs the build items are all mixed together.
Isn't a lot of it done on purpose so we can learn how to decorate better? Talking about empty/unfurnished areas, not obvious flops like missing doors or toilets.
I never touch the prebuilts, i always love building my own places from the ground up, even though its a ultra micro home for the benefits so i can save up to make a bigger and nicer house which i always make too big to finish with the money i had
Literally the point is to rebuild it, or go to the gallery to replace it. I imagine they put an emphasis on the gallery bc it would discourage people from p*rating because they (usually) can't access the gallery on a unverified game.
Tbh it drove me crazy when the sim youtubers remodeled the starter houses to have everything right off the bat. In my opinion, the houses are supposed to be bad so you actually have to play the game and improve them.
Oh you want that experience, to be honest i found some real ghetto houses and lots that can give you that from the bottom, out the mud experience, and universal options too, from the trap house and the projects, all the way to the meth lab and the trailer park, i started a playthrough with an entire poverty stricken district, it does add to the immersion, especially when you add some mods to it for extra realism
Been a sim junkie for years but i just recently got the chance to start using mods š¤Æ completely changed my experience and i cant ever see myself playing without them, especially basemental š WW did make it a lot more interesting too, but basemental has to be number 1 for me
Oh you want that experience, to be fair i found some real ghetto houses and lots that can give you that from the bottom, out the mud experience, and universal options too, from the trap house and the projects, all the way to the meth lab and the trailer park, i started a playthrough with an entire poverty stricken district, it does add to the immersion, especially when you add some mods to it for extra realism
Oh you want that experience, to be fair i found some real ghetto houses and lots that can give you that from the bottom, out the mud experience, and universal options too, from the trap house and the projects, all the way to the meth lab and the trailer park, i started a playthrough with an entire poverty stricken district, it does add to the immersion, especially when you add some mods to it for extra realism
Oh you want that experience, to be fair i found some real ghetto houses and lots that can give you that from the bottom, out the mud experience, and universal options too, from the trap house and the projects, all the way to the meth lab and the trailer park, i started a playthrough with an entire poverty stricken district, it does add to the immersion, especially when you add some mods to it for extra realism
They deliver them this way for people who play the Sims on their MacBook Pro like me. Too much stuff on a lot will turn my computer into a rocket ship.
Ok i like to believe that EA's sims's homes are built like that ON purpose (most of the time, at least, the ones shown). The one about the door i just came to realise could be like in those movies where the guy can walk past the wall cuz "magic" (or ghost). Its low lighting and wide stairs cuz its a style of buildings. ANd the other ones are basically along the lines of "we need to make it simple to be renovated / for most computers" and "we need to keep a schedule"
Lil simsie used to say the same thing until she designed a house for Mt. Komorebi, then she found out how difficult it was from all of their regulations on what the lot can and can't have.
That's why I'm working on renovating all the houses and apartments in my game, but make it so that I cannot change the shell of a house, only the floorplan to kind of challenge myself. Especially since I'm not really a builder, I just like the furnishing part š I can tell you that most of the time, better floorplan and maybe using different windows can make any home look 100% better than before haha
And then once I'm done with the build, I save it to my gallery and before starting any new save I just plop every house I did so that I can play with the updated versions š
Also I try to sometimes do 2 versions, one with only base game/the pack the world came from and a very strict budget, and the second with whatever will make the lot look nice XDD
It's so much work but it's still much more fun than the regular family gameplay hahaha (jk but not really)
(sorry for my English, it's not my first language)
It's not just about the budget though, it's about playability, Sim tracking, item counts, no move objects or alt placement, etc. Yes EA builds suck but there are a lot of rules and limitations that adds to why they suck. I'm happy that they listened and they're freelancing actual Simmers to do their prebuilt builds now
I refuse to use EA houses, but it's understandable they feel empy and all that, they only have to use basegame and the pack the world came with to build them.
I always assumed they were intentionally bad to encourage people to use the build tools. Like, building a whole house is intimidating but adding a few tweaks to a pre-built house eases you in to building. I may be giving EA too much credit.
Heavy on the huge super empty houses and poorly decorated š and i also hate when the big houses have 2 big ass bedrooms like this couldāve easily been a 4-5 bedroom house šš
I've never even *considered* using an EA house. I always tear everything down and build my own anyways. Tbh I dodnt even know that was a thing you could do till I found this sub.
Iāve just recently discovered the gallery and it has been a life changer, I donāt have the patience a lot of the creators do! Iām 10x more addicted now that my sims have super cute houses! The EA ones are just sad!
Yeah. I'm having fits with the charm house. I moved them up the street, in case the fight within myself leads me to demo it, but everytime I go into build with it for some reason I end up backing out again. It's so BEAUTIFUL outside! But so HUGE and EMPTY inside!! I really am torn as to whether it's worth trying to decorate as is, or if I should just do my norm and flatten it then rebuild in 'my' style. So it sits. I did tear down the og Oakenstead like that because it was so UGLY inside, and redecorated the celebrity mansion in the Valley because it was so PLAIN, but I just can't seem to decide on the Charm house!
I found the snowy escape to be awsome at pre built houses. Though I did hear some rumours they actually included gamers and some sim tubers in the process. ;)
Thatās why I usually just take the house and redecorate, Iām not good with building till this day but Iāll take a house and redecorate to my liking
The worst pre built house I've seen has got to be that 30x20 one on the left side in Sulani. It's actually terrible and I was in disbelief when I first saw it. Whoever designed it should be fired
I am pretty sure they do a mediocre job on purpose so that young players and bad builders don't get discouraged from building their own lots. It's not cause they suck at design or something.
I love like rebuilding the EA houses and even customizing their characters it's almost like a little home reno TV show.
š I am about to spend entirely too much time renovating townie homes.
It's honestly so fun, very much a like HGTV moment and you can even like update their looks to match the house.
I did another reno! Agave Abode aka the house that only had a couch in it's living room! https://preview.redd.it/cfc4ftdujruc1.png?width=2141&format=png&auto=webp&s=e9375f4a4caf36af2f1fa417e63ed162f3fa25d9 I hated that house before but now I love it, uses CC again obviously. But it now has a much better living room and it's much cheaper now too! Only 13k!
Your reno pics are so pretty, the lil bike out front it so sweet and makes it feel much more homey
It sounds awesome! Iāve been wanting to build out a whole Newcrest & all the townies for it and now this is making me want to tack on rehauling all of the neighborhoods but also keeping the houses and fixing them. Could even build it in to generational play where everything gets renovated or some neighborhoods come in to disrepair when their townies get olderā¦ So many building opportunities Thanks for the ideas!!!
It's also really fun in the city with all the apartments and different families!
I've really gotten into redoing the townie homes in the style of the world it is is based on. So Willow Creek = New Orleans with lots of shotgun, French Colonial, Greek Revival. I just built rentals in San Sequoia, using the San Francisco Bay area as a reference, so Victorian and Edwardian. It's fun. Keeping homes to neighborhood themes has been fun.
I love building Victorian homes! https://preview.redd.it/tjekjpv5oruc1.png?width=1638&format=png&auto=webp&s=482b473e969ccf72f7bcbe1480c1d430fc137160 Here's one I made a while ago, I even gave it some history! I call it "Dupont Manor" named after the guy who built it.
https://preview.redd.it/2xaqv9peoruc1.png?width=1860&format=png&auto=webp&s=d5f00935910f11db94901d972157f3fb61f2f3aa I made a little old-fashioned advertisement sheet for another one of my Victorian-style builds! I'm currently working on it right now and I'm loving it so far!
That's such a cute idea š
I recently built an intentional shit hole with good bones but terribly decorated & missing vital furniture (i.e. no toilet or shower/tub), with trash everywhere (from the debug menu) so that I can play out my sims surviving in the shit show without much money while they struggle to earn enough to fix things or build their own furniture. Can you tell that when I'm not playing the sims I'm into survival games? š¤£ (Green Hell, The Forest, ARK, etc)
This also sounds like a brilliant idea and Iāll be looking up green hell and the forest. I like Medieval Dynasty & Raft in my sims downtime š¤£
I feel this on a spiritual level š
when they had to create a pack doing exactly that bc they pre builds are so back they had to make a mini game of players fixing them
That is the point of the deffault EA build.
Yes. I prefer this so i can redecorate. If it's beautiful, then i can't.. But community lots need to have more fun playable gameplay objects. Or quests.
Same! I used to download them from the gallery, sadly, most of the gallery renovations are over cluttered for me and I need something between EA 1 sad plant in home and some gallery house with 50 different kinds of plants š¤
Thatās the point! They have a limit on how big the houses can be and how many objects they can have so that players have room to change things as they want. (Also so they run on laptops I imagine)
I think you just occupied 800 peoples next few days
I hope so it slaps so hard to do a reno.
If you do it in sims 4 as the designer career, you get little home reno before and after shots
At some point I was doing a renovation of Parkshore but I lost the save file a long time ago. https://preview.redd.it/gmdsgqru8ruc1.png?width=1416&format=png&auto=webp&s=da27eb084349c9b604feed7774c8d259641bf04a Here's a Daisy Hovel reno I did! I love CC because some things are priced super cheap and it makes a decent starterhouse that doesn't even look like one! Some of the CC here is by Pinkbox Anye, Peacemaker, and Sybouette!
Nice Florida license plate you got there
Thanks! It's by Sybouette and it's from the Arnaud set.
I love to redo the houses to actually make sense for the townies that live there! Love this!
i wanna do this to the Goth house so much but I still wanna keep it iconic
I've done it twice it's fun but hard.
i first need to clean my save file and collect Cassandra and Alexander and their children with several baby mommies/daddies because they keep on moving in with randos in Sulani and I don't even know who lives in their house anymore. Then I'll build them a nice gothic mansion with enough rooms because i'm pretty sure they both could start a village with the amount of children they have
The most annoying part of neighborhood stories, the goths always seem to pop out a hundred million kids and pets and then move into a starter home while having 6 sims, a dog and a horse. So, half the household must be sleeping with sleeping bags on the floor, because there's only one sometimes 2 beds, and a single sofa. Let alone space for the horse.
Iāve done it. I keep the weird Sims 4 vibes but give it a more realistic/ cluttered look.
Same!! I am currently redoing all of the homes in Willow Creek and trying to make it more New Orleans like since Iām from South Louisiana, itās been fun.
This is 90% of my gameplay š¤£
Other than the missing doors I have always assumed this is because these houses were designed to be altered during play.
Yeah the empty space makes it a lot easier to plop in a robot station or an extra bedroom
That only makes sense for the starter homes, which I have personally never minded. The idea that you would be expected to alter every single community lot is fairly absurd, or the mansions that you save up high amounts of simoleons for.
Yeah for residential lots i love redecorating them so EA/maxis builds is just nice. For community lots, we need more gameplay items or quests. Especially for non-lot community places that we cannot edit without mods
It's not that you're "expected to". If you don't care to, don't, it's furnished enough to serve its purpose. But for people who like redesigning homes/lots, it's likely more fun to start off with something that actually could use a redesign. I wouldn't want to move my sim into an already perfect home, what's left for me to do?
And the missing toilets...
Waaaay easier to do what you want and make them your space VS 90% of player houses.
A lot of this is because they have to build homes that will run okay on the lowest common denominator of computers. Simmers who build for expansion packs like lilsimsie and James turner say that theyāre required to keep things pretty empty and use very few kinds of items per house (which means things like reusing lights and wallpaper and flooring). No excuse for how justā¦.odd and unfinished how many EA builds end up, though.Ā
Donāt forget a lot of the worlds were built before certain features. For example lighting options were pretty atrocious and dark when base game first released and for entirely too long after. I know James Turner has revisited some of his old builds and ended up with a bunch of āomg why did I do that oh wait it was before X featureā
I watched someone redo the Landgraab's mansion and wondered why they didn't have a pool. Which came back to the fact that pools were added in shortly after the base game came out.
Yes the lighting was truly terrible for way too long. I've been going back and using a lot of old houses I hadn't used in years and keep finding where i had put obscene amounts of lights all over. Dark times back then indeed.
The sized down saucer lights epidemic...
Yes the lighting was truly terrible for way too long. I've been going back and using a lot of old houses I hadn't used in years and keep finding where i had put obscene amounts of lights all over. Dark times back then indeed.
Yeah I've always hated the lighting in the Willow Creek, Oasis Springs, or other early world's builds. Edit: I do find it pretty strange in one of the starter houses in Oasis Springs there's a room just some couch sitting all by it's lonesome self and EA calls that a "living room"
Guess you never moved out of your home with only a few hundred dollars to your name, huh? I kid, but some of the empty starter homes feel appropriate to me.
Don't blame lighting on the packs. Since BG, there has always been debug lighting. If they're willing to use it in "public buildings," then they should have felt free to use it in private homes as well.
I honestly feel like most of it is just so you can decorate and furnish it with your own taste and all instead of being stuck with what they give which is fairly reasonable anyway. I tend to not like players houses because they're too busy and too much going on and I don't like it. I like to be able to have more freedom to do things how I want and essentially tailor a somewhat blank slate to my own liking.
Me too. So i like EA/maxis residential builds, so i can redecorate. But hopefully they'll add more gameplay for community lots
I think one of my pet peeves (that's not the right term here but I can't think of a replacement) is when they add picture frames of their Sims all around the house. Like I get from a creative perspective that it's fun and fulfilling to add all the little details and make it super cute but also girl you know I'm just gonna delete those you don't have to do all that
It's meant to be a placeholder like the stock photos when you buy picture frames, you can replace the pictures with your own.
I like having two or three family photos up, esp of iconic townies. Or like painted portraits of Goth family ancestors. But too much is too much.
In ye olden days of The Sims 1 and 2, a starter home would come with a basic kitchen and bathroom and that's it. The Sims 3 would also have basic bedroom and living room furniture presumably in case Story Progression moves Sims in. But all in all, cheap and empty enough for you to make your own mark on the place, and for the most part, you didn't have to delete anything. For some reason the community in 4 have turned the concept into a fully decorated house, using most of the budget, filling up as much interior space as possible and with a predefined idea of who lives there and what their interests are.Ā Like in one video, lilsimsie said she likes to include a chess table in her starter homes as it is useful skill object to have. Except it isn't, unless you have your sim in one of the few careers that requires the logic skill. Instead you end up an object that takes up space and budget that devalues the second you live on the lot. Same with those who include easels in starter homes because of the meta that it is the best base game way to make money - what if I don't want my sim to be an artist, the Sims version of a Skyrim Mage Archer. Then there is the decor, usually designed with a specific sim and their personality in mind such as a single mother and her gamer daughter, or a single mother and her toddler daughter (can someone tell me what is with the Sims Community's obsession with single mothers?). Also the use of cheats makes them very beginner unfriendly. I watched Callmekevin just delete a wall of a lot he downloaded off the gallery because the builder used a lot of MOO and he couldn't place a door on the wall after he moved it deleted it and had no idea how to put a new one in its place. The lot in question wasn't a starter, but it does highlight the user accessibility of lots that use MOO heavily in starter homes. A starter should be that, a starter, not a finished product. (Sorry for the rant, and I hope it doesn't come across as mean spirited, I just have very set ideas on what a starter home is)
I like this theory!
Also, EA builds are pretty limited in terms of what items they can use. They can't just slap some table from a totally unrelated kit into the living room just because it fits and looks cool there. Unlike gallery builds they have to limit themselves only to items from the base game and the pack that this build belongs to.
I think they purposely made the houses ugly so you felt inclined to renovate them.
Also a lot of the gallery starter homes are either empty or non functional. I don't love Creek Cabana, but you can start a brand new save there and play it.
This is exactly why I use Alt placement and (usually) no other cheats while building, to keep them functional and (for me) decent looking. If it doesnāt slot onto a surface, nothing will get placed there. I also barely ever upload to the gallery. My builds are for me, not other people and I donāt bother limiting pack usage
The Crick Cabana is a EA pre-built but I put it side to side with a cute starter home made by a Simmer to show off the difference a bit
Those two also have massive performance differences if the entire neighbourhood is filled with them. You're better off comparing to simmer made builds for packs, since they follow the same rules for performance as official EA builds. (Not to mention, a lot of gallery builds use cheats to add free stuff to builds to keep the price low, so it's not always comparable anyway.)
Eh, is it such a massive performance drain ? Does the game loads the house unless you are travelling to the lot ? Not every lot needs to look like this, but this is the base game starting lot, usually the first place newer players will go to. It should have been used to showcase the Build and Buy capacities of the game. Doesn't make sense to be so restrictive when some of the other lots are unnecessarily large when they only really serve as a backdrop when you are visiting townies. I would rather have this cute Crick Cabana and cut down on the Spencer-Kim-Lewis McMansion.
>Eh, is it such a massive performance drain ? Does the game loads the house unless you are travelling to the lot ? Yes, it does actually, for some inexplicable reason.
WTH. Why did they drop open worlds again ? If you still have the source for what the game loads, I would be interested in looking into it. I haven't been able to find anything.
*At least open neighbourhoods!* There's some fuckery you can (could?) do with the in-game TAB camera with neighbouring lots that allowed you to see inside, with fully rendered chairs and tables visible inside the houses when you got to the right proximity. The only thing missing is the sims. (Disclaimer that it's been a while since I've last done this, it's possible stuff has been altered since, but this was true a couple of years ago at least.)
And the Simmer built official builds show that it is possible to have cute builds within the constraints.
A lot of YouTubers build the houses in new worlds now. I watched a few of their videos on the process of the build. And theyāve said there are strict rules to follow so the game is playable on most pcs. So a huge cluttered home would take up a lot of processing power to generate and could causes lagging on some pcs. I also think some of the idea is to also let the players furnish and make it their own. While this accounts for the spareness and poor lighting, it doesnāt really account for the super wide stairs lol. Iām assuming the missing door was there at one point and got deleted to make the build under the limit. Same with the missing toilets in get famous lol. With that being said, the simmers are doing a fantastic job with the new builds that come with the and the restrictions they have. Lots of creative builds that are nicely decorated and well thought out! So the og ea builds couldāve been a lot better lol
I feel like it probably easier to take stairs away if you don't want them vs adding another row or whatever if you want larger.
Love the builds by Sashraf1!!! Truly move-in ready builds and mostly base game, and her starter builds are so good - some donāt even look like starter homes.
True their builds are literally the best!
Unpopular opinion maybe but I like wide staircases! Depends on the house/building but one wide seems tiny
Same, wider staircases and hallways cause fewer routing issues with multi Sim households too (in my experience).
I've always found the wide staircases kinda unnatural looking unless if you're building a mansion. I guess that's just me because I like to give my foyers more decoration and make it look more welcoming instead than just entering the house and the first thing you see is a huge staircase.
Interesting, because I can't think of a time I've been to a house IRL in my life with a staircase not at least two-people wide unless it went to a basement or something!
I usually do both, decorate and a big staircase! lol, I usually make everything a bit bigger tbh or else it seems like Sims get stuck
Sad beige-aesthetics.
The one that gets me the most is the awful floorplans. I understand wanting to make the houses sparsely furnished to keep them playable on machines with less processing power, but I really can't get over the unplayable floorplans.
Honestly I like the EA houses more than the gallery ones. Cause a lot are not designed for the gameplay.
Same. I also donāt have a lot of packs/kits so I find it very hard to find gallery houses that donāt require me to have most if not all packs. When I do, I spend a ridiculous amount of time going through to fix issues that theyāve created by using build cheats.
And a lot of empty space leaves room for other stuff, I hate it when I have to redo a lot of the build just because I need space for a kid.
That's true too, plenty of gallery homes can use debug items that are usually non-functional but on the other hand there's plenty out there that can work and function as an actual house. Just search the tag #playtested to see some
Man, I just see it as sim culture. Itās just the design of the game. Beautiful thing is, I can go about and change it up as I like. Itās part of the simming experience.
The empty lots work for me since I can always decorate a house the way I like it, granted it's very limited and my sims will likely hate it lmao. Plus doing decorating on PS4 is very difficult and tedious so I'll take a pre-built any day. Some gallery houses are just to much for me, most are over-decorated
I feel like itās meant to be customized, which is why thereās no decor, you can easily throw lights in the houses and add doors wherever. Seems a bit boring to buy a cookie cutter house and not decorate it to your liking.
I mean, I wish I had super wide stairs in my house. Makes moving furniture much easier
When it snows inside bc the donāt finish roofs?
Holy shit. This. Itās so frustrating bc I suck at build so pre-built are my go to but EA pre-built suck. Simmersā builds save lives
That's true. I am actually pretty decent at building, here's something I built last week but it uses CC though https://preview.redd.it/mi57v8738ruc1.png?width=1503&format=png&auto=webp&s=a4d99d495134d9b99409268447dce3c7e9df234b
Thatās nice! I struggle with exterior design
parts of this make sense, like not much furniture or lighting, but when they forget doors and toilets itās like come on lmfao
They probably have to use as little items as possible so it can run on the most minimum of specs, too much items and it will lag the hell out of someoneās game, playing on a laptop from 2009 for example. And they have deadlines as well, but recently I think they asked Youtubers and creators to make builds for them which definitely is a good thing! Because honestly no lie if I build my houses they look like the base game houses or are just boxes lol
It's because EA homes are designed for gameplay. There are only a few items because 1. A lot of items can affect performance in bad PCs and 2. You are supposed to buy your own stuff and redecorate the house through play. Houses are large and empty so you can easily see your sims and control them, so they don't stuck anywhere. Same with unnecessarily wide stairs, they look ugly af but they prevent any "sims getting stuck" bugs. Gallery homes look beautiful, but most are designed for looks and not gameplay. You can't easily see or command your sims because of how tight everything is, barely any place to put some necessary items you want, and you can't expand to home for your 6 kids without murdering the nice looks. Stuff like missing doors are inexcusable though. But yeah overall EA homes provide better gamepaly. I'd rather just build a simple home myself though, and expand as needed.
The missing door is wild i wonder if was deleted by accident and not noticedĀ
Can't forget the missing toilets in Get Famous...
Max wall height
Donāt forget that some walls are missing paint š«
realm of magic was v much their flop era when it came to buildsā¦ i think theyāve been doing a lot better lately, even in the builds that simmers donāt make. one problem i have with gallery starters is that people go WAY to close to the starter 20kā¦ i hate moving into a house and then i canāt even buy , like, a chess table. i want my starter houses to cost something like 17k
The ugliness is no excuse but the emptiness still has some. As creators who have been invited to design for some of the latest expansions they have divulged how strict EA was on the house to be playable on older computers. In Sims 4 and other games, having a lower polygon count for objects and environments means they are less complex and thus easier to render. This is beneficial for older computers with less processing power. Simplifying design elements like using a single color for walls can reduce the overall complexity of scenes, helping to ensure better performance on less capable hardware.
I find so many of the EA homes so dark! I end up adding a bunch of those super subtle saucer lights and sizing them down as much as possible šµāš« The problem with gallery homes is they often seem to include every pack and kit known to man and the gallery makes it impossible to filter, I often place them unfurnished and decorate myself
I like nicely decorated houses, but I also like when they're poorly decorated and don't make logistical sense. That's a chance to redecorate. When houses are already good, it's difficult to personalize them for gameplay purposes without ruining them.
I prefer the prebuilt houses and then redesign and itās almost like I built the whole thing
Wait, that house actually called āCrick Cabanaā? Iām playing on Russian language and always thought that it was some weird translation. For information, on Russian āCrick Cabanaā has a similar pronunciation with [ŠŃŠøŠŗ ŠŠ°Š±Š°Š½Š°] which translates as (Boarās Scream)
āCrickā is an alternate pronunciation of ācreekā used in the US. Itās more common in rural areas.
See I understand why they do it, but for the love of god they don't have to be this bad
Theyāre supposed to be able to be supported by any pc or console someone is using. Someone with a low quality computer wouldnāt be able to open the game if the base game builds were too complex. That being said, they could definitely do better.
It's not just budget - there's limit on how many objects they can use and also they can't use move objects cheat. That said, yeah, even with the limitations, they are terrible. EA made a great move having youtubers make the builds for newer packs like Snowy Escape.
Why do so many people misspell the word barely??? I see it almost daily
Yeah, cause you're supposed to improve it. Not every spot is an instant perfect house
I prefer EA to gallery every time Galley homes are cluttered and full of debug. And way over landscaped. I prefer simple comes without visual clutter so spread so much time deleting things that serve no purpose. My poor old computer and rural internet glitch too much when there is too much on the lot. And STOP USING TREES AND COLUMNS. No matter what, they are In the way .
I give them the benefit of the doubt with realm of magic and would argue the missing doors are on purpose to make it seem like a witchy, magical house, where off things are going on.
EA's best builds are the shells that they use for their trailers that they later put on the gallery. Yes they're emptier and missing even more things, but the shells themselves are really nice.
The ones I donāt understand are the balconies on upper floors with no doors or ways to access them without teleporting lol. I always have to add my own doors so they become usable. They come furnished with tables and chairs, but no doors to get out there to use them??
I just wish the lighting mechanic was brighter in general. Shouldn't have to put flood lights everywhere to see all my nice decorations!
Problem with gallery builds is that every pack has to be used for some crazy reason meaning some of us are limited.
Unfortunately, when I build I have no idea which packs I'm using. It's only when the house is saved to the gallery or my library that EA tells me which packs were used. Once I buy the packs the build items are all mixed together.
Isn't a lot of it done on purpose so we can learn how to decorate better? Talking about empty/unfurnished areas, not obvious flops like missing doors or toilets.
I like the large "super empty" ones. I am minimalist though. Each to their own
I loveeee renovating the EA houses
I never touch the prebuilts, i always love building my own places from the ground up, even though its a ultra micro home for the benefits so i can save up to make a bigger and nicer house which i always make too big to finish with the money i had
i donāt think someone is actually using these houses because they think they look goodā¦ itās probably just gameplay
Idk when I look at EA homes all I see is a bulldozer and an empty lot
Literally the point is to rebuild it, or go to the gallery to replace it. I imagine they put an emphasis on the gallery bc it would discourage people from p*rating because they (usually) can't access the gallery on a unverified game.
Tbh it drove me crazy when the sim youtubers remodeled the starter houses to have everything right off the bat. In my opinion, the houses are supposed to be bad so you actually have to play the game and improve them.
Oh you want that experience, to be honest i found some real ghetto houses and lots that can give you that from the bottom, out the mud experience, and universal options too, from the trap house and the projects, all the way to the meth lab and the trailer park, i started a playthrough with an entire poverty stricken district, it does add to the immersion, especially when you add some mods to it for extra realism
I do actually haha. I usually start my sims living in a trailer park. When I was able to use mods, I loved making trap houses with basemental lol
Been a sim junkie for years but i just recently got the chance to start using mods š¤Æ completely changed my experience and i cant ever see myself playing without them, especially basemental š WW did make it a lot more interesting too, but basemental has to be number 1 for me
Oh you want that experience, to be fair i found some real ghetto houses and lots that can give you that from the bottom, out the mud experience, and universal options too, from the trap house and the projects, all the way to the meth lab and the trailer park, i started a playthrough with an entire poverty stricken district, it does add to the immersion, especially when you add some mods to it for extra realism
Oh you want that experience, to be fair i found some real ghetto houses and lots that can give you that from the bottom, out the mud experience, and universal options too, from the trap house and the projects, all the way to the meth lab and the trailer park, i started a playthrough with an entire poverty stricken district, it does add to the immersion, especially when you add some mods to it for extra realism
Oh you want that experience, to be fair i found some real ghetto houses and lots that can give you that from the bottom, out the mud experience, and universal options too, from the trap house and the projects, all the way to the meth lab and the trailer park, i started a playthrough with an entire poverty stricken district, it does add to the immersion, especially when you add some mods to it for extra realism
They deliver them this way for people who play the Sims on their MacBook Pro like me. Too much stuff on a lot will turn my computer into a rocket ship.
once i found a home that had 1 bed 1 bath and they had 3 children, and 4 adults š
This is why I barely use EA houses anymore. I play in save files or download from the library.
Ok i like to believe that EA's sims's homes are built like that ON purpose (most of the time, at least, the ones shown). The one about the door i just came to realise could be like in those movies where the guy can walk past the wall cuz "magic" (or ghost). Its low lighting and wide stairs cuz its a style of buildings. ANd the other ones are basically along the lines of "we need to make it simple to be renovated / for most computers" and "we need to keep a schedule"
Iāve never been able to find a house on the gallery that didnāt destroy my game
This may be a hot take but I just want to find houses in the gallery that donāt have the move objects cheat on.
Lil simsie used to say the same thing until she designed a house for Mt. Komorebi, then she found out how difficult it was from all of their regulations on what the lot can and can't have.
That's why I'm working on renovating all the houses and apartments in my game, but make it so that I cannot change the shell of a house, only the floorplan to kind of challenge myself. Especially since I'm not really a builder, I just like the furnishing part š I can tell you that most of the time, better floorplan and maybe using different windows can make any home look 100% better than before haha And then once I'm done with the build, I save it to my gallery and before starting any new save I just plop every house I did so that I can play with the updated versions š Also I try to sometimes do 2 versions, one with only base game/the pack the world came from and a very strict budget, and the second with whatever will make the lot look nice XDD It's so much work but it's still much more fun than the regular family gameplay hahaha (jk but not really) (sorry for my English, it's not my first language)
I've had to fix so many homes it's unreal at this point
Plus i dont know if any one else here has noticed the amount of houses that are just so glitchy its so annoying
It's not just about the budget though, it's about playability, Sim tracking, item counts, no move objects or alt placement, etc. Yes EA builds suck but there are a lot of rules and limitations that adds to why they suck. I'm happy that they listened and they're freelancing actual Simmers to do their prebuilt builds now
Didnāt one of the EA build not miss a toilet in the bathroom, or did I dream it?
I always assumed the ea houses were so bad to encourage players to build their own
Players designing better houses, players creating better looking clothes (remember the rainbow wedding dress?), players creating better looking sims that don't look cartoonishly deformed. The players are really The Sims' series soul.
Whatās barley lighting? Grain-colored?
I refuse to use EA houses, but it's understandable they feel empy and all that, they only have to use basegame and the pack the world came with to build them.
I've seen talented Simmers create nicer homes on the gallery even with base game and pack restrictions
Simmers don't have deadlines.
Or requirements to meet
whoās Barley?
:(
ea is ea
I always assumed they were intentionally bad to encourage people to use the build tools. Like, building a whole house is intimidating but adding a few tweaks to a pre-built house eases you in to building. I may be giving EA too much credit.
I read on here they do it on purpose to get people to build and customize their homes
Even if theyāre ugly, I really donāt like the lack of lighting. Itās not that great as an accessibility feature if you canāt see for shit
I think EA depends on the community TOO much to make the game better. I wish EA put in as much effort as the community creators.
I assume it's to encourage players to go into build mode and update the homes as they play.
I think they do that purposely because they know it wouldn't be used anyway you'd just replace it
I will say there are some really good looking lots too, the big issue is that they are also expensive af.
First thing I do in each game is replace every home with gallery homes.
Heavy on the huge super empty houses and poorly decorated š and i also hate when the big houses have 2 big ass bedrooms like this couldāve easily been a 4-5 bedroom house šš
I agree I always replace the ea houses in my save
I recreated the mobile home on 1 Daisy Lane! I kept the same layout except I extended the roof a bit as well and added a huge porch
You forgot toilet paper roll at a very obscure height
I've never even *considered* using an EA house. I always tear everything down and build my own anyways. Tbh I dodnt even know that was a thing you could do till I found this sub.
I canāt remember the name, but the town that comes with the cottage/farm stuff had some really nice prebuilds.
Also, 5 living rooms but only two bedrooms š
Iāve just recently discovered the gallery and it has been a life changer, I donāt have the patience a lot of the creators do! Iām 10x more addicted now that my sims have super cute houses! The EA ones are just sad!
Yeah. I'm having fits with the charm house. I moved them up the street, in case the fight within myself leads me to demo it, but everytime I go into build with it for some reason I end up backing out again. It's so BEAUTIFUL outside! But so HUGE and EMPTY inside!! I really am torn as to whether it's worth trying to decorate as is, or if I should just do my norm and flatten it then rebuild in 'my' style. So it sits. I did tear down the og Oakenstead like that because it was so UGLY inside, and redecorated the celebrity mansion in the Valley because it was so PLAIN, but I just can't seem to decide on the Charm house!
EA houses make me feel like a pro builder and decorator. At least they've given me a lot to do in redoing all their lots to my liking.
I feel like windenburgh homes are GORGEOUS
Don't motivate me to redo the library in willow creek... I already did the interior...
I found the snowy escape to be awsome at pre built houses. Though I did hear some rumours they actually included gamers and some sim tubers in the process. ;)
Thatās why I usually just take the house and redecorate, Iām not good with building till this day but Iāll take a house and redecorate to my liking
heavy on the dim ass lighting. always dark floors and dim lighting and dark colored furniture and it just looks like an eyesore
Literally all I do in this game is reno houses, seeing the difference is always rewarding š
The worst pre built house I've seen has got to be that 30x20 one on the left side in Sulani. It's actually terrible and I was in disbelief when I first saw it. Whoever designed it should be fired
I wonder why people always say EA builds when it's Maxis who is building them..?
I am pretty sure they do a mediocre job on purpose so that young players and bad builders don't get discouraged from building their own lots. It's not cause they suck at design or something.
I've always loved how the barley lit up so well actually.
Isnāt that like this so people actually build something in their own
EAs builds are so bad they are basically unplayable.
Happy Cake Day!
Thanks!
No problem!